Look at This 24.06.14

The first one is by Dustin Nguyen, who is amazing. And I wish Lil’ Gotham was still going.
In this I wanna show some rad art stuff. There will be comics and pretty pictures. Feast your eyes!

Music Monday – August Will Rule the Year

Eventful times. Cayetana just showed off a new song and is is just as rad and special as the last one was. Really excited for that one. This summer is shaping up to be quite fantastic. It is amazing to think back to last years May and my excitement for a new Dillinger or Anamanaguchi record. Now those have come and gone and there is another month filled with amazing releases ahead.

I am talking about August. Holy moly that month is packed to the brim with promising music. There is a new Prawn album, called Kingfisher. Maybeshewill are releasing new material in an album called Fair Youth. I am so damn excited for these two records, they are some of my absolute favorite bands and it has been a while. The aforementioned Cayetana will release their first full-length called Nervous Like Me in the same month.

This is gonna be a rad month. A rad year actually, seeing how there will be a new Gaslight Anthem record and a softmore album by the Einar Stray Orchester. There will also be a new album by Empire! Empire! I was a lonely Estate! And damn if that one song during the show at Berlins Cassiopeia didn’t almost get me to tears. This is gonna be a good one. August is gonna be a good month for music. And I bet you I didn’t even cover half of the great stuff coming out. What do you think I missed?

Of course, I know. I missed the Beatsteaks! Their new album is a self titled effort. Releasing on the first of August it should kickstart the second half of the year in the most royal of ways.

I’ll leave you with a quote from a very interesting interview done by the try-hardzine. They talked with members of Plaids, who have a full length close to release as well.

Matt: Every band, to me, that has ever failed has begun with the words “let’s start a band that sounds like this” which is counter-productive because it completely removes the personality of the music. It’s like choosing to be a cover-band but instead of stealing songs, stealing musical devices and regurgitating them in a, more often than not, less effective way. What’s worse is this also sets a band pre-determined rules that shouldn’t exist when making music, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems in Punk today, at least musically, is that too many bands buy into pre-existing aesthetics and musical conventions when the scene would be alot more interesting if when people sat down to write music they said “Let’s just try to play how we feel” and express their own personalities and musical tastes without sounding overly cheesy. I’m all for playing the music that you like but why not try to add your own flavor to the sound instead of creating something completely devoid of original thought? I guess it’s easier to play into the current wave of musical styles in the UK than to do your own thing, but to me Punk was always about playing whatever the fuck you want, instead of conforming to what the UK scene’s flavor of the month is.

And some music by Plaids of course.

Weekend Short – Teleporting Bread

Long live the Source Filmmaker. Long live the Steam Sale. Long live the bucket. Chances are you have already seen this. Well now you might just watch it again. Deal with it.

Food for Thought 18.06.14

Justin Jordan talked about the cost of comics and the revenue flow for artists and writers. He picked up where Brandon Montclare started and gave further inside on the numbers necessary to make a living of comics. It is scary to see the numbers they deal with and then read how Rocket Racoon sold 300.000 comics in pre-order alone. That is some heavy shit. And it might make you go and buy more floppies, maybe? Which is another interesting thing. Dead Body Road was mostly on time, at least without noticeable delay. Rocket Girl is taking forever, at least that’s my reception. That can’t be good for sales. And it will take the comic even longer to make a trade a possibility.

“If Rocket Girl dips into the 8000s, we’ll start thinking about when to wrap it up. If it stays above 12,000 we can do it forever. At 12,000 copies I can make as much writing Rocket Girl as Hulk; Amy Reeder can make as much penciling/inking/coloring as she would on Batwoman. 8000 vs 12,000 is a significant difference in percentage, but it’s not a huge amount of readers.”

I spend a good part of the evening reading “How I Work” posts on lifehacker. I love these things. I think the Verge has one about the inner parts of pockets. I always pick up neat things from there. And it is quite interesting to see what other people use to work and what level of output is actually possible. Much to learn young Padawan.

The Wicked + The Divine is a seriously pretty and great comic. Comics Alliance did a really long interview with the entire creative team about the inner works of the fine comic. Did I mention it is a really pretty comic?

Somehow I ended up listening to an episode of KEXP’s Music that Matters full of country songs. Or no, sorry, Swinging Door Jams. Apologies, they are actually pretty rad and comforting in their difference to what I normally listen to.

When it still came out semi regularly I loved listening to A Life Well Wasted. There seems to be an alternative now. It is called “A Brief Escape” and while I haven’t listened to it yet, the most recent episode features Space Boyfriend a pretty cool chiptune artist. So that is a thing that will happen when the Swinging Door Tunes are gone.

In the end I encourage you to check out Tabdump. It is a rad service worth your attention. And money. Here is an interview the dude who runs TabDump did with Forbes. So long and thanks for the fish.

Read a rad Manga: Obrigado!

I have talked at lentgh about Baka & Gogh, which is one of my favorite manga Period

Obrigado! is by the same author and simply a collection of short stories. It is beautiful, touching, funny and a sight to behold.
I love Shinkichi Kato’s style, his noses, the backgrounds and the way he draws a star filled sky. The impressions his characters make are always so earnest and he is able to portray the angriest people. This dude can draw! Obrigado! got collected well after Baka & Gogh and Kokumin Quiz. The latter is a story I still have to finish. I guess it was a bit to heavy compared to his other stories. No less interesting though. I reckon it would be wrong to call these stories light, they all carry a certain darkness. I like them a lot you see and you should read them.

Sadly you can’t buy it in English, you’ll have to go to Batoto or Hox Scanlations. And please notice what the smoke from the coffee is forming as she is talking about going far away. I love this.

