Warren Ellis's Blog, page 52
July 16, 2012
STATION IDENT: Chip Zdarsky
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.
Spread the word, please.
Chip is on Twitter as @zdarsky
July 14, 2012
This Week
Joss, on Friday at San Diego:
Whedon also said he is going straight from Comic-Con to London to meet with Warren Ellis about another project.
Yes. This week I am in London, working with Joss on this damn thing again. You want to know how good a friend I consider him? I have to be working BEFORE ELEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. I am rarely awake before eleven. In order to do this I will have to be on a train before ten. This is tantamount to asking me to chew up an entire sheep and spit out a woollen blanket before I am allowed coffee.
I’m preloading a few pieces in the system, but consider me gone until Thursday.
July 13, 2012
July 12, 2012
Around
Still here. Took delivery of a new laptop yesterday — the 15-inch Lenovo Ideapad Y580 with the FHD screen and the i7 chip, for those who care — so I should be productive again shortly. Although I’m writing this on the iPad, because I won’t be productive on the Ideapad until the gel tape I ordered from Amazon arrives. Because the Ideapad has sharp edges. On the leading edge, where my wrists sit when I type. Which is why I have red grooves in my wrists, like a very tired cutter armed only with a butter knife, this morning. So I have to put gel tape over the edges. Other than that, it doesn’t seem like a bad machine, the usual Lenovo and Win7 crankiness aside.
The really nice thing, of course, is how quickly I can get a new machine up and running these days. I use a service called Ninite, that creates a loadpoint for new machines — a little executable file that contains the installation commands for the programs I need. Start it up, and it goes off and downloads and installs every program I selected (from a long list on their site). There were, I think, only four things I needed that they didn’t have on their list. And all my work lives in Dropbox. So, within an hour of taking delivery of the machine, I was away, with Chrome and 1Password all synced, iTunes library recompiled and entirely within my preferred setup.
(All I really have to do is puzzle out my Livedrive instance — I have two external drives hooked to Livedrive, but Livedrive won’t recognise them as anything other than new drives, because they’re piping through a laptop with a new name. So I may have to re-upload 35GB of ripped CDs to keep everything straight, which is a little irritating, but still…)
Anyway. No heavy writing until the gel tape arrives, but I’m around, on a machine that won’t (so far) crash if I cough on it.
July 9, 2012
Counting
I was trying to work out something for myself. Amount of pages done in creator-owned comics work. This’ll be easier if I get it out in front of me. All numbers very approximate. Just looking for a rough count:
* TRANSMETROPOLITAN, 1300.
* FREAKANGELS, 850.
* GLOBAL FREQUENCY, 250
* the “superhero comics trilogy” at Avatar, 400
* the 5 three-issues miniseries at DC Wildstorm, 300
* SCARS and OCEAN, 300
* CRECY, AETHERIC MECHANICS, FRANKENSTEIN’S WOMB, 150
* ORBITER and MINISTRY OF SPACE, 200
* LAZARUS CHURCHYARD, 150
* IGNITION CITY, ANNA MERCURY, CITY OF SILENCE, 300
* FELL and DESOLATION JONES, 250
* all the GRAVEL stories… 400 pages?
I’m pretty sure I’m missing a bunch of stuff. ATMOSPHERICS was around 32pp? I don’t remember how long DARK BLUE was. Pretty sure I’m over 5000 pages.
(CEREBUS was 6000 pages long. But I didn’t have to draw them all.)
July 6, 2012
DEEP MAP PILOTS 4: by Eliza Gauger & Warren Ellis
CAMEO is a rock dancer. Not everyone wants to make the run to Ceres. You have to like scientists, for one thing, because there’s nothing inside Ceres but hermit physicists and their weird globular microgravity labs. You also have to like dancing with rocks. On a good day, Ceres is riding between Mars and Jupiter with a family of a thousand other objects. On a bad day, it’s like being shot at by seven armies. Shot at with asteroids. It takes a lot of craft and more art, and no-one gets through even the first month without picking up some bulletholes and powder burn. They say that, to do the Ceres run, you either have something to prove or you want to die. Cameo says she just likes dancing.
[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
July 3, 2012
2010 From 2005
In 2005, Bruce Sterling, in his role as Visionary-In-Residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, worked with students to generate a bunch of design looking forward to 2010. I just found some shots of their work hiding in the back of my Flickr stream, and they’re kind of interesting to look at from here.
Don’t pay attention to the Arnie thing so much. Look at the smaller headline in the left, and the slugline above the logo.
July 2, 2012
Notes On The Future Of The City/The City Of The Future
Copying these from the notebook before I lose it. I want to come back to a bunch of these: one of them led to a long Twitter conversation between Deb Chacra, Eleanor Saitta and myself that I need to return to soon. So, anyway. Jottings for the outboard memory.
Notes I worked from:
* What is the legal status of the weather?
