Category: Blog

As my poor wife can attest, my brain often seizes on a made-up word, witticism, or song…and repeats it ad nauseum until I’ve come up with a new made-up word, witticism, or song to replace it. I’m a bit manic that way.

When I was down in Texas, visiting fellow cartoonists Scott and Kris, the word that happened to be stuck in my brain was “Snap-a-doo.”

Casual use went something like this:

“Hey Kellett, wanna go get some pancakes?

“Snap-a-Doo.”

“Hey Kellett, here’s that five bucks I owe you.”

“Snap-a-Doo.”

It’s one of those all-purpose words that mean everything and nothing, depending on the inflection you give it. In any case, I used it a lot in Texas.

Kris tells me the word has now infected their conversation, to the point that they now imagine it to be my Shazam summoning word. Hence, this little caricature of me by Kris:

After posting about the TED Photosynth presentation yesterday, I had a lot of readers e-mail me with links to other TED presentations.

TED, to me, is one of those mythical conferences of beauty and light and goodness and intelligence and awesomeness and lots of scientists that didn’t date much in High School. And I want to attend so badly.

Back in my Mattel days, when I was helping to run some sessions of “Project Platypus” (Mattel’s really cool, blue-sky, months-long brainstorming and creativity project), the two places I always wanted to check out were the IDEO San Francisco offices…and the TED conference. Given enough funding and the right creative space, nerds can create some truly awesome things. IDEO does it on an almost daily basis…and TED…well, TED is TED.

Anywho, of all the TED-related items that Sheldon readers sent me yesterday, I liked this one the best.

For those among us who advertise online, I’d invite you to check out this little tidbit from Sheldon’s uber-group, Blank Label Comics. Buying into 20 million pageviews for just a few bucks is actually an immense, immense deal. Check it out:

***

Blank Label Comics, the ground-breaking co-op of independent cartoonists, is partnering with Project Wonderful to launch an ambitious concept in advertising that will offer never-before-seen marketing possibilities.

BLC’s Summer Wonderfest is a limited-time offer through which advertisers can buy ads that will appear across the entire BLC network at the same time. That’s every single Blank Label comic and their forums.

Ads will be purchased through Project Wonderful’s innovative infinite auction model: You bid on an advertising slot, and for as long as you are the high bidder, your ad is displayed. You can bid whatever price you’d like for as long as you’d like: two days, a week, a year – it’s your choice. Read through Project Wonderful’s site, then advertise on Blank Label Comics (including Sheldon) here.

BLC traffics over 20 million pageviews a month. That means that you have a very good chance of buying a phenomenal amount of exposure for much less than you would spend on a traditional cost-per-view basis. Plus, you’re buying a tremendous amount of advertising saturation. Your ad will be seen simultaneously across the Web sites of some of the most popular comics on the Net.

The traditional BLC ad system will return in four weeks, so this is your chance to make an incredible impact for your product, site, comic, or group.

The URLs for the BLC member comics are:

Checkerboard Nightmare: http://www.checkerboardnightmare.com/

Courting Disaster: http://www.courting-disaster.com/

Evil Inc: http://www.evil-comic.com

Greystone Inn: http://www.greystoneinn.net/

Joyce and Walky!: http://www.joyceandwalky.com

Krazy Larry: http://www.krazylarry.com/

Melonpool: http://www.melonpool.com/

Real Life Comics: http://www.reallifecomics.com/

Schlock Mercenary: http://www.schlockmercenary.com

Sheldon: https://sheldoncomics.com/

Shortpacked!: http://www.shortpacked.com/

Starslip Crisis: http://www.starslip.com/

Ugly Hill: http://www.uglyhill.com/

Wapsi Square: http://www.wapsisquare.com/

I make fun of my buddy Bill
for workin’ there, but those guys at Microsoft are all right sometimes. Take, for example, Photosynth — their collaboritive project with University of Washington (watch theTED presenation first, then head to the actual Photosynth site).

What an amazing application! Can you imagine what it would be like to be a young geography student with an application like this? An architectural student? A history student looking at a much-photographed moment of history?

The one thing I’d be interested to see, based on their reconstructions of real-world, 3-D images based on virtual-world, 2-D images (Flikr, in this case), is how the metadata of “time” would be considered.

Let’s say there’s a Photosynth approximation of Big Ben. But four months from now, the clockface of Big Ben is destroyed by a meteorite, and stands defaced for 18 months while Parliament allocates the funds to fix it.

In a case like that, how do you handle the metadata entries of time when reconstructing a public place by communal photographs? I assume that Photosynth looks for shared data — individual pixel sets that are shared in two disparate photos — and then builds out from there. No problem there. But what happens when an event fundamentally changes an object? From which moment in time do you draw your photos?

Some photos will have been taken with the old clockface, some will be taken during the unrepaired period, and others during the post-reconstruction period. Will you end up with a Platonic Ideal of photos — a Big Ben as it is best remembered (and best viewed) from all angles? …an image of Big Ben that ignores any temporary damage, spray-paint protests, etc? Or will you have to create different image sets for different Big Bens in time?

