Warren Ellis's Blog, page 172

Spectral Rehab

My musical acquaintance Xela needed a name for his new DJ night, to be held in the wilds of Cambridge MA, which is apparently in the USA. So I pulled a name out of an old notebook for him. Wish I could be there.

In other news, I'm sick again. Made the mistake of clearing some stuff out of the office without a dustmask on, and was shortly after crippled by the worst housedust allergy attack I've had in years. To the point where I had to spend Saturday night in a hotel room with all the windows open, because the next step was clearly hospital. But, like the last time I got sick, my immune system was so depressed by the allergy attack that I woke up on Sunday with greatly reduced allergy symptoms — and a chest infection, ha ha go me. Am coughing up green lungbits like a good 'un. (And just had a coughing fit that's left me with a blinding headache over one eye, so this is going to be even briefer than intended.)

All this coincides with the new laptop arriving this morning, a 17-inch Lenovo W701 with 16GB of RAM. It's so nice to have a computer which doesn't make me wait five minutes for an application to open.

And with that, I'm taking more meds and going back to bed.

Currently enduring the worst allergy attack I've had in y...

Currently enduring the worst allergy attack I've had in years. Having to take steps to ensure I don't end up in the hospital. Back online Monday.

links 6jan11

Massively behind on everything, let's close some tabs:

John Robb, of the Global Guerrilla blog frequently cited here, is building a thing that sounds, on the face of it, a leetle creepy:

We've finally found a very simple way to test out the concept of an open source venture with a project we're calling "Picture This."

In short, "Picture This" is:

A venture that gathers digital pictures of home/business/etc. at every postal address in the world.

Here's how it works:

An Internet site that allows people to search on an address to view a picture of that location.
An address specific self-service advertising system (akin to adwords and earlier work on context sensitive advertising).
A cell phone application that makes it easy for anyone to take a digital picture and upload it to the site.

It's just me, right? I'm obviously missing something, and must ruminate further when I have the spare braincycles.

A few hours after the Moment of Alan Moore tumblr opened, someone sent me a link to A Moment Of Ellis.

In Vancouver? Want to be a comics artist? Steve Rolston, who did MEK with me and QUEEN AND COUNTRY with Rucka, will teach you how. (To draw comics. Not how to be in Vancouver.)

The blog Beyond Victoriana is running excerpts from Jess Nevins' indispensably brilliant FANTASTIC VICTORIANA encyclopedia.

Sniffing a woman's tears reduces sexual arousal in men. Which just made me think of stories of a certain guy in a certain region's fetish circles who couldn't actually get it up until he'd made a woman cry.

Jim Woodring's massive pen.

Fancy a bit of vaguely Turkish ambient theremin experimentation? Course you bloody do.

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Every time someone complains about a thing Alan Moore said, The Neonomicon Fish God shags a kitten until it explodes.Thu Jan 06 15:55:34 via webWarren Ellis
warrenellis

Reflexions

Recently finished Reflexions, the memoir of the food writer, wine expert and cook Richard Olney. (I read it on Kindle in the UK.) He writes — wrote, he died in '99 — beautifully. He was a painter by vocation, and he wrote with brushstrokes, evocative and vivid with charmed hues. Also often very funny, as he tells a life of an American in France, surrounded by the mad and the beautiful, haunted by the demented chef Georges Garin and the brilliant, alcoholic statistician Mary Painter; drifting in and out of the orbits of James Baldwin, Elizabeth David, Alice Waters. It's the story of a life lived well, and a reminder that even a well-lived life is not perfect.

(Also, a reminder to drink more red wine. LOTS more.)

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Saint Death

"Mexican police have arrested the leader of Mexico's "Saint Death" cult and accused him of kidnapping and posing as a member of the feared Zetas drug cartel."

Lovely. Get this:

Known as "Santa Muerte" in Spanish, the saint is often depicted as a skeletal "grim reaper" draped in white satin robes, beaded necklaces and carrying a scythe. Followers leave offerings of tequila, rum, beer, cigarettes, cash, flowers and candy at altars adorned with rosaries and candles. The Catholic Church frowns on the cult, whose origins may trace back to Aztec and Mayan death-gods or to ancient European traditions, but many devotees call themselves Catholics. The lure of the death saint is that she is said to honor requests without judging them.

Not Comicsweek

Not doing the Comicsweek thing this week. First week back at work, so I need to be scripting and thinking, not chasing down links for comics in order to find out what the hell they are. Also, honestly, there wasn't a hell of a lot I was interested in writing about this week.

If you're looking for recommendations for new things to look at in the comics shop this week, it's pretty much the 5th issue of CHOKER, EDGE OF DOOM #3, SWEETS #4 (OF 5), WEIRD WORLDS #1 for a little slice of Kevin Maguire work, the second issue of WOLVERINE BEST THERE IS because the first one was mad, CYANIDE AND HAPPINESS, INVINCIBLE IRON MAN Vol 4 and the new Juxtapoz book.

