Life without Paul Pope art is no life at all.

(link)

According to Forbidden Planet International, the collected IGNITION CITY will be out in February 2010, and apparently it’ll look like this:

• African conflicts spurred by warming - environment - 23 November 2009 - New Scientist
  "Africa is poised to experience a surge in civil wars, causing nearly 400,000 additional battle deaths by 2030 ? all as a direct result of rising temperatures."
  (tags:war pol eco )
• Nicholas Szczepaniak ? A Defensive Architecture | Interactive Architecture dot Org
  "Set in the Blackwater Estuary, Essex, his allegorical and provocative defensive architectures envisage the construction of a set of austere coastal defence towers that perform multiple functions within this dystopian future. The militarised towers are alive ? breathing, creaking, groaning, sweating and crying when stressed. Airbags on the face of the towers expand and contract, while hundreds of tensile trunks are sporadically activated, casting water onto the heated facades producing steam…"
  (tags:architecture )
• Motion Comics
  "one of comics' greatest strengths is the idea of closure, or how readers fill in the gaps between panels. Motion comics do this for the viewer with extra sound effects and time. An unfortunate side effect of this is that while traditional comics enable us to read at our own speed, motion comics lock us into fixed durations." Which is why motion comics aren't comics, if you were wondering.
  (tags:comicstheory )
• New global map of Mars suggests Red Planet once had ocean
  "?All the evidence gathered by analyzing the valley network on the new map points to a particular climate scenario on early Mars,? said NIU Geography Professor Wei Luo. ?It would have included rainfall and the existence of an ocean covering most of the northern hemisphere, or about one-third of the planet?s surface""
  (tags:space )
• I traced my dad… and discovered he is Charles Manson | The Sun |Features
  "He says: "I didn't want to believe it. I was frightened and angry. It's like finding out that Adolf Hitler is your father. I'm a peaceful person - trapped in the face of a monster.""
  (tags:crime )

Continuing my list (and yes, there will be more of these posts to follow, so don’t tell me what I’ve left off this list):

MONOLITHS AND DIMENSIONS, Sunn O))): the more I listen to this immense album, the more I think of it as four movements transitioning from the pagan to the organised church through an apocalyptic collapse into some awful, barren post-civilisational doomspace that fades to become a weirdly sylvan, almost innocent place. Of course, that could just be me. Never discount the possibility that I am a mad old man and completely full of shit. Anyway, yes, it all sounds a bit prog, but they pull it off as far as I’m concerned.

BROMST, Dan Deacon: perhaps not as gleefully mental as SPIDERMAN OF THE RINGS, but still a greatly entertaining record and a working-playlist staple for me over the summer. Very beautiful in places, and, I think, curiously revelatory of his conservatory background. It’s a record you can just spazz around to that also rewards a close listening, just to hear how he really builds that stuff.

"Skeletons," Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Off the album IT’S BLITZ. Honestly, much of the album left me cold. "Skeletons," though, approaches the heights of "Maps" (and if you don’t like "Maps," then you’re dead inside). Love as a long winter march.

"Dog Days Are Over," Florence And The Machine: similarly, I thought LUNGS was a weak album, and I suspect "Dog Days" will prove to be their One Great Song. (I have a half-arsed theory that 95% of bands have One Great Song in them, and I can prove this using an abacus, Manhattan Love Suicides’ "Veronica," and my right fist.) This one is the one: brilliant structure, some beautifully written lines, she sings like she knows what she’s talking about (which I didn’t get from "Kiss With A Fist, oddly), and she opens up her pipes and blows the door off.

SYMBIOSIS, Demdike Stare: this was a marvellous thing. World Hauntology, if you like: Middle Eastern musics, lo-fi drone and the hideous Arctic menace of Scando exorcists like Elegi, all whacked together with stark rhythmic instinct and crazed machine intelligence. I get the impression this record went way under the radar this year, and it really shouldn’t have.

More in a while.

TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #005: HEALTH:

We also offer a couple of perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

• Help “Escape From Dullsville” Escape Obscurity!
  "About a week ago, he finally finished the 288 page book collecting all 7 issues of L.O.A.F. The collection, titled ?Escape from Dullsville? also contains over 80 pages of new material, including the previously unpublished L.O.A.F. #8. Unfortunately, pre-orders have not been high enough for SLG to justify printing the book. (That can?t have been an easy decision for a publisher so dedicated to supporting industry underdogs.) Unless Andy can raise enough pre-order sales quickly it may never be printed…"
  (tags:comics )
• ‘Frankenstein’ fix lets asteroid mission cheat death - space - 20 November 2009 - New Scientist
  "the mission team has now cobbled together another working engine using parts from two sick ones" - this mission, as I recall, was an absolute lemon
  (tags:space )
• Acoustic Weaponry In Nature

  (tags:video )

• polis: a blog about cities: Underground Below Ulaanbaatar: Homelessness in Mongolia’s Capital City
  "The manhole covers are often only partly closed because they serve as the doorway to the underground sewers where the homeless of Ulaanbaatar live. The homeless sleep underground on the hot water pipes as a way to keep warm during the bitter winters…"
  (tags:city pol architecture )
• polis: a blog about cities: Paramodernism
  "…not the repackaged neomodernism that seems to be cropping up everywhere, a literally redesigned utopia that ignores the social, the political and the very notion of a just city or the right to the city - but one which is capable of taking on the profound and intertwined crises of poverty, injustice and the environment. This requires not a new modernism but a paramodernism, something altered, contrary beyond and alongside what has come before…"
  (tags:architecture culture )

By which I mean music released in 2009. And [1] because I’m obviously not going to get them all in one post. It’s going to be lots of little ones. I’m giving myself a month for my memory to work properly. But I think it’s still worth making a note of what was good to my ears this year.

