Warren Ellis's Blog, page 94
October 4, 2011
Chrome And Insecure Content
Putting this here in case it's useful to anyone else.
Opened Gmail this morning in Chrome (Win7) and got a flash message across the top of the browser: "This page has insecure content." With options to load it anyway, or not to load. Blearily, I pressed "do not load," and things were fine. What is up with this, I thought?
The Rapportive extension had been a wee bit flaky lately, so I disabled it, closed everything, then relaunched Gmail in Chrome. Same thing. So I went looking. And, lo and behold, I found the answer on a Google support forum. Which, in my previous experience, had been a wasteland.
Credit for this solution comes from the kind folks at Baydin, makers of Boomerang for Gmail. They don't really provide tech support for this kind of thing but they went above and beyond the call of duty on this one. Instructions below:
1. Right-click anywhere on your Gmail page and click "Inspect Element".
2. A debug window will take over the bottom half of your browser. Click "Console" at the bar at the top of this window.
3. Search for the words "insecure content" in the console (search bar at the top-right of the console). This line will reveal where the insecure content is coming from.
4. Disable the plug-in that is creating this message. In my case it was Zemanta, which neither one of us realized was even a gmail plug-in.
Chrome is getting stricter about insecure content on secure pages. You can contact the maker of your plug-in if you want to continue using it w/o receiving this warning message.
In my case, it was actually Zemanta that was throwing the error. Disabled the extension, all was back to normal. Reading around, I see that a lot of people have been getting this error and not knowing why. It seems that, going forward, more and more extensions may cause the error. Now you, like me, can find out which ones and kill them.
This has been brought to you by "If I don't write this down I will forget how to fix it next time this happens."
Bookmarks for 2011-10-04
""Everything in aerospace always takes longer that you originally think," he said."
(tags:space )
shitscape
""Shitscape" describes "the making of an entirely functioning landscape built from human excreta". It proposes to accomplish this by recovering "the 'soil' from the settlements while extracting the beneficial flora from the forest and, in turn, utilize both as a generator for a new and evolving landscape"."
(tags:eco cities )
Wildlife Incursions into Modern Cover Design – 50 Watts
"books from an invented intellectual history concerned with the study of invertebrates and other animals as they relate to architecture and psychology."
(tags:covers books design design+fiction )
The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music: Article
"Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, is launching a zine this autumn titled Cool Drool. Cool Drool Volume 1: Our Drool & Why features written and visual contributions from Jon Rafman, Megazord, Cory Arcangel, Laurel Halo, Taylor Richardson, Dominic Fernow, Robert Beatty, and Pan's Bill Kouligas. The Wire's Derek Walmsley has also contributed a written piece on the early 90s Amiga demo scene, where coders hailing primarily from Northern Europe released AV material on floppy disc."
(tags:magazine )
Co-Founder of Siri: Assistant launch is a "World-Changing Event" (Interview) | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence
"…it appears that Apple is getting ready to reveal what it has done with Siri over the past year and a half (we were actually expecting it at WWDC). Make no mistake: Apple's 'mainstreaming' Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I'd go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language."
(tags:comms comp iphone voice )
Enceladus weather: Snow flurries and perfect powder for skiing
"Global and high resolution mapping of Enceladus confirms that the weather forecast for Saturn's unique icy moon is set for ongoing snow flurries. The superfine ice crystals that coat Enceladus's surface would make perfect powder for skiing, according to Dr Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute"
(tags:space )
October 3, 2011
Eager To Tear Apart The Stars
I'm on Leyland Kirby's subscription list, so I got to hear this sublimely beautiful and melancholy summoning of memory some weeks ago. Now you can pick it up on Bandcamp for five quid by clicking through, and listen to the whole thing for free right here:
Molly By Ellen
Things that are always guaranteed to make me smile: my friends getting together to make things. Molly Crabapple by Ellen Rogers:
[link]
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Supers (warrenellis.com)
British Summer Time (warrenellis.com)
GUEST INFORMANT: Lauren Beukes (warrenellis.com)
Bookmarks for 2011-10-02
"I have been trying to catch up with story submissions and working on getting the first issue ready for the 10th. I will try to reply to everybody when I can. Secondly: We were given the title by Michael for two years to do with as we would. Instead of trying to recreate the amazing magazine that he published (which would have been a: impossible and b: redundant) we are trying to head in directions new…"
(tags:sf magazines )
Crotchety is Amazing « File 770
"Steve Davidson today received notice that his application for a trademark for AMAZING STORIES has been granted. Amazing Stories was science fiction's original pulp magazine…Amazing Stories has had a rocky history, stumbling along through bankruptcy (when Gernsback lost ownership), through a series of publishers and editors…By 2007, Hasbro had abandoned the trademark. Davidson, who was managing the intellectual property department of an R&D firm at the time, routinely reviewed the status of some favorite marks. Noting the lapse for Amazing Stories, he filed an application for the Mark in 2008."
