Soldier Ant 

Stikfas are 3" tall, fully poseable and customizable action figures, and they look like a lot of fun.

On the site, click the 'About' tab (it's Flash, or I'd link to it) to read a refreshing tale of the inspiration for Stikfas, and the high standards that the creator Banyj held himself to in producing the finished line.

It must've paid off, because I understand that Hasbro has decided to partner with them, handling distribution and sales through their (considerable, I'm guessing) channels. I don't know the toy industry, but I'm guessing a Hasbro partnership is the equivalent of having your first novel optioned by Dreamworks.

It's nice to see that some industries still reward quality work and attention to detail. Now I gotta go order me some...

Meg Hourihan is leaving San Francisco and her reasons for doing so kind of resonate with me.

Unlike Meg, I don't know that I'd say I'm ecstatic about my move back East. New England may be a place that stays in your blood -- Ohio is more like something you find in your stool.

"I'm not sure California would ever really feel like my home nor would Californians ever feel like my people."

That's a fairly concise summation of how I felt about California for my five years there -- like a permanent tourist. Californians were never my people. (Which is more a sad statement on my own self than on the many fine friends - both native to the state and transplants like me - that I met while there. Good people are in California, and some damn fine drivers. Oh, and good Indian food, but that's beside the point.)

So I'm back in Ohio, amongst my deep-fried people.

Every once in a great while, it gives me pleasure to look at an old, old project of mine on the Web - Bryce's Buttons & Widgets.

Completed when I was a grad student at Georgia Tech, the goal was not only to contribute to the burgeoning community of freeware Web icon-and-art providers. I also wanted to make layered, deconstruct-and-bake-your-own versions available for people to learn from. (Apparently a secondary goal was to test out every Photoshop filter I could get my hands on.)

For a while (all of 3 or 4 months) it was a smashing success. Ever since, it lies in a bit-bucket, a forgotten directory on a departmental webserver. It makes me feel all warm and cuddly to know that it's still out there, though, serving up it's meager (if dated) collection of drop-shadowed fun.

That last post made me feel like doing something creative, and I've always loved robots. So I started goofing with Illustrator a bit tonight to do some character design:

Screwtop the Robot will probably end up being a blatant ripoff of two of my favorite characters - Bender the robot and Mike Mignola's Amazing Screw-On Head. (Although, truth be told, the name came to me in a blinding flash. I remembered my best friend from high school, Brad, whose common refrain upon entering any bar, basement, or general area near alcohol was "Gimme yer best bottle-a' screw top!")

Sounds like I missed another great Tim Easton show at Andyman's Treebar. Victoria Williams in attendance, no less...

Yamaha Motors has a small but nice collection of Paper Craft models available for download in PDF format. These are great! Ostensibly, a way to promote their own cycle line (check out that badass VMAX) they also offer up some great models based on nature and Japanese culture. (My favorite is probably the Kabuto-Kazari, warrior's helmet, for the festival of Tango-no-Sekku.)

Yes, I realize that the site design for this weblog could use some help. (Of course, you'll recognize it as the 'out of the box' templates for the Movable Type personal publishing system.)

I'd like to say that there's a posh and polished design waiting to be deployed, but - wouldn't you know it - on my sabbatical, the last thing I've felt like doing was working on Web-stuff. I do have a logo, though:

Ah, the glorious results of a misspent vacation..

My old manager Erin Malone has taken on more responsibilities! Nice job Erin! Keep your chin up.

I recently reconnected with an old grad-school pal (and one-man Art Collective) Ryan Todd whose been a busy boy lately -- check out his e-zine Pastiche Online.

I got a real chuckle from seeing Pastiche's travelling correspondent Jamella in and around Atlanta -- in fact, in one shot she's right in front of the strip joint that was down the hill from my old apartment.

It's amazing to me somehow that -- in the 5 years since I've been away from Atlanta -- the proprietors of Girls Are Fun have seemingly never managed to change the lettering on the sign out front. The entire time I lived there, it read 'Girls * ATM.' What more could you ask for? I guess.

I suspect there might be at least one native Minnesotan that reads this weblog from time to time (you know who you are.) Here's a fantastically-executed Flash piece, an interactive comic that you might find interesting: Forests, Fields and the Falls - Connecting Minnesota. (Link courtesy Scott McCloud.)

