The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Seats, The Most Minimalist ASCII Art I've Ever Done.  Thanks, ISO-8859-1!

Callie and Izzy is an upcoming webseries it’s been my pleasure to be part of.  The show is by Nicola Rose, with whom I’ve previously worked on The Media Show and the musical Aisle Six.

More info coming soon, keep an eye on it!

This is a new variant of Scrabble I'm working on which is fairly mean to its players.  Rare letters are no longer rare, point values are rendered mostly meaningless, and you have to make valid plays without actually seeing any of the words on the board. Please click over and share your thoughts, I'd love some input on this.  Would it actually be any fun to play this way?

When I was growing up, there was a certain "inspirational" poem most, if not all, of my elderly Christian relatives had framed and displayed somewhere in their home.

I rewrote the poem as inspirational material for a Jedi pursuing the Dark Side of the Force, and set it against a Tatooine version of its standard backdrop.  I don't know about you folks, but I certainly feel more inspired now.

Here's the poem in text:

"Bootprints"

One night I dreamed I was walking through the Tatooine desert with Lord Vader.  Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed bootprints in the sand.  Sometimes there were two sets of bootprints, other times there was one set only.

This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow, or rebel defeat, I could see only one set of bootprints, so I said to Lord Vader,

"You promised me Father, that if I joined you, we would rule the galaxy as father and son.  But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my journey toward the Dark Side, there has only been one set of bootprints in the sand.  Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?"

Lord Vader replied, "The times when you have seen only one set of bootprints, my son, that is when I levitated you."

Public domain source photos taken from here and here.  Star Wars crawl font taken from here.

K2 Red Telephone Box 1926

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.   Britain's very first red booth design was the cast-iron K2, which very quickly became ubiquitous throughout London and the surrounding areas throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Britain’s Red Telephone Boxes continued to take inspiration from the K2 throughout the entire payphone era, and copies and tributes to the design can still be found in phone booths around the world today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

There are only so many combinations available.

One fine evening in the lobby of the radio station WBAI, where I work on Off the Hook, I was doodling in my sketchbook to kill some time.  I decided to draw the file cabinet, plant, and telephone which happened to be in front of me.

When the drawing was complete I stuck it to the wall behind the cabinet, natch.  It was suddenly inaccurate, though, so I added the picture on the wall to the picture, and so on.  It's cabinets, plants, and phones, all the way down.

I figured someone at the station would get rid of this before too long, but as you can see from this photo taken a couple of months later (note the plant's growth) it's still in place. In that time I've witnessed a few other denizens of the place notice, do a double-take, and get at least a slight chuckle out of it.  RESULT!

2013 UPDATE: The sketch, which I posted in November of 2010, surprisingly ended up staying on the wall for a couple of years.  It remained even after the plant had grown larger, the phone had been replaced, and the cabinet had been moved.  The lobby closed down, and the station and its contents hurriedly transferred to other facilities, when the building was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012; the drawing's fate remains unknown.

Joybubbles (May 25, 1949-August 8, 2007)

Joybubbles (born Josef Engressia) was an early phone phreak.

With perfect pitch he was able to control the phone system by simply whistling the tones normally generated by Bell's systems, an ability he accidentally discovered at age seven.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

My standup set from last night’s “Say Everything,” the talk-show-esque pub comedy show where I’m a regular performer.  We talked about my hometown, Hurricane Joaquin, funerals, and more.

More info about the show on its Facebook.

I'm taking my Doctor Who Facts! project to a few new places.  I'm doing cartoons like this for some of the facts; also, there's a @WHOFAX Tumblr now!

A fact from the @WHOFAX archives, illustrated.

In response to the current kerfuffle going on in Neil Gaiman's corner of the Internet, the affable @mistressmousey suggested her artist acquaintances draw this elusive creature known as the pencil-necked little weasel.

So sorry, etc.