"The veil is a thing of secrets and the hidden, of neo black". I like Princess Hijab's art interventions. I like the aesthetics, the ambivalence, the appropriation of advertising, the ambiguity.

Rupert Sanders has made an atmospheric, eerie, NSFW short film adaptation of Charles Burns' cult comic Black Hole.

Kristamas Klousch's self-portraits are dark and enchanting, and dangerous and whimsical, and gothic fairylike.

PSFK writes about the trend among young, photoshop savvy, Chinese women to doctor out blemishes and carry out blepharoplasty on their online photos.

Resistance to fundamentalism in Indonesia gets raunchy as pop singer Julia Belen enters the political arena.

Verena Brandt takes a look at the lives of German pensioners in Thailand in Villa Germania.

Listening to Taiwanese electro-pop-punk band Go Chic debut album from cheap headphones plugged in to my Mac on a rainy London afternoon. And liking it.

So there's this teenage girl from the Isle of Man who discovers anime and starts dancing to Japanese pop songs in manga garb in her bedroom and uploading videos to YouTube, and she gets loads of hits and ends up an idol in Japan.

The story of 14-year-old Rebecca Flint aka Beckii Cruel makes for a fascinating documentary. And mundane reality finds its own uses for things, to paraphrase William Gibson, as an idoru comes into being in a kid's bedroom in British suburbia. Fantastic.

Was wandering around feeling rather underwhelmed by part one of Newspeak - Saatchi's latest collection of British art - until I came across Clunie Reid's work covering two walls.

With the art of appropriation of a Richard Prince and the rebelliousness of a Jaime Reid, the contemporaneity of her collages slashes out at celebrity & consumer culture with a sharp eye and gift for juxtaposed compositions united by gaffer tape and marker pen. And scissors and great wit. Cool stuff.

From Mutate Britain comes the Whitecross street party in London later this month.

From study to slum:

"The number of college graduates in China is growing far faster than the number of white-collar jobs in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Young people who thought higher education would lead to high-paying jobs and chic apartments are instead cramming by the tens-of-thousands into slums near the IT districts where they seek jobs in computing and programming. The new aspiring professionals are known as "ants" because of both their eagerness to work and a willingness to cram together in poor living conditions."

Oh, the horrendous optimism of "Rainbow Bomb Parties" on the rooftops and verandas of Honolulu hotels, as an H-bomb goes off in outer space in 1962.