My dears, my sweet darlings, my everythings, my sins and souls, my readers. I feel as if sticky veils of honey-snot are being dragged off my starved gills. Like a stone toad, I am reborn from muck. And how I long to shake and shiver and splatter it all over your eager cheeks.

Well. Seeing as our posting schedule is more relaxed than it once was (no longer is Ectomo in the first wild urgencies of youth), I have turned our Twitter feed back on. Meaning: Twitter user Ectomo will now report when a new post is posted, as it will with this very post. POST.

I am pleased to announce that in addition to my slow recovery from the worst case of burnout in recorded human (or wookiee) history, I am also in the thrall of preparation panic for the sake of two overlapping art shows, in Seattle, in September. One a group show, with a cadre of my prestigious peers, the other a lonely solo redux of my bizarrely successful Lighthouse Roasters show. More on that when I have flyers at hand, I suppose.

Until next time, droogs.

milkman [Flickr]

I’ve been part of the pedestrian elite for some time now, eschewing the convenience of zipping along the freeway at a heady 30 miles an hour in favor of not dying in a fiery explosion. Cars make me a little nervous you see.

But even so, as of late the siren song of not boarding a bus crowded with the indigent insane fresh from a filth bath has called to me. Unfortunately, the pint-sized CARS?! by which I’m apt to be intrigued leave something to be desired in the design department, leaving me to hoof my hooked path through the world.

Cree, however, brings me one step closer to a life of wheeled wandering with a sub-compact straight out of my dreams. Theirs are the cars that prowl the streets of Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles, bustling through the alleys before leaping into the sky to carve arcs through the decades-old haze.

Just as soon as they start offering fender-mounted machine gun turrets we’ll be in business.

Cree [NotCot]

When Ross approached me with his business offer I didn’t really see the harm. Just clamp the apparatus to my armpit before shuffling off to the land of nod every noon and collect my pittance from the dresser in the morning. They always use the dresser.

Had I known he intended to actually market my sudations I’d have asked for more than $3.75 per diurnal marriage of man-pit and machine.

Q Tonic [Cool Hunting]

A young John and Eliza caught on film during the scant years before their respective idea afterbirths achieved serialization. As you can plainly see, Eliza was quite the fetching creature before the mange set in.

Thanks, Haux!

The house in which I spent my formative years was a creaky, Victorian affair packed to the brim with a strange collection of dusty antiquities. All my attempts at affecting a rebellious minimalism resulted in a sense of mourning for my abandoned nest of detritus, and eventually I came to accept my magpie tendencies.

One such fellow magpie is Mr. A.R.M., the founder of The Secret Society of Odd Acquisition, a group who devote themselves to amassing a strange collection of wonders and learning their secrets. Mr. A.R.M.’s antiquated archive of macabre delights is framed in the age polished wood of Trundle Manor — a nefarious, and thus perfect, abode. Not content to simply collect, the members of the S.S.O.A. produce conglomerations of their strange googaws in the form of custom crafted jewelry, photos of which are viewable after the jump along with images of Trundle Manor itself.

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There is a small cabal of crow devotees along the West coast that count several EctoEditors among their number. You can tell who they are easily enough. The sacks of bread-heels and dog-treats stuffed into pockets and trailing crumbs are a dead giveaway. The occasional full-stop, moon-eyed, staring into the sky might seem like the local weirdo’s weekly fugue state, but maybe they’re just watching the antics of a group of jousting adolescent corvids.

If you’re lucky enough to have a few near your home, try tossing out the occasional treat. It won’t be long before soot-winged minions swoop menacingly over your mountaintop lair, rattling across the bones of your fallen enemies in search of necrotizing morsels as a warning to all that would disturb your uneasy peace.

Crows [Gustavo Lopez : Why Me]

Is it really any surprise that we find the gospel of the R’lyehian sleeper within the murky, neglected confines of a Detroit squat, however duplicitous they may be? Cthulhu may save us, but only for a midnight snack. Yet it is our obligation — as indigent wretches slave to the whims of beasts lurking in the nothing-space between worlds — to lure the unwary into the famished maw of our ageless lord beyond the stars.

[Thanks, Blake!]

Finally, a toy seemingly made specifically with Ectomo in mind. A fez, smoking jacket, slippers, and sunglasses can be a hard combination to pull off, but Ennui Man, the creation of Nick Dewar, does so with a singularly apathetic aplomb. Tentacles and virgin sacrifice sold seperately.

Ennui Man [Nick Dewar : Who Killed Bambi?]

One of my favorite things about scouring the internet for fantastic furniture with which to fill my meagerly furnished home (or as is more often the case, bemoaning the lack of dosh that prohibits me from doing so) is analyzing the pieces that catch my eye and making mental notes of how they are constructed so as to attempt my own (far less expensive) reproductions. Such is the case with the Reel Rocker.

