The Onion is reporting that 53′ long, 900 pound Giant Squid has joined the cast of daytime talk show “The View”.

“We feel that the squid brings a fresh new point of view to the program,” said View executive producer and host Barbara Walters. “We looked at hundreds of potential candidates, but in the end, this rare and exotic creature from the darkest depths of the sea truly stood out.”

Thanks to Veek for the tip!

image via The Onion

GAMA-GO makes some really great squid themed t-shirts, like their new “Golden Gate Squid” men’s t-shirt.

photo via GAMA-GO

John Hodgman directs our attention to a Jonathan Coulton Paper Doll with Giant Squid Outfit designed by Jason Norman. You may recall that Jonathan wrote a great song about a giant squid “I Crush Everything”.

Includes bonus evil robot Santa outfit from Jonathan’s song “Chiron Beta Prime”.

illustration by Jason Norman

“When The Kraken Awakes” is an amazing Lego diorama featuring a Kraken (giant squid) defending a Dwarf castle against a from a Viking war ship. This epic battle scene was constructed by Paul (Fifth Conspiracy) and his son over a period of 8 months in 2006.

In an alternate netherworld dimension, the book of the dead ~ the necronomicon, has thrust Vikings, Centaurs, Dwarves and other creatures of horrid evil into battle as they relentlessly pursue strongholds of middle-earth. Shazam!!!

Thanks to Mary for the tip!

Over on squid.us, we were going through our backlog of submissions and came across “Le Calmar Geant a Retropropulsion” (which translates to The Giant Squid with Reverse Thrust), a beautifully articulated mechanical giant squid, which is one of the featured attractions in “Les Machines de l’le de Nantes”, a new project from the amazing Royal de Luxe (see previously Royal de Luxe in Nantes & London).

Hilary Talbot has a great write up on Les Machines de l’lle de Nantes on Spirits Dancing, which includes some photos from the exhibit by Claude Joannis.

Planned as a new artistic, cultural and tourist venture, and part of an urban renewal of the docklands, it consists of numerous large mechanical creatures to build dreams around, imagined by Francois Delaroziere and Pierre Orefice. They are installed in the great naves of the old shipyards on the island of Nantes, France.

Here’s a video of the giant squid in action.

At Friday’s 12th Anniversary Party I had a nice surprise when SF Slim presented me with the amazing “Squirty Squid”, a felted wool squid that doubles as 4GB USB flash drive, hand made by the super talented Nifer Fahrion.

He’s very playful and is always laughing at all the other silly critters in the sea. Why? Because Squirty is impish and always sneaks up behind his friends, and squirts them in the head! What a silly squid!

Nifer runs NifNaks, where she makes and sells all kinds of wonderful things. Her creations would make great holiday gifts for your friends if you are looking for something unique. I can’t decide which of her tree ornaments I like better, Flying Spaghetti Monster or Cthulhu.

So I guess ripping off the tentacle last time wasn’t good enough, now they had to go and execute our tentacled comrade.

The humans will pay for their insolence. The world of science will be bathed in blood and bitter, bitter ink.

These beautiful Laughing Squid stencils showed up on the sidewalks outside of Mighty just before the start of Laughing Squid: Decade 2.

When parking your squid, don’t forget your green tea.

via » squid

I thought should probably do a write-up on what Laughing Squid is all about, beyond what is in our FAQ and what has been written about us in the media. I plan on updating this post from time-to-time it as things change.

When I meet people and tell them that I run Laughing Squid, many of them say they’ve heard of it, but don’t really know what it is that we actually do. Here’s the short version:

Laughing Squid is an online resource for art, culture and technology from San Francisco and beyond. It is run by primary tentacle Scott Beale, who is also the publisher editor of the blog and is joined by the occasional guest blogger.