THE SPOILS, Zola Jesus: of which I’ve made much mention lately. Nika’s a beautiful ghost moaning from the shadows of a bombed-out cathedral, on this record. Possibly an aspect of my continuing fascination with The Haunted in early 21st Century music. But I’m returning to this record a lot.

GABON and INCAPULCO and a bunch of other releases, High Wolf: top of the whole glo-fi thing, for me, has been High Wolf and his wet lo-fi tropical dreamstates. GABON in particular was a glorious thing. Hypnogogic reverie when you’ve still got the drugged beat of a rainforest drone-rave beating in your ears.

MAN OF ARAN, British Sea Power: always a band I’ve almost-liked rather than love, but "The SOuth Sound" off this soundtrack they prepared for the re-release of the eponymous film is the best piece of classical building/soaring postrock I’ve heard since "Raise Yr Skinny Fists." I mean, flat fucking out. Coda to the whole subgenre.

HORRIBLES PARADE, Gary War: this thing continues to fascinate me. It’s melted music. Seriously. Like someone went at a wax master with a blowtorch and then struck the record with it. A gorgeous gurgling gargoyle of a thing. Partially dissolved rock.

FLORINE, Julianna Barwick: astonishing vocal music, multitracked and layered and processed until it became the sound that the trails of collapsing photons passing through the feathers of angels’ wings in a particle accelerator should make. Or something.

BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO AGE, Broadcast And The Focus Group: the title should tell you all you need to know. You’re either the sort of person who wants to own an album by that title, or you’re not. It is, as Moon Wiring Club would say, in the finest tradition of confusing English electronic music. It’s less a "proper" album than a collection of sounds that surround a certain set of timebound notions about Strangeness. As the title implies, it sometimes seems more like research (in the form of original music). It is really bloody good, yes.

• Witchcraft
  Religion News Blog's witchcraft news tracker
  (tags:cult news )
• BBC News - The new miracle cure for injuries?
  "Arsenal striker Robin Van Persie has flown to Serbia for a novel form of treatment - placenta fluid is to be dripped on his injured ankle. Why is he doing this and will it work?"
  (tags:med weird )
• New fossils reveal a world full of crocodiles
  "New fossils unearthed in what is now the Sahara desert reveal a once-swampy world divided up among a half-dozen species of unusual and perhaps intelligent crocodiles, researchers reported on Thursday."
  (tags:eco history )
• CONSTANT SIEGE - John Dickie, gold and silver…
  "John Dickie, gold and silver Versace-logo-encrusted Mexican druglord pistol, Mexico City, via Planet Magazine"
  (tags:guns culture )
• Coming Anarchy: A Better State Of Peace
  "Epaminondas?s strategy successfully dislocated the power base of Sparta after just a few months campaigning, and no victories in the field. After all, the object of war is not to destroy your opponent?s military force, but to ?obtain a better state of peace ? even if only from your own point of view.?"
  (tags:war pol )

Because the internet is made out of people: this was The Friday Telescreen 2009. These are the readers of warrenellis.com.

Thanks to all who sent in photos, and especial thanks to the three hundred people whose photos I just couldn’t fit in. Sorry. Next year I’ll do a weeklong thing again, and get everybody in.

Have a good weekend.

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next hour or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next couple of hours, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next few hours, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next few hours, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Ariana got the shouting out of her system in re: whining about how making stuff and showing it to people is too hard.

Now she’s moved on to: how to start thinking about making a project.

…if the feedback I’m getting is any indication (and I’ve got comments disabled here because they don’t suit me, but I do pay attention to Twitter and I read everything on Whitechapel) — there are a LOT of you right. on. that. cusp. of taking the first step. So look, I know I’ve been giving you lot a hard time about “just getting it done,” but before I get into my list of Stuff What I Learned Working With POD sometime tomorrow, I wanna back up a step and talk to you.

Here’s what you need to do, right now, tonight. No, NOT tomorrow morning, or this weekend, or once your work rush has let off a little, or after the holidays, or sometime in the New Year: Right. Fucking. Now….

And from there to book-specific notes and observations about working with a POD system:

…how you go about putting your book together is completely up to you, and what you’re comfortable with. The Lulu templates will give you a bit less control over what the finished product looks like, but it’s a really good place for the people that are just starting out. Do you already understand why your inside margins need to be a titch wider than your outside? If that question just kinda terrified you: that’s all right, but you probably want to start with the templates. Trust me, your book is still going to be lovely, the important thing for you is just getting your content into a pretty and readable format.

