On my internet knocking-shop tonight:

* The Self-Portrait Imagethread (Jul 2009) - always good for a laugh. Currently featuring less close-up photographs of stubbly and confused-looking young men than usual.

* I’d Like To Politely Ask For Help With My Webcomic - help this person out?

* The July 2009 Book Club

…actually, it occurs to me that I really have to find time to sweep the place out again…

So. BBC TV’s ROBIN HOOD gets cancelled. ITV’s PRIMEVAL and DEMONS get cancelled. ITV also declares that it will not run drama series, aside of course from soaps, before 9pm.

BBC’s response? A teenage-themed prequel to the thirty-year-old ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES comedy workhorse, and, for the fourth time, the loathesome and archaic children’s book JUST WILLIAM will be adapted for television.

Why not put up a sign outside Broadcasting House saying YES TAKE THE LICENSE FEE AWAY FROM US WE’RE NOT GOING TO PUT UP A FIGHT IT’S A FAIR COP GUV and then have the cast of TORCHWOOD sit around it crying? (They’ve had enough fucking practise.)

(John Barrowman on TORCHWOOD’s reduction from 13 episodes to 5 as it moves from BBC2 to BBC1: "I felt like we were being punished. Other shows move from BBC3 and 2 to 1, and they don’t get cut. So why are we? It felt like every time we moved we had to prove ourselves.")

I don’t even like TORCHWOOD and ROBIN HOOD and PRIMEVAL and I’ve never sat through DEMONS. But this is so clearly a full-on retreat from the 21st Century and any storyform that doesn’t look like it was originated in The Days When Beige Rocked that I can only assume the hatches are being battened down and everyone in British television is preparing to not actually be here in five years. ITV’s already made it clear it intends to become a delivery system for game shows and reality shows. James Nesbitt, possibly the most popular actor on British tv today, is saying he’s probably going to have to move to the States because there’s not enough work left for him in Britain.

YES I’M A BIT RANTY TODAY WHY DO YOU ASK LITTLE FUCKFACE BOY

I discovered today that, through the very good technology house Expansys, an unlocked iPhone 3GS costs pretty much a thousand pounds per unit.

Which is a bit strong for something that only learned how to do MMS five minutes ago. But.

A thousand pounds per unit actually forces you to recontextualise the iPhone a bit. That’s not a mainstream consumer street device anymore. That’s a digital instrument. That is something very different from a mobile phone. That’s something you don’t dare carry around in your pocket because it costs a thousand pounds. And if you do carry such a thing around in your pocket, you are either a wilfully conspicuous consumer of a piece with the people who used to lug mobile phones around when they came in briefcases or you are some kind of scientist performing science on the street with a digital instrument or else why would you be carrying around a device that costs a thousand pounds per unit?

Perhaps iPhone 3GS users need a bumper sticker for the backs of their instruments that reads IT’S OKAY: I’M DOING SCIENCE.

Featuring my friend the thereminist and violinist Meredith Yayanos, a piece from the CONTRAPTION EP by Beats Antique: Oriental Uno, "a reconstructed experiment of a traditional eastern European brass tune."

Better late than never, this is warrenellisdotcom. Good afternoon.

(Emma Rios)

In which I take a break and Paul explains how an episode of FREAKANGELS is illustrated.

Full details here.

1.

Garen Ewing’s retro ligne claire-style webcomic series THE RAINBOW ORCHID is going to print. Read much of it here.

2.

Rich Barrett is 16pp into a creepy online graphic novel called NATHAN SORRY that looks like it’s going to turn into something fun.

3.

ELLERBISMS has been on a roll lately.

4.

My favourite comics-related blog is probably still Brandon Graham’s because it’s so beautifully random.

Writer Si Spurrier is not a real man because he’d rather watch LABYRINTH than THE GODFATHER, but we like him nonetheless, and would like to announce that he is launching a new weekly column at bleedingcool called SHORT AND CURLIES.

This is the first edition, which he’s calling #0 because he can’t fucking count. The same kind of mental disability that leads to watching LABYRINTH and cooing over David Bowie’s wig rather than watching THE GODFATHER like a real man.

Whenever my fiancée catches me glowering at some irritating dickwit (a chronic snot-sniffer, let’s say), with that special “Oh God I Haaaaate You” glare – the one that comes naturally to Jack Nicholson, Maths Teachers and all Russians everywhere, but just makes me look constipated – she tells me off and asks how I’d feel if it turned-out I’d accidentally given Said Dickwit a dose of Psychic Cancer. To which I dutifully have to lie that I’d be mortified – oh yes, guilty as sin, sob – then go back to industriously setting fire to kittens or whatever I was doing before the HATING first took hold.

Quite how “Psychic Cancer” transformed into “Comedy Bum-berries” in my dream, I don’t know…

Made by big machines.

Photo by Dave Walsh.

Thanks to Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, comics writer Mark Waid finally tells in public what is possibly The Greatest Story About Insane Comics Fans Ever Told. Scroll about halfway down the page here, you’ll find it. It begins like this:

Several years ago, I had done an over-the-phone college radio interview with a couple of guys in Vermont. Chat went fine, I remembered to mention what a genius Alex Ross is the requisite nine times, and we probably moved some trade paperbacks in the process. So once the interview was done, one of them explained that they ran a store in one of Vermont’s largish towns and asked if I’d be interested in doing an in-person signing. “Sure,” I said…

Via xplanes, this is a Gyrodyne Model GCA-55 :

And, obviously, I need one. See to it.

