Drawing in China

Here's the finished drawing I made in Beijing.



I've posted a sequence of photos here.

The Wrestling Elves

Here in their full glory. Each figure is approximately 17cm. They will come as a set. When put together they are bigger! A substantial piece. Produced specifically for Silly Thing in Hong Kong these are not strictly an Amos release. But we will have a few of our own for sale through the online stores. To begin with these sets will be pre-sold to members only. If any remain they will go on general sale early in December.

Gold Members of the online store. Get ready. This weekend you get first go!

And another piece on YOD at Honeyee.com...

http://www.honeyee.com/news/2007/art/029/index.html.

Article about YOD in Creative Review

There's an article about the development of YOD in the November issue of Creative Review. You can also read it on-line here.

Heeeere's Dworkin!

And more...



Amos online store this weekend.

Another Japan YOD promo short.

Thanks to Ozawa at One Gram for another great promo film to announce the release of the white SE YOD in Japan.

See for yourself here.

JJ in China

Despite the Chinese authorities' censorship on blogging sites, Jimmy Jarvis has managed to smuggle out his post for the day. I'm posting this on his behalf. From this point on it's all his words!

"I am in Beijing for a couple of days to take part in an exhibition there, along with KAWS, DELTA and various other low-brow luminaries.

I managed a five-hour kip and another 50 or so pages of Infinite Jest (plus 20 pages of the Notes and Errata) on the flight over. I broke my no-running-for-a-week pledge as soon as I arrived at the hotel as 45 minutes on the treadmill was the only way to fight jet-lag. I know the treadmill's a cop-out, but the air pollution here is pretty ferocious.

I spent today at the gallery hard at work making a 3m x 4m drawing for the exhibition, which you can see the beginnings of below. I'll post the finished thing after the opening. So far I have seen nothing of Beijing other than through the window of a taxi. It is very big and grey.

Tomorrow I have the morning off and then its off to the gallery to jolly things along until the opening in the evening." James Jarvis - October 25th.

More Special Edition especially for you my friend...

These were made in Japan in very small quantities and released especially for the end of summer events that James and I attended in Tokyo. We managed to get a handful to sell through the online store. They will go up this weekend with other assorted Japanese licensed goodies.

How YOD spent the day.

YOD wasted the day bidding for YODs on ebay. But all the bids have been cancelled. They did not trust the bids of the_amos_equalizer. Shame on the naughty re-sellers and their friends.

YOD thanks them for their nasty messages. I promised to post the best ones on YOD's behalf. This one was a particular favourite.

Dear the_amos_equalizer,

I don't know who you are but if you are a member of the "amos crew" I just want to tell you that YOU are first responsible of this business ! Why make Yod so limited & not 1000 of each color so everyone can have one at reasonnable price ? Why say "be on our website at 1 pm, we won't have enough for all". YOU first are trying to make always more money with toys buy selling limited toys to stupid addicts & this is not surprising a few pple are trying to get their part of the business. That's not really fair-play...

Oh & one more thing : YOD SUCKS, it's no more about artistic creation, it's just about making money with an ugly crappy toy & the comic "Mr Vortigern's etc" SUCKS too : it's just a poor story, with poor drawings & backgrounds colored with Photoshop & full of useless characters just here to sell more toys ! Who do you think you are Mr Jarvis ? The new Hergé ? Lemuel & Samuel are Dupont & Dupond ? Haha let me laugh you're just an opportunist as those sellers.

Cheers.
lagokinetics

And here is my response on behalf of all of us at Amos. I have made this public as the sender hid behind an ebay moniker!

Dear Mr/Ms lagokinetics,

Produce thousands of figures, in every colour? And how do we do this? Call Hasbro to help us?!? Clearly you have no idea about running a small independent company. We try and earn a living doing something we like. We can not afford to make thousands of one product. How do we finance and distribute that? We do what we can and try to strike a balance. Now we try to sell product ourselves (independently) so we make a reasonable profit within safe parameters. So we would be fools not to tell people when our products go on sale (that is why we give a time for our products going live on the website!).

We tried to distribute the YODs to those that were really interested in the product. We feel aggrieved that there are spivs out there that want to sell our product at a far larger profit than we can make ourselves. They do nothing to earn the premium other than prey on a difficult situation. We can understand some collectors re-selling to fund their collections. But there is no excuse for the greedy profiteering happening at present! Speculative buying is wrong. Those that do, simply leech off a small independent culture, giving nothing back!

But lagokinetics my friend, clearly you have a bigger issue than the fact our products are limited. Do I detect a hint of artistic rivalry/jealousy? I can only assume that you have managed to achieve far more with your own work than we have with our limited output. Although if your artistic prowess is as proficient as your business accumen then I could be wrong!

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

The sound you will make this weekend if you visit the online store and see the high price of the Amos keychains and pin badges! All we can say is that we are sorry for the expense. Importing from Japan is definitely not cheap! But I would also say that our people there have done an amazing job on all the merchandise they have produced so far. Top quality if a little pricy. The keychains, pin badges, mugs, tees, bags and books all look amazing. And store.amostoys.com is the only place outside of Japan that has all of this stuff.

