Friends, Countrymen;

In a few days I will be retracing the path of thousands of ancient conastogas, puttering up Shasta and down Grant’s, charring and grimacing under the Oregon blaze, just to get to my homeland of Seattle, Washington.

It’s very rare that I show my art publicly. After last time, when an angry mob showed up early with torches and pitchforks and ate all the cubical cheese, I had really lost hope in the Seattle art scene. I tried showing down here in the Bay Area, where I now reside, but had to take down early due to hippies protesting a yeti that had climbed one of the campus trees.

It is for this reason that I would be terribly obliged if only you’d find some way to drop in at either one of the art shows I’m launching this weekend.

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Those of you eagerly waiting for Saturday Morning Cartoons might have noticed that Saturday was a particularly long day of an apparently interminable 72 hour span. We’re sorry about that… or, rather, I’m sorry about that, while the rest of Ectomo’s editors have simply contented themselves with eloi eloi lama sabachthani-ing and rolling their eyes to the heavens. Another example of Brownlee’s complete slacktitude. It was my duty to put them up this week. I failed this duty, due to an imminent flight, scrambling for my passport, realizing my passport was missing and then scrambling for a replacement, all the while tearing meaty chunks of blond, gossamer hair from my throbbing scalp.

I promise, we will have an extra special, extra long SMC next week, put together by yours truly and taking all of the excellent suggestions into account. In the meantime, might I suggest checking out the links left in the comments of our request line? There’s some real winners there.

It’s about 16 weeks into Ectomo’s Saturday Morning Cartoons season and inspiration is beginning to run a little dry. So we’re trying something new: weekly suggestion threads. We need your help! Got a cartoon you want to see tomorrow morning? Drop your requests and suggestions in the comments here. Keep in mind we’ve got an archive of 100+ cartoons, so you may want to do a search: we always list the cartoon title in our posts.

Fired from Wired last year for the evacuation of various mucousy Eldritch discharges upon the beard of a paralyzed and supine Lore Sjoberg — not to mention ancillary transgressions such as making an executive decision to rename Table of Malcontents to “Conde Nast = Cunt” for the first week of May 2007 — Eliza and I founded Ectoplasmosis. Nine months later, the tag line’s still pretty good: “Technically, the viscous progeny of material ectoplasm and the mind-controlling brain parasite toxoplasmosis, aborted from the belly of an octobee.” But the scrambled-embryonic aftermath of that abortion was always our template.

Consider this a violent flushing. We’re all tickled pink to unveil the new template in all its mewling, slimy glory. Designed by none other than the Gypsy CSS King, Mr. Rob Beschizza, we’re aping the style of the broadside for a smart layout designed to look pretty swank and force an endless parade of advertisements in front of your squirming eyeballs.

It’s not entirely finished yet. There will be bugs, and we would encourage you to report them in the comments here. Ectotweet is currently missing, but coming back shortly (and we’ll still read Ectotweets). The site looks best in a modern browser: IE6 users, it should look okay, but be warned that it’s not perfect. Also, although the site should look fine without installing them, Ectomo looks best when using the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society font pack. It’s a free download for both Mac and PCs. Shortly, you shouldn’t even need to have those fonts installed to see the site as intended, but if you want the 100% experience in the meantime, it’s worth the small download.

We’ve also shifted hosts. Though for the last nine months, we’ve been hosted with aplomb (and dirt cheap prices) by POE Hosting, ultimately they couldn’t keep up with our traffic. We would still heartily recommend them to anyone looking to start up a blog: they would respond to summonings at belief-defying hours of the AM and put up with us long after we had become more of a liability to them than anything else. Plus, it’s run by Chet of Old Man Murray fame, one of the guys who wrote Portal. Give these guys your business if you’re just starting a blog. We’re now hosted by the equally awesome Wing Six and you should notice a huge speed and stability increase.

And that’s about it! Please drop problems, bugs, criticisms, compliments and anti-consumerist outrage in the comments! The Octobee is pleased

We’re a long time coming with the announcement of the winners of our first OctoB-Side Coloring Contest. There’s good reasons for that, of course: on my part, I point to a conspicuous doner kebab and the subsequent spool of intestines slithering beneath my chair, gaseously spurting any time I eat. Eliza, on the other hand, has been boot stomping in the streets in a crusade against Xenu; Qais has been trying to grow a luxurious moustache and, failing that, been gluing dreadlocks of pubic hair to his upper lip; and finally, Ross has been indulging in a talmudic orgy of baby eating for which his people are known.

