Warren Ellis's Blog, page 51

Oh God Apparently I Said All These Things On Twitter About The Olympic Opening Ceremony

I’m so sorry

[View the story "Warren Ellis comments Olympics opening" on Storify]

Bah

Fell ill Weds night/Thurs morning.  Still ill.  Was invited by BBC Newsnight to watch the Olympic opening ceremony and then comment on it.  Couldn’t get out of bed.  Very sad.  Live-tweeted it instead.  Back Monday.

THREE PANELS OPEN: Paul Pope

PAUL POPE is one of the most significant American comics creators of the last twenty years.  You can find him at his blog, and on Twitter as @PULPH0PE.

 

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

And We’re Off

Attempting to post with an image from the iPad. The iPad WordPress app seems oddly less smart about this than the iPhone one.

Anyway. I broke ground on my end of WASTELANDERS last night. Which was mostly about getting used to Final Draft again, a screenwriting program that I haven’t spent time with in a while. Also, there’s still some comfort to be found on writing on my new laptop, which is one of those widescreen jobs with a chiclet keyboard. I still feel like I’m missing some screen real estate, and the keyboard is a bit odd (and a bit weird in its layout — the Return key is relatively tiny.) It’s the Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 with the i7 chipset, the FHD screen and the SSD memory cache on top of the 2TB HDD, for those who like to know such things. It seems reliable thus far aside from an occasional issue with the pointer — for some reason, new Lenovos and Flash (and perhaps Chrome) don’t play well together. But it’s better than the complete crash I was getting every time I played YouTube videos on the old machine.

I did leer at Joss’ MacBook Air last week, just because it’s so thin and tiny. But that screen would wreck my eyes in the end. I’d previously considered a Zenbook, for the same reasons, but discarded it, for the same reasons. Also, the demonstration machine crashed when I touched it.

And I’ve just realised that this app isn’t going to let me post the goddamn picture. Maybe when I get past this screen? We’ll see.

So, for the next few weeks, I’m in WASTELANDERS and a couple of other projects that won’t get announced until next year. And pacing around the opening of Next Novel, which is still giving me some trouble. And still peering at comics a bit, in the distance, because I can see one or two things I’d like to do in the future, should I ever find amenable artists. But thinking about that is mostly just mental play, the thing you toss around early in the morning or late in the evening to sharpen the edges of your brain on.

Also keeping half an eye on Thrillbent (which, as a title, still sounds to me like an obscure British gay porn magazine from 1980, sorry guys) and Monkeybrain, which both look to become major webcomics portals over the next year. I find it particularly interesting — and honestly a little odd — that Thrillbent’s teamed with Top Cow to present new work from that publisher, but if it injects new money into Thrillbent so that they can do new and more peculiar work in their free-to-air model, that’ll work out fine for me as a reader. Very curious to see what my old mate John Rogers, of LEVERAGE, eventually does in that comics model. I’m still not sold on The Thrillbent Way, but if they can make it a success, I will happily shut up and read comics.

Okay. Back to work.

STATION IDENT: Marie Rameau

Thank you, Marie.

 

A couple of times over the last year, I did a thing for people who make comics called Three Panels Open.  Literally, a three-panel comic.  The only rules were that it had to be legible at a width of 640 pixels, which is the width of the content bar on this site, and that it had to be three panels long.

Perhaps you’d like to do a three-panel comic to be posted here.  If so, email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.  Same rules apply: three panels, and it can’t turn to mud when I run it at 640px.  Ideally, it’s a piece of new work, and not just a clip from your current comic. (Though obviously I’m happy to plug said current comic as thanks.)  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid.  However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  Three Panels Open will be a semi-permanent element of the site.

Who I Am And Where To Find Me (July 2012)

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write books and comics and articles and other things. 

I live in south-east England.  My next novel, GUN MACHINE, is due January 2013 from Mulholland Books.  The film RED 2, sequel to RED, based on the graphic novel I wrote, is due autumn 2013.  A film version of my GRAVEL graphic novels is in active development at Legendary Pictures.  I have author pages at Amazon and Amazon UK.  Right now I’m co-writing a thing called WASTELANDERS with Joss Whedon and working on my next novel.

My most recent original comics work was SVK, produced in partnership with the design & invention unit BERG.

If you want to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills – her email’s linked in the righthand menu bar, too. I’m currently looking to write more articles and the like, to help keep me sane during the writing of this novel.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move and make noises, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

Sometimes I speak at conferences, or do other kinds of talks and appearances.  I’ve previously been a columnist for WIRED UK and Reuters.  You can contact me directly about everything else, including interview requests, at my public email address: warrenellis@gmail.com (gets checked daily.)

I have a weeklyish newsletter, MACHINE VISION, which you can sign up for at this link.

@warrenellis on Twitter. I have an Official Facebook Page. Username warrenellis on Instagram (for as long as it lasts!) and This Is My Jam. I keep a notebook at Tumblr. I occasionally podcast.

I can next be seen in public in Brighton, UK, on September 6, speaking at Improving Reality 2012.