On a strangely twisted Web-jaunt this evening (with stops at the Philadelphia Experiment, the Illuminati and Nikolai Tesla's home-made earthquakes), I somehow ended up on Mike the Headless Chicken, and he's perhaps the most incredible story of the night. (And the one that comes closest to being verifiable!)

Mike was kind of an amazing, if somewhat alarming bird. But I was glad to find out that he was "examined by the officers of several humane societies and was declared to have been free from suffering." Which is really all we want for our freakshow poultry displays, right?

Riding an old, solid-steel riding mower around your in-laws yard. The crisp air, the crunchy (if sparse) leaves. Ah, it's nice to be back East...

(The only downside to this excursion? I got a little too close to the 'firepit' and picked up a furniture tack in my father-in-laws rear tire. Oops!)

This is great -- the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a new ambitious attempt at reconstituting one of the greatest lost wonders of antiquity - the destroyed library at Alexandria.

And leave a good-looking corpse. Leonardo the dinosaur mummy is living the teenage American dream.

'An analysis of the fossilized bone structure led researchers to conclude that Leonardo was a subadult that died when it was about 3 or 4 years old. "It still had what we call the 'cute factor,'" he said.'

Just like James Dean...

(Link followed from Robot Wisdom.)

Okay, maybe it's not been dead but the product has changed hands at least twice since I stopped caring. The SuperCard 4 beta is out and it's OS X native! I spent way too many hours thumbing through a set of thick SuperTalk manuals in grad school. It almost makes me want to download the beta and see if I can get some of my old projects running... Almost.

Dark Horse's Scott Allie recently announced a new anthology of Hellboy and BPRD stories that will -- for the first time ever -- be done without direct supervision or approvals from Mike Mignola. While this might ordinarily make me cringe (one thing I enjoy so much about the characters and the series is Mignola's singular vision) when I hear a teaser like this, I can't help but be excited:

"In Bob Fingerman's story, Hellboy and Abe and Roger are trying to get a soda out of a vending machine. It's hilarious, and it's nothing Mike would've done."

(Link courtesy Bob Duffy.)

Here're some fun little icons. You can download them in PDF format for use in Photoshop or Illustrator.

This site cracks my wife up. It's a particularly charismatic cat, whose owners like to snap pictures of it with the lights off. "A thing was born of me that day. A monster I am that will never die."

And check out Beastly as Liza Minnelli. (For the record, this cat is nowhere near as frightening as seeing the man-mouthing suckfest of a kiss administered by 'husband' David Gest at Minnelli's 'real-life' wedding. Ick.)

In my early days at Netscape, I worked with an odd guy named Dov. Dov called himself 'Cid.' (Apparently, being named Dov just isn't unique enough for Cid.)

While Cid's British accent is somewhat suspect, his talent is not. So when I noticed a Comrade.Cid on the credits page for how loathsome, an original comic by Ted Naifeh and Tristan Crane, I immediately though of Dov.

And, sure enough, it is the one and only Cid. Wonder if I should drop him a line? Nah...

(Oh, and Warren Ellis started the whole mess.)

A 2,000-year old limestone ossuary, that's rested in a private collector's hands for the past 15 years, bears an Aramaic inscription dedicated to
James the Just, brother to Jesus and leader of the early 'Christian' church in Jerusalem.

For an excellent and thorough history of scholarship surrounding the existence of James (and the challenge that the fact of James' existence has posed to the Roman-Catholic Church) read James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls
by Robert Eisenman.

This has got to be a record. I'm at this weblogging thing for... what? A little less than a month. And I've already bored myself stiff.

"You see kids? This is why you should never, ever try.

Actor Richard Harris dead at 72.

I've recently written about the Green Man, so imagine my surprise when his tortured visage showed up in the green bell pepper I was dicing for a home-made chili today.

He was delicious.

Here's a nice, if too-brief, history of the clown, dating from clowning's early origins in jestery:

"One day the king glimpsed himself and a mirror, and saddened at how old he looked, started crying. The other members of the court decided they better cry as well. When the king stopped crying, everyone else stopped crying as well, except Nasir Ed Din. When the king asked Nasir why he was still crying, he replied, 'Sire, you looked at yourself in the mirror but for a moment and you cried. I have to look at you all the time.'"