Review: Madeline Ashby’s iD is Great. You Should Read it!

I read almost all of vN on a flight from Reno to Berlin. It was great because it took my mind away from cramped legs and smelly neighbours. Instead I thought of robot like beings who were only made to satisfy those who survive the apocalypse. Madeline Ashby had written a very immersive and great piece of science fiction. A story with likeable and intriguing main characters. A story full of feelings and of course, a failsafe.

It was the story of a failsafe failing. iD, the second book in the series, deals with the aftermath of the first. This is a sequel in almost every way.

The blurb:
Javier is a self-replicating humanoid on a journey of redemption.

Javier’s quest takes him from Amy’s island, where his actions have devastating consequences for his friend, toward Mecha where he will find either salvation… or death.

This time we see everything out of Javiers eyes. Amy’s companion from the first book still has a failsafe in place and it bugs him. It is cause for some stress, since it is questionable if he likes Amy because he likes her, or because she appears as a human to him.

The failsafe is arguably on of the biggest topics of the book. The things it makes Javier do just as much as he lets it do things for him. He uses it, as it makes things seem nice to him that other people might find troubling. Javier goes to the ends of the world to save Amy and it is as touching as it is entertaining to read about his travels.

The book is very well written. I already called it immersive. Javier is a great character that grows throughout the book. What was the most interesting to me are the relations between vN’s and normal humans. How they are treated and thought of. They are used, a lot. I believe “fucking fuckbots” is one description used by a steward on a ship.

It says a lot about humans and what they might do to something or someone that isn’t human and won’t say no to anything, no matter how old or young as a matter of fact. This is where the book really shines. It made me think.

The only thing I didn’t like about the book was its rushed ending. Just like vN, iD lost me near the end. Suddenly perspective and writing style changed and it confused me quite a bit. I had to read that part a second time. Normal in science essays, not cool in fiction.

So, should you read iD? Yes, please do so. When you are done, think about robots. Read vN if you haven’t yet. And wait patiently for Madeline Ashby’s next books.

Lucas Lee Might Be the Greatest Actor of All Time!

If you see a volume of Scott Pilgrim and you don’t have it yet, don’t pass it up. That is a rule. Columbus had it in his rule book in Zombieland, I promise you that. That comic is great. I ended up watching the movie again and enjoyed it a lot. Right now I am listening to the soundtrack. The whole reason for all of this are these sweet posters I saw today. They are probably quite old, but awesome nonetheless. I can only assume that they had a ton of fun making these.

More after the jump!

Robots? Wonder how that is gonna go down…

I am guessing there will be robots at some point. The question is not if, but how. How will they work? How will they be treated, how will their relationships with humans be like? I am looking at fiction for examples because I don’t know enough of the science here, but even in fiction there are myriads of examples.

It could go down like Terminator, Matrix or the Robocalypse and then everything is over anyways. That’d be kind of shitty and I hope it won’t happen, although knowing the human species it will only take a few years until a drone thinks itself alive and goes on a rampage. Yeah, let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

On the other hand those robots could be something good. It could be like Asimovs “I, Robot” with the rules and all. The same rules accounted for the Astro Boy universe I think. I wouldn’t mind that. Astro Boy is a badass. Even though robot workforces raise a lot of new questions and it took the people in Tezukas stories a while to actually accept their electronic friends.

I do think that this is gonna be the hardest part of the whole deal. The way they’ll be treated as soon as they actually develop a conciousness. It will be a slow and terrible process. If they ever advance that far or get the chance to go there.

I wonder if there will be a mad scientist who builds a robot to resemble his or her kid and is terribly disappointed with it. It happens in Astro Boy and it happened in a book I just finished reading called “The Mad Scientists Daughter”. A wonderful book by the way. About a girl and the robot servant she falls in love with.

So given that the robots become conscious of themselves, their surroundings and their emotions, the aren’t gonna have an easy life. It’s gonna be like a whole new pot of racism. It’s gonna suck for them. And that sucks for us, as a statement about the human race, as well. At least I think that’s gonna happen. Well maybe we have crushed the “Iron Heel” by then and advanced into a much more open society. Who knows.

“An android is a robot or synthetic organism designed to look and act like a human, especially one with a body having a flesh-like resemblance. Until recently, androids have largely remained within the domain of science fiction, frequently seen in film and television. However, advancements in robot technology have allowed the design of functional and realistic humanoid robots.” – Wikipedia

Maybe we’ll go down Blade Runner road. Or the way of vNs (von Neumann), where all those androids have been set up with a fail safe and can’t say no to anything humans tell them. It is a great book Madeline Ashby wrote there, about the struggle of those who can’t say No to anything, have to enjoy everything done to them and shut down completely if they see a human being harmed.

In the end I hope that I, personally, will be able to keep an open mind if I ever meet a robot like Finn, Astro Boy or Amy. I hope I do meet one actually, how rad that would be. And then to talk with it, or is it a he or she actually? Who knows, questions, questions!

Books/Manga/Comics you should read that have robots in it:

Blade Runner
I, Robot
vN
The Mad Scientists Daughter
Astro Boy
Battle Angel Alita
Pluto

And probably a ton more that I can’t think of right now. If you know of something I forgot please tell me about it, I’d love to read more on the subject!

A creative cabin in the woods

These two artists show us their little and very nice hide out in the woods. A place to regain energy and ideas.

DIY-FPV-Drone for under 200 bucks

This guy from norway talks about his experiences with quad-coptor-drone. Very interisting talk. Funny, entertaining. Check it out and built a little drone for spying on the girl next door.