Eliza put out a call for suggestions and the Ectomite Hive Mind responded with a bevy of bizarre links and nostalgic requests leaving us with a hodge-podge of old childhood favorites and surreal art-house films. Thanks to everyone who took the time to post and if you don’t see your contribution here, rest assured it will make an appearance in the very near future. Now, go Ectomomites! TO THE JUMP!
The Blair Godzilla Project is released in theaters today meaning that, hopefully, I will stop being assaulted by viral ads and television commercials. As Nevin reminds us, a big movie release means that Asylum must leap into action with a small budget, direct to DVD release and this is no exception. Behold, the less pretentiously ambiguous Monster!
Arlette has begun the tedious task of sifting through the thousands of photos vomited onto Flickr by the Library of Congress and surfaces with some welding, wartime beauties.
Dr. Zoidberg is not nearly as funny and innocent as first assumed. Thanks, Your Name!
Kevin Nuut and Daniel want you to know that, even though figures based on Mike Mignola and Brian Augustyn’s Victorian-era Batman/Jack the Ripper mash-up Gotham by Gaslight will never be produced, if only to spite you, someone was inspired enough to make some custom Justice League figures to drive the knife in deeper.
The ever excitable Melissa demands that her toilet bowl have a cephalopod decal!
This is not a pizza. It is a heart attack disguised as a pile of greasy, fatty ingredients covering pizza dough. Thanks, Evil Jim.
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.
• Mmmm, girls with blue lips and porcelain skin. Wearing octopi. Oh yes. Thanks to Nadya, she of the ruff!
• For the Victorian videogame enthusiast of good breeding there is no substitute for Pac Gentleman. Assist in the toothsome devouring of ruffian spirits inside a diabolical maze. Thanks Cleveland!
• George Barbier’s frontispiece illustration takes care of the “issues” one is presented with when confronted with a gorgeous, nymphet mermaid in towering wig. NSFW for illustrated breasts. Thanks yhancik!
• An accusatory finger points at the sphincter of a nine-tentacled octopus. A nonopus? Thanks, Karen!
• Cycloptic space squidling hugs onto the side of a Mars rover in the latest Ectomo-endorsed Threadless tee. Thanks, Blackrockbob!
• Brad sends in this news report about a strange virus hitting the most remote island on earth, triumphantly crowing “IT HAS BEGUN!” R’lyeh, anyone?
• Creationism dismissed as a ‘kind of paganism’ by Vatican’s astronomer. This story seems to be surprising a lot of people, but Catholicism has been edging away from a literal interpretation of Genesis for centuries now. This guy’s making some good points. ectotweeted by Wolven.
• Nicholas Cage goes absolutely zonkers when confronted with the prospect of authographing the six breasts of three twins. Hey, who wouldn’t? Ectotweeted by oldhat.
• The best thing to come out of yesterday’s inaugural ectochat: “Marmaduke, are you even listening to me you zany dog?”
Philosophically, I tend to think Christmas trees should be staggered with a thousand small, colorful toys, as if Santa’s sled exploded over an evergreen. Just like the jumble of gifts beneath, a tree’s decorations should be a chaos of joy, with no aesthetic direction whatsoever.
That said, of course I think this thematically cephalopodic Christmas tree is the best I’ve ever seen. And look at the adorable girls who helped grandma decorate it! Future handmaidens of the tentacle, they. Send pictures of your ultimate consumation, ladies! That will be my Christmas.
As an arrogant Frenchman, I will not let you tarnish a proud part of France’s glorious colonial advertising past. The tirailleur sénégalais (tirailleurs sénégalais were Senegalese soldiers enrolled in the French army back in the 19th and 20th centuries) on the Banania ad is definitely not eating banana custard, but rather drinking chocolate milk.
I am relieved to hear it. A stereotypical African eating a dessert made entirely of bananas might have pushed the boundaries of social taste in a way that a black person smacking his lips over a tin can full of chocolate milk would not. Chocolate milk! It’s dark milk for dark people!
Banania is a cocoa powder brand still popular in France. Paradoxically, the ingredients never included bananas in any way, but the name must have sounded exotic at that time.
The slogan “Y’a bon” means “It is good” in petit-nègre (literally : little nigger) which is the French equivalent of broken english.
Again, let’s congratulate the French on their progressive stance towards renaming their linguistic dialects.
Due to legitimate complaints, the current Banania ads are slightly less racist.
I was in Dijon a few weeks back. No joke: I stumbled across an entire licensed shop selling nothing but vintage Banania memorabilia. There, I bought a cafe au lait cup larger than my hydrocephalic head with the “Y’a Bon” guy on it. I love it, but let’s face facts: obviously, they are still cashing in on this guy.
No, seriously, thanks Guillaume for setting the record straight. This is the best comment we’ve gotten all week.
From the series of short films for Adidas’s line of Adicolor footwear, comes Charles White’s entry entitled Pink. Pink is the story of a stuffed animal and his bestest friend in the whole wide world, The Attractive Blonde Nymphet. In fact, Mr. Bear cares so much for his lithe BFF that one day, with the help of a magical, metaphor -and fluid- dripping seashell, he turns her into a sequined fuck doll and brutally “snuggles” her.
Take from this what you will. I am to understand from the comments I’ve read for this video that I am “not getting it”, that there is, in fact, a “deeper meaning”. Now, as both my masters and my readers are fond of pointing out, I do not know things about stuff. Make no mistake, I am grateful for the mass of sneering and merciless pedantry that follows in my wake, like a fetid, editorial afterbirth, assuring that my already fragile self-esteem remains on the level of a herpes ridden porn starlet preparing to service every male within a 5 mile radius.
That said, what we have here can be interpreted as the story of a girl’s sexualizing and commodifying of her body. In making herself a beautiful, bling-encrusted product, she robs herself of her vitality and innocence, represented by Mr. Bear. However, twisted pervert that I am, I recognize veiled threats of sodomy when I see them. That said, I stand by my claims of filthy, vicious, ursine toy rape.
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.
