Direct Youtube Link
Above is a Japanese ad from the 80s. At the end it says “World Fashion Creator Renown”, so I guess it’s an ad for a clothing manufacturer, maybe? I’m not really sure.
I wish I could have been at the meeting where the advertising agency pitched this ad to the company. What did they say? “Studies show that consumers love ‘bat-shit crazy’. The ‘bat-shit crazier’, the better!”
This clip was brought to my attention by an old friend, who conducts his (or her!) interneting under the alias “vogdoid”. Thanks, “v”!
Concept
Certain flavors just go together. Peanut butter & jelly, sour cream & chives, coffee & doughnuts… and now thanks to Japanese snack manufacturer Yamaei, we can add a new combination to the pantheon: squid & mayonnaise.
How could no one have thought of it before? The marketing campaign practically writes itself, a la those old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ads. “Hey, you got squid on my mayonnaise!” “Hey, you got mayonnaise on my squid!” American snack manufacturers, snap this one up before it’s too late.
Packaging
The packaging, as shown above, is pretty ho-hum, with the exception of the bitchin’ illustration:
It should be noted that unlike in the U.S.A., where mayonnaise usually comes in jars, in Japan it comes in skinny plastic bottles like this:
This is fortunate for the illustration, because you couldn’t really have a squid riding a rocket-powered mayonnaise jar. That would just be stupid. The aerodynamics would be all off.
Taste: I was expecting the worst, but really they weren’t all that bad. They just had a mild mayonnaise flavor, actually; I couldn’t really detect any hint of squid (though it did smell just a little fishy). If fried mayonnaise chips sound good to you, then this is your product. If not, then… what’s wrong with you? Who wouldn’t want to eat fried mayonnaise chips?
Youtube direct link
This has already made the rounds all over th’ Internet, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch.
Via Digg, Boing Boing, et al
Okay, it’s impossible for me to write this entry in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a total nerd, but oh well. I’m an overweight cartoonist/blogger, so I guess there wasn’t much chance of someone mistaking me for Steve McQueen anyway.
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Some of the stages of my process for creating a comic, such as writing & penciling, require a great deal of mental focus, and are best done in silence. But other stages, like inking and computer stuff, are pretty mindless. For those parts, I usually listen to music, audio books, and podcasts to pass the time.
Certain videos and tv shows also work. You can often get the gist by just listening to the audio and looking up every once in a while for any visual jokes that pop up. I often listen to The Daily Show in this way, for example.
Hands down the nerdiest thing I listen to while I work are “Let’s Play”s, or “LPs”, which are internet videos of people playing video games. There are a surprising number of people that do these, for all sorts of games. Since I listen rather than watch, I prefer ones where the player provides running commentary as they play, and like games that have a story to them; I gravitate towards the old Sierra adventure games of the 80s and 90s.
My two favorite LPers go by the names of hercrabbiness and LateBlt (a video of the latter heads this entry). They appear to be friends, and often provide guest commentary on each other’s videos, with amusing bickering throughout.
Nostalgia probably plays a role in why I enjoy these, since I played Sierra games as a kid. And as I say, I don’t really “watch” them, just have them on in the background while I work; they may not be worth devoting one’s full attention to…
But for all my backpedaling, I really do enjoy them, as the fact that I devoted a blog entry to them would attest. I’m curious if other people would find these entertaining, or if it’s just me. Leave a comment with your impressions.
Also, if anyone has any suggestions for other videos/podcasts/audio that would make for good listening while working, I’m “all ears” (*cough*).
Above is an episode of one of my all-time favorite cartoon series. Offhand, it’s the only CG cartoon I can think of that I really enjoy. It’s like a cross between the slapstick of Looney Tunes and the surrealism of Jim Woodring’s work.
It ran on a Japanese cable channel called the “Kids Network”, but honestly I don’t really think it’s appropriate for kids. Watch a few and you’ll see what I mean.
Pictured: Some preliminary attempts at a quicker drawing style
When I play pool, my “strategy” basically amounts to trying to shoot in whichever of my assigned balls is closest to a pocket. I suck, so managing even that is rare.
Professional pool players, on the other hand, take a lot more into consideration. They don’t consider each shot separately, but think in terms of the whole game. They might start off with a more difficult shot if it will put up in a better position for the shots that follow. At the highest levels of play, there’s a whole other layer of strategy.
It’s similar with comics. An amateur cartoonist might only concern themselves with making a comic that’s interesting and looks good. The professional cartoonist has the added challenge of needing to do all that in a timely manner. The greatest cartoonist in the world wouldn’t be able to make a living at it if their life’s work amounted to one book that was 10% done. If you want to make earn any sort of living as a cartoonist, you need to have books available for sale, which means you need to finish them at a steady pace.
I suspect that if I could manage to put out a book like Tonoharu: Part One at least once a year, and devoted time to marketing them, that I could somehow eke out a living. Right now I’m nowhere near that pace. I spent all of last week drawing a single panel. Granted it was probably the most complicated thing I’ve ever drawn in my life and I think it turned out pretty cool, but still. It might be reasonable to spend a week on the cover, but a single panel in the middle of the book? That’s harder to justify. I literally can’t afford to work as slowly as I have been if I want to make a living as a cartoonist.
It’d be too jarring if I just switched styles in the middle of a story, so even though it’ll take me years of tedious work to finish Tonoharu, I’m going to continue along in the same way. But I’m already thinking about the books that will follow, and how I might adapt my style to allow me to finish pages more quickly. My study of East Asian calligraphy has been helpful towards this goal (for reasons I’ll describe in another blog entry sometime).
