Warren Ellis's Blog, page 176
December 11, 2010
December 10, 2010
Live (And Not Live)
No FREAKANGELS today — not sure why — but there is a Message From Our Sponsor there for you.
My friend Cassandra Melena's photography website has gone live.
My penultimate column for WIRED UK, still bearing some introduced errors but thankfully scrubbed of the worst ones, is live for your free reading pleasure.
My old mate Lee Barnett's new book of short stories is live at Lulu, with a new introduction by Wil Wheaton.
Laurie Penny's report from the London protests is live at the Staggers.
Leyland Kirby has deleted his website content entirely. I am baffled.
Related articles
Sailing By (warrenellis.com)
2010shopping (warrenellis.com)
GUEST INFORMANT: Charlie Huston (warrenellis.com)
December 9, 2010
Sailing By
That Diaspora pod I joined? Diasp.org? Noticed on their devblog today that apparently the only way to cure my problems with it was to delete and recreate my account. Which I've done, out of curiosity. So if you had a pending add request with me, it's gone, sorry. warrenellis@diasp.org if you want to try again, though I can't imagine why you would.
Spent hours on a script before realising that I had the double-page spread in the wrong place, and so had to condense the first five pages into three pages in order to fix it. My eyes ache.
Yelena on Spider action
Had TweetDeck running for a few hours so I could keep an eye on the protests and the tuition fees vote: the latter because it has political implications and direct implications on my finances, and the former because my friend Laurie Penny was in the middle of the protests as a reporter. As I've noted before, Laurie is basically Yelena Rossini from TRANSMETROPOLITAN, and she blames me for corrupting her with my work. True to form, she emerged from the crush covered in blood and paint and bruises, after a worrying Twitter post along the lines of "leg not work properly," ready to get some copy filed. And that's the interesting thing. Not Laurie's leg. She's actually covering these events two or three times over, and the first time is realtime, on Twitter, from right in the middle of it all. Down to broadcasting, in certain instances, individual police ID numbers. As deep in the story/stories as you can get. She's silent right now: I'm presuming her phone ran out of charge, as predicted, and hoping she's not still in the kettle, which, others on Twitter are reporting, is still active at 1230am. There are children in there. This is how we treat our children when they question us, now: by cowing them, in the dark and the cold.
Other things: the beta sites for the Gawker net are interesting to me. Look at beta Gawker or beta io9. "Important," substantial posts own most of the space, and the smaller stuff rides a sideblog. I can't decide if it's new and progressive or actually a bit 2005. We still use a sideblog here, what we call the metaweblogbar, which pulls in new posts from fellow travellers. The equivalent to beta Gawker would, I suppose, be using the sidebar for the microlog posts, music stuff and brief plugs that usually count for half the day's posts here. I don't know how useful or productive that would be. But I suppose it's nice that someone's thinking about how blogs could change with the times. Interesting to me is that it's essentially the reverse of the BoingBoing design, where the more substantial posts are stickied in the sidebar…
(All of which while what's actually happening is happening on Twitter, yes.)
Related articles
Diaspora (warrenellis.com)
Gawker Is A Blog. Just Like Twitter. (dashes.com)
This isn't just a student protest. It's a children's crusade | Laurie Penny (guardian.co.uk)
Links for 2010-12-09
"publishing is modern fun. Press Publish is an experimental publishing outfit with a particular interest in the online and digital realms. Things we've made so far include online archives, print-on-demand books and magazines, blogs, mooks and more. Things we'd like to make include printed magazines and books, catalogues, more archives, monographs… the list goes on. You can preview and purchase a selection of limited edition publications here."
(tags:pod publishing )
Life expectancy slips, stroke dips to No. 4 killer
Life expectancy dropped about a month, from 77.9 years in 2007 to 77.8 years in 2008. The author of the report called the change minuscule and says it will take many years to see whether it's a trend. A similar decline occurred in 2005.
(tags:med )
Dotspotting – About Dotspotting
We're making tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible. Our hope is to do this in a way that's simple enough for regular people to get involved, but robust enough for real research to happen along the way.
(tags:maps )
Exposure to North Dakota road material may increase risk of lung cancer
New data shows that people exposed to the mineral erionite found in the gravel of road materials in North Dakota may be at significantly increased risk of developing mesothelioma, a type of lung cancer most often associated with asbestos exposure
(tags:med )
DESIGN AND EXISTENTIAL RISK LECTURE SERIES 009
Design and Existential Risk is a series of conversations with leading thinkers, designers, and educators ?who critically question how the practice of design can imagine and prepare for extreme existential risks. ?The series explores the ways design thinking engages sustainability and human survival now and in the future.