So, I’ll try expanding on that a bit more on this blog post, but first, a little history:

Laughing Squid was founded on November 16th, 1995 by Scott Beale as a film and video production company, producing documentaries on the surrealist painter Alonso Smith and The Cacophony Society’s Portland Santacon ‘96 event. In 1996 Laughing Squid launched The Squid List and for a while Laughing Squid offered publicity and web design services, but then started focusing on web hosting in 1998. In December 1999 John Law invested a small amount in Laughing Squid and joined as head of “special projects”. David Klass soon followed, investing a small amount as a silent investor.

Ok, on to what we actually do. Here a few things that make up Laughing Squid:

1. ART, CULTURE & TECHNOLOGY - As our tagline suggests, one of the main objectives of Laughing Squid is promoting art, culture and technology, with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area. A secondary goal of ours is to help connect the art community with the tech community, by letting artists know what tools and resources are available to promote their work and in turn get the geeks out from behind their computer and experience more art.
    
2. WEB HOSTING - Since 1998 we have been providing dependable web hosting services to individuals, artists and bloggers. This is our primary source of revenue. The “business” side of Laughing Squid. If Laughing Squid were a mullet, web hosting would be the short part in the front. The revenue generated from the web hosting side of Laughing Squid helps to fund the community-based side of Laughing Squid. Our web hosting operations are located over at laughingsquid.net.
    
3. BLOG - In January 2005 we launched the Laughing Squid blog, essentially converting most of Laughing Squid to WordPress. There I post about a variety of things (with the occasional guest post), mostly relating to art, culture and technology, with the primary focus being the San Francisco Bay Area.
    
4. THE SQUID LIST - For the last 10 years we have been running The Squid List, a curated list of art, culture and technology events taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is both an online calendar, as well as an email list.
    
5. EVENTS - Speaking of events, Laughing Squid typically organizes at least one large event each year and sometimes a few smaller ones. For our 5th anniversary in 2000 we sold out the Great American Music Hall. In 2003 we went to New York and had our big “Laughing Squid: NYC” show at the now defunct CB’s 313 Gallery. From 1999 to 2003, we produced The Tentacle Sessions, a monthly artist salon. Here’s a list of the events that we have organized over the years.
    
6. PHOTOGRAPHY - I shoot a lot of photos and have been since high school. For the last decade my primary focus has been documenting San Francisco’s incredibly diverse art scene and in the last couple of years I’ve expanded it to the current explosion in web technology and related events. Here’s over 20,000 photos from 2005-2007, plus a few thousand more from 2000-2005. Some day I’ll get around to scanning and uploading all of the pre-2000 stuff.
    
7. PROPAGANDA - We’ve been pretty good at promoting ourselves through the years. Our infamous logo, created by the super talented Matt Dong, has been making the rounds since around 2000 and shows up on our t-shirts, stickers and buttons. We also commissioned a series of 10 post cards from some of our favorite artists.
    
8. SQUID - Well as you might guess, we love squid. In fact, we’re so into squid that we launched a whole blog devoted to just squid: squid.us
    
9. COMMUNITY - A big part of what Laughing Squid does is connecting people and organizations with other people, organizations and resources in the community. This often includes helping to organize, document (photos or video) or even sponsor an event. A few of the events and organizations we have been involved with over the years include Burning Man, ArtCar Fest, Defenestration, Survival Research Labs, The Cacophony Society, SEEMEN, the extended universe of Chicken John, Power Tool Drag Races, Black Rock Arts Foundation, RoboGames, Santarchy (Santacon), Webzine, the original BarCamp, Maker Faire, BrainJams, dorkbot-sf, How to Destroy the Universe and Hi Fructose Magazine, just to name a few.

Yeah, so as you can see, it’s not that easy to give an “elevator pitch” about what we do. For the most part, we like the fact that what we are all about is somewhat ambiguous.

Oh right, I bet you were hoping that I would tell you why were are called “Laughing Squid”. Well that will have to wait for a future blog post.

We are printing up 500 Laughing Squid: Decade 2 posters featuring the amazing Laughing Squid photo by Brian McCarty. We will be handing them out for free at our big 11th anniversary party, which is coming up soon on Saturday, November 18th. Tickets to the event can be purchased in advance or the night of the show.

