A little while back, I wrote about Nathan Fox here, and was super-pleased to get a nice note from him about it. We had a nice back and forth over email which led to him getting interviewed on the Pulp Secret Report today, but even better for me, he sent me this super cool self-portrait via email. I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it (I think fatherhood suits him, personally). 3D glasses not included.

Be sure to check out Nathan’s work on DMZ#18, on newsstands now at your friendly neighborhood comics shop. And check out the interview on Pulp Secret, embedded below.

I just realized I’m going to miss this. My old friends Cory and Lizzi are both headlining, and I’m literally stuck in San Francisco (flight cancelled). Don’t you miss it — go.

A funny thing happened the other day. Our friends at Talking Points Media, who are working with us on the soon to be launched Veracifier, posted a clip from a recent Bush Rose Garden speech on YouTube in order to support a blog post on TPMCafe. They were trying to make a specific point, that Bush seems to be continually asserting that public opinion is with him, and had clipped the part of the video they needed off C-Span with the audio of Bush’s lines.

But then, a few readers started noticing the long shot of Cheney standing dejectedly in the shrubs, absurdly far from the podium. Soon after, the video was everywhere. Picked up by The Huffington Post, Wonkette, even AOL News, TPM had accidentally unleashed a political video nearly as funny and odd as the MC Rove clip of the week before (OK, nothing’s that funny). The average TPM video gets between 1,000 and 10,000 views. This one, within three days, had gotten almost 250,000 views.

I hadn’t seen this until now, but just a day later, someone had already set the video to music: specifically, Radiohead’s “Creep,” to hilarious effect. It’s amazing how a video that seasoned eyes like Josh Marshall and Rachel Sklar missed the absurdity of the first time around had this much potential — but that’s the beauty of the Internet. Get enough eyeballs on something, and there’s a good chance that synapse will fire for the right person. And they’ll do something about it.

And without a doubt, that cameraperson who shot the long zoom deserves a raise.

It’s hard to resist just turning this blog into a place where I embed all the Next New Networks show episodes (hmm, maybe we should do that somewhere on a separate blog and feed, for the people who would want it).

That said, it’s really hard not to do it on Fridays, as each Thread Heads and Pulp Secret Report gets better and better, and both deserve a much wider audience. I’m buckling to the impulse today, and embedding them both here.

In Friday’s Thread Heads, we visit Etsy Labs and Bre from Make Magazine.

In Friday’s Pulp Secret Report, we have the usual comics insanity.

Hope you like ‘em. Anything you’d like to see, please email the shows or leave a comment on the site. We’ll be happy to listen.

Drawn by Pain is a new 12-part series on the web, mixing live action and anime, focusing on a girl who can manifest her drawings in the real world. Cool anime swordplay and angsty pubescent drama in the streets of New York, and a pretty darn good trailer… and be sure to check out the video responses fans are posting, which I can’t figure out how to link to directly, but are the first time I’ve seen people using this (Brightcove) feature.

I love that writer/director Jesse Cowell and animator Erica Langworthy just went out and made this themselves; I’m definitely going to be sending this over to our folks at Channel Frederator and Pulp Secret, and if we get a chance to meet the folks behind the show, I’ll post more about it here.

Painter Audrey Kawasaki just put another new beautiful giclee print up, Yume No Ato, pictured above, in a limited edition of 100. I’m still kicking myself over not having bought one of her Isabelle or Sophia prints on wood when they were available last year, but this latest series is on paper with a nice impression of the wood grain of the original painting.

Check out more of her work here; I especially love some of her latest paintings, like Osasoi and Komorebi, and some of her gorgeous 2005 paintings like Ratgirl and Blue Girls. There’s a new series in the works for an upcoming ThinkSpace show, which she’s been posting photos of on her livejournal.

more: MacTribe interview | LifeLounge.com | Juxtapoz (photo gallery - Copro Nason show)

Granted, I’m not religious, but I’ve got no issues with the chocolate Jesus sculpture that’s apparently touching off all the controversy this week, and from this photo (thanks for posting, Chuck) it seems like we’re missing out: it looks pretty beautiful, especially the way the cocoa butter seems to now be separating out under temperature differences (what chocolatiers call “bloom“), which is reminiscent of the oxidation of a copper or iron sculpture (here’s a shot of how it originally looked).

Chocolate’s a noble medium, as foods go, and well-suited for the theme of resurrection, as it can be so easily broken down and reformed. Not to mention, the concept of transubstantiation for many of us raised Catholic could be pretty confusing: we were taught to conflate Jesus with food, but not necessarily enjoyment. The artist’s title for the installation, “My Sweet Lord,” sounds like an attempt to reconcile some of that.

It’s starting to feel like the people of New York just like to have a big flareup over art and religious iconography every year or two, to pretend there’s still a line left to cross. Meanwhile, someone’s buying all those chocolate bunnies at Rite Aid every Easter, and tuning in to a special Christmas episode of that depressing E! show about Hugh Hefner and his houseful of girlfriends (saw a few minutes of this the other day: and you thought cable couldn’t get any more venal, banal, dull, dull, dull). Modern U.S. culture cheapens and appropriates its religions every day. So it’s hard to understand why an artist can provoke such outrage, unless it’s just that he’s an easy target.

(side note: is this site turning into some kind of odd food blog? –ts)

I really miss the days sharing an office with the Serious Eats crew when they do a thing like full-team coverage of National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. The picture below says everything… until you see the diagram.