Friends

"Vessel," by the phenomenal Grouper, from a recent split EP (with Roy Montgomery). Grouper’s DRAGGING A DEAD DEER UP A HILL was one of my favourite records of 2008, and this EP has basically made my night.

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I discovered Scott Tuma’s work a few years ago, with a record called THE RIVER. He’s usually filed under "Americana," but I find this reductive.

This is a piece from a collaboration with Mike Weis called TARADIDDLE, just because it’s what I’ve got to hand right now, but I find it preserves what’s important about Scott Tuma. His work is powerfully strange and estranging: it smacks of mutated ground, poisoned water, rust and death. The first track off 2008’s NOT FOR NOBODY is actually kind of harrowing, in the way that recent Elegi and Svarte Greine records have been — the sound of someone in extremis in an unforgiving environment. But I seem to have misplaced that. And TARADIDDLE is a fine record. So, from it, I play you "On Cox."

(mp3 provided for review purposes only, dies in seven days, contact me at warrenellis [at] gmail.com if you need it removed)

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• First Earth-like planet spotted outside solar system likely a volcanic wasteland
  "The rocky planet CoRoT-7 b is, however, a forbidding place. If its orbit is not almost perfectly circular, then the planet might be undergoing continuous, fierce volcanic eruptions…"
  (tags:space )
• Neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light
  "Neuroscientists at MIT have developed a powerful new class of tools to reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light. When targeted to specific neurons, these tools could potentially lead to new treatments for the abnormal brain activity associated with disorders such as chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury, and Parkinson's disease."
  (tags:sci med neuro )
• Oloshino > Top Shelf 2.0
  short online comic by Whitechapel regulars
  (tags:webcomics )

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Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, which is where you can read a shitload of Marvel comics for between five and ten Yanqui dollars a month, is sorting their inventory by creator.

Which means there’s a Warren Ellis page on Marvel Digital.

A lot of it is, of course, appalling shit that I was hoping might disappear forever. But, on the other hand, you can spend ten bucks on joining for one month and read all of NEXTWAVE and all of my THUNDERBOLTS run (which was quite funny in places, and apparently my having the Green Goblin give monologues while naked was somewhat influential on the development of the Marvel universe or something)…

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What’s that? Cold? Snow? Ice? Not where Meredith Yayanos is living. She’s down in New Zealand, and the weather is apparently fine.

This is warren ellis dot com and I want to go back to bed please.

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DO ANYTHING was mostly written in a Moleskine reporter’s notepad with a propelling pencil. The page reproduced below — cranked up in GIMP to make it visible, if not legible — appears to date from late May 2009. It’s written in block caps because I needed to be able to copy-type from it, and as we know from earlier posts, my handwriting is shitty.

Pretty much every page of DO ANYTHING in this notebook looks like this:

If you’ve read DO ANYTHING, you know a lot of it is pretty densely layered with connections. The column was written in a very specific way to maximise the information. It always, always started out as longhand, early in the day. The longhand was always about the forward thrust of the column — the column meanders a lot, but it doesn’t wander, it’s constantly following a channel. As I go, I’m signposting things I need to check later, or need to remember to tie in.

Later, I sit down and copy-type the thing into Notepad, with a browser open, because I’m fact-checking as I go. The longhand draft is all mental, and that includes working in information from memory. Since I often can’t remember what I did yesterday, it needs to be checked.

I’d write the longhand version in intense two-hour stretches, and usually had way too much for a single column. After 003, in fact, I just kept writing without thinking about column breaks, and found those breaks later after the copy-typing.

Once I’d typed the column up, the real draft started. Because I’d then spend an hour plugging names from the column into Google, looking for more connections, as well as following my signposts, and layering that stuff into the piece. The Notepad draft after an hour or so on Google was the actual first draft, and that’s what’d get pasted into OpenOffice to get edited and cleaned up.

Really, an incredibly complicated and time-devouring process for a column no-one read. But it was fun, and it taught me things.

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The serial version of the first DO ANYTHING book concluded today. It’ll be out in print in April, and it’ll look something like this:

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• Charitable Front: Some Bay Area organizations appear to be part of a secretive group
  "Mysterious organizations in the Bay Area profess to be advocating for liberal causes. In truth, they appear to be part of a secretive group with a bizarre radical past."
  (tags:cult pol )
• Sikhs strive to keep language alive
  "The Sikh scriptures and the Punjabi language of many Sikhs were written in a script known as Gurmukhi. So to be fully initiated into the religion, you must know how to read it."
  (tags:cult culture language history social )
• U.S. Evangelicals? Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push
  "…the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how ?the gay movement is an evil institution? whose goal is ?to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.? Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior…"
  (tags:cult crime )
• Freescale promises bargain-price tablet this year
  "Freescale Semiconductor unveiled blueprints for a tablet computer to be priced at less than 200 dollars (US) when it debuts later this year."
  (tags:tech computing )

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Curzon from Coming Anarchy took some photos of the opening of the Burj Khalifa, the new top medieval folly in Dubai. The thing about criminal lunatics who live like God’s just keeping their chairs warm is that, well, they do know how to put on a show:

More at the link.

