Indie Squid Kid

I designed this shirt a few years back on Spreadshirt.com. By “designed” I, of course, mean “selected a font,” but since I’m not an artist, this is about a good as it gets. (I also took this picture of myself earlier today, and this was, sadly, the best one of the bunch.)

I don’t know if this shirt is Meta, Ironic, Ironically Meta, or Funny Because It’s True. (Or maybe it’s just really Dumb, but that’s OK, I still find it amusing.)

“My other shirt…” is one of several such “designs” for sale in the Random Signal Spreadshirt store, which I set up so that I could offer some merchandise related to my podcast. There you can get this and other shirts emblazoned with marginally witty pseudo-memes such as “Go Eagle Go!” and “Totally Airwolf.”

Incidentally, the Random Signal podcast is five years old this month! I posted a brand new episode last night, and it includes new music by Merge Records artists Let’s Wrestle and Telekinesis, a song about cyborgs by Jonathan Coltoun, and a song about vampires by The Magnetic Fields. The talky bits include discussion of the HBO series True Blood, MRIs, Kraken Rum, and a special message to British Petrolium. Download the show, and if you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes. It’s free!

Today’s shirt is avaialable in Giant Squid Red for $17.50. The back reads “www.randomsignal.com”. Buy it from Spreadshirt.com (I might even make a little bit of money from it!)

Halloween is nearly over, but I think I have time to squeeze in one last post. In case you haven’t noticed, I really like Halloween, and one of my favorite things about the holiday is that it gives me an excuse to make compilations of music about Halloween-themed topics such as horror, death, blood, black magic, and monsters. I try to make at least one a year, and there are eight of them so far. I’m constantly on the look out for new songs, and fortunately I see no signs that I will run out of material for new compilations any time soon! In this year’s mix I was pleased to include a small aquatic-themed section:

• Into the Water by Dethklok
• She-Devils of the Deep by Future Bible Heroes
• The Octopus Is Gonna Get You…Dad by Boss The Big Bit
• Creature From The Black Lagoon by The Happy, Happy Jihads

I also do a Halloween music show every year on my podcast. Today’s Halloween show is the fist episode of Random Signal I’ve recorded since June. I tell myself that this temporary hiatus is because of Kid Indie Kid Squid, but the fact that I started doing daily posts on this blog might also have something to do with it…

logo designed by Leah Riley

In theory, Random Signal is produced bi-monthly (on average) and I either host the show solo or with my wife Ryn Nasser. I usually describe the podcast as equal parts geek talk and indie rock—we talk about comics, movies, TV, books, cephalopods, etc., and each show usually features 3-5 songs by independent musicians. I actually do two Halloween-themed shows every year. One on Halloween proper, and one in April on tax day, which I have declared to be the holiday of Aprilween.

I now want to switch gears entirely and talk about cephalopod-themed jack-o-lanterns. I don’t know exactly why, but there seems to be a strong correlation between cephalopod appreciation and artistic talent (although I seem to buck that particular trend). Case-in-point, the following awesome jack-o-lanterns:

Ninja Squid! by Vicious Bits

Vampire Octopus by alexfiles

Cthulhu by Sketchy-Stories

Cthulhu by timailius

And in case you were wondering, our jack-o-lantern this year was sort of a goblin-bat kind of thing…not a cephalopod at all. I’m not completely single-minded!