Once again, taking inspiration from Promise Tangeman, here are 5 things I love:

Pulp covers
They’re weird, they’re sleazy, and they suggest all kinds of sordid stories with just one picture. I’ve never actually read a pulp - and my guess is that I’d be disappointed if I did, so for now, I’ll just stick with the covers.

Videocopilot.net
There are a lot of sites out there dedicated to After Effects tutorials, but the most stylish and entertaining of them all has to be Andrew Kramer’s Video Copilot. It and Matt Fraction’s advice to “%$#@ around as much as possible” have helped me more than anything with the software. Of course the problems with tutorials is that there’s a temptation to rip them off completely (which I’ve done a couple of times…), but Kramer always encourages people to take what he teaches and build on it.

Siege - Marvel Comics 4 issue limited series
I not a huge fan of all the event storytelling taking place at Marvel these days - but man, Siege has knocked it out of the park so far. Bendis is writing an action packed story that gets my childhood favorites, The Avengers, back together and it’s being drawn by Olivier Coipel - one of the best artist working in the biz today. Only two issues in and I’m already in love.

Love, Power, Peace - James Brown Live at the Olympia, Paris , 1971
I saw the aforementioned Matt Fraction recommend this album twice so I finally checked it out. From now on, live is the only way to listen to James Brown to my mind.

iPod Nano
I got my iPod stolen a month or so ago. I replaced it with a 16 gig Nano. That’s quite a bit less storage than I had before, but that’s actually turned out to be a good thing. It’s made me invest myself a lot more into what music I put on the thing - and it’s much smaller footprint has me carrying it everywhere. It’s really kind of invigorated my music-listening. It also has a video camera that I’ve never used and a pedometer which I assume tells you how many child molesters are in your area.

There you go. Five things I love.