We'll have a couple of new items and restocks on most of the above this weekend. More images later in the week.

Croydon 10K

I ran the Croydon 10K yesterday, in 33:32. I was quite pleased with the time; it was a hilly course with lots of sharp turns so it was hard to get a rhythm going. It was slight improvement on two weeks ago and I hadn't done any serious training in the interim.

I am off to Beijing tomorrow and I am going to take the week as enforced rest. I haven't had more than two days off running all year.

I am still aiming to do a sub 33:00 time at the Brighton 10K in late November.

Which YOD best represents your world view?

Not more bloody plastic figures...

Yeah there's more. Life after YOD. Amos had a slow start to the year but we are making up for it now. The next release has been produced for our friends at Silly Thing in Hong Kong. We've turned JJs Wrestling Elves, originally designed for the packaging of Juno's Chapel of Dawn CD, into real life soft vinyl figures (what's a real life vinyl figure?) The Wrestling Elves will be available through Silly Thing in Hong Kong, but we will have one or two available through the Amos on-line stores. We'll post more information and images soon.

A double apology.

First we apologise for the continued problems with the online store. The guys that run the store tried really hard to keep it rolling when the heavy traffic hit on Saturday. Unfortunately it could not take it and crashed again. Even the main Amos site was running at a super slow speed. We are really sorry for all those that had problems. I would love to say that we have sorted everything out for next time but after the last time I daren't say anything! However I will say that we are working on it...

And second we want to apologise to all those that did not manage to get a YOD figure. They were produced in limited quantites as we simply can not afford to take the chance and produce loads of any one figure. We produced an amount that we felt would be right for the type of product, and those it would appeal to. Sorry if you did not manage to get one. I think there are still some on the Japanese site so if your Japanese language skills are strong. I'm sure they would be happy to ship abroad...

For everyone else...YOD will come again soon...

YOD is here!

On Saturday 13th October at 1pm BST we will release the last of our allocation of YOD figures for sale through store.amostoys.com. These are open for anyone to buy. We think they will probably go fast.

All YODs will start shipping during the week beginning October 15th.

We advise that anyone planning to purchase a YOD figure that has not already registered and set up a store profile, should do so before the release.

INSTRUCTIONS TO REGISTER
Click HERE then scroll down the opening page to Your Account and click Sign Up. Then complete the form as instructed.

We've tried to address the problem of the server crashing too. Hopefully the massive increase in traffic will only slow the site down rather than cause complete meltdown! Fingers crossed...

YOD promo film from Japan...

Click below for a promotional film made by the people at amostoys.jp to promote the release of YOD. You'll also see a few new products coming soon!

YOD@amostoys.jp

YOD Is Everywhere

Just in case anyone was wondering... I drew this YOD as a favour for my friend Giorgio Camuffo to use for a conference he is running at the University of Venice. 

YOD will not be there.

You can find out more about the conference here.

Dulwich 10k Road Race

This Sunday I ran in my local road race, the Dulwich 10k, which I won last year. I came second in 33:38. I was a bit disappointed with the time as I had run 33:00 twice already this year. Stupidly, I ran the first two miles in 5:00 and 5:10 which was way too fast, and my last four miles were all over the place. It was hard work as I ran the whole race on my own and it's always easier when you've someone to share the pace with. The winning time was 32:08, so I was never going to win it! 

I'm determined to run a sub-33:00 10k before the end of the year. There's a 10k race in Brighton in early November but I have to go to Beijing for a week at the end of the month so I'm not sure how I'm going to maintain my schedule.

On the subject of running, many thanks to Acyde and Kerry from Nike for the package they sent. You can never have too many short shorts. I've been trying out the Free 7.0s which felt great when I first ran in them but don't seem to agree with me as much as the Free 3.0s, which are amazing.

A new theme for YOD.

Thanks to the mysterious OCD we have a new tune for YOD now posted on the myspace page. An electronic techno Kraut-rocker with a deep, deep lyrical content. Click on the link below to experience for yourself.

YOD on myspace.

Just click the button in the corner...

As Arron so rightly (and kindly) pointed out, when checking the +81 Plus links in yeasterday's post, just check the top left corner for the "English" button and all will be revealed! I have it on good authority that the YOD piece will also be updated and translated into English soon.

After my last post I feel a little foolish...

Big in Japan...?

After our recent trip to Japan some of the press we did is starting to surface.

YOD on +81 plus online

James and Russell on +81 plus online

Someone please tell us what it says!!!

An Apology.

We would like to apologise to everybody that struggled to pre-order YOD last Saturday. The server simply could not cope with the demand and it took over an hour to actually post the items and make them available for sale. Sorry if you had to waste time trying to log on. Eventually we managed to clear up the problems but not without a battle with the store ISP. Hopefully this will not happen during our official online sale of YOD on October 13th. We have been promised a dedicated server for this and future limited releases.

Also thanks to those that remained patient. We sold out of our pre-order allocation in around 2 hours. We hope you got what you wanted.

Once again. Sorry for the grief!!!