Warren Ellis's Blog, page 171

Phantom Circuit #60 (10th Jan. 2011) by Phantom Circuit o...

Phantom Circuit #60 (10th Jan. 2011) by Phantom Circuit on Mixcloud

The Full IMPOSSIBLE GIRL

Kim Boekbinder's album finally assembled into the complete unit. Stream it for free, click through to download it and toss her some money so that she can make more songs like "Impossible Girl #1″.

Station Ident

this is warren ellis dot com and i am very tired and also coughing a lot

[image error]

(katie west)

BREAKING FREE: Tintin The Revolutionary

A guy called Frank Lynn asked me on Twitter if I'd ever seen this.

Seen it? I used to own a copy of this short-run black-and-white comic, back in the Eighties. Lost it years ago, of course. Thanks, Frank. Am amazed that the internet can still do its thing and bring back even the fringiest of cultural artifacts.

In this instance, a detourned leftie Tintin and friends in dead-end Thatcher Britain fomenting a working-class uprising.

Related articles

GUEST INFORMANT: Steve Aylett (warrenellis.com)

Loving Emma Rios' layouts on this sequence from OSBORN #2...

Loving Emma Rios' layouts on this sequence from OSBORN #2 (as written by Kelly Sue DeConnick):

(embiggening)

Loving Emma Rio's layouts on this sequence from OSBORN #2...

Loving Emma Rio's layouts on this sequence from OSBORN #2 (as written by Kelly Sue DeConnick):

(embiggening)

Heavy Ink

This is my first full day back at the desk since last Tuesday, so I'm still catching up on stuff. Like this.

There's an online comics retailer called Heavy Ink, owned and operated by one Travis Corcoran. Following the attempted murder of US Senator Gabrielle Giffords (and the murder of Judge John Roll and several others), Corcoran was moved to post:

It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot "indiscriminately".

Target only politicians and their staff, and leave regular citizens alone.

Please!

He then posted a long, strange and weaselly explanation of why he felt it necessary to say that, which didn't explain it at all. So, in the comments, someone pinned him down, and he said:

I don't think that anything productive is going to come of killing either the senator or the judge, but, yes, I think that it is morally legitimate to kill pro-regulation senators and pro-regulation judges, if it can be done without harming innocents.

Obviously, I'd rather Heavy Ink didn't sell my work, but I don't have a choice about which stores order my books. However, if you do buy my work from Heavy Ink, would you please consider buying it from someone else instead?

And before the nutters start: yes, I'm sure this can be justified as your lovely American free speech and not hate speech or malicious communication, and yes, I'm sure he has a perfect right to say it and all that shit. Guess what? I have a perfect right not to like it, and a right to wish not to be associated with the nutter who spews it.

I should start a blog category called "Things That Are Ap...

I should start a blog category called "Things That Are Apparently My Fault":

Dear OpenOffice

Dear OpenOffice,

I have been using OpenOffice a long time. I have written uncountable pages of comics and graphic novels with OpenOffice. I wrote a novel on OpenOffice. I have recommended it to many, many people.

Yesterday I got a shiny new Windows 7 laptop. So, of course, I immediately loaded it with OpenOffice and went about recreating the macros that I can't easily work without. I've been using the same macros for ten years or more, and, as I produce a lot of pages, they're kind of hardwired into my workflow now.

Imagine my joy on discovering that you somehow managed to bugger up the macro system to the point where something like Change Case cannot be recorded either as a menu selection or a keyboard command.

(Also, you still haven't fixed Page Numbers.)

(Also, if I write a Style to try and compensate for the macro fail, please arrange for OpenOffice to actually record that Style so it doesn't vanish the next time I open OpenOffice. Thanks.)

I don't really want to go back to Word, and will tough it out (providing the Style I wrote to compensate for the macro fail doesn't vanish AGAIN). But, really, macros and page numbers aren't a hard thing to fix. Sort your lives out, please, so I can go back to recommending you to people who think Word is all there is. (Like my daughter and her school.)

Station Ident

I live.

Here's a photo by Ellen Rogers. I've written a foreword for her new book, which I believe is due imminently.