The work of Ellen Rogers (which to me haunts a similar space to the Ghost Box record label, Moon Wiring Club, detourned library musics and spooky 70s childrens tv) continues to fascinate me:

From Enemy Combatant:

And, for every item of good news about a book, there’s something like this, from my friend, the nonpareil scholar of Weird Shit, Jess Nevins:

For entirely understandable reasons, MonkeyBrain has decided that they won’t be able to publish my Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes.

So I’m looking for a new publisher. I expect the book will be picked up by someone, somewhere.

Bah.

I got to flip through a copy of Geoff Manaugh’s THE BLDGBLOG BOOK, print annex to the fine BLDGBLOG, the other month while at the Architecture Association.

I shall be at the launch party at the Architecture Association in London on July 7 to buy my copy from the AA shop downstairs. But you needn’t wait. You need this book. Geoff Manaugh writes and thinks like some unholy hybrid of Umberto Eco, Paul Morley, William Gibson and an unhinged ayahuascero dressed only in pages from a furniture catalogue dated 10 December 2012. The book is a mad wunderkammer of mad and lovely things, making the real world into science fiction and making science fiction into the real world. The great joy of BLDGBLOG is when a discovered thing sends Geoff’s brain into some lunatic alternate world of possibility, and then folds the whole the back on to the present day.

I worked out on a calculator that Geoff is approximately eighty times smarter than I am. But I don’t know how to use the more complicated-looking buttons, so it could turn out to be more.

Really interesting short article by John Robb this morning concretises the nature of Taliban structure in a way I’d heretofore been unable to pin down:

Most people consider the "Taliban" an ideologically and hierarchically cohesive movement ala 20th Century insurgency. It’s not. Instead, it’s fragmented, highly entrepreneurial, tribally cohesive at a local level, and open source in structure.

I know I’ve recommended reading Robb before, and he appears on the sidebar of People Much Cleverer Than Me, but I would commend his site to your attention once again for these wonderful little bomblets of clarity he produces.

This is Warren Ellis dot com. Good morning.

By the band Dark Mean, from their EP entitled FRANKENCOTTAGE. I’ve been there, and I approve of the sentiment. You’ve been there too, I’m pretty sure.

Good night, internet.

(link degrades in seven days, mp3 provided for review purposes only, contact if you need it removed)

More media-engineering brilliance from the mad scientists of Schulze & Webb:

Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months.

Obviously less useful for my Foreign Johnny readers, unless you’ve worked out how to access the BBC from abroad.

At bleedingcool.com:

Aha. Can you hear that? It’s the Villain’s soundtrack. That awful whistling sound. A sound that comes from before recorded time itself. It is the sound, gentle reader, of Stan Lee’s ocarina…

1. bump, 2. wonderland, 3. the swan whisperer

Apparently inspired by my ROTOR idea, TAG is now live:

TAG is a project where every week, a theme is chosen, and every day, one of our artists creates something based around that theme, using a variety of mediums from prose to audio to video to images and so forth.

And it’s actually rather good:

This is Warren Ellis dot com.

The shortest and most accessible piece of Philip Jeck I have immediately to hand in mp3 form. As I’ve said before, I didn’t really “get” Philip Jeck until I saw him perform live, but you’re very probably much less stupid than I am. Philip Jeck makes fine night music. Although it’s probably not wise to listen to a great deal of his work in the dark in a Finnish hotel room in the middle of the night while exhausted and slightly drunk.

This is “Wipe,” from his album “7.”

Good night internet.

(link degrades after seven days, provided for review purposes only, contact me if you need it gone and it’ll be removed immediately)

Currently occurring in the depths of my internet knocking-shop:

* Post your Dr. Sketchy’s Artwork - The boss herself, Molly Crabapple, comperes a thread where Dr Sketchy’s visitors and customers show off their work. Join in.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: International Patents, Inc. - the weekly space where I call out some ancient character from the public domain and have artists reinvent it for the 21st Century.

* The LongBox Digital Comics thread - this one’s going on and on. Will Longbox be the iTunes for comics? Will Longbox kill the comics shop?

* Whitechapel UK Midlands Meetup - where they will all huddle in some shitty pub and mutter together in their funny accents

Monthly reboot in a couple of days’ time.

• test tube - [tube157] DOPO - Blue Lands

  (tags:music mp3 )

From: Warren Ellis
To: Bad Signal mailing list
Subject: [Bad Signal] Steam
Date: June 27, 2009 - 7:17 pm EST

Back in my hotel room to write this talk, and I put
Glastonbury up on the tv while I write. Springsteen’s
on. Not a huge fan of the man, though I admire
his industry. The man puts in a day’s work on stage.
And he’s sweating, working hard. Got his foot up
on an amp as he sings. It’s just him, right now, the
stage is blacked out, and there’s one spot behind
him. And he’s hot, and it’s cold night out there, and
he’s steaming. And he’s just blown the authenticity
thing and gone into supermystification, because it
looks like he’s got an electromagnetic halo, curls of
glowing, pearly white light rising up from and playing
around his head and shoulders while he stands there
in near-silhouette….

He looks like he’s The Last Rock Star, the Ascended
Master who glows in the dark.

At lunchtime, while everyone else was at the conference.

Home now. Will post the notes that I based the talk on later in the week.

It’s Friday, it’s just gone noon UK time, so it’s FREAKANGELS episode 0060, free to air.