I might be dating myself when I say that I was one of the unfortunate souls to experience the unpleasant yet elite craft of cassette creation back in the day (ya I wiki’d “cassette”, deal with it). To give you an idea: this was when gas was $1.05 a gallon, pre-Google, and wayyy before the ShamWow guy got beat up by a prostitute.

Hang onto it, toy boy. You’re gonna need it when it starts raining naked ladies.

Thanks, Zach.

Download Broken Windows and Shooting Pains on iTunes.

I wrote and recorded a handful of acoustic songs roughly around 2002 and never really knew where I could fit them into a record. I started kicking around the idea of having two music projects; one being a band and the other my acoustic songs. I wrote these 13 songs with a solo project in mind but eventually held onto them because I didn’t want to detract from the energy I was putting into Last Falling at the time. 

I always envisioned Last Falling being the band name of a few like-minded friends who would share a common bond in maintaining a creative music project – I never thought of it as a selfish professional business or a name for myself. An epiphany and a few realizations later, Last Falling makes sense to me now. My songs are best left to my own success or demise. Open eyes are beautiful.

Click to download now.

EFF YES OF THE WEEK: 04/26/09 – 05/02/09

It’s no secret. I love me some Slap Chop.

Steve Porter did an awesome job remixing the infomercial.

Better than a Kanye West track, imo. Check it, yo.

04/05-04/11 Idokungfoo.com

A while back, around April 2006, I discovered an amazing artist on istockphoto.com by the name of Simon Oxley. He is a British born designer/illustrator operating from Fukuoka, Japan. His pop culture design expresses a very simple, fresh, and intuitive attitude. I would describe his work as half cheeky and half witty with an extra special pinch of cuteness. We’ve exchanged a few emails over time where I would keep up communication and let him know where I’ve been seeing his distinctive work.

I purchased a license for this particular piece that I modified a little bit and used as a print on a couple rounds of shirt production in 2006:

Simon’s pop culture influence didn’t hit me until I saw an episode of Lost (season 4 I think) where there was a Japan flashback scene where Jin enters a toy store to buy a stuffed panda. His artwork and cute little creatures, my adopted name “Vortex Buddies”, are widely renowned in Eastern culture. A poster of the “Vortex Buddy” was on the door of the store where Jin walked through in that particular episode. I’m not sure if it already existed at the location, or if it was the idea of the show creators or set designers at the time.

I started using Twitter last year and found the artwork used on the site to be vaguely familiar. I asked Simon about this to which he wrote, “Yes, Twitter used the bird as a support for their text logo”.

Visit his site idokungfu.com and check out his work for sale on istockphoto here.

On any given basis, I’m normally very amused by spam.

No spam can upset me or penetrate my amusement.

Except this time.

Today, I got an email with THIS IMAGE.

Um, who’s this lady? RIGHT profile?! What did she do with Vince Offer?! WHY IS SHE SMILING!!

You might remember my review of the SlapChop. This does not, in fact, entice me to click the highly hackable link that was embedded in this image contained in the email. Not at all.

This is a dark day in the world of spam. A dark day, indeed.