My pal Allen Henderson, who made the famous Which Way Game and Steamshovel Harry (that I did the music for) has a new website of his animation up. It’s full of secrets (hint: click the balloon on the first page.)

Also here’s some old test animation Allen did for a project called Frank and His Exposed Brain. I recorded three theme song ideas that you can hear there.

I believe the idea was that Frank would be having a normal day but then run into problems (birds, soccer balls, weather) because his brain was completely exposed.

Sad news. I learned yesterday that ANSI artist Fredrik Olsson aka Big Yellow Man, who did the rad artwork for my 2008 album Out of It, passed away in October.

I really wanted to use ANSI artwork for Out of It because BBS’s and ANSI were a huge part of my teenage life. (I was in iCE and ACiD at various points.) I also thought it might be the first time it was done? I found Fredrik’s work on Deviant Art. Pieces of his like “television” and snowy street really stood out to me from other ANSI artwork, which tends to be a bit juvenile and cleavage-heavy. “television” is the back cover of the Out of It CD and I still love looking at it.

Fredrik was a loved and respected member of the Blocktronics ANSI art community. They’ve paid tribute to him with their latest Artpack. (I used PabloDraw to view it.)

I didn’t know Fredrik well, but he was great to work with. Not only did he design the artwork for the package but he handled all the fiddly print stuff to make sure all the colors and pixels came out perfect. He seemed proud of how it turned out.

Check out some of Fredrik’s artwork. You can also watch a captured session of him drawing an ANSI piece if you want to see what it was like to paint with your keyboard and ANSI text characters in the old MS-DOS days.

Thanks and so long, Fredrik. You’ll be missed.

My friend Ken Flagg (aka Vic-20, touring keyboardist for MC Frontalot) is using Kickstarter to fund a really cool looking animated music video for his song Pieces. He’s over halfway to his goal and needs a final push in the last few weeks. Here’s the project:

You can check out the album the song is from here. Good luck, Ken!

Scott Andrew's new record Save You From Yourself is out. Check it out, he's OG-Internet. Congrats, Scott.

Marc Orchant has died.

I met Marc when I was in Seattle at Microsoft a few years ago -- he was a super friendly, knowledgeable guy. We kept in contact and he was always passionate about what he was doing and what everyone else around him was doing. He was a guy I had hoped to meet up with again down the road and it's shocking that I won't get that chance.

My best to his family.

Scott gives the lowdown on his pre-orders. Very awesome and open of him to give the numbers out. Looks like it was a pretty great success and huge congratulations to him.

I've been thinking about taking pre-orders for the next Brad Sucks album but I don't think I have the energy or time or talent to set up a sweet system like Scott's so I doubt I'll bother. It's hard enough getting the record out the door.

I've known Adam Finley since 2002 when he wrote about Brad Sucks in Lockergnome. We struck up a friendship and stayed in email contact since then. He was a very talented writer and we shared the experience of having large creative aspirations but being stuck in small towns. I encouraged (code for hassled) him to put his writing online, to start a blog, to get into blogging commercially, to get RSS feeds, to fix his RSS feeds, etc, etc. With my nerdy faith I knew that if he got his writing out there, nice things would happen for him as they have for me.

Lately he had been happily writing for TV Squad and updating Raise Your Children My Way, Damn It as well as Adam's Utterly Podcastical Podcast.

Earlier today I received an email from his brother saying Adam had been struck and killed by a school bus on Thursday. I didn't believe it at first because Adam's most recent post on TV Squad was this morning (and made me laugh). But I knew it was possible the posts were pre-written and queued. I held out hope it was a sick joke, but Google News backed it up (1, 2). Awful.

As is common these days, I had never met Adam. We spoke on the phone once or twice and got along great. He interviewed me for Flak magazine and it was like talking to an old friend. In email we tossed bits and pieces back and forth, checking in for life/career/project updates whenever we had gone too long without contact. I always asked him what he was working on. I knew that he'd go on to be an extremely successful writer. It was only a matter of time.

There are huge gaps in my knowledge of Adam. I really didn't know him the way his family and friends did and it would be disingenuous to even put my sense of loss on the same level of what they must be feeling. But I do know Adam was thoughtful, funny, caring, talented and unique. I'll miss him and I'm very sad he's gone.

My pal Scott Andrew's taking pre-orders for his new record. His album site is super awesome and fills me with seething jealousy... of friendship. Go check it out!