Warren Ellis's Blog, page 305

Kieron Gillen's Tracks Of The Year 2009

I've actually come to look forward to this. Every year, games journo/music journo/comics writer Kieron Gillen does his "top 40" tracks from the previous. Every year, it's just a completely bloody fascinating bit of writing. It's also always completely wrong, and I usually spend a few weeks roundly insulting him and the terrible mental debilitation he rode in on. This year, I am simply going to recommend it to your attention, as something fine and interesting to read on a cold Saturday...

Links for 2010-01-01

Population of the Dead
"How many people have ever lived? While doing research about populations for my last piece, I began to wonder just how many people had ever walked the face of the earth. The articles I found [here and here:] were intriguing so I decided to visualize them as well…"
(tags:info death )Kenyan witch-hunt targets elders
Not an unusual story, currently, but it has a detail I haven't seen before. Kenya has a Sorcery Belt. Like the Bible Belt or the Rust Belt. A Sorcery Belt...

Links for 2010-01-01

2010 preview: Will a neutralino steal Higgs's thunder? – physics-math – 26 December 2009 – New Scientist
"All supersymmetric particles produced in the early universe would have long since decayed into the lightest such particle, the neutralino. And the neutralino, it turns out, is a perfect candidate to account for dark matter – the mysterious stuff that far outweighs ordinary matter in the universe."
(tags:sci )Computer-aided design for life itself – life – 31 December 2009 – New Scientist

STATION IDENT: Happy New Year

Happy new year. May this one be kinder, funnier and more interesting than the last.

Photo by my good friend Brian Wood, who's away with his family tonight. My family's asleep, and I'm sitting here with whisky in the glass and Michael Cashmore's SLEEP ENGLAND on the speakers, brushing the last traces of a brief snow flurry off my shaven head, and thinking about the future. Annual tradition, maybe, or perhaps just something coded into my bones. It's the only way I know to break the new year...

And Finally

2009, it turns out, was not quite done with me. Fell over with a repeat bout of Mongolian Terror Trout Flu a couple of days after Xmas, and am only now back on my feet today. This is what happens when your child constantly brings back disgusting diseases from other children and your immune system never has time to recover. I ought to laminate the little horror and hose her down with boiling water and bleach before she re-enters the house every day.

I read today that auld acquaintance...

Not A Creature Was Stirring, Not Even A Mouse. Because I Ate It.

And, with the house cleared and shit wrapped and an unwise number of wine bottles emptied, I'm out. See you on the other side of little Winterval. Have a good break. Try not to stab anybody important.

About My Power

Musician/writer Christine Hart felt it necessary to preserve this Twitter exchange from earlier in the year:

I have just been informed via the power of Twitter that I'm on io9's 2009 Science Fiction Power List, alongside, um, Lady Gaga. Actually, it's kind of an interesting list — and an interesting, if peculiar, concept. Doubtless, by the time you read it, the comments section will have filled with snark. But the article itself is worth a read (not least because it includes Lady Gaga. I ...

Midwinterish

This is me with local musician Carolina Fasalo of The Voronas. Caz dumped a load of old photos on to her Facebook account and turned this up. Last summer, I think?

I was reading this interview with David Simon the other day — he gives good interviews, see if you can find the one he did with THE BELIEVER magazine sometime — and something he said stuck with me a little bit. As it often does in Simon interviews, as he's good with a bon mot or two. I've hacked some connective tissue out to p...

DO ANYTHING 025

Very nearly completing the first volume, at Bleeding Cool:

(And there's an error in there that should read: "…crossing the four hundred miles from Berlin to Metz")

Down In The Ditch

Well, nearly. We ran into a blizzard north of Church End, east of the Gallows Green Road (love the place names up-county – Bacon End and Butcher's Pasture are in the same area). It slicked a small, winding country lane already made treacherous by packed sheet ice. And then we hit a pothole and that was it, we were planing. Up over the kerb and headed for a low wall with a deep ditch behind it. Luckily, mounting the kerb gave us the traction we needed to pull round with a foot to spare. That w...