DEEP MAP PILOTS 5: by Eliza Gauger & Warren Ellis

ASCENCION is four billion miles away from home, and that’s the way she likes it. She’s seen the stained egg of Haumea, and the misty red lump of Makemake, and dozens of other things that no-one had ever laid eyes on before. Ascencion dives the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune and Pluto. It’s the graveyard at the end of the solar system. Failed planets, dead comets, lost moons and all the strange dark rubble left over from the formation of the worlds we know. She’s out among the spectres, flying through ultimate history to places where, quite literally, there have never been eyes before. The Kuiper Belt is vast. She wants to see it all. She wants it all to herself, in a way that no-one else has ever been able to understand. She never wants to go home again.

[larger image] [original size image]

DEEP MAP PILOTS: A Series Of Five Pictures From Words
MARENKA – REHANI – CAMEO – JINJING – ASCENCION

[process: I wrote five flash fictions for Eliza Gauger to produce a piece of accompanying art for each. The idea was to produce five little portraits of women in space, in art and words.]

Art © Eliza Gauger 2012. Words © Warren Ellis 2012

Back From London

And I won’t return until after the bloody Olympics.

So, two days of hitting things with hammers, and WASTELANDERS looks solved.  Dinner last night with Natalie Haynes and her man Dan, Anthony Head and his daughter Daisy, Bryan Hitch and some nice man whose name I barely caught because I was leaving as he was coming in, because I was friiiiied.  I was taking two days off to work on WASTELANDERS, but the film, tv and book industries weren’t, so I was operating on an overclocked brain and nowhere near enough sleep.

(Bryan and I talked briefly about his future comics work, for those who follow that: soon he will finally be writing for himself, a thing that is about ten years overdue.)

There was a very funny and sweet moment where Joss and I, pacing around Covent Garden in search of a solution to a hurdle in the fourth act, were stopped by a charming young woman who was literally physically shaking at having recognised Joss.  She was very nice, and kindly indulged us as we pretended not to be staggering around London in search of a plot.  Or even the plot.

So that was that.  And now my city, from whence my forebears emanate, is overrun by pay-cops and the military and the moneysuckers, I shall struggle mightily to avoid it until after the farce in Stratford is over.

I noticed today that the standard digest-size comics page fits quite nicely in the content stream width here.  Not that I can really do anything about that, but it was an interesting thing to me.  I am probably the last comics guy who doesn’t have a problem with scrolling.  You know, since the rest of the fucking internet does it and all.

I have another speaking event coming up in Britain this year, which I’ll give its own post tomorrow.  For now, I’m just going to note that I’m back by the sea, I have some things to do, and I may even add a few more.

Rare Image Of Me Making Joss Whedon Work

We’re getting there. Even though I am slightly hungover due to the hospitality of 300 producer Gianni Nunnari last night.

The Facebook Cortex

Robert Scoble is a well-known internet writer and videomaker whose chief skill appears to be the almost childlike, obsessive early-adoption of new services.  He was bitching for months about not being on Twitter’s suggested-users list because he followed tens of thousands of people, and currently has more than a million people in Google Circles or something.  In a recent post about “scalable living,” he linked to a statement he made on Facebook, of which this is the relevant chunk:

Compare my profiles at https://www.facebook.com/robertscoble to https://profiles.google.com/scobleizer and you’ll see the benefits of frictionless sharing on Facebook. On Facebook you can see a LOT more about me. My Quora questions. My foursquare checkins. My Spotify music. My Pinterest repins. And a lot more.

Google, on the other hand, hates automatic sharing of who you are. I believe this puts Google at a huge strategic disadvantage.

Interesting word, there.  “Benefits.”  He’s told Facebook probably tens of thousands of things about his life and economic activity.  Robert Scoble is, in fact, one of Facebook’s most delightful products.  He’s turned over his short-term memory and the digital wormcast of his waking hours over to a company that sells advertising space on the basis that their products – also know as “their users” and their tracked activities – can be induced to spend money through targeting.

Put another way: there is, in fact, a little bit of Robert Scoble’s brain that is now the Facebook Cortex.

And, through his usual hyperactivity, he’s become an even better product: there are 350,000 people following Scoble on Facebook, clicking Like on his Foursquare checkins and Spotify reports – and by those actions Facebook can compile consumer profiles on each of them, too.  That little chunk of brain that Scoble has turned over to Facebook is helping to make all his readers better products, too.

Scoble’s looking ahead to contextual computing, and the idea that putting all this data into Facebook will eventually make his life easier because other services will be able to extrapolate it into daily-life informational aid.  Because, of course, Facebook is all about you being able to take your data out of it.

Oh, hey, here’s Scoble in 2008, being kicked off Facebook for scraping his contacts data out of his account.

Services, of course, may be able to pay Facebook for the use of Robert Scoble’s Facebook Cortex, and of the products who’ve been pulled into his pseudo-social wake.  Scoble may even wish to pay services to use widgets powered by his own data that the service has paid Facebook to access.

Perhaps there will be tangible benefits (for values of “tangible”) for allowing Facebook to colonise a tiny corner of our brains, in the future.  If we continue to report, we get things.  Amusingly, Bruce Sterling suggested in Eindhoven suggested that something like that could be a condition (or even the condition) of a citizenship that allows you access to basic social services.  Perhaps, once again, Robert Scoble is the canary in the coalmine of social media.

Him and his little blue Facebook Cortex, automatically reporting away in the social dark.

 

 

(Disclosure: yes, I have a small Page on Facebook.  It’s an aggregator.  You know what sort of thing gets posted here.  If someone releases jenkem as a retail product, I’m sure Facebook will be the first to inform my Facebook readers.)