Warren Ellis's Blog, page 88

Vagina Dentata Glow-in-the-Dark Underwear

Melissa Dowell is offering pre-orders on this… item.  Get an order in by the 9th and they should be with you for Xmas.  Because nothing says Xmas like getting your nose nipped.

Hand silkscreened in a glow-in-the-dark AND blacklight responsive water-based ink, this detailed design of a row of x-rayed teeth go down the front & onto the crotch of black American Apparel cotton spandex hot shorts. Never fear dancing on a mirrored surface in a skirt again. Perfect for deterring up-skirt photographers and disturbing your lovers!

The Final Xela Album

John Twells started recording as Xela some time ago.  I've played some of his work here from time to time, and I know some of you have liked it.  Now, there is a final Xela piece, and a blog entry from John (who began as Xela in Walsall and moved to the US), explaining why.

This was a project that for better or for worse lived and died in the muddy puddles outside the Arboretum, and in the 50p bin on the VHS stall at Bescot Market. It doesn't have any relevance here in Massachusetts, and that's why I'm bringing things to a close. I'll still be making music of course, but it feels good to say 'this is the end' of this particular era…

Click through for a direct download link for the whole thing:

Blue Verbal Data Feed

Someone emailed me this a little while ago.  I have no idea what this is.  It may just be one of those weird bits of ephemera that I've somehow missed, but…

The YouTube page says, in part:

This inexplicable 10-inch record from 1969 is one of the strangest and most obscure private pressings you could ever hope to find. It contains a 24-minute psychedelic message from the distant future, presented with intermittent bursts of electronic music, feedback and ambient noise.

This recording is an "unauthorized experiment" that was made in the year 2058 C.D.S. (Carbon Dating System), a "blue verbal data feed" sent backwards in time to "retro A.D." by Decker, T. L., index J-3, CMR 00965 of T-Group Roaring Vectors 252, a human cyborg who suffers from a malfunctioning number nine electrode in his head which causes him to have an emotional breakdown as he records this message. It's a secret message to a past world he has trouble imagining, a retro world of foreign substances like metal, plastic, animals, soldiers… a world all "physical and slow," "all mechanical and disunified, before major coordinations."

An 8½" 20RPM disc containing this recording was found on the elevator at 205 W. 57th Street in New York City on February 11, 1969 by the composer Clark Gesner…

 

One would presume that Gesner, probably best known for a stage musical based on Peanuts but also having written comedy for NBC'S Experiment In Television, is in fact the originator of the work.  If anyone knows any more about this, I'm @warrenellis on the twitters.

Post-Everything

A still from "How To / Internet" by Jaakko Pallasvuo, as captured by James Bridle of RIG, who also tells me RIG have a FRSTEE for me.

Post-novel, I find myself still mostly in recovery: one of those disturbing "not as young as you used to be" moments.  Compounding this concern was the recent worry, introduced into the household by the arrival of two bottles of Shackleton whisky, that I was having blackouts and going internet-shopping for alcohol and not remembering a thing about it.  Thankfully, today, the fine people at Whyte & Mackay contacted me to ask if I'd received the bottles and the note.  There was no note.  I've been enduring days of people telling me I drink until I don't remember ordering more drink.

This is a meticulous recreation of the whisky Shackleton took on his ill-fated trip to the South Pole: there's a website (has an age-check gate) that explains it all.  The original whisky was a Glen Mhor, now a silent still.  I opened a Glen Mhor of some forty years' age the other month, and it was frankly astonishing.  Very much looking forward to this younger, yet historic bottling.

(Whyte & Mackay just told me in email that there's a scavenger hunt in the UK for smartphone users.)

The important takeaway from all this is: I am not having blackouts.  Or, at least, if I am, I can't operate my credit card during them.

Now look at these: a photographer from Seoul using the name "komeda" on Instagram releases a new shot every day or so:

Something sadder, here's Brian Wood talking about how Dark Horse Comics were essentially menaced into upping the prices on their digital comics.