Brian McCarty, master of toy photography, recently did a photo shoot for Laughing Squid and created this spectacular photo for us which we will be using as the poster image for our “Laughing Squid: Decade 2” party which is coming up on November 18th. We are planning on using this same photo for the back ad of Hi Fructose Volume 4 which will be coming out soon.

If you like Brian’s work, I highly recommend checking out his online portfolio as well as signing up for his ePostcard.

Pop Cling makes frameless adhesive art that can be applied directly to walls or other smooth surfaces. They have just released limited edition Pop Cling adhesive prints of Laughing Squid art by Attaboy (created for our 8 ½ Year Anniversary Show) and Joshua Ellingson (created for a Hi Fructose ad and our 10th Anniversary Party poster).

From the Pop Cling website:

Pop Cling makes art. Kick-ass, adhesive-backed art. You peel it off the backer and stick the image on any smooth surface. Try putting images on your concrete floors, or the sliding glass door leading to your balcony, or on your shower door, or on your kitchen cabinets. You don’t need a frame, you just need a blank space. Voila, you have fresh pop art on your wall from new, favorite, and cutting edge artists. They really are limited edition. They really come with a Certificate of Authenticity signed by the artist. Pop Cling really is new and completely different.

Cross-posted to the Squid blog.

Laughing Squid is featured in the current issue (#3) of Ambidextrous Magazine, a magazine about design that is published by the Stanford Institute of Design. The article is about cephalopod-themed design firms. It’s probably a stretch of the tentacle to call us a design firm, but regardless, we are honored to be included in this group which features SQUID Labs, Squidoo, The Octopus Dropkick and Giant Squid Design. The centerpiece of the article is the awesome “angry squid” illustration by Mule Design Studio.

Ambidextrous Magazine is a project of the Stanford d.school. It is a magazine for the wider design community, which includes engineers and ethnographers, psychologists and philosophers. Rather than focusing on promoting product, Ambidextrous exposes the people and processes involved in design.

Check out this awesomeness: The Calamari Wrestler

We are definitely going to show this at our next Laughing Squid party.

Our tentacles are tingling with excitement as we introduce the latest addition to the Laughing Squid family:

squid.us or simply “Squid”

It’s our new WordPress blog for all things “squid”. Both real squid news and other squid related items. What better time to launch then today, as news spreads about London’s Natural History Museum’s new exhibit of a massive giant squid named “Archie”.

For years people have been sending us squid info. We’ve never really had a place to put all of that stuff…until now.

Special thanks to those amazing teuthidaholics over at Mule Design Studio for creating such a wonderful squid header graphic for the blog. They do squid right.

“Floating Submerged” has just been released, featuring 32 delicious postcards by Attaboy. It is available through publisher Last Gasp and directly from Attaboy’s Yumfactory.

Thirty-two full-color, removable, oversized postcards, perforated for your pleasure. Attaboy’s maniacal undersea creatures and otherworldly vermin are together here for the first time. This postcard set features fans’ favorite images seen the world over, along with characters from Atta’s Vinyl Toy and Plush line, including the Axtrx and Gooberry! A great gift to send anyone for their next goo-filled visual vacation.

One of the postcards features the amazing squid illustration that Attaboy did for the Laughing Squid 8 ½ Year Anniversary Show. We are quite honored to be included in this wonderful postcard collection.

Weebls Stuff presents Demolition Squid in “Calamari Democracy”.

When you are in danger. There’s only one squid for the job.

Thanks for the tip David!

The squid-positive folks at Mule Design Studio have recently announced a new tentacular product to spruce up your iPod: The Cephal-iPod

Your iPod’s glaring whiteness is relaying signals back to the humans. Protect yourself from harmful rays in style with this hand-crafted hip cozy made of (possibly) organic felt.

Mule Deisgn is also behind the wonderful “Welcome Squid Overlords” t-shirt. Having been a squid overload for many years now, this t-shirt makes me feel quite at home and I plan on adding it to my collection very soon.