(tags:sf magazines )
New Statesman – Laurie Penny – Occupying Wall Street
"As the light fades and the rain starts to come down hard, hundreds of protesters, reporters and members of the press are still trapped on the bridge. In the pouring drizzle, they strap their backpacks onto their fronts so the police can't take them, according to Kristen Gwynne, a New York writer. Gwynne tells Alternet that protesters are singing to keep morale up: 'this little light of mine.' Hundreds more are cuffed and on vans headed to jail. "I had a feeling as soon as we walked onto the bridge that this wasn't going to end well," says Michael, a member of the march. "The police allowed people to go on the car ramp on the bridge, and when they realised what was happening, people started jumping onto the pedestrian side, but then it was too late.""
(tags:pol )
October 2, 2011
Who I Am And Where I Am (Oct 2011)
My name's Warren Ellis. I write comics, graphic novels, books, journalism and anything else that people pay money for. Sometimes I even go out in public. I live in south-east England.
I'm the writer of the graphic novel RED, the film version of which (starring Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman & Helen Mirren) came out in October 2010. (A sequel is apparently due next year.) I'm the writer of the GRAVEL graphic novels, under development for film by Legendary Pictures. I also wrote the novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. I have an Amazon.com page here. (Ignore anything it says about LISTENER, that book was lost and cancelled years ago.)
My next novel, GUN MACHINE, is due from Mulholland Books in autumn 2012.
A collection of the writing I've done here and elsewhere on the internet, SHIVERING SANDS, was published in 2009.
Sometimes I speak at conferences, or do other kinds of talks and appearances.
The easiest way to contact me in the first instance is probably to message me on Twitter.
I have an Official Warren Ellis Page on that Facebook thing , which mirrors this site as well as my Tumblr and a few other things.
You can also find me on Instagram as warrenellis.
If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.
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.
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Bookmarks for 2011-10-01
"Radio23.org is a non-commercial, freeform radio station dedicated to providing an international artistic platform for innovative and creative home broadcasters. Explore underground music and culture from all parts of the globe created by dozens of weekly live broadcasters. Every two hours, experience a new rad broadcast from a new location on Earth."
(tags:radio )
High aura'd
"tags: americana cinematic soundscape drone minimalist old time Boston"
(tags:music bandcamp )
Voyage of Time | Kösmonaut
"Motorik drum pulses ride smoothly underneath cerebral arpeggiators as audio-starlight percolates throughout the stereo field. A droning dark matter undercuts the entire ritual, and at times so dominates the procession as to approach some forbidden incantation of unspeakable forces. But balance is never lost as the trip equally embraces a frail beauty, travelling into blissful fields of sun-dappled harmony."
(tags:music bandcamp )
October 1, 2011
Supers
Random and ultimately conclusionless jottings on the notion of rhetorical comics.
Which is an inexact and probably not useful term, but polemical comics seems even worse.
It's an idea I've been interested in for years, but somehow never had the time to fully develop. It comes from having grown up with the extended televisual essay, also sometimes referred to as rhetorical television. The first one that really impacted me was James Burke's CONNECTIONS:
You can throw THE ASCENT OF MAN into that bucket too, and probably COSMOS if you feel like it. And, most recently, the work of Adam Curtis, including this summer's ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE.
The text overlaid on the image is termed a super, for superimposition. A fusion of the intertitle, the text card between sequences in the silent movie, and the lower third or chyron, the explanatory text overlays most often found in the lower third of the screen in news broadcasts. ("Chyron" comes from "Chyron Corporation," the company most associated with their generation.)
I have a habit of staring at things until they unpack in my head.
It's an awkward tool to adapt for comics, because it kind of relies on the motion behind it to ensure the whole thing doesn't stop dead. I tried floating supers on a Marvel comic called ULTIMATE HUMAN once, just because these things should be used to try stuff out on.
When there's a moving image behind the supers, running time isn't necessarily being eaten. We can process the events behind the super as well as the super itself. Serial comics can't match that easily. Real estate gets eaten.
Fraction and crew try supers in CASANOVA: AVARITIA 1. The super's on a repeated image. They match the super with a hard change in visual tone, a stringed soundtrack descending for half a bar into a doom metal chord. It fits the general warm, organic, analogue feel of a CASANOVA comic, but to me it also opens up the path to the adoption of visual glitch for a similar effect.
Matt's not going for a rhetorical feel: it's narrative-diegetic, if you like. It's in the same bucket, as, say, the end of ANIMAL HOUSE:
Actually, I'm going to correct myself. Fiction-diegetic, perhaps. Because a rhetorical piece obviously has its own narrative. The lyric essay, as pushed a year or two back by REALITY HUNGER, uses all the tools of fiction without being fiction. Which, again, isn't a million miles away from the tenets of the New Journalism. The supers in CASANOVA don't pop you out of the story. They serve the story.