I got this tweeted at me several times today: apparently I'm Guerrilla Geek's favourite comic author of 2010
First script for Short New Marvel Thing got shipped out to the editor last night, and a FREAKANGELS script went out to Avatar this afternoon. I still have to process the new batch of SVK pages Matt Brooker just dropped in the box — oh, and, apparently there are still one or two advertising slots available on that project.

I was talking with a cabbie just before Xmas. Got talking about comics. He said to me, do you remember those free things that came with comics back then? (This was, I think, actually a central part of the genesis of SVK.) Do you remember, he said, the stickers that came with the comic 2000AD back in 1977?

The Biotronic Man stickers. For sticking on your skin, so you could pretend to be biotronic. Not only did I remember them, but I remembered that, twenty years later, someone wrote a letter to 2000AD that read something like, "Hello. My Biotronic Man stickers just fell off. Where can I get replacements?"

He laughed so hard he nearly crashed the cab and killed us both.

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Station Ident

This is warren ellis dot com.

And this is an excellent Doktor Sleepless tattoo seen on BMEzine.

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One Of Those People

Arrived today. Only took them six months to send to me.

I don't think I'd even heard of the Writer's Guild until reading Harlan Ellison's THE GLASS TEAT, sometime around 1988. And, even then, Harlan made it sound somewhat frustrating. On the other hand, he loved it, and was clearly proud to be part of it.

Membership of the Guild is a necessity for working with major studios in Hollywood. It wasn't something I was given a choice in. And there's a lot about the WGA I'm not thrilled by. That said… I now have this stuck above my desk. There's a peculiar pleasure in it. When you're a kid reading about these people, living in a 6′ by 6′ bedsit in the shit end of Essex and eating once a day if you're lucky, wondering what it was really like to be those people and do those things… it's an interesting thing, to become one of those people.  I like being a member of the WGAw.

at the top of this CBR page, a brief note on the comics I'm interested in seeing in 2011 +++ partway down on this Newsarama page, a brief note by me on my old mate Axel Alonso becoming Editor In Chief of Marvel Comics
Very good interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick at The Comics Reporter today. And Bruce Sterling's doing his State Of The Union for the year, which is always fascinating.
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Experiments In Food: Baked Game Chips

This was a half-arsed experiment committed the other day due to it having been 7pm and I realised I needed to make dinner for Lili and there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of stuff in the fridge.

A game chip is like a big potato crisp, basically, only hot. Usually deep-fried. Some people will show you deep-fried potato wedges and call them game chips. The way you know they're not game chips is that they're deep-fried potato wedges. Anyway. I don't like deep-frying stuff if I can help it. So I tried this.

So what you need for this is a large baking potato (or a couple of small ones), like Maris Piper — and I had half a bag of Maris Piper in the cupboard, left over from Xmas when we made roast potatoes out of them. Bugger peeling it. Just wash it. Get a saucepan two thirds full of cold water. Now what you need is a mandolin or a big sharp knife and a steady hand, because what you're going to do is slice the potato thinly. It is fairly important that they're all roughly the same thickness, because you'll make extra work for yourself later if they're not. Slice them and immediately throw the slices into the water.

It's okay to leave chunks of unsliced potato left. Don't go gonzo and try to slice it all, you'll cut your fingertips off.

Let them sit in there for twenty minutes doing nothing while you glue your fingertips back on. The starch is leeching out of them into the water.

(It's been suggested to me that you could blanch the potato slices: bring the water up to the boil, cook them for four minutes, get them off the heat, drain them and then plunge them back into cold water. My personal feeling is that the slices would probably be more prone to breaking up after blanching them. But I might try it next time if I can find my good mandolin, because my slicing with the crappy old one was terrible.)

Get the oven heated up to 200 degrees C, which is 400 degrees F, with a baking tray in there ready to go.

Your next trick: get lots and lots of kitchen paper. Make two layers, then lay your slices on it, then gently mop and press all the water out with another layer of kitchen paper. You want them good and dry.

Open the oven, get the tray out, cover the tray with a single layer of your slices. Now drizzle some olive oil over it all. Use one of the slices to push the oil around if you like. Now scatter some salt on there. Now slam it in the oven.

You need to watch it. Check every five minutes. When they start going gold, flip them. You're probably looking at fifteen or twenty minutes' work. If some are clearly cooking too quickly — which will happen if they're not of a uniform thickness — pluck them out, wrap them loosely in cloth or more kitchen paper and lay them in the bottom of the oven.

You should end up with a big pile of nicely crunchy potato slices. Put a bit more salt over them, and the fresh herbs of your choice if you want them.

Next time I'm going to toss some crushed dried chillies in oil and honey and drizzle that over them as they go in the oven.

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