And here's Bruce Sterling at his most Bill-Hicksesque.  Back later.

SPEKTRMODULE 02

SPEKTRMODULE
02
The Lane
41 minutes and 27 seconds

1. logotone

2. "Seeing This Shape" – Golau Glau  (album: "Electronic Encounters" – free d/l)

3.  me (all my bits recorded on phone, I like lo-fi sometimes)

4. "High Speed Flight" – Daphne Oram   (album: "Oramics")

5.  "Last Breath" – DJ Funeral (EP: "Last Breath")

6.  "Reverse" – Black Polygons  (EP: "Black Polygons")

7.  "Winter, Week 100" – HANDWITHLEGS  (album: "The Electric Cave")

8.  me again

9.  "Bells and Tape 1" – Adrian Corker  (album: "Way of the Morris")

10.  "Tuesday Before Poland" -  Noveller   (album: "Glacial Glow")

11.  "True History" – Scott Tuma  (album: "Dandelion")

12.  "SlaaplieDJe" – Kreng  (album: "L'Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu")

13.  "Unrequited 2" – Kemper Norton (album: "Unrequited")

14.  "Clipd Cascade" -  WHITE TRIANGLES  (album: "The Night Is Ours") (also!)

15.  "Navajo" – Tropics  (album: "Parodia Flare")

16.  "As We Lie Promising" – Kuedo  (album: "Severant")

17.  "Sonorous artificial language (Schizophrenia)" – Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik  (Disc 2 – Xenoglossy, Glossolalia, Other)

18.  "Wash" -  Ian Holloway  (album: "These Clockwork Tides")

19.  me again

20.  "Kirkonväki" – Paavoharju (album: "Laulu laakson kukasta")

21.  "Return To Ghost Area" – Moon Wiring Club  (album: "Clutch It Like A Gonk")

22.  logotone

I can be reached at warrenellis@gmail.com.

At eighty-four goddamn thousand words, the first draft of...

At eighty-four goddamn thousand words, the first draft of GUN MACHINE is finished.

Normal service will resume here next week.

Progress Status Report On The Novel GUN MACHINE

The DEATH BAR logs my word count.  As noted passim, I estimated GUN MACHINE to get itself told in 80,000 words.

DEATH BAR RIGHT NOW

VICTORY

but wait

IT'S NOT DONE

IT'S NOT FINISHED

AAAAAAAAA

 

HAAAAAATE

(dies)

(but KEEPS WRITING ANYWAY)

DEATH BAR

DEATH BAR

BERG Cloud And The Little Printer

Years ago, I blogged some notes by Matt Webb & Jack Schulze, back when they were Schulze & Webb, on the notion of a "social letterbox."  Later, Schulze & Webb and Matt Jones fused into the creature known as BERG, and became a company that did all kinds of interesting stuff, including publishing SVK.

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

BERG Cloud, and The Little Printer. Or, as Jones put it to me last night, a node for the papernet. 

It ties together a bunch of ideas from the last few years: the social letterbox, BERG's notion of the receipt as the "paper app", Tom Taylor's microprinter. 

And in 2012 it'll be a thing you can have in your house.  It comes with a cloud-based control system to allow you to precisely control what's printed – therefore, what enters your home or office – and when.

Little Printer, a thing that makes the vague and numinous ideas of the papernet concrete, would appear to be just the start.  BERG Cloud, the thing that makes it go, is scaleable and adaptable:

Our technology means we can focus on great design for connected products, rather than programming chips to make them work. We have a list of products we'll be making next, but if you have a need for anything from prototype Web-enabled clocks to smart infrastructure for a new city block, we'd love to hear from you.

And that is all kinds of interesting to me.

My friends amaze me.

Status

Into the final week of writing GUN MACHINE.  Have been running around doing stuff.  Back soon.