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Of a 300-word column on comics for SFX. 300 poxy words. This usually means I’m going to have to scrap it and start again. It’s not due to file until the 11th, but I want to get it out of the way today, because I need to be producing some comics pages by the end of the week. Of course, at the end of the week, I’m planning to be in London to consult with a few people on a few things, so…

Provided London hasn’t been cut off by snow, of course. Extreme weather warnings are popping up all over the country today, and both London and Southend are pegged for "heavy snow" tonight — about a foot of it, by all accounts. People in other parts of the world are laughing their arses off at the very idea of that being "heavy snow," I know. But you can confidently expect this shambles of a country to fall over and play dead after a foot of snow.

Today I had a very, very strange job offer.

This turned up in my inbox the other day, from artist Sam Haney.

(Larger version)

You too can send me dirty pictures at my "dump" email address, which I check every day or two, at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com.

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At my internet cave today:

* The Katie West Residency

* The Brian Wood Residency

Both here until end of Friday. Go and meet them.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: Ace Of Space – return of the artists’ challenge thread.

* Free Paper Science newspaper from We Are Words + Pictures – oh yes. We do free stuff now.

* Comics on Sale This Week (Jan 6) – For people with a local comics store.

* SHUDDERTOWN; March 2010 from Image/Shadowline

* GHOST PROJEKT: Coming in March from Oni Press

Preview material for two new comics by creators who visit Whitechapel

* DJs lets post some mixes thread!

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No writing yesterday. And I don't much feel like writing about that just now. More and more, I do not feel like writing about writing. I'm even less inclined to write about not writing. Except, yesterday I learned from my agent that the signed Audible.com contracts that were mailed back to NYC on December 11th never made it to NYC. So...I'm waiting to see what I'm supposed to do now.

Yesterday, we did the same thing we did last January 4th. Maybe this is the beginning of an annual pilgrimage. Maybe it's only a coincidence (yes, I do believe in those). We drove from Providence to Conanicut Island, to Beavertail State Park. Like last year, there was snow. Actually, quite a bit more snow this year than last. And colder, I think. And I wasn't dressed as well for the weather. All that ice and snow made it too treacherous to attempt to make it down onto the rocks. But we watched gulls and murres, cormorants and crows.

Last night, in a moment of weakness, I bought asparagus from Peru. That's fucking insane. Asparagus from Peru. How much fucking fuel was burned, how much C02 released into the atmosphere, to get that asparagus some 3,500 to 4,000 miles from Peru to Rhode Island? We have perfectly good asparagus grown right here in the state, a few miles from our house. But it's not asparagus season in Rhode Island, and I had a moment of weakness. This civilization (and much of the present biosphere) will fall at the mercy of a trillion trillion moments of seemingly insignificant luxury. Seemingly insignificant, that is, when each is considered alone. It's not so much the big things that kill worlds; it's all the little fucking things that come before the big, inevitable things.

There are photographs from yesterday:

( 4 January 2010 )

Concluding the first volume.

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Clayton "Siege" Cubitt’s notebook is probably a lot nicer to wake up to than mine, you know.

Good morning. This is warrenellisdotcom. I write things here.

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Broadcast and network culture. (And Atemporality, which, like the term "post-industrial," you’re likely to hear a lot about this year.)

In my part of the world, in the 1960s, you’d come home from work — as my mother did, as Niki’s mother did — and the first thing you’d do is put the radio on. You’ve already selected the broadcast channel you want. You’ve found out the frequency from friends, from a magazine, or just twisted around the dial ’til you hunted it out and left it there. Radio Caroline, or Radio Essex, broadcasting off the Maunsell Sea Fort called Knock John. These are pirate radio stations, outside the control or mandate of the BBC. And you’ve left the dial locked to that frequency because it’s the only way you can hear the music you like. It’s music the BBC doesn’t play, and the BBC’s pretty much the only game in town, if your town is ashen, brick-faced Sixties Britain. Broadcast technology has gotten to the point where nutters like Paddy Roy Bates can lash together a kit on a concrete plug sticking out of the Thames Estuary and blanket the area in modern music. It’s on the verge of a consumer-society democratisation.

My RSS feed reader is tuned to several broadcasters. I’ve found out the web addresses from friends, from magazines, from twisting around a search engine until I found what I was looking for. These broadcasters send music directly to my main daily listening device, which is a X61 Thinkpad (as opposed to an ITT transistor radio). And, even though I live in 2010 Britain and have a few more options than three or four BBC stations, it’s still often the only way I can hear the music I like.

(My daughter comes home and puts on YouTube, clicking around playlists. YouTube is in fact the radio for her and her friends, right now to the shitty sound quality.)

We’re in the depths of the consumer-society democratisation of the relevant technologies. It is really not hard to be a broadcaster now.

There’s obviously going to be a rush of tablet technologies this year. These are largely going to be about the broadcast of magazines. This is going to be kind of a new thing: over-the-air simultaneous delivery of post-print journalistic/design digital objects to handheld devices. Without immediate democratisation. This is a thing that large publishing corporations would presumably be intent on controlling access to. This will, equally obviously, not happen.