But those are all tertiary excuses. The real reason judging took so long is because each and every entry we received was an utterly perfect work of art, a unique snowflake made up of chromatic suckers and writhing limbs. You all deserve Cthulhus. Unfortunately, we must pick three, if only to save on shipping.

And The Winners Are…

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By now, all of the ectodrooglings have seen our triumphant first salvo into the respectable print medium: the broadside.

Our xeroxed b-sides have been taped to countless telephone polls, where they have quickly transformed into mushy, unreadable pulp. What omniscient mind can count the number of drunk New Year’s Eve revelers that, taking a break from barfing and booyeahing to visit the toilet, have found their minds edified on the nature of toxoplasmosis even as they micturate? For that matter, how many hobos have wiped themselves with our pompous musings? Three? Four? One thing is clear: the b-side is a triumphant symbol of ectomo’s value as a whole.

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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:

• US Letter 8.5 x 11″ one-side printed sheet: broadside1_standard_final.pdf
• 8.5 x 11″ borderless, all the way to the EDGE, man! For people with printers who can handle “borderless” printing: broadside1_borderless_final.pdf
• Eurotrash A4 8.3 x 11.7″, for our international clientele: broadside1_a4_final.pdf

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.

Our homespun solution to ectochat is now live. Just click the big green ectochat button in the sidebar and you should find yourself automatically whisked away to our chatroom, with no other input required (though you may want to change your nick when you arrive by typing in “/nick whatever”). The IRC client will open in a small new window, which will allow you to idle with the best of us as you continue on your Internet travels.

We just installed this, so if it doesn’t work for you, let us know in the comment section here. We’d like to make this as accessible as possible. You’ll need to have Java installed. If you don’t (Firefox will automatically prompt you), or it doesn’t work, you can continue to use the chat.efnet.org solution, or you can load up a real IRC client like mIRC (for Windows) or Colloquy (for Mac) and access room #ectomo on EFnet.

Come join us. There’s usually at least 15 people there, and while we’re sometimes idling or sleeping, we’re just as often not. Make sure to bring Eliza a piece of cake. See you there!

Join Ectochat [#ectomo on EFNet]

Last night, we officially announced ectochat and had a banner night, with a high of 25 people in the chat room at the same time.

The experience was so successful that we immediately decided that the ectochat proof of concept was over, and we needed to set up an #ectomo chat room on IRC pronto. The problem? We didn’t have a flawless IRC solution for it yet, something office drones stuck behind their browser at work could just click to come chat.

And we still don’t. That’s coming this weekend. In the meantime, we have a stopgap solution on how even people without an IRC client can visit ectochat through the comfort of their browser.

1) Go to chat.efnet.org.

2) Enter your desired nickname.

3) Add some semblance of a possibly real realname.

4) Under “Channel,” select “Other…”

5) Enter “#ectomo” in the pop-up, then click “OK”

6) Click “Login.” You’re there!

Or use an IRC client, if you’re not at work. You want to connect to an EFnet server: irc.efnet.net is a good one. The IRC option is officially superseding the crappy Meebo Room option until futher notice, and the ectochat button in the sidebar will go to this post until we provide our own solution. See you there!

If you look to the right, next to our radioactive RSS icon, you will see the newest addition to our sidebar: our lovely, day-glo ectochat icon, as mottled and flaky as a barrel full of fluorescent goo unearthed after 50 years in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Nevada.

ectochat is our “new” ectomo chatroom. We say new with such pregnant quotation marks because a link has been sitting in our sidebar forever, and our history logs show many wayward souls wandering in, desperately asking “Hello? Is anyone here?” and then sullenly marching out.

But now (right now) we are there. John “Florian Eckhardt” Brownlee! Eliza “What’s the Rumpus?” Gauger! Qais “Ernest” Fulton! Ross “Whatsisface” Rosenberg! And the rest!

And actually, we mean for it to stay that way: we’re going to spend our days idling in there. Feel free to come on in, chat, feed us tips, whatever. We’d like to see a lot of you in there and help us while away the day, chatting about cephalopods. Cthulhu commands you. Come to ectochat!