There has never been a higher and more noble calling than knitting. If human history were to be viewed as a slowly rising plateau, always stretching onward and upward, then knitting would sit high upon its apex as the grandest achievement of which humanity can lay claim. If 2000 random people were sampled, you would consistently find that the knitters among them would be the sexiest, the most intelligent, and the noblest of purpose.

Knitting: the single greatest thing ever.

…now please stop threatening me with sharp knitting objects. It was just an example about magazines! 🙂

I happened to walk by a huuuuge newsstand recently — the kind with 10,000 different magazines on the racks — and couldn’t help thinking: “Do we really need a ‘Knitter’s Magazine’, a ‘Simply Knitting Magazine’, a ‘Vogue Knitting Magazine’, and a ‘Creative Knitting Magazine’?” Do we really?

Have we reached the point not just of hyper-specialization in our magazine selections, but of just plain ol’ fashioned need-a-boot-up-the-rear ridiculousness?

And then my second thought was: “Where the heck is the VC money coming to launch that fourth knitting magazine?” That would’ve been a helluva pitch meeting to sit in on…..

“Ladies and gentlemen, the market needs Creative Knitting Magazine. The market is crying out for Creative Knitting Magazine. Ladies and gentlemen, won’t you give us the 6 million dollars to fill that void?”

This is worth sharing with you for the sheer randomness and creativity of it. After looking at a site like this, how can you not love Japan? Something tells me there’s a whole second layer of awesomeness to the web, but it’s all written in katakana…so I’ll never find the URLs to even see it.

[…found via OK/Cancel]

In the most recent Sheldon newsletter, I mentioned that Sheldon reader Monty F. had organized a shipment of donated Sheldon books to troops serving overseas….which was awesome of him to do. I was more than happy to donate the Sheldon books, but Monty did the heavy lifting in making it happen.

Kindness like that should be returned. So allow me to steer you to Monty’s store for the best salsa I’ve ever had in my life: his Cranberry Salsa. It’s amazingly tasty stuff: cool, sweet and delicious. My wife and I devour it in barbecue season.

He makes award-winning hot sauces, too, but because I have a wimp of a palate, I can’t give you knowledgeable recommendations in that department. But I’d fight a bear for that sweet, sweet salsa. A bear with anger-control issues. A bear who’s looking to burn off some of the steam from his failing marriage. A bear who….well, you get the point. A big bear.

(Note: I don’t profit from this link at all. I just wanted to do something nice for Monty’s kindness in getting Sheldon books to troops stationed overseas.)

It always cracks me up when I start to notice the marketing for pro-soccer-in-America heating up. Since David Beckham starts playing for the LA team in July (…sorry, the “LA Galaxy” — I literally had to look it up)…the radio, TV, and magazine spots have started to appear.

The potential in sports licensing, advertising and merchandising is what’s driving the push, of course. I doubt few, if any, markets generate as much sports-related income as the US. But boy, this is a road we’ve walked down before, isn’t it? The average American just couldn’t give a hoot about the game. I played soccer for seven years, and even I can’t seem to muster a long-term interest.

Why is that, I wonder? What is it about the American experience that makes soccer a “less-than” sport? It’s like the metric system of the sports world: no matter how good it might be, Americans are just not gonna have it. It’s right up there with Canadian Ice Curling as a sport Americans would rather not be forced to watch on TV. Yet the rest of the world goes absolutely bonkers over it.

While watching an Arsenal game in a pub one time, an English friend of mine told me that he was glad Americans weren’t into the game. He said that if we were, the World Cup would play out like the American medal count at the end of the Summer Olympics. He was much happier to see us sit it out, thank you very much. And he probably had a point.

So I say, “Watch out, Canada! The day we get interested in Ice Curling, you guys are going down!”

Today’s strip features that urbanite classic, the Big Wheel.

Ah, Big Wheel…how many trees did I crash into on you? How many hills did I tempt death with on you? And how quickly did your front wheel go out of alignment from your handlebars, making you completey impossible to steer? Ah, Big Wheel…you and I had some good times.

But even better than the Big Wheel was the less-commonly-seen “Green Machine”…the ultimate in childhood awesomeness:

The Green Machine still exists on the market, I see…but they’ve added some extra safety features from the model that I owned as I kid. Which is good…because let me tell you: that baby was not particularly safe in the hands of a 10-year old boy. I bit it at least 10 times over a half-hour period, riding on my Green Machine. That thing was a recipe for skinned knees and klonked skulls.

But you know what? That thing rode like no other vehicle I’ve operated, before or since. It was awesome: sitting 3 inches off the ground, flying down hills, steering by two vertical handles like some sort of jet pilot, crashing every few minutes, getting up and doing the whole thing again…C’mon! What ten-year old wouldn’t want to ride that! I’d want to ride one now, if I could fit my Krispy Kreme-addled rump on there.

Which is why this guy is so awesome. I wish this guy lived on my street. I’d love to crash on the Green Machine one more time.