(Made with the I Don't Know What I'm Doing lyrics and wordle)

Server outages bring out the doodler in me. Gig poster for the show on Friday:

(Here's the PDF [3mb].)

Did you know: 60% of the bands playing Friday start their names with "the".

Also I was asked to deface a t-shirt with my signature and lyrics from Dirtbag:

Spot the errors, I'm an idiot.

A long time ago I put out a call for album art for the new record and got a lot of great submissions in the forum thread. A few complications arose that I hadn't realized -- mainly that for printing I need a super high-res version. Plus a cover isn't enough for a CD, you also need the back, the inside and the disc face, etc, etc. I'd love to put the submitted covers in a gallery so people can use them as the cover art if they want.

Here are some of my favorites:

(credits: Douchegordijn, Ash, Forsten, onemorechris -- thanks to everyone who submitted!)

I also had a difficult time deciding what really fit with the album. I take that kind of stuff maybe too seriously and felt lost. When I was whining about my lack of direction a friend reminded me that the best way to find a focus is to go personal, find something meaningful to me. Without an anchor in reality I just float around.

ANSI art was a big part of my life during my isolated nerdy teenage years. That time was largely defined by dropping out of high school, hanging out on BBS's, having no friends, playing video games, rarely going outside and antidepressants. The songs on Out of It are all about those sorts of feelings, so I felt a strong connection. I'm not sure it's one many people will pick up on at first glance, but it's important to me that it's there.

And now I'm gonna go play some video games. Life is so different now!

Here's what my next CD will look like:

The entire design is in ANSI art by Fredrik Olsson.

I'm trying to find a way to spice up my t-shirt selection. I've got a bunch of ideas chicken-scratched out but I'm no artist. I thought it would be nice to find people who could turn those into viable designs. I looked on Spreadshirt and Threadless but came up empty.

Mr. Coulton recently had a post about a collaborative t-shirt design site. Which would be sweet but is obviously a pretty rough thing to set up dealing with paying out royalties all the time.

I'd be satisfied if there was simply a site with talented t-shirt artists I could buy designs off of easily.

Guess I should post this here also (already in the forums):

The title of my next album, barring mind-changes, will be "Out Of It". I'm looking for album art & ideas.

I want to go with a different style from I Don't Know What I'm Doing, so nothing too cartoony or that looks like a kid drew it.

Stuff you've made (that I can use) or things found through the Creative Commons search would be sweet. Thank you!

Figure I should get a jump on it. Thanks!

This collection of the worst album covers has some gems. On the down-side this was going to be the cover of my next album:

Back to the drawing board.

Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundström.

Ziggy Stardust comic - scans of a David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust comic. They should revive the Rock Fantasy line of comics and do indie bands. Everyone can be working day jobs and have no time to fight crime.

I'm trying to put my Brad Sucks gallery back together. I lost a lot of that stuff in some sort of server disaster long ago. If you've done any Brad Sucks artwork or videos, feel free to send them in. Also I'm trying to remember the credits for some of the things in there.

I went to see Body Worlds 2 in Toronto yesterday. You can read about it on Wikipedia here, see lots of images of it on Google Images here. (We weren't allowed to take pictures.)

It was a little crowded but otherwise corpse-tastic. Before I went in I was concerned I might puke, I'm not big on dead things. But once I got in there that fear faded and I was more afraid someone else would puke and that would create a puke chain reaction that would take me down with it. After a while that wore off and nothing much happened. Bodies are gross though.

I've put up a $100 jackpot in this Worth1000 contest for a Brad Sucks logo. I've been trying to put together a semi-decent press kit forever now. I hate doing that stuff, it's awful and I'm terrible at it.

I thought a cool logo might help, but art is hard to come by. I talked to a few people about it but after pricing it out I decided I'd give the Worth1000 community a shot. They're enormously creative over there (check out their previous corporate contests) and I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

I checked out the Christopher Pratt exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada yesterday and it was excellent. I wasn't allowed to take pictures and the examples on the web don't do his work any sort of justice so you'll just have to trust me that it was great. His work is all of fairly ordinary things; buildings, streets, rooms, ships. But he uses color in such a way that elements of the paintings take on a 3D quality and seem to jump right out at you. Very cool and worth checking out if you get the chance.

The Effects of Diseases, Drugs, and Chemicals on the Creativity and Productivity of Famous Sculptors, Classic Painters, Classic Music Composers, and Authors - very interesting article.

altered books - "Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration." I really love these.

Crimewire is Louise W. Klinker's proposed Limewire skin that reorganizes the P2P app into a different light. For instance instead of there being a "Library" of what you've downloaded, it's called your "Criminal record". Crimewire would track how much you owe each band and record label and you have a Justification Profile:

The last new function is the "Justification Profile". This section is the most fictional part of CrimeWire and based upon a point system. When you input your salary, number of records in collection, amount of vinyl in collection, number of concerts you go to per year etc. it returns the amount of money it is fair for you to "steal" for per day.

I like it, it's pretty funny. I'd also like to see aggregated stats of how much all downloads on the service are costing individual artists and labels, damage you're doing to the economy, the amount you would be fined for the material you've uploaded and maybe how much you're hurting Coldplay's feelings.

Gallery of the Absurd - I really like this artwork inspired by celebrity gossip. [via]

Story of the Sex Pistols - a Flickr photoset of an old comic book from 1984.

The Guns N' Roses Self-Similar Midi Synth is Guns n' Roses songs made up of sped-up samples of entire Guns n' Roses songs. How it works:

First, We took the recordings of several Guns N' Roses songs, from the albums "Appetite for Destruction" (1987), "GN'R Lies" (1988), and "Use Your Illusion I and II" (1991). We sped up these recordings exponentially until the tempo of the song became a pitched frequency. This is generally in the area of 480 times faster than normal playback speed (at this speed a song that lasts 4 minutes would be over in 0.5 seconds). Then we take these short sounds use them as samples to play back midi files of various Guns N' Roses songs. For instance, the GNR Self-Similar version of Sweet Child O' Mine may use the entirety of November Rain as its snare drum sound and the entirety of Patience for a note in Axl's voice. In this way, we can make Guns and Roses songs that are made up of very small Guns N' Roses songs, which could reveal themselves under a sonic microscope, yet are too fast to hear in the actual final product.

Paradise City and Sweet Child O' Mine are available.

Saw this 3.2 million dollar art spider in town today and snapped a picture. Gotta go back once they attach the egg sac!