Warren Ellis's Blog, page 43
October 6, 2012
Bookmarks for 2012-10-06
IDW To Publish Cerebus Book Of Covers, from Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors http://www.bleedingcool.com
(tags:ifttt googlereader Bleeding Cool Comic Book Movies and TV News Rumors )
October 5, 2012
CLOSEDOWN: Hallow
See you next week, folks. I leave you with the new record by Dirty Knobs, optimised for your Halloween enjoyment. Click through and buy the whole 90-minute ambient soundtrack of skulls being slowly and loving crushed in hell wonder for a single Yanqui dollar.
Whisky and the keyboard await. Back Tuesday.
Bookmarks for 2012-10-05
The Haxan Cloak – The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2) (Preview) Due to the fact the forthcoming album by The Haxan Cloak has now been pushed back to early 2013 we thought we'd give you a small insight into what you can expect, so here's a preview of album track 'The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)' The Haxan Cloaks starts his month long European support tour with Liars on Oct 10th in Leeds, UK
(tags:music ifttt soundcloud )
ARIADNE On Pause
Please be advised that ARIADNE AND THE SCIENCE is on pause because Molly’s travelling. Back soon.
October 4, 2012
NIGHT MUSIC: There Was Never A Time When Your Life Was Not Now, Nor Will There Ever Be
It is clearly Epic Titles Week. I present Matthew Shaw’s 41-minute opus, in the hopes that your dreams are strange, sweeping and high-definition:
There Was Never A Time When Your Life Was Not Now, Nor Will There Ever Be by Matthew Shaw
Japanese Execution Chamber
Not sure why I find this interesting. Perhaps the little zen-garden trap door marks? Perhaps, simply, that this is a rare sight. From this story, about the hanging of a woman who killed six people while performing exorcisms. The story has interesting notes in itself:
In court it was revealed that the victims were those who had started to doubt Eto’s “spiritual ability,” as well as followers who refused to loan her money.
The prosecutor said Eto “tried to make herself a deified ruler and killed people who threatened her authority in her bid to stop her lover Nemoto from being taken by a female follower.”
Eto’s defense attorney had argued that she was not guilty due to mental incompetence as a result of having been ‘possessed.’
Related articles
SPACEGIRL And Why Your Funny Webcomics Bore Me (warrenellis.com)
There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void (warrenellis.com)
Path (warrenellis.com)
How To Sell A Digital Comic
This is a grid of covers from i-D magazine.
I took this screenshot off the i-D magazine website. It’s not a great way to display their covers. And it’s obviously a little bit reduced here. They cropped the damn covers into squares themselves, so the logo is truncated in almost all images. That said, this is their own website, so they’re not trying to tell you what the magazine is or anything. But have a look at that, and then have a look at this:
Front page of Comixology on the iPad. The cover images are actually bigger than the ones in the i-D screenshot. I shot this at random, having thought about it while flicking through the new releases.
Now, how do these covers work, reduced to smaller size and mixed together like this?
On the understanding that none of these images have been optimised for the Comixology shopping UI. And, therefore, that if anything works here, it’s by dumb luck.
In tiny little box form, many of those i-D covers are more visually legible/parseable than the comics covers.
I can’t even make out some of the logos here. Thank god for the handy text underneath each one. Although I’d have to click through to discover what those CHAMPIONS OF TH are actually champions of.
EVIDENCE: nobody optimises their covers for Comixology.
Why? God only knows. My presumption is that big important publishers can’t spare a person to do the cutting or create a workflow that creates a thumbnail image suitable for the Comixology app. A zoom-in on part of the cover, or even clipping a bold image from the inside, and getting an optimised version of the logo on it…. apparently that’s too much work. Most publishers simply don’t want digital sales enough. It’s the usual assumption of “if you build it, they will come." Which is why digital sales on monthly books are still (I am told) no more than a fifth of print sales.
LESSON: five minutes’ work will get you a thumbnail that works better in the Comixology store than 95% of the covers around you.
You’re welcome.
October 3, 2012
Bookmarks for 2012-10-03
(tags:working )
Lowering Life’s Chances on Super-Earths
". Rather than being planets much like the Earth but simply more massive — worlds characterized by thick atmospheres, plate tectonics, volcanic activity and magnetic fields — they may differ in fundamental ways. With internal pressures tens of times higher than those found in Earth’s interior, large viscosities and melting temperatures could have adverse consequences on the planet’s habitability."
(tags:space )
Fujifilm introduces new authoring software
"Fujifilm has launched GT-EpubAuthor for Fixed Layout. GT-EpubAuthor is an authoring software that allows the easy output of images such as e-comics and e-books in EPUB3 format, the official international standard for digital publishing. The software has full English support; hence it can be also used by publishers worldwide."
(tags:comics ebooks )
Path
Path is a lovely little app that is used by pretty much nobody I know. And the thing about it is that you find you don’t want to accept friend requests from people you don’t know well. (Yes, I slept like the fucking dead that night.)
It’s somewhere between a personal journal / lifestream and semi-ambient awareness for good friends. There is something about it – the fact that when you wake up and tap it the thing tells your friends you’re awake, maybe? – that makes it feel far more intimate than Facebook or Twitter. I see photos here that don’t appear on Instagram or other services. I see locational notes that certainly don’t show up anywhere else. And I only have eleven friends on the service, and at least three of them seemed to stop using it the day after they installed it.
I’m pretty sure the intimacy is what doomed it, once the early adopters moved on.
The suggested friends list is, in fact, all tech-circle early-adopter types. Hell, as you can probably tell, I uninstalled it for a few months myself. I put it back on because I wanted to try and make it work properly, to get a sense of what it really is. And what it is, in fact, is a very cleverly designed lifestreaming application sitting inside a walled garden that sits inside a walled city. It quite marvellously creates the air of quiet, dignified privacy, as well as the suggestion of the sort of privileged friendship that makes you comfortable with the reportage of your sleep and wake times.
Which is perhaps an odd thing to centre a thought on, save that I follow a couple of hundred people on Twitter and very few of them open their day’s Twitter use with “awake!” It’s probably actually only me, after being awake for an hour or so, who posts “good morning, [insert insult here],” and that’s only to fuck with people here in Britain who’ve been up for hours at that point. Kind of makes me wonder what Twitter would look like if people did use it as a log of the day. Actually, no, it doesn’t, because I immediately think of that literary agent in NYC who was recently physically assaulted by a disgruntled writer who had tracked and trailed her in realtime by her Twitter and Foursquare use.
This is the niche Path was developed to fill: realtime lifestreaming for your trusted personal friends. I don’t know that, in 2012, the majority of people are actually ready to hear that about a social service. 21 and under, maybe. Possibly even 50+. Perhaps you run something similar as a Circle on G+. It seems to me that Path, an intelligently gentle app for an always-on and always-fast internet, may prove to have the niche that no-one really wanted to set up a table in. Shame.
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