I was a nervous child. My overactive imagination joined with my natural timidity to make an ongoing horror story of my life, thick with evil spirits and malevolent hands reaching out for my fat little feet from under my bed or pouring like smoke out of eerily anthropomorphic cracks in the plaster. I can trace all of these childhood anxieties to one point, one specific Boogieman that lay lurking in the dank swamps of my own brain: The Bunyip. This is his song. Continue Reading…
My sincerest apologies, ye denizens of the wonderful, monstrous Ecto-Nation, for the deplorable lack of content over the last few days. Your outrage at the passing of a Monday unmoustachioed is, of course, understandable. Had I been able to drag myself to my computer I would have most assuredly fulfilled my duties however, due to the fact that I am a young man in possession of the body of a centenarian, I could not. No, dear readers, the past three days have been spent on my back, the muscles of my lumbar gripping the delicate nerves of my spine in a vise-like death grip. Only through sheer willpower — and 10 milligrams of Cyclobenzaprine — have a been able to lurch over to the keyboard. I pray this will serve as explanation should my normal, typo-laden musings be more…laden…than usual.
That out of the way, on to the clip. The above is an ad for Nike Women featuring Nicola Sanders, who I assume is a runner of some repute and whose organs and muscles all have mouths which they use to spit gibberish at each other. Also, her brain wears a monocle, an image which is so fitting that I dare say I will be unable to look at a brain ever again without superimposing the eyepiece upon it. The whole concept is extremely simple and the animation takes it just far enough into weird territory to work without coming off as horrifying. That’s how it strikes me at least, your unmedicated mileage may vary. Creativity has the hi-res version.
As you know yesterday was Brownlee’s birthday which meant that today I had to take an extra long shower. It’s no use though, no matter how long I scrub I just can’t get clean. In any event here is a nice little animated sandwich of spoof-tastic Fox Kids and Kids’ WB cartoons between two, moist slices of anime. I hope they will entertain you, our loyal readership, and I pray that, perhaps, they will help me to repress the events of last evening. Please, God…
• FLCL: We’ve entered the final half of this spectacular mini-series, and only two more to go. Will you just look at those eyebrows.
•Eek! The Cat and The Terrible Thunderlizards: Eek! did a number of film spoofs during its run and the two that stand out, to me, are “Lord of the Fleas” in which Eek is trapped in a shopping mall with some penguins — one of whom hysterically exclaims “Shut-up, Piggy!” — and this episode entitled “Eekpocalypse Now!, which thoroughly hits upon every major joke one could make about Coppola’s film. This one is for the adults, unless you were an eight year-old who loved movies about Vietnam. The Terrible Thunderlizards was its own show but was later merged with Eek! to create a variety show more like our next two entries.
•Tiny Toons: “A Quack in the Quarks” is the second episode of this seminal show and features a loose parody of Star Wars and a plethora of fourth wall shattering humor. In this episode Plucky Duck is kidnapped by aliens to Planet X to save it from the nefarious plot of Duck Vader. This was the beginning of a real golden age of Warner Brothers cartoons in the late 80s/early 90s that include Animaniacs, Freakazoid, and the Animaniacs spin-off Pinky and The Brain. Oh, and a Watchmen reference!
•Animaniacs “Super Strong Warner Siblings” is a brilliant send-up of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers which always marked the end of cartoon time. Animaniacs also did an Apocalypse Now parody which, while excellent, did not follow the plot as closely as Eek!. Next up is one of the many “Good Idea, Bad Idea” clips followed by my favorite, Pinky and The Brain. In this episode, entitled “Battle for the Planet”, Brain once again acknowledges his Orson Welles influence by attempting to fake an alien invasion ala the Mercury Theater’s broadcast of War of the Worlds.
•Paranoia Agent: Someone has some unpleasant secrets…
Your gross negligence in assuming I am ashamed of any of my musical predilections is noted, and will be revenged. There is absolutely no reason to assume, self-righteous pricks that you are, that the carmine creeping up my collar is anything other than stoic pride, a touch of the ol’ toxoplasma gondii, and perhaps a brief spike in my everyday, baseline feelings of discomfort.
Listen you, I was enjoying the Ruski pop nymphets way back, before any hoity-toity English remixes got loose, much less actual American album releases. This shit was edgy and inaccessible. Hell, it still is! I would get home from my live-action Vampire the Masquerade roleplaying session at the local college campus (back when I was a ginger-curled nymphet myself), maybe boot up a game of Fallout 2, invite my BFF Steve over, and we’d watch these videos, on repeat, in silent awe. Why, I thought to myself, did I not have a dark pixie of a partner, an eternal semi-succubus, someone to cling to during the long nights of crippling self-doubt, someone to share my pants and lipgloss, someone to hold my hair while I purged, someone with whom to ghost ride the whip? I mean, someone besides Steve?
Now, emerald-haired, naked in a wooden trunk, chugging Red Bull and typing on a keyboard for which I cannot see the screen, I ask myself: if I had found her, this dark unicorn, would things have turned out better?
Four Red Bulls, twenty hours, and a bag of squid chips later, it is done. The very first Ectoplamosis print broadside is ready for distribution.
But soft, ye say, what in blazes am I talking about? I’ll let Warren Ellis, Big Daddy to Ectomo’s Little Sister, explain:
The broadside has a centuries-long history as a device for disseminating news and ideas. I mean, flyers go up on the web to be printed off, sure. But it’s not quite the same thing. Getting an idea, or a piece of writing, on a single sheet and saying, yes, print this off, copy it and distribute it wherever you like — that’d be interesting.
In short, a single-page guerilla publication, distributed by xerox and zealous reader in coffee shops, cubicle farms, club bathrooms, 24-hour greasy spoon diners, on telephone poles, shoved under windshield wipers, wiped under windshield shovers, safety-pinned on unsuspecting hobos, and fluttering in a comet tail behind us, wherever we may roam.
The first episode of ECTOPLASMOSIS! is offered in three editions:
This broadside is formatted specifically for easy printing and xeroxing, and features original artwork, an updated version of my famous Toxoplasmosis article, vintage illustrations, and an octobee coloring contest! Those of you who wish to curry our excellent favor, print and distribute with zest and enthusiasm! You will be rewarded in this life, and the next.
Stay tuned for more information about the coloring contest, a distribution contest, and other blunt mutterings from Brownlee.
We all know how I feel about LOL Whatever memes. You’re all idiots. I just hate and I hate and I hate as you type out verbatim the same spelling mistakes, the same bad grammar, and then slap it in a Something Awful font on a picture of surprised looking kitty cat with the smug satisfaction of Jacques Barzun finally settling upon le mot juste to sum up the cultural impact of Moliere. Stop. Stop.
The other day, someone I knew came up to me on the streets and said, “Oh, hi!” But from the smile on her face, I knew that, deep in the jelly of her brains, she had mnemonically spelled it as “O HAI!” Consequently, I have spent most of the morning scraping that brain jelly in little squidges from underneath my fingernails, which was the unfortunate natural result of pushing my thumbs through her eye sockets.
That all being said… hey, check out this cool LOL meme, LOLSheviks! I post really for the fantastic Soviet art and the crazy commie font. But for one brief moment, I was just like you, reading “I Can Haz A Reign Of Terror?” and giggling idiotically like a thorazine addict staring at a spinning pinwheel. Gabba Gabba! One of us!
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
