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Here’s a progression of that Little Brother sketch I put up a few days ago. This is what happens when I have a weekend to myself. I’ve had lots of fun putting this together, particularly including little easter eggs (hints: run the binary through a translator; check out the ‘maker’s brand’ on the arphid on the spine, etc.). It’s not done—there’s still much work to be done on Mr. ‘Camera Head’, and I feel like it needs some textural elements, possibly in the background. Myabe a city-scape? Some DHS-type seals or other government type printed matter? Who knows, I’m still turning it over in my head.

Most likely this will not be used for the actual cover, but in any case the feedback so far has been good, so I’ll definitely be making silkscreen prints of it at some point.

I took a break from GTA IV (freakin’ awesome!!) to have a life, at least for Saturday. Liz, Mila, Mila’s friend Christie, Theresa, her boyfriend Jeff and I went to the Sakura (cherry blossom) Festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. We spent a few hours walking around, looking at the pretty flowers and negotiating a rather crowded Botanic Gardens, replete with shutterbugs, tourists, and, of course, people dressed in cosplay costumes (what, exactly, does Naruto have to do with Sakura, I’m not sure, but leave it to Japanophiles to find any excuse to play dress-up). For lots of pictures of pretty flowers, check out my Flickr set.

After that, we went next door to the Brooklyn Museum, to catch the much-hyped Takashi Murakami exhibit. While pretty, and fun, and enjoyable (mostly), and full of great work, I’m not sure that Murakami belongs in a museum. His work is too commercial, if not always in its intention, certainly in its execution. In addition, I found the inclusion of a Louis Vuitton retail station right smack dab in the middle of the exhibit to be in very, very poor taste. While I can appreciate the draw that Murakami lends to the museum, I think the exhibit would have been more at home in a commercial gallery.

While there, we also checked out the Utagawa Japanese woodblock prints exhibit, which was much more interesting, as there was historical context to the work, and a true sense of craft. There was a great sampling of work from the entire Utagawa school lineage, spanning a period of about 130 years. Good, good stuff.

After that, I headed over to Habana Outpost, for their Season Opening block party. My friend Leo was running the sound system for them, and I got to hang out with him a little bit before Anhelo, Pedro and Lex showed up. Later, it was off to a friend’s house party with Lex, where much drink was drunk, and I was too. In all, a long and fun Saturday. 

The folks over at Instructables have started an rss feed with instructables based on the contents of Cory Doctorow’s forthcoming new book, Little Brother. According to Cory, on his Craphound blog:

….[the instructables crew] were really inspired by all the ingenuity demonstrated by the book’s heroes, so they’ve made a series of HOWTOs in the voice of M1k3y, the techno-guerrilla who tells the story in Little Brother.

Little Brother goes on sale in something like ten days. It has been generating a lot of buzz, particularly at Comic Con this past weekend. It is one of those wonderfully subversive books that inspires, educates, and informs, all while geared towards a YA audience. I read an advance copy a few months ago, enjoyed the hell out of it, and recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who even halfway asks, especially to kids. 

I’ll be following this feed closely. The first entry is, appropriately enough for me, the photo-emulsion screen printing process! Print geeks, unite!

New print in the works, here’s a concept sketch, playing around with the layout. It’s inspired by the first chapter of Sly Mongoose, Tobias S. Buckell’s new novel, which can be found here. The book opens with Pepper, the main character, dropping like a stone into the atmosphere of Chilo, with only a handmade heatshield and an armored spacesuit to protect him.