(tags:dooooom future war )
Havasu: a material exploration of conversational interfaces ? Blog ? BERG
Havasu is a robot that helps you find out what films are on when, and then organise your friends to go. You talk to Havasu through instant messenger.
(tags:web )
Received goods 9dec10
[image error]
Sent from my iPhone
Posted via email from warrenellis's posterous
Related articles
received goods 22nov10 (warrenellis.com)
December 8, 2010
Links for 2010-12-07
HARUKI MURAKAMI: "The moment our minds crossed the threshold of the new century, we also crossed the threshold of reality once and for all. We had no choice but to make the crossing, finally, and, as we do so, our stories are being forced to change their structures. The novels and stories we write will surely become increasingly different in character and feel from those that have come before, just as 20th-century fiction is sharply and clearly differentiated from 19th-century fiction."
(tags:writing )
Five reasons why Facebook Credits will save newspapers
interesting.
(tags:journalism net )
GUEST INFORMANT: Charlie Huston
Image via Wikipedia
Charlie Huston became, with SLEEPLESS, one of my favourite novelists. His new WOLVERINE series for Marvel launched last week, he has a new series of books forthcoming from the beloved Mulholland Books, and his novel THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH is being adapted for HBO by Alan Ball. I asked him to write to you about whatever was in his head today. This is it:
A counter proposal: let's talk about reading and writing. Rather, let's write about reading and writing.
Questions and answers that we can, if we're feeling ambitious and dickish, hurl at our writer friends.
I'll go first.
To wit: You have to take an enormous dump. You can tell at once that it will take a great while, but will also be a glorious experience. You will feel weightless after this magnificent shit.
Still, you will occupy the head for some time, and just recently all reading material was removed from said water closet.
With only a brief amount of time to consider the options, select three texts to take with you.
One book (not necessarily a novel).
One comic book/graphic novel.
One magazine.
Paper only, no online matter.
Because, in the end, you must use one of the above to wipe.
Which will it be?
In the interests of fairness, I will go first.
The most recent William Gibson, whatever it may be. Gibson can be read in small chunks while always bearing fruit.
Grant Morrison's run on NEW X-MEN. Madness. Makes little or no sense. Always entertaining no matter where the pages flop open.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Pop culture consumerist trash about a city I love and lived in for many years. The mind drifts, the rectum relaxes. Shit in, shit out. I once opened the pages to see a picture of a friend of mine wearing a monkey fur jacket. My household subscription will never lapse.
In need, I will wipe with NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Starting with the real estate listings. The pages are too smooth for the purpose, but reasonably soft when crumpled.
PS
A more serious query: have you read Toby Barlow's SHARP TEETH? This is important. If you have not read it, you will need to do something about that. Werewolf noir set in Los Angeles, inspired by Barlow's readings of graphic novels, written in free verse.
Related articles
GUEST INFORMANT: Steven Shaviro (warrenellis.com)
comicsweek 8dec10 (warrenellis.com)
TRUE BLOOD Creator Alan Ball to Direct Dark Comedy (collider.com)
December 7, 2010
Links for 2010-12-07
"After coming across the ghost town of Cairo, Illinois, with demolished streets and buildings that barely hinted at once housing townspeople, Reddit user inkslave was left with a head spinning with questions. After no success on Wikipedia, he turned to Reddit: What the hell happened to Cairo, Illinois?"
(tags:history )
BBC News – French library finds Leonardo da Vinci manuscript
A coded manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered in a public library in the French city of Nantes.
(tags:history )
BBC News – Uganda mystery illness: Tests fail to identify killer
Tests have so far failed to identify an illness that has killed at least 38 people in northern Uganda, officials say.
(tags:med )
Assange
How embarrassing is it that it's Britain who eventually exercised an arrest warrant, put Julian Assange up before the beak and then banged him up for a week pending rendition extradition to Sweden? Very.
But, I have to say, it's almost as irritating that people are screaming about his being denied bail. Of course he was denied bail. Of course he was and is a flight risk. His legal team have already stated their belief that Assange's return to Sweden would inexorably lead to Assange being handed over to US authorities, and that eventuality is unlikely to be healthy for him.
Not that, at this moment, I think Mr Assange's story is going to end well in any case. I will be faintly surprised if he leaves my country alive: which is less a comment about my natural cynicism, and more a comment about the state of my country.
Charlie Stross has an excellent overview here.
Related articles
Julian Assange arrest: How the extradition process works (guardian.co.uk)
The Chickens Are Not Impressed (warrenellis.com)
Warren Ellis's Blog
- Warren Ellis's profile
- 5768 followers