In something that is broadly non-fiction, the expectations of being immersed in the text are a little different. A story is being told, but you don't enter it with the desire to be wrapped up warmly in the internal logics of a new little world. Which is one reason why so many darlings get killed, in the writing of fiction: you can't always brake to talk about something interesting to you without bringing on that business of "readers being thrown out of the story." You can't draw attention to the fact that the backdrop to the car journey really is just two stagehands winding a long paper mural to create the illusion of travel through the landscape.
Except, of course, when you can.
The essay has a different pact with the reader or viewer. The pact is that you'll be taken from A to B and that there will be a point to the trip, but also that you're probably going to get to B via C through Z. And not necessarily in abecedarian order.
Fusing that approach with fiction presumably loses you a lot of readers. People being taken out of the story. People who want the story to be the point. I guess an early Thomas Pynchon novel would kill those people stone dead. The thing to bear in mind is that those people already have lots of other books to read.
(A dozen years ago, I did a comic that was nothing but art and dialogue and brief supers, with the explicit intent of keeping people "inside" the book. No internal monologue, no box captions where I could possibly help it. Some of you will be more familiar with that style from Marvel's "Ultimate" line, particular "The Ultimates.")
There is a space where the narrative is the point, and the "story" is just one of the things that keeps it moving.
The examples I've used aren't the only ones, of course. Just the ones that occur to me this afternoon, sitting out in the garden writing this. And there will probably be a few people I'm completely unaware of, working in webcomics or minicomics who've solved all these tools.
It's all unlikely to be something I'll ever get to fully develop, unless something very unusual happens, like the perfect trusted collaborators appearing out of nowhere and sometimes materialising with open funding. And also a few more hours in every day. But, with all the talk about commercial comics going back to the Nineties, or pricing themselves out of the market, or all the other shit-smoke that gets blown every day to stop people thinking about what their next move really *could* be…
…well, it's just a pleasant thought to me, that a few people might say, "well, these old paradigms are all well and good, but maybe I just want to find new ways to talk about the things that are interesting to me, and people can either come along with me or not."
It's a rough ride. I don't think, for instance, that as many people are as interested in old Smoky & The Bandit flicks as Joe Casey, but I love that Joe's just saying fuckit and doing BUTCHER BAKER anyway. That said, BUTCHER BAKER intercut with a visual representation of the backmatter essays Joe's writing, story interleaved with rhetorical comics, or even studded with supers about what Joe's *really* talking about… that would have been something to see.
Most of us descend into the pop stuff, like BUTCHER BAKER or CAPTAIN SWING or whatever, because it's where most of us came from. But it always comes with the auctorial request to the rest of the pop medium, I think: please be less boring. Please be less interested in your rules about what comics can and can't do. Please just say something interesting.
How the hell did I end up there?
[send]
Bookmarks for 2011-09-30
"This is Mexican architecture firm BNKR Arquitectura's concept for a 65-story subterranean "earthscaper" right in the middle of Mexico City."
(tags:architecture )
BBC News – 'Flying carpet' of conductive plastic takes flight
"The 10cm (4in) sheet of smart transparency is driven by "ripple power"; waves of electrical current driving thin pockets of air from front to rear underneath."
(tags:tech )
Decline Watch: New York's cocaine comedown | FP Passport
"Cocaine-related emergency-room admissions, overdoses and requests for rehab have declined since the economy started its 2008 decline"
(tags:drugs money )
Japanese 'Noah's ark' disaster capsule goes on sale | World news | The Guardian
"A Japanese company has developed a miniature version of Noah's ark in case Japan is hit by another massive earthquake and tsunami – a floating capsule that looks like a huge tennis ball."
(tags:tech rescue eco )
Energy in Chile: Dancing in the dark | The Economist
"ON THE evening of September 24th a power cut plunged almost 10m Chileans, more than half the population, into darkness. Copper mines shut down, traffic lights failed and Saturday night revellers in Santiago found themselves dancing in the dark. Power was restored within a few hours, but the blackout was a worrying foretaste of what may be to come."
(tags:energy pol )
Egyptian Dust: An Interview With Xenia Nikolskaya
"I know people who have penthouses, and they pay like 20 dollars for it per month. So that is a reason why half of these beautiful buildings are empty. The landlord can't afford to renovate them because he doesn't earn enough money. This makes the country look very weird. And that is why in some areas there is no development whatsoever."
(tags:cities )
The future of physics (1): So long, and thanks for all the quarks | The Economist
September 30, 2011
The Authenticity Filter
The iOS photo-sharing service changed all the filters one can apply to one's iPhone photos. The Gotham filter, as favoured by Ben Templesmith – here's one of his shots with Gotham applied – went away entirely. (And so has Ben, now). All the filters are now very… is mild the word? None of the filters apply heavy change to the image any more.
Which tends to eliminate the most interesting thing about Instagram. The application of patina filters made them feel to people like authentic memory: like they were already placed in a treasured past context. Now they're just digital photos. Just new.
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