Pete Ashton’s Blog

On a whim I applied for a Google Adsense account. Since Google sends about 5000 people this way every month the chances are a few of them might click on the ads and if they do it’ll pay for all the time I spend clearing comment spam posted by arseholes trying (and usually failing) to game Google. I just got the account approved. Expect to see textads on the archive pages in the next day or so.

I so sell out!

…it kinda stops the spontaneous blurtings. That may be a good thing of course.

Finally caught up with the BugPowder blog backlog - I’m sure I’ve missed stuff so feel free to tell me again. I’ve still not done my Caption report - maybe I’ll just list all the other Caption reports but that’s what I did last year… Oh, and there’s an article I’m supposed to be writing for Baz at Engine Comics‘ Rough Guide to Self Publishing about BugPowder which is due in, ooh, two days. Maybe by outing my failure to get this done in public I’ll actually do it.

Also on a comics note, I did Phil Hall a favour and sorted out the RSS feed for his new Movers and Shakers gossip blog as well as tidying up a few rogue template issues. He was reluctant to mess with the guts himself and having seen them I understand why. It’s easy to knock Blogger but this kinda has me worried. When I started out using Blogger in 2000 the template system was simple and as such I taught myself a lot about templates and what I later learned were modular content management systems. I owe Blogger a lot - without the service I wouldn’t be the blogging guru/help-desk I am now. However, if I was starting out today I probably wouldn’t get further than selecting pre-designed templates and leaving it at that. The learning curve has gotten steep again and that’s no good thing.

(If anyone who knows me wants help on this kind of thing don’t hesitate to ask. It’s probably just a five minute job and if it isn’t I can always just say no.)

On a more positive note, have you noticed how most of the blogs that really break out into the mainstream consciousness tend to be hosted on blogspot with standard layouts? Dear Raed, Bell De Jour, etc. Not only does this mean when they get millions of visitors they don’t run up bandwidth bills but it also says a lot about content over style. Something we should all perhaps think about more often maybe…

Right, now I have to be off to the pub. Sorry Baz!

Normally when I go to gigs at the moment I don’t really know what to expect and so I’m kinda reluctant to drag other people along just in case it’’s shite. However, next month there are a couple lined up in Birmingham that I can safely say should be pretty darn good.

First up on September 11th is Yumi Yumi playing the ColdRice night at Bar Academy. I saw them a week back and loved them so come along to that. Crashing space is available at mine (the club closes at 2am).

The week after, on the 18th, Jeffrey Lewis is playing at the Jug of Ale in Moseley. I’ve been wanting to see him for ages and was very pissed off when I missed his Birmingham gig in the spring. There are a couple of tracks on my mp3 blog at the moment so have a taster. While I’m not making a deal about it, my birthday is the day after so if you need an excuse to come along that’s as good as any. I’m not sure if I’ll be crashing at mine but it’s a normal pub gig so getting back shouldn’t be a problem.

Let me know if you’re interested!

I went away for a few days and came back accompanied by a new Mac. It’s a three year old G4 tower with two, count ‘em, two 19 inch LaCie monitors and a ramped-up bunch of memory n’stuff. You might be asking yourself how an agency temp on a budget can afford such glories - suffice to say I’m a very lucky boy and let’s leave it at that.

So the last 24 hours have been spent transferring everything off the trusty five year old old iMac, which is now sitting dejectedly in the corner of the room (though it’ll be off to a good and loving home soon), loading the 15 days (not including spoken, radio or live recordings) worth of mp3s I’ve accumulated into iTunes, watching the AVI movies the iMac couldn’t cope withh, rearranging this corner of the living room to accommodate these absurdly large monitors and generally tweaking till my eyes burn. Tomorrow I’m investigating WiFi and DVD burners.

I may be some time. Normal service will resume, ooh, eventually…

ColdRice does it again - three quality bands on one bill for £3 in. On a Saturday. In central Birmingham. I cannot recommend this night highly enough.

Jen of The Priscillas gives me the finger, pointy style.
Read more »

With housemate Sam due back any day it’s time to stop procrastinating and start sorting all the small press comics on the living room floor, so I’ve spent this morning putting them into alphabetical piles, not order, piles. Actual anal levels of sorting can follow later. Interesting observation, other than that there are more letters in the alphabet than my back can stand and that I don’t own any SP comics beginning with the letter Q: the more “professional” the format, the less inspiring. The pile of US comic format comics were, with some exceptions, pretty ordinary while the A6 and A7 minis were like sifting through gold for more gold. Smaller is better, limitations are possibilities, obscurity is inspirational, etc…

Overheard at work yesterday: “If things don’t change they’ll stay as they are”, which made me smile. Reminded me of the Glenn Dakin (triffic cartoonist) saying “If you weren’t here you were somewhere else.”

Any other good ones in the comments please.