* Are we in fact tending to imagine a city-state? A city that borders on a closed and self-sufficient (resilient) energy state? Singapore rather than Brussels?
* Sonic architecture – footfall energy harvest – road energy harvest
* Repurposed ambient urban drones
* The ethics of machine reportage
* The lessons of archaeo-acoustics – can cities be designed for sound?
* acoustic mirrors in architecture
* Buildings that breathe
Notes from things Simon, Rachel and Bruce said:
* Futurism as radical reductionism
* Capital as simplification – human life happens in the friction
* To be an ecological human means understanding our bacterial nature
* Dematerialised Urbanism
* Predator Lidar
* Cities as habitats that domesticate the human
* Architecture forces solutions on materials
* It costs $1000 to grow three inches’ worth of tissue culture
[top image cropped from a bad iPhone shot of one of Rachel’s slides]
June 29, 2012
DEEP MAP PILOTS 3: by Eliza Gauger & Warren Ellis
JINJING makes the jump from Titan to Enceladus the same way, no matter what their relative positions might be on launch day. She’ll make her approach trajectory for Enceladus while she’s on the other side of Saturn from it. Enceladus is in the E Ring, the one furthest out from the planet. So Jinjing gets to spend a whole half-orbit skipping across the top of the E ring. It’s a glittering ghost road three hundred thousand kilometers wide. There’s not a children’s story, nursery rhyme or fairy tale that ever competed with riding a road of diamond dust to a moon where stations drift across a wide warm underground sea. Sometimes Jinjing laughs out loud, at the thought of having grown up into a life that no childhood dream was ever big enough to capture.
[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
June 27, 2012
Money Isn’t Real: remarks for the Greg Palast event, 26 June 2012
This is what I said at the launch for Greg’s VULTURE’S PICNIC book at ULU last night, more or less. I believe Greg’s team got audio, and may put that up on gregpalast.com later. Please bear in mind that I was hopped up on massive painkiller loads when I wrote this. Thanks to all that attended – we had a full house – to Oliver for organising, and Anna for running the stage.
I’m a writer of fiction. It’s fair to wonder why I’m here. I’m the last person who should be standing here talking about a book about real tragedies and economics. I come from a world where even the signposts are fictional. Follow the white rabbit. Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning. And a more recent one, from forty years ago, the fictional direction given by a mysterious man to an eager journalist: follow the money.
Economics is an artform. It’s the art of the invisible. Money is fictional.
The folding cash in your pocket isn’t real. Look at it. It’s a promissory note. “I promise to pay the bearer.” It’s a little story, a fiction that claims your cash can be redeemed for the equivalent in goods or gold. But it won’t be, because there isn’t enough gold to go around. So you’re told that your cash is “legal tender,” which means that everyone agrees to pretend it’s like money. If everyone in this room went to The Bank Of England tomorrow and said “I would like you to redeem all my cash for gold, right here, in my hand” I guarantee you that you all would see some perfect expressions of stark fucking terror.
It’s not real. Cash has never been real. It’s a stand-in, a fiction, a symbol that denotes money. Money that you never see. There was a time when money was sea shells, cowries. That’s how we counted money once. Then written notes, then printed notes. Then telegraphy, when money was dots and dashes, and then telephone calls. Teletypes and tickers. Into the age of the computer, money as datastreams that got faster and wider, leading to latency realty where financial houses sought to place their computers in physical positions that would allow them to shave nanoseconds off their exchanges of invisible money in some weird digital feng shui, until algorithmic trading began and not only did we not see the money any more, but we can barely even see what’s moving the money, and now we have people talking about strange floating computer islands to beat latency issues and even, just a few weeks ago, people planning to build a neutrino cannon on the other side of the world that actually beams financial events through the centre of the planet itself at lightspeed.
Neutrinos are subatomic units that are currently believed to be their own antiparticle. Or, to put it another way, they are both there and not there at the same time. Just like your cash. Just like fiction: a real thing that never happened. Money is an idea.
But I don’t want to make it sound small. Because it’s really not. Money is one of those few ideas that pervades the matter of the planet. One of those few bits of fiction that, if it turns its back on you, can kill you stone dead.
It’s a big story to tell. A big idea. And to get to grips with it, what you need is someone who understands it, to explain all its strange invisible edges. Someone who uses the tools of writing to tell the truth. A journalist. I’m here for the same reason you’re here. Because it’s important to have someone around who can crawl back out of the rabbit hole with reports from that other world that are accessible and informed. We’re lucky enough to know someone like that. I know a journalist whose truth-telling has left a trail of fire halfway across the world. And we’re launching his new book here tonight. And I want to stop talking now, so we can listen to Greg Palast talk some more.
Related articles
GUEST INFORMANT: Laurie Penny (warrenellis.com)
Some Notes On THE NEWSROOM (warrenellis.com)
Who I Am And Where To Find Me (June 2012) (warrenellis.com)
Warren Ellis's Blog
- Warren Ellis's profile
- 5767 followers
