Check out this recently uploaded video of Self’s Matt Mahaffey playing a one man band version of AC/DC’s “Back In Black” on drums and Omnichord. I’ve never heard an Omnichord run through guitar distortion before, but the effect is extremely rocking. After I watching more live Self videos, I realize he’s been using them for years on songs like Trunk Fulla Amps (live) and others off of Gizmodgery. I’ve been looking for a cheap Omnichord for several years for circuit bending, but now I’m really jonesin’ for one.
The video is an excerpt from Self’s upcoming DVD “sElf- Live at Spaceland Acoustic”. There aren’t many more details of the dvd’s release, which originally went on pre-sale in April, but some believe the hold up could be concerning copyright issue’s over Matt’s AC/DC cover. Of course the rest of the show footage will be acoustic versions of Self songs, not Omnicover songs… which would be a cool dvd on it’s own.
With the Apple’s highly anticipated World Wide Developers Conference starting today, the question on everyone’s mind is, of course, “When Will Twitter Crash?”. In a recent blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that Twitter expects site traffic to increase up to ten-times it’s daily use as real time news starts to leak from the floors of the Moscone Conference Center. Twitter is preparing for the extra traffic by monitoring usage and throttling extras such as pagination and replies to reduce the stress on their servers. Of course, the replies page seems to miss half of the messages that people send in response to my tweets anyways, so I prefer using Summize anyways.
So now is your time to start making bets… when will twitter crash?
If Steve Jobs gives his keynote at 10am today (according to CNN)… I’m guessing twitter will go down at around 11:15am.
Leave your best guess on when you think twitter’s next big crash will be in the comments below or @docpop with your answer. List the time, date, and any extra details you wanna take a stab at (like why or for how long). Sorry, Twitter employees are not eligible to take place in any bets.
Hey, Twitter has actually been running pretty smoothly for me lately, so it seems they are getting things under control. Best of luck to the team on growing their audience this week while maintaining the load.
Based on the fun we had creating the Fail flickr set, I’ve created a new flickr group with a whole new meme. Cupcakes Have Jumped the Shark is an open group for anyone to post illustrations of cupcakes jumping over sharks. Any style is accepted, but color illustrations are preferred. So far 9 artists have contributed, and a few of them were even drawn at our most recent Cartoonist Conspiracy in SF. Read the rest of this entry »
Saturday night I attended (and performed) at Scott Beale’s Laughing Squid Lucky 13 Party. I got there early with my friends Irina and Mike to do the soundcheck and get ready for the show. During the down time, Mike and I decided to print some inserts for my mini-comics and hand them out during the show. I had 800 unfolded copies of The Flatjack Incident ($85), 500 index cards ($2), and of course my Gocco with one screen and one set of flash bulbs ($12 in Gocco materials). We let Scott watch as we flashed our screen, then we added our stickers to partition the inks (so the colors didn’t spread around), and we got to work.
Make handled the bulk of the printing, while I did the folding and inserting. The minifig image (that Lego guy) was originally painted by Mike and appeared on the album cover of Me Geek Pretty One Day. I took that version and traced it down to a simple line drawing to make it easier to Gocco.
In two and a half hours, we finished nearly 350 prints and had them inserted. They looked great too. Eventually, the party reached capacity, and a line was forming outside. It took some about 30 minutes before they could make it in, and the line was raging for about 2 hours, during this time I would try to come out every 30-40 minutes and talk to folks in the crowd and hand them the comic to read. “It looks small” I’d say, “but if you read it right… it should take about 30 minutes”.
My tailoring gig for Self Edge has been crazy lately. We’ve opened online orders to our chainstitched hemming, and my work load has nearly tripled. I tailored 25 pairs of jeans just yesterday, which left my hands stained with an indigo dye, but also earned me enough to finally purchase a pair of the very limited Self Edge X Flat Head collaboration jeans! My Samurais are finally getting retired (after 16 months of heavy use) and I’m loving my new indigo SEXFHs.
