(watch the video)

This weekend at Comic Con, we got to fulfill a wish for some really nice and talented people (more on the Galacticast blog). It was a pleasure all the way; Kevin Smith couldn’t be a cooler or nicer guy, and he clearly genuinely appreciates things like this. There’s a very funny second chapter to this story, actually, involving his overzealous volunteer honor guard, but you’ll see that soon enough, when we launch PulpSecret.

update: anyone hearing about Galacticast for the first time, it’s a very funny videoblog made by Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan that features ingenious sci-fi parodies every week, all made at home on shoestring budgets. The excerpt you see in the beginning here is from their soon to be classic Galactifund episode.

Author and comics cult leader Warren Ellis, via his Bad Signal mailing list, opens this morning with:

Y’know, if Ellen Degeneres is presenting the Oscars these days, I figure we’re less than five years away from Ze Frank presenting the Oscars. Which I’d watch.

Be sure to check out Ze when he hosts the SXSW Web Awards Sunday night, and there may be some other places he’ll turn up, too — more on that soon.

Click To Play

I don’t have a videoblog, but here’s an episode anyway. Seen: The many creative people at Next New Networks. A bona-fide ATHF mooninite. The very nice people from Viral. Snow and ice dampen Valentine’s Day in Manhattan. And the art of Tony Matelli. Music, “words,” by Ohler. Download it here: hello mr ohler. Special thanks to Josh Leo.

I’ve been remiss in not telling the world about this sooner, but the best thing any of you could do to brighten up your day is press play on the little video below. Adventure Time is an original cartoon short from a young animator named Pen Ward (blog), who pitched the series to my partner in Next New Networks, Fred Seibert, for his cartoons business. The short keeps racking up a quarter million views on YouTube, then getting yanked (the rights are owned by Viacom, as part of the Random Cartoons series), but someone’s recently uploaded it again – watch it while you can (or try the Addicting Clips link).

It’s obvious from just a few moments’ viewing that this is a really special cartoon, and a bit miraculous for being one that, as Fred says, both older and younger people can love for entirely different reasons. I love lines like “I’m 28″ and “Rhombus!” and “my hat is awesome!” but a nine year-old might simply love when they yell, “Adventure Time!” And we’re both right. If you think this should become a full series like I do, and revolutionize kid’s cartoons all over again, I don’t know, post this on your blog and tell Nick you want your Adventure Time.

*** special bonus fun-time link: Monster Party!!!

What a treat this week to get the Sunday NY Times Magazine and see this great Speed Racer homage on the cover by Nathan Fox, whose work I’ve always noticed and liked, as part of a series of illustrations for this week’s story about Toyota.

Fox has a loose, brushy style and pop sense of color that often gets him compared to Tomer Hanuka or Paul Pope; I think that all three of them are diverging a lot lately, but that latter comparison would be more apt in this series, where Fox let a manga influence really take over, and composed the drawings in panels, which I haven’t seen too often in his commercial work. Wish there were larger and clearer images online; illustration really gets the short shrift sometimes in the digital version, and these were especially beautiful in print.

The clearing of all other posts from the RSS feed is nothing drastic — I’ve just made some changes behind the scenes on the blog publishing side, and this is the first new post. But it’s as good as time as any to clear the deck a little bit.

I’ve been keeping a blog now for almost ten years. I’ve met too many very successful bloggers to think my blog is anything special, or that I’m any more or less happy for having the number of readers I have. But people who read it say nice things about it occasionally, and I’ve made a bunch of great friends through blogging. Lately, it’s become harder and harder to update, though, since I haven’t known what this site was for anymore. Over the years it’s shifted from a personal weblog to a home for random stunts; a place to reblog art and media stories to a place where I post about a randomly associated bunch of interests. And each time I’ve known so little about who was reading, except that there seemed to be more of them than people I know. Whether they’re regulars, random visitors from search engines, or just people clicking through from Jonah’s still popular Nike emails, I haven’t pored over the stats enough to know, since one thing I learned years ago was that paying much attention to stats only makes me self-conscious and unhappy.

The thing I wanted to do most of all was turn on commenting, and start finding out who some of you are. I haven’t had comments on this site in years. They’re back on now. And I’ll try to not make myself crazy if I see zero comments on most of the posts.

I’m also going to try to find a new voice here with the reboot. I don’t think I’ll be reblogging much. I haven’t in a while, just not enough time to do it right, though I still love the idea. All the old posts are still up somewhere. At some point, I’ll get an archive up and working, in the meantime, the old index page is still here.

I’ve started blogging over at the Next New Networks site about professional interests, so if you want to read my thoughts on things like video and online media, plus those of a number of smart people besides me, that’s a good place to start checking out. Here, I’ll probably be posting about the same things as ever, but a bit more personally than before. I hope you’ll say hi from time to time, and let me know how this thing’s doing.