This is something I’m going to be kicking around for a while.

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Recent work:

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Speculative architecture from design team Chimera:

our vision is to define an urban ecosystem which supports housing and cultural programs and has the ability to adapt, transform, mutate and adjust according to the specific urban and social character of the site and of manhattan. this urban ecological system is taking as a model an organism in nature, specifically the mangrove plant. the mangrove plant and its collective the mangal, provide examples of social associative principles as well as structural capacities and hybrid responses to environmental and contextual conditions.

Interview and more images at the link.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

• Hong Kong air pollution: ‘life-threatening’ levels
  "Hong Kong's roadside air pollution reached life-threatening levels one in every eight days last year, a report said Monday, citing figures obtained from the government."
  (tags:eco cities )
• The world’s most likely trouble spots in 2010 | World news | guardian.co.uk
  "From Iran to Yemen, and from Zimbabwe to Italy, we look at the prospects for conflict and include the Guardian's Troublespotometer rating"
  (tags:pol war dooooooooom )
• What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us? | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine
  ?There?s just one thing we haven?t quite dared to mention. It?s this, and you won?t believe it. It?s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child?s face.?
  (tags:history )
• Microsoft patent filing: Control a computer by flexing a muscle
  "According to a newly surfaced filing, the company is seeking patents on a method of controlling computers using Electromyography, or EMG — a system that translates electrical activity from muscles into instructions for the computer."
  (tags:tech bodymod computing )
• Small Victories
  Webcomic by a friend whom I think is remaining an anonymous author at this time.
  (tags:webcomics )
• Thirst for Kava drink is growing like weed
  "Mary Jane?s Relaxing Soda, a sugary drink laced with Kava, a South Pacific root purported to have sedative properties… Along with new drinks like Slow Cow and Ex Chill, Mary Jane?s is part of a new group of so-called slow-down or anti-energy drinks, and are expected to be one of the top food trends of 2010…"
  (tags:social food )
• sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy: From the Mill to the Mall
  "How did this city, which by all accounts was once the undisputed regional capital (a perusal of The Buildings of England's extremely complimentary 1966 entry on the city is instructive here) get to the point where an entire stretch of its centre, as large as a small town, was given over to a gigantic retail park? How is it that the 16th largest city in the country has the 3rd highest level of violent crime and the 3rd worst exam results, despite being central to one of the most affluent counties? And does any of this have anything to do with the fact that the city contains what was, when built, the largest urban mall in Britain?"
  (tags:architecture culture social )

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

• Hong Kong air pollution: ‘life-threatening’ levels
  "Hong Kong's roadside air pollution reached life-threatening levels one in every eight days last year, a report said Monday, citing figures obtained from the government."
  (tags:eco cities )
• The world’s most likely trouble spots in 2010 | World news | guardian.co.uk
  "From Iran to Yemen, and from Zimbabwe to Italy, we look at the prospects for conflict and include the Guardian's Troublespotometer rating"
  (tags:pol war dooooooooom )
• What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us? | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine
  ?There?s just one thing we haven?t quite dared to mention. It?s this, and you won?t believe it. It?s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child?s face.?
  (tags:history )
• Microsoft patent filing: Control a computer by flexing a muscle
  "According to a newly surfaced filing, the company is seeking patents on a method of controlling computers using Electromyography, or EMG — a system that translates electrical activity from muscles into instructions for the computer."
  (tags:tech bodymod computing )
• Small Victories
  Webcomic by a friend whom I think is remaining an anonymous author at this time.
  (tags:webcomics )
• Thirst for Kava drink is growing like weed
  "Mary Jane?s Relaxing Soda, a sugary drink laced with Kava, a South Pacific root purported to have sedative properties… Along with new drinks like Slow Cow and Ex Chill, Mary Jane?s is part of a new group of so-called slow-down or anti-energy drinks, and are expected to be one of the top food trends of 2010…"
  (tags:social food )
• sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy: From the Mill to the Mall
  "How did this city, which by all accounts was once the undisputed regional capital (a perusal of The Buildings of England's extremely complimentary 1966 entry on the city is instructive here) get to the point where an entire stretch of its centre, as large as a small town, was given over to a gigantic retail park? How is it that the 16th largest city in the country has the 3rd highest level of violent crime and the 3rd worst exam results, despite being central to one of the most affluent counties? And does any of this have anything to do with the fact that the city contains what was, when built, the largest urban mall in Britain?"
  (tags:architecture culture social )

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No, not Ramming Speed at all, not without significant stimulation. The WIRED UK column lays in a file waiting for editing, because it turns out I misread my schedule and it’s not due til next week, ha ha oh god.

Congrats to Nika, Zola Jesus, for winning the Best New Artist 2009 place on the Brainwashed year-end reader’s poll.

* * * * *

Kelly Sue DeConnick has, with Matt Fraction, a two-year-old son named Henry Leo, whom they refer to as HL online for speed’s sake. Kel is currently pregnant with a girl they’ve named Tallulah. That’s all the context you need to enjoy Kelly Sue’s most recent Twitter post:

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