Warren Ellis's Blog, page 165

Winter Ain't Going Away Anytime Soon

(Siege)

Instructions

(Molly Friedrich)

Idle Thought On Comics And Social Media

Two pieces read back to back.

Matt Webb:

People with 1 million dedicated 'can contact them at any time' followers simply weren't around two years ago, — from this article about Kevin Smith trying a new film distribution technique: he's taking his movie round just one city at a time, and charging $70 a ticket. This feels like a new kind of money. The pub game used to be imagining what you'd do if you had a million bucks. Now it's imagine if you had a million people who had decided to pay you attention.

I have to say, right off the bat, that I think Kevin Smith showed incredible balls and style in choosing to self-distribute his new film.  A lot of people didn't like what he did or how he did it, but I say more power to him.

(And I have all the respect in the world for deadline.com, but when that site's Mike Fleming complained that Smith "made (Hollywood business practices) all sound shady," I laughed like a drain.)

And then also this, from The Province:

While 16-24 year-olds prefer to rip and burn CDs without paying for them, twelve-to-fifteen year-olds are the digital natives of today and tomorrow… Though a mere 15 percent of this young group download peer-to-peer music and just 12 percent buy tracks, 56 percent listen to music on their mobiles and 53 percent watch videos on the Internet.

"Twelve-to-fifteen year olds, who represent the consumers of tomorrow and have grown up with the Internet, want rich immersive music experiences in which they can watch, listen and share…"

Which isn't news, really — especially not to me, with a 15-year-old daughter downstairs who primarily experiences music through YouTube.  The piece goes on to say:

An increasing number of musicians have tuned in to this shift and are trying a variety of creative approaches to reach out to their fans in order to boost their popularity and their sales of music.

"Knowing how to use social media to connect with fans is key…" But fans want much more than just information about their favourite bands' upcoming concerts and the release date of a new track or CD…

Obviously, both pieces are pretty much talking about the same thing.  The latter piece goes on to provide some concrete examples, by the way.

The thing that particularly hit me is how none of this has any relation to print comics: that is, these are not things print comics really do.  Nor, to any huge effect I've seen, do webcomics.  Comics are generally pretty bad at social media — and yeah, you can generate any number of jokes as to why, but I don't think they'd hit the actual mark.

Maybe one day I'll see someone do something as simple as badging and (physically and digitally) rewarding check-ins to local comics stores on Foursquare or Gowalla.

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GUEST INFORMANT: Paul Di Filippo

Paul Di Filippo is a science fiction novelist and short story writer of wide genrebending influence, as well as a journalist, a sometimes comics writer, a mail art fiend, and a bunch of other things that are probably very hard to describe.  Also, the first person to use the word "Steampunk" in a book title.  So he can be blamed for quite a lot.  The first time I ever spoke to him, he responded with "Ah!  Mon frere!"  I asked him to write to you about whatever was on his mind today, and he said:

Did you ever feel that all the world's problems–environmental, cultural, political–could be the result of just too many fucking people on the planet? ("Fucking," as used here, is a precisely descriptive adjective, and not a mere kneejerk intensifier.) Nobody wants to talk about this issue, since it's too fraught with ethical conundrums: First World versus Third World, Elites versus Marching Morons, People of Color versus People of Pallor, Age versus Youth, Healthy versus Sick, Coercion versus Choice. What a minefield! And, yes, I know the "good news" about how the rate of population growth has leveled off, leaving us with a projection of "only" nine billion souls for mid-century, and even a hollowing out of certain countries like Russia, Japan and Italy. But I still say the current population level is at the root of most of our troubles.

I was born in 1954. (Geezer alert! Feel free to chalk up this whole rant to "You damn kids get off my lawn" syndrome.) The global population then was 2.7 billion. Today it's nigh on seven billion, over 2.5 times greater than when I was a kid. Tell me that adding nearly five billion hungry mouths and goal-seeking individuals to our planet has no detrimental consequences. Dwindling resources, diminished elbow room, clashing ideologies–it's all down to over-crowding. Although of course, it's not as if we needed seven billion people to start World War II, did we? Still, the exact nature of our current dilemmas seem to me population-driven. But there's an even more insidious threat than the physical ones, and that's the spiritual one.

