In this Pecha Kucha presentation, I’ll take you through 12 years of creative failures and false starts contained on my 4TB drobo. Illustrations, posters, lunchboxes, and a cartoon about a Tiki Bar await.

All this, and I still manage to distill the whole thing down to a poop joke. Classy.

This was shot as part of the Bulletproof event hosted by the Art+Copy Club of Kansas City on April 23rd. Special thanks to Thill Media for shooting and editing this video.

If you’re interested in seeing more videos from this event, make sure to check out artandcopyclub.com. A new presenter’s video will be featured there every day for the next two weeks. Nine people in total presented that night, and all nine were awesome.

I started off the evening by presenting ‘Creative Turtleheads’, which basically equated my hard drive full of half-finished personal creative projects to a poop joke. I am nothing if not classy.

This, as many of you know, is the second Pecha Kucha presentation that I’ve given. I have to say that now that I’ve done this a couple of times, I’m hooked and am also thoroughly convinced that Pecha Kucha can save the business world as well.

Pecha Kucha translates to “chit-chat” in English, and this presentation style gets your point across quickly and concisely so that you have plenty of time for discourse over the remainder of the meeting time. There’s no time or place for belabored bullet points and a presenter droning on and on or just simply parroting the slides back to the audience.

I want to teach people at my agency how to effectively do Pecha Kucha-style presentations. I think it would increase productivity, communication, and collaboration dramatically.

And by the way, if you missed last night’s Bulletproof, you missed one hell of an event. There were so many fantastic presentations over a wide variety of subjects. There was even one musical presentation that I was a little skeptical if it could be pulled off. Damned if they didn’t though. It was very impressive.

You might be saying to yourself, “Self, didn’t Jeremy just redesign his blog a couple of months ago?” The answer to that question would be a resounding YES. I did redesign my blog back in January. But, the problem with that design was twofold. 1) I didn’t think through ancillary content flow very well, and 2) I never really finished the design.

Not finishing my personal projects is a huge problem of mine, and it’s one that I’ll be addressing in my next Pecha Kucha presentation on April 23rd at Alistair Tutton’s new studio. But, I digress.

It might even be worth noting that THIS design is also incomplete. But, where the last incarnation was only about 70% complete, this one is about 90% complete. There are only a couple of small things that I need to add but otherwise I like it as is.

The observant reader might notice that the new design borrows from and acknowledges a couple of older incarnations of this site’s design. I guess there’s just some things about those old designs that were quintessentially me, and I’m bringing ‘em back like they never went out of style.

This redesign is also part of a larger rebranding effort I’ve got going on. At some point, THE COCKTAIL NAPKIN will join this family of sites design-wise, and eventually it will spill over into my portfolio site. This is all in an attempt to cluster these disparate sites together into an easy to digest portal about me. Hopefully it will work.

Enjoy the new design. I know I do. It’s very easy to read.

In this episode: Creative “burnout”, new plans for the future, eventual replenishment.

In this episode: The Concho Valley, DFW, early adpoters, taking technology for granted, airplane winglets, kaizen.

If you want to follow the cocktail napkin* discussion on Twitter, just use or search for this hashtag: #thecocktailnapkin. Also, archived episodes are available at thecocktailnapkin.com.

This is the classic Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch we’ve all seen a million times before, but this time it is performed by two Nigerian scammers who were fooled into thinking they were producing the film for a motion picture production company, after they attempted to scam the company owner!

I love these kinds of things. If you’ve ever seen the Anus Laptops debacle, you may have been like me and spent half a day reading the whole story. If you want the full story of this video, you can check it out here.

Breathtaking.

About ten years ago there was a fantastically weird campaign for Rice Krispies Treats that I’m pretty sure I would have caught on Comedy Central (that’s all I watched 10 years ago). The campaign featured all these different things you could use Rice Krispies Treats for but ultimately ended with the tagline “Best When Eaten.”

There was a guy who built himself a girlfriend out of the treats so he could have someone to swim with in his backyard pool, and a couple of others that are escaping memory at the moment. But, the best one was the hair helmet spot (seen below).

For one thing, hair helmets are funny. I knew a guy whose hair highly resembled a helmet, cradling and protecting his substantial melon. Charles Burns used it to great effect on Liquid Television’s Dog-Boy. For another thing, the dance at the end of this spot is one of the all-time best moments in all of commercialdom. Seriously. I think these two have been watching Grill Vogel’s Business Hugs series (also seen below).

The one thing about the web version of the Rice Krispies Treats spot that’s missing is the very end when the tagline came up. In the original version the helmet hair guy took a huge bite out of the product instead of just holding it up to his lips. I remember because I set a still frame of that moment as wallpaper on the discreet flint* I was operating at the time. There was something amazingly copraphagic about that moment (which is why I’m sure there was a re-edit to a less disgusting spot close), but like a fine trainwreck it sucked you in. Didn’t do much for showcasing the product though.

Enough from me. Enjoy “Wig.”

Spectacle!

What is Pecha Kucha (pronounced pe-chaw-kchaw)? One way of looking at it is that it’s performance art set to PowerPoint. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each — giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up.

I will be presenting a piece entitled “My Social Graph Is Getting Weird.” In this presentation I’ll talk about the strangeness of some of the Facebook friend requests I’ve received lately, the ramifications of being Facebook friends with an ex-wife, and ultimately whether or not some relationships from the past are just better off forgotten.

Pecha Kucha Night: Kansas City is being held tonight at Crosstown Station, 1522 McGee St. KCMO (across from the KC Star building). The show starts at 8:20pm and there’s no charge to get in the door.

I don’t think you’ll have ever seen anything like it. What else do you have to do on a Thursday night that’s more interesting than watching PowerPoint performance art?

Good point, but I’d still like to see you there.

In this episode: Observations, Coexist bumper stickers, Bath & Body Works soaps, patchouli, hemp traders, Hooville, presentation clickers, ChipIn to help bring Vimeo Plus to the cocktail napkin. (Just sayin’ right now… I’m persistent)