my.bicycle

I'm about 12 hours in on Saints Row , THQ's entry into the Action/Driving genre. It's really good; if you've got a 360 and are jonesing for a Grand Theft Auto fix because GTA IV has been pushed to next year, it's a must-have. In short, it's got a lot that's a direct lift from its inspiration, but there are numerous additions to gameplay, more personalization of your character, and ability to customize and keep your cars, and many of the missions are actually pretty damned challenging. Oh, and it's got online multiplayer.

art.blogging.la: I Touched a Brick of Coke I experienced my first experience last night (since I was out of town for two experiences and I wasn't quite ready to be buried) with monochrom at Machine Project. That's me touching the brick of coke - which, of course, I received a certificate for doing. Many liters of Coke, one ruined pot, and one tough art group created this "brick of coke" that looked like an oil blob or those microwavable brownies that never come out right. The smell wafted of burnt Coke (not to mention something that probably shouldn't be cooked) through the gallery space and both the beginning and end of the experience commenced with the global-loving coke song. It's good to be back in LA!

The ever-fabulous Scott Rogers is interviewed in Wired's look at user-modified custom figures : If you're like most people, you're aching for a Batman action figure carved with the sharp angles and noir feel of the masked vigilante's 1939 debut. Or a Rorschach or Comedian doll ripped from the pages of the classic 1980s graphic novel Watchmen -- slated for big-screen treatment in 2009, but still nowhere to be found on toy shelves. Fortunately, what Mattel and DC Comics withhold, a thriving custom action-figure underground provides.

Does anyone know the actual, initial source for this quote? I can’t recall where I first heard it.

30 Days of Night - Trailer R Uploaded by toma-uno Video 30 Days of Night (direct link; thanks, KD!)

Audio: Make the Logo Bigger - W. B. Mook’s Blog on Vox . (thanks, justine ) Warning: audio Warning: totally metal

From Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon, an 8pp. free online space (think "pop" not "opera") comic in the new myspace creative area  (thanks, KD )

Q&A: William Gibson Discusses Spook Country and Interactive Fiction : Wired: One of the details that leaped out at me was the Adidas GSG9, named for the German counterterrorism squad. I felt certain you'd invented the shoe, but then I Googled it. Gibson: The Adidas GSG9s were the obvious choice for the thinking man's ninja. Nothing I could make up could resonate in the same way. There's code in name-checking the GSG9 history — esoteric meaning. Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I†discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page. There have been threads on my Web site — readers Googling and finding my footprints. I still get people asking me about 'the possibilities of interactive fiction,' and they seem to have no clue how we're already so there.

—William Gibson, in an Amazon.com interview