Ectochat [It’s Ectochat!]

Shelley Batts is the sultry scientific minx over at Retrospectacle, a neuroscience blog. And she needs Ectomo’s help to win a scholarship.

Full disclosure: I have a bit of a crush on Shelley. Not only does she possess a luscious pair of ripe, jiggling brain melons (like the ones you might see if you peeled back the scalp of a virgin angel), but she has the most entertaining neuroscience blog on the Internet and an African Grey.

Now, neuroscience isn’t usually my thing: I’m a trepanation kind of guy myself. But Retrospectacle is a must-read for any Ectomite. Here’s an example of the kind of posts Shelley does over there:

• Science Vault: Monkey to Human Testicle Transplant

• Science Vault: How Much LSD Does It Take to Kill an Elephant

• Science Vault: Coffee As Treatment For the Plague

In short, Shelley deserves your adoration. Which brings me to my point: Shelley is now competing for a $10,000 scholarship to be given to the best academic blogger on the web. She’s got 1006 votes so far, which is pretty good.

Unfortunately, she’s still being soundly beaten by the loathsome and evil Jess Kim.

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<Squelch: recording sessions begins.?

How do these fuckers expect me to contribute to this thing when, one, I’m stuck 350feet underground and I can barely pick up the global WiFi signal that Cthulhu mysteriously broadcasts–SSID…ummm, rlyehrocks0E6A3A7A8B22CD63; way to just put your WEP right out there, you dummies–and two, I can only type with my left hand now. This sucks.

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This will come as a surprise to those of you who don’t follow our alternate game journalist personas (and why would you?), but next week Eliza and I will be in Tokyo, covering a video game conference for Destructoid as gonzo culture journalists.

What this essentially means is that we are being paid to fly around the world and — in a feverish delirium of alcohol and caffeine that will transform us into the nightmarish caricatures of a Ralph Stedman illustration — write about our surreal adventures. We’re calling it Fear and Lost in Translation and you can read a bit about our plans here.

We’re not very likely to have time to contribute to Ectomo while we’re there, but never fear: we’ve lined up three crackerjack fill-ins from our constabulary of readers. They’ll be introducing themselves over the course of the weekend, but here’s who we’ve lined up…

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Well, that was quick: we already sold our first two Project Wonderful ad boxes. Thanks to Dethroner, the lad’s blog for lads who aren’t cromagnous cretins, and Derek C.F. Peregritz, author of the Cthulhu Brothers In A Cave story Trois Freres, for the six pack money!

Our interest plucked by the success, we’ve put three more ad boxes up in the sidebar, between the ectoplasmosis blurb and the ectotweet. Bidding is starting at 50 cents, so if you have something to plug, go for it.

Incidentally, a word of explanation on how Project Wonderful works: you’re essentially bidding for ad space. So let’s say Dethroner wins an ad slot, but you’re willing to pay a few cents more per day, you can put that bid in. If you win, we cancel Dethroner’s ad, and they only have to pay for the time they were up (so if they pay 50 cents per day and were up for an hour, they only have to pay 2 cents). And if an ad space opens that you like more than the one you currently have? You can cancel your ad and place a new bid for the open one. Also, keep in mind that an ad slot that goes one day for a buck a day might, the next day, be down to 50 cents per day.

The new ad slots we added include one half banner at 234×60 and two squares at 125×125. We’re not sure what people will go for, so take a look, and if you’re interested, place a bid. If 125×125 doesn’t work for you, let us know… if we don’t sell them, we’ll try different schemes. Also, if you didn’t win slots you bid on, feel free to either up your bid, bid for another slot, or wait for a slot to become free.

Again, thanks for your patience. We’re playing with it and it seems neat, but it’s going to take a little bit to strike the right balance, and also make sure that it fits in well with out theme. If you want to bid on a slot, just click on it.

Just a reminder that you’ve got until Cthursday to enter our latest Cthulhu Contest Giveaway. This week’s theme is the best Lovecraft/Ectomeme mash-up. We’ve got six strong entries so far, so the odds are still good. Enter here!

Also, previous Cthursday Contest winners? Our slavishly unpaid intern (my Mom) reports that all Cthulhus are in the mail as of Friday and should take 3-5 days for delivery. God help you if you don’t send us a picture of you and your new Cthulhus.