Lots of good stuff is perhaps attributable to all these many thronging masses. On alternate days I try to believe that every individual is a unique repository of ideas and feelings, and that having more people around simply means an expansion of the creative mindspace that humanity can colonize. Some poor refugee kid living in a garbage dump in Iraq will grow up to cure cancer, or create a new style of music. But on the off days, I believe the exact opposite. The sheer presence of seven billion people devalues the existence of any single person. The human continuum is only so broad, and every conceivable niche of it is overstuffed with identical individuals. If I die tomorrow, there are a hundred persons with my similar skillset and worldview to take my place. Does this seem harsh or an overstatement of the case? Consider the opposite scenario for clarity. Some seventy thousand years ago, there were approximately five thousand human females capable of breeding on the entire planet, our species having just gone through a population bottleneck. Imagine what the death of any one of these women meant to the race!  Now, tell me what the death of some miserable hapless miscarrying mother in any under-developed country today — or, to be fair, the death of any overprivileged Soccer Mom having her third kid in the best US hospital — means to you or me or the race?  I'm not trying to diminish the essential personal loss for this woman's grieving relatives, but just place her significance on a larger map. Doesn't it become easier to kill, too, when the line of "replacement" individuals stretches back infinitely?

http://www.answers.com/topic/population-bottleneck

John Brunner's 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar seems to me to be a remarkably prescient version of our present situation in realistic speculative form.

Humanity going nuts under the pressures of overcrowding, Stop and read or re-read this book soon.

But Brunner had another story that conveyed our dilemma in starker metaphorical terms. In "The Vitanuls," babies began to be born without souls, because, science discovered, there was only X amount of soul stuff to go around. It's a chilling symbolism, but I see it in every headline.

Paul blogs at The Inferior 4 +1 regularly.

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A Jacques Tardi book I haven't read, coming soon from Fa...

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Bookmarks for 2011-01-25

rejectamentalist manifesto – London Intrusion
China Mieville's webcomic
(tags:webcomic )
Weird Tales – Exciting News for Weird Tales!
"This is the first time in the magazine's 88-year history that Weird Tales has had an all-female editorial/management staff."
(tags:magazine sf )
» Blog Archive » Weird Tales for Winter (season 2)
"Weird Tales for Winter is an invitation to enjoy a psychic communal experience- 8 sonic portals to familiar worlds collapsing on the margins of the uncanny." Spoken-word and confusing sounds, feat. Moon Wiring Club, Advisory Circle, Outer Church, Kek-W etc etc
(tags:radio )

I refuse to believe I've filled a 1TB drive with mp3s....

I refuse to believe I've filled a 1TB drive with mp3s. It's a mirage. Or something.Wed Jan 26 02:23:28 via webWarren Ellis

warrenellis

@warrenellis If I've managed to fill such a drive with jpegs of weightlifters' prolapsed anuses, it can't be so hard to do it with mp3s.Wed Jan 26 02:43:55 via webJhonen Vasquez

JhonenV

A Quick Daybook Note

I am peering at hotel rooms, in prep for an upcoming lightning visit to Berlin.  The hotel appears to be one of those designer affairs, with a very designery website.  I'm pretty sure Barbarella fucked robots in at least one of the rooms I'm looking at.

Been thinking about comics as PDFs, today.  Because, seriously, comics are always going to be pirated, and it's probably much more effective just to accept that and move on.  One of the things that must've hobbled the Longbox comics viewer has to have been their insistence on providing strong DRM for publishers.

(Yes, CBZ files have better resolution, but they're a bit fatter and aren't native in the way that PDF readers usually are.  And it's going to be a lot easier to sell PDF files through lulu.com and The Illustrated Section than it is to handroll a way to sell CBZs, even one as planned-out as the Not 99c Method.)

And now I have to finish an episode of FREAKANGELS and another thing.

Revenge Of Print

from Atomic Books' flickrstream

For those once again asking for NSFW tags on posts here, ...

For those once again asking for NSFW tags on posts here, may I remind you:

This is warren ellis dot com.

Funny how I never get the NSFW complaints when there's a shot of Katie West's tits on the site. EMBRACE THE BATCOCK.