Here is a pic of the “classic yo-yo” leather tag + the special edition red Duncan butterfly
And the jeans getting their first cold soak
A lot of folks are really over-soaking their SEXFHs to get the shrinkage out. I’ve seen a lot of these jeans and figure even though the inseam may shrink 2 inches, it’s the type of material that will probably just stretch back out about 1.5 inches. So I decided to go with a real light, cold soak to keep them pretty stiff and raw. The rise is a little low on them, but the rest of the fit is absolutely perfect for me, I’m really loving them.
Btw, I’ve got a pair of brand new Self Edge X Flat Head collaboration jeans, for sale. They are a 31″ waist/ 31″ inseam, and could be yours for $300. Email me if intersted; yoyogenius at gmail
I bought a Gocco at a yard sale last year and never got a chance to use it, but since I ran out of the last of my silkscreened shipping supplies, I decided to dust it off and put it to use for the very first time. All the directions were in Japanese, but the design was so intuitive that I had no problems burning my screen. Within 4 hours I created my screen and printed my logo (the cloud hand) on over 260 envelopes.
This week’s HipTrax podcast (on Wired’s GeekDad blog) features my song Weapons Grade Porpoise. The whole episode is worth checking out, it’s just the right length. This week’s theme is instrumental songs by nerds, check it out here.
Weapons Grade Porpoise is one of the instrumental’s off of my new album Me Geek Pretty One Day. One of the things I really like about this particular track is that it was one of the first instrumentals I wrote that sort of tells a story. Of course I never expected anyone to figure out the story, so I thought I’d just quickly lay it out for anyone interested.
Basically, the song is about a group of dolphins that have been trained by the US military to be living weapons. Believe it or not, it’s actually based on a true story! I remember hearing this story on an NPR segment 5 years ago, and it blew me away. I seem to recall a naval officer describing the project by using the exact phrase “weapons grade porpoise”. The drums at the beginning of the song replicate a military drum march right before the dolphins go on a mission. Then the drums kick in, as the dolphins go into action mode…. imagine them swimming around in enemy territory, past submarines, through coral reefs and underneath warships. I like to imagine them with that black face paint under their eyes, if that helps. When the chorus comes in, you here the dolphins talking to each other, maybe barking orders.
So that’s the nature of the song, on to the skeleton; the song was created mostly from samples of a circuit bent Techplex 2000, a device so rare, that I can’t even find any mention of it on Google.
Cupcakes have totally jumped the shark, but I don’t mind ’cause they are so fun to draw. I feel like I’ve been ignoring my drawing side this year, so I decided to get some practice. I don’t do much computer art, but I’ve always wanted to create a style that sort of mixes my pen and ink art with a vectorized look, but I don’t really want to use Illustrator. I think recently I’ve sort of hit the look I wanted, especially when creating the “cloudcake” pattern that I use for my Twitter background.
The Cloudcake was a design I whipped up as a mockup logo for Ariel Weldman’s Cupcake camp thingy. The image is hand drawn, then scanned and uploaded to VectorMagic.com, before coloring it in photoshop. I thought the basic logo would look sweet as background on twitter, but I was wrong. The tiled image just looked really boring and perfect, and obviously just a bunch of tiles. So I figured out a “trick” (to me it was a trick, but I’m web stupid… to anyone else it would just be how you do it) to creating a dope tile pattern (as seen in the image above). I started with an image (cloudcake), then cut it in quarters and arranged them so the middle of the image was now spread out to the edges. I then added another image in the center, like this:
Now when the pieces are lined up it makes the overall pattern:
To really keep it Twitter oriented I snapped a screen shot of my basic Twitter page, and used the same colors they used for my logo. Using this same technique, I also created a LaughingSquid pattern:
Update: Scott Beale from Laughing Squid has given me permission to post my Squid pattern for folks to download and use on their Twitter pages. Follow this link to go the Flickr page and download the size image you want (below is the 100 pixel one).
Based on the fun we had creating the 
This week’s 
