W!T!F! R.I.P. - As the second year of the critically unacclaimed comic Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot! comes to a close, I have decided to end the strip. Thank you very much for reading, and thanks to The Valley Advocate for publishing it. Knowing my feckless capitalist ways, perhaps someday I will collect all the strips into a book. I will self-publish it and sell maybe five or six copies. To those five or six Future Purchasers, I extend an extra-special thanks.

HELLO AGAIN - I am very pleased and excited to announce that the Hello, Darkness My Old Friend coffee-lovin' art print, which sold out in March, is back in print in a second edition of 180. I encourage you to buy one, because I like your money. Order now and I'll chuck in a free Hello, Darkness sticker. Available for sale on the BUY STUFF page, ETSY, and the Gigposters.com classifieds. If you'd like to see a few printing process photos from Andy MacDougall, click here.

A COUPLE O' DIGITAL PRINTS - I've added two editorial illustrations I've done for The Valley Advocate to the Standard Design Buy Stuff page: Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) and Barack Obama (OMG). haw haw. Digital prints on matte paper. Ten bucks each.

SOLID STATE DISKS - Super-Dork Alert: Here is a somewhat tech-ish recounting of me installing some solid state disks (SSD). It's not worth reading unless you actually care. I am just linking to it so Google can find it. Ohh, I think I just double-dorked.

NORTHAMPTON STUFF - The day after The Hot Chocolate Run shut down downtown for a little while, Main Street got shut down again for the installation of the long-awaited Northampton Bike Trail bridge alongside the often-hit-by-18-wheelers train bridge. (Here's a weird quality cellphone picture taken standing in the middle of the closed street.) If you're interested, you can take a look at a slightly outdated map (PDF) outlining bike path routes.

SEMI-RECENT WORK - I dusted off the ol' Powershot S50 to get some pics of stuff that's been piling up on the vast, endless landscape of my drafting table. Over on the Safe Passage page there's a new poster design (illustrated by cartoonist Hilary Price). There's also a dandy new holiday card I made for 'em. (I hope you Northampton locals are heading to the Mayor Higgins' Hot Chocolate Run this Saturday, cos it's Safe Passage's biggest fundraiser of the year.) Over on the CD & album layout page I finally took a few snaps of the Starline Rhythm Boys latest LP, Green Mountain Style, which came out a couple o' months ago. It's a good no-frills 1950s layout. And lastly, here's an informative little movie about jails illustrated by the amazingly talented Frank Chimero for GOOD Magazine. I did all of the After Effects animation work on it. I've never animated someone else's art before. It was weird.

BEST OF NOOOOOOOOO - As December decends upon us (clever intentional misspelling what the whaaaaat?), we find ourselves under siege, our eyeballs and earholes attacked by a media frenzy of end-of-year "best of" lists. These things annoy me. Yet I am compelled to share with you one of my consumer impulses - just this one little thing: The Roots Rising Down. It is so rare that I am even paying attention to new releases, never mind actually buying them and listening to them and really fucking loving them. Get Busy, Rising Down, 75 Bars, Criminal, Rising Up (oh my god the cowbell breakdowns...COME ON)... all Really Fucking Awesome Songs. Awesome cover art, too. Buy this album. Other 2008 worthy-mentions from my limited sampling: The Sword's Gods of the Earth and Cat Power's Jukebox.