How Reel Furniture can charge $870 for this in good conscience is beyond me. It’s simply a massive wire spool converted to recliner/rocking chair, and to be honest looks a bit uncomfortable. But I’m an enterprising young fop, and don’t balk at the idea of a bit of work to replicate (and improve) on a design, so away it was filed as a possible project should I find myself with time and the scraps I need.

Granted, this design might not seem appealing as it is, but imagine a few coats of stain or paint, a bit of burgundy brocade upholstery, upgraded stops, polished fixtures over exposed bolts and suddenly this otherwise laughably expensive piece becomes something you can be proud of. Keep in mind I’m no enemy of craftsmanship, some hideously expensive pieces are justifiably priced, but making obscene gestures at my wallet by way of overpricing is a sure fire way start my gears to turning.

Reel Rocker [cribcandy]

We’re experimenting with something new here at Ectomo: we want to sell you guys really cheap ad space.

One thing Eliza and I have wanted to do since we started the blog is sell ad space directly to our readers at a price cheap enough that it is just as attractive to promote a personal project as it is to promote a business.

Eliza threw the $30 buck number around a little while back, for a rotating ad banner for one month. I think that’s the goal. We want to keep the number low enough that if you’ve got something to promote, you won’t think twice about promoting it with us.

We’re not quite there yet, but we want to start experimenting with this, so we’ve signed up with Project Wonderful and have initially set up two spots where you can bid to place an ad.

The current bid is $0.50 cents per day and if we sell out those two spots and see there’s a demand, we’ll allocate more space on the front page. For the moment, these ad spots are between a post’s content and the comments (click here for an example), but if there actually seems like a demand for this, we’re going to expand our number of slots and start adding slots to the front page. These ads don’t rotate so everyone will see them.

So want to run an ad for a month to advertise your Cthulhu short story? Go for it: it’ll cost you about the same amount as a large pizza. Want to run an ad for a day to promote a blog post you are particularly proud of? You can do that too: it’ll cost you the same amount as a pack of gum. Or just want to put up a joke ad for a week? Go for it: anyone can afford a $3.50 joke. We’re hoping the amount is cheap enough you’ll be willing to play around with it.

Ultimately, our plan is to be doing the vast majority of our advertising like this, and if we see a lot of repeat customers for the Project Wonderful ads, you’re going to be the first people we go to as potential clients when we decide to take it to the next level.

Thanks, guys. And hey, someone bid on those two Project Wonderful ad spaces, will you? We feel like tools with the placeholder ads up.

Ectomo on Project Wonderful [Bid Here!]

Click any of the squares to go to their Flickr pages, which will allow you to view them in full 800×800 glory.

You may have noticed the new author portraits in the upper right part of Ecto, the bland Photobooth leavings replaced by glowing sepia cartoons that, when moused over, reveal horrible secrets.

We are pleased with these depictions: Brownlee is represented every inch as debonair and slovenly as he should be, and I can only smile gently at the beautiful freckling on my rubbery visage. His sassy little tassel. My suspiciously hooded eyes and finely waxed moustache. His quilted, satiny smoking jacket. My face as a metaphor for the Internet itself: a series of tubes.

But all this is not enough. No, above all at Ectomo, we crave novelty. At Table of Malcontents, we implemented a randomly-chosen title banner at each pageload, pulling from a pool of exquisite, reader-submitted works. We’d like to do the same for the author portraits now.

If there are artists in the house who would like to take a shot at some square renderings of the authors, or perhaps rival lesbian ganglords with pink handguns, or even a brace of the hallowed Ectobee, please do not stay your paintbrushes. We would love to see what comes out of your horrible brains, and we will gleefully show them to the world with full credits and links aplenty.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ectomo/

Although we currently seem to be having quite a bit of mysterious trouble with post-by-email, we now have a fully functional Flickr account. This will allow us to post photos from our phones, gather a Flickr favorites collection, and generally go hog-wild with ever more depictions of sepia-toned sodomy.

One thing we’re going to be doing at Ectomo.com as we try to build it up is write up some of our experiments and the methodology behind them. This is partially to give our readers ideas for their blogs and partially to get feedback. We’re eventually planning on having a Wiki to coalesce these ideas, but for now, we’re going to make them posts.

The Via Chain: You might have noticed that our posts have more links than normal. Conventional blogging protocol is you give a nod to whatever blog pointed you to a post. But here’s the dark and dirty secret: pro bloggers hate giving vias. There is an irrational belief — and my mind has feverishly embraced it as well — that once your readers figure that each and every post you make has not sprung a priori into the blogger’s mind, absorbed in the uterine slosh from a transhumanist mother with a fiber optic cable for an umbilical cord, that they’ll stop reading. Not to mention the business aspects of it: why is that multi-million dollar company bothering to pay you when Goofus McFerguson is blogging it for free (and oftentimes better, out of pure passion?)

For Ectomo, we’ve decided to take a different approach and embrace the million man 69 orgy of circular cannibalism that is the truth of the blogosphere.

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