Andy and m’self are off to ColdRice in Birmingham this Saturday evening for strange musical fun. If you’d like to come too we’re meeting in the Sunflower Lounge at nine.

THE PRISCILLAS
(London, UK)
The ColdRice London invasion continues! The Priscillas look cool and mean. They’ll grab you by the ears and rock you until your change shakes from your pockets. They have very big hair and sing about brain surgeons, broken hearts and junk food. Formed late in 2003 in London, the four Priscillas graduated with honours from the Ramones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and then spent a salubrious term at the Academy of Tragic Melodies (the Shangri-Las’ finishing school, in case you didn’t know). Now Jen, Kate, Guri and Mavis have taken time out from chewing gum to leave audiences reeling across London with their fast, fun punk and anthemic harmonies. They’ve got attitude. They’ve got talent. And they’ve got BIG hair.

YUMI YUMI
(Kumamoto City, Japan)
Two girls from Kumamoto City in Japan were in London on an extended holiday. Fortunately for us they decided to bring their guitars and, “to satisfy a dream”, play a few London venues. The reception was overwhelming.
Clearly the public’s choice, YumiYumi must be seen live! It’s the X-Ray Spex, Bangles, B-52s, Go-Gos. It’s all hurried, cute, hungry, driven, rifftastically tuneful, slightly fuzzy and sung in the sort of broken-English you wish the girl next door would speak in. Crrrrrashing drum beats, electro bleeps, loud bits, quiet bits. it’s the sound of kitchen sinks being joyfully thrown-in, not barrels being scraped.

There’s something quite critical that never gets mentioned in the “file sharing is killing music no it’s not yes it is no it’s not yes it is” debate. If you work in pretty much any large factory or office in the UK there will be a person there who will sell you a DVD of a recently released movie months before it hits the shops for £3 and any mainstream music CD you want for a couple of quid, in a case with a colour cover. Now, given that there are rather more people working in these sorts of places than there are with broadband connections and a working knowledge of peer-to-peer networks, and that actual money is being made from the former while the latter are giving the stuff away for free (or sharing, as we like to call it), you’d think there’d be a bit more noise being made by the record industry, perhaps demanding that employers stop this illegal activity going on in their workplaces and getting the police to infiltrate the canteens and use CCTV footage to prosecute the dealers.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for ages but at first I thought I might be getting someone in the shit. Now I’ve seen it going on again and again in every place I’ve worked this year. This is bigger than the VHS pirates of the 80s, beyond the dodgy bloke at the car boot sale. This is utterly mainstream. If anything’s going to hit high street sales this is it.

Maybe I’m missing something here, I dunno…

Had a bit of a come-down after Caption, which is a good sign but made for a rather irritating couple of days at the car factory where I’m thinking all these great things went through my mind over the weekend and now I’m putting together a small part of a gear box over and over and over and then the evenings are spent in a fug of brain-full stupor as all the great things clogged up and wouldn’t budge in an inspiration-constipation kinda way. All seems to be getting better now though.

One very annoying thing was all the ideas for new projects that kept popping up, annoying because I feel I’ve already got too many projects on the go as it is. I’m actually quite jealous of the ‘real’ artists I know in that they generally have one project on the go based around their particular skill, whereas I don’t have a specific skill, more a general smattering of things I’m quite good at, none of which tend to stand alone, and a seemingly endless supply of ideas for things that would be cool to do, along with never enough time or energy or (more often to be honest) self belief to see them through.

I like being an ideas person, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I wish I just had a sketch-book, the ability to draw and the attitude to stick to it.

So anyway, four new projects have come to mind this last few days which don’t seem to be going away. Try as I might they just seem far too sensible to not do. First up is a zine, tentatively called Brain Fart, wherein I’ll sift through the quarter of a million words in this weblog and see if any are worth preserving in print. The chances are a few of them might be, plus I’ve always intended to collect the Farmblog at some point. Next up are a couple of comics history projects, a web-presence for my small press comics archive being the obvious one (since I’m currently working on cataloging them all) and a small press comics history site based on the panel I chaired at Caption looking at each year in turn and gradually adding all the important things that happened and comics published. Finally I’m still thinking of bringing back the comics mail order distro (that BugPowder was before it was a weblog) as a small concern running it more as a publishing house than a shop gradually building up a list of quality self published comics of distiction, partly because I think there’s a need, partly to subsidise the other comics projects, partly because I still have stock left over from the last time and partly because I want to.

Oh, and there’s another idea for a gated music aficionados site that’s been brewing for the last month but that’s going to require me learning stuff first, and I don’t think I’m going to have time for that.

So if you come up with a cool idea and want me to be involved and I seem really keen but keep edging away from any actual commitment to actually do any actual stuff that would take actual time and actual energy (or actual self belief), this is why.

Okay, brain unclogged now.