Okay, since this has shown up three times in three different places over the past two days, I'm not gonna ignore the Law of Fives showing up like that.

So, I give you www.esty.com, a nifty site where artisans and craftspersons can sell their stuff online. They have a lot of neat stuff, with different kinds of searches. Even a search by color, and a search by location.

Tres nifty all around, really.

I imagine everybody's heard about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force ads in Boston that the cops overreacted to. There's not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. But there's other things to it, like the relationship between street art and ads. Which Posterchild goes into here (Posterchild being a guy who does street art stencils and came up with the Mario Blocks. His main concern is about the impact it has as ads try more and more to be like street art, so people start to assume any street art's advertising, and ignore it the way we do ads.

And that, I can totally empathize with. Co-option is the most powerful weapon marketers of culture have. They have the money, and a lot of desperate art students who are pretty smart on their own. Which is not a real slag against art students who work for marketing, 'cause people gotta pay for living somehow, but still. It's like Microsoft, if something cool and new comes up they don't control, they can either buy them out or just set people to making something close enough to it they can give away, and drive the original out of business, so to speak. If DC comics starts doing "street ads", for example, how would you know if somebody's stencil of Superman was a fan thing, or a paid ad by DC? If it becomes common enough, people would assume it's an ad, and tune it out.

That's one of the problems with the insatiable marketing culture/entertainment industry. I'm not sure there's really anything that can be done about it, except what artists have been doing for years, which is just moving in once the ADD marketing moves on to a new fad and making something new out of it, until that too becomes a fad and snake of the entertainment industry eats its own tail once again.

She looked grumpy. Cute, but still grumpy.

"You were drawing cartoon owls."

"Yes. Well, one. Multiple times."

"And that's why you were too busy to talk to me."

"Yeah, pretty much."

I'm starting to think you really are hopeless."

"Maybe, but look at the owl."

"Aww, that's cute," she said.

"See, even works on succubi. And mine is but a poorly rendered shadow."

"Dude, if you used language like that on women, you might get some more action."

"And you have no ulterior motive."

"Me?"

Then she poofed and was gone. Sulfur and perfume really don't mix at all well.