And, today, the begininngs of how we run FREAKANGELS the way we do.

Wil’s been all over Ariana’s THIS IS HOW WE FIX SHIT WITH WRENCHES posts during this week, and has a distillation of what he’s taken from them at this link here:

This is incredibly inspiring to me, and I hope that it’s just as inspiring to indie artists everywhere. Why not take a creative risk and see if it works out? Unlike the old days, when we had to purchase a lot of stock ahead of time and hope we could sell it, we can just Get Excited and Make Things, knowing that the very worst that can happen is that nobody likes that thing we made as much as we thought they would…

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

In which things start to break apart.

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 24 hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

• IBM Makes Supercomputer Significantly Smarter Than Cat
  "An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group's massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat."
  (tags:tech computing neuro )
• Cabell cairns pique archaeologist’s interest
  ""On the summits of nearly all prominent bluffs, spurs and high points of this region are heaps of large, angular stones," according to a survey report published in 1894. "Unlike the loose cairns of the Plains and the Northwest and elsewhere, these appear to have been systematically constructed for some particular purpose.""
  (tags:history )
• Gang ‘killed victims to extract their fat’ | World news | guardian.co.uk
  "Peruvian police have arrested a gang which allegedly killed scores of peasants, drained their bodies of fat and sold the liquid abroad as an anti-wrinkle cosmetic."
  (tags:crime )

Because it watches you while you look at it. For the next 20-odd hours or so, I present a selection of the readers of this website:

(Join in by sending a self-portrait to warrenellis@gmail.com.)

Knock John, like Shivering Sands, was a Maunsell Sea Fort in the Thames Estuary. It still stands today. All its ladders have been prised off to ensure it can’t be used as a smuggling stage… although it’s worth noting that the big guns weren’t taken off it until 1992. In 1965, it was taken over and used as a pirate radio station.

(We like our pirates around here. The creeks of shoreland Essex were the byways for pirates all the way into the 19th century, after all)

Radio Essex broadcast for a little over a year. They may have been the first British radio station to broadcast the likes of John Lee Hooker, I’m not sure — I know they played a lot of blues and R&B that wasn’t getting much attention elsewhere. I’ve read that Radio Essex was in fact criticised for being "weird" in 1966. Roy Bates, who set Radio Essex up, later decamped to the sea fort Roughs Tower, which you may know better as the principality of Sealand.

SHIVERING SANDS was my first POD book. A year from now or thereabouts, KNOCK JOHN will be the second.

(Superb image of Knock John by Richard Brown, found on a Flickr search)

So every year I do a thing where all the readers of the site take a photo and send it in to me, and I run as many as I can. It started off as World Wide Wednesday, and last July I did a World Wide Week just because of the volume of shots I get. I just realised today that I haven’t done one of these stunts this year. And that I don’t have a clear week between now and New Year where I’m actually at the keyboard every day. So I’m going to bring back the iteration from 2008, I think. Tomorrow will be The Friday Telescreen 2009.

Take a picture of yourself, email it (not a link to it) to warrenellis@gmail.com and I’ll run as many of you as I can here during Friday.

Why do I do this every year? I dunno. Kind of a tradition now, since the days of the WEF and Die Puny Humans. I have this idea in my head that the internet, like Soylent Green, is made out of people, and it doesn’t hurt to see the people you’re with when you come here.

It begins.

I’m off in my head today, in story-hunting mode. In lieu of actual content, let’s see what some people I know are up to.

Jamais Cascio is practising his stance for the day he takes over the world:

Katie West is… god, I dunno… pink?

She’s also in Matt Sheret’s PAPER SCIENCE, which I’m going to need a copy of, young man, if you’re reading this…

Zo is Zo:

Templesmith’s new book is looking good:

Bruce Sterling’s laptop:

(Bruce lives out of his laptop, and it accrues memetic furniture as it rolls around the world with him.)

Ellen Rogers photography for the Dec 09 issue of i-D:

The Twitter account of industry magazine PRODUCTION WEEKLY just posted on teh twittarz:

The CW will again try to adapt Warren Ellis’ comic book "Global Frequency," this time Scott Nimerfro will script the pilot.

Which I discovered because half a dozen people retweeted it at me within about thirty seconds of it landing.

I haven’t been cleared to comment yet, so I can’t really add anything to this. I’ve spoken briefly to Scott Nimerfro — by which I mean I threatened to have him stabbed, and he thanked me and told me a funny story about how he’s had worse threats — and he is Okay.

Anyway. Yes. Shouldn’t say any more until I get the nod from the studio. But yes.

(Also, yes, I did tell John Rogers. But John, you know, has his own hit show LEVERAGE these days. One of his temple houris told me that John, from the depths of the bed made of golden vaginas that they wheel him around in, wishes me luck.)

(whom you know better as comics creator D’Israeli)

(is living in Greece for a while)

(and these are his photos of his time there so far)