Solo Tales of Professor Swift

Originally uploaded by The Searcher.

We’ve reached the halfway point of the first volume, so we’re taking a week to catch our breath. But there’s still something new to read there.

At Comics Bulletin.

Teaser for the IRON SKY project that I mentioned here last year:

(thanks, Bill)

Issue 20, featuring the excellent "A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica" by Catherynne M. Valente and an interview with my old friend John Picacio:

This is just the presage to a frankly brain-burning day on ModBlog. Can you identify the mystery meat?

It’s worse than you think. Don’t look.

You should look at this one, because it’s kind of romantic, really. In an indescribable WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THAT kind of way.

This has been doing the rounds, so I apologise if you’ve seen it. But you need to see it. Credits at the end of the video.

kyoteizinc (video mix) / omodaka (far east recording)
dir.: hiroshi kizu (P.I.C.S.)
dancer: masako yasumoto

OMODAKA is the name of the project developed through a trial and error process of mutational fusion of music and motion graphics. It will knock over your existing image toward a music video by a beautiful trajectory.

(via Mez, thanks)

The New Narrative? Comics in Literature, Film and Art — a conference over May 10 and 11 at the University of Toronto.

Features Steven Shaviro’s presentation “’You Will Never Own a Jetpack’: Warren Ellis’ Science Fiction Comics” (on the Saturday, 3A, 1:30pm):

This paper looks at the science fiction comics of Warren Ellis: Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, and the currently ongoing series Doktor Sleepless. These comics are about the social effects of new technologies. They bring us a wavering and uncertain vision of a highly technologized future, and ponder the possibilities of change in a world pervaded by a sense that the future itself has largely been played out.

Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (1997), and Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003).

• Man pushes creation of panel to prepare city for space aliens : Elections : The Rocky Mountain News
  “It is important because if you’re driving down the highway and you saw a crash of a small spaceship and a car or a bus full of kids, you really wouldn’t know what to do,”
  (tags: mad)
• English Russia » A Visit to Baikonur
  (tags: space)

I would buy records from a notional record label that released no records at all but produced beautiful sleeves, posters and stickers from bands and performers who didn’t actually exist. I would, as people once said, buy the shit out of that.

I would have bought an awful lot more from ZTT Records in the 80s if there’d been no records in the sleeves.

I’m off on the road again this month.

On 23 May, I’ll be speaking at the Norwegian Film Institute. (Also appearing during this seminar are the major European comics figure Igort and the brilliant Killoffer.)

I will also be appearing at the Oslo Comics Expo (fuck-all details on website at present) on Saturday 24 May at 17:00, doing an onstage Q&A. No plans for a signing.

In real terms, this means that I arrive in Oslo airport tired and confused at 11 o’clock at night, attempt to get to central Oslo on my own without getting mugged or raped, locate my hotel, confirm that it’s not a crackhouse or a knocking-shop for backpackers, fail to sleep because I’ve timeshifted an hour, pass out around dawn, wake up five minutes later, jabber incoherently for two hours to a room full of filmmakers who don’t actually speak my language anyway, spend the next 24 hours staggering around town using the only two words of Norwegian I can remember ("thankyou" and "beer"), throw up over a small group of people at Comics Expo who were only standing there because they were looking for Killoffer, and then get myself conveyed back to the airport by ambulance on Sunday.

WIN.

See you there?

Received from a 24-year-old man in Florida:

why should i read new universal if it has nothing to do with wolverine….is there a wolverine in new unviersal, have the howletts become prominant in this universe? I would read new universal if it had wolverine. I honestly do like what you do.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately: growing your own Twitter clone that gives a private circle of people access to both the crowd and the single user via desktop and mobile device. Other people are just looking at the possibility of growing clone services that aren’t reliant on Twitter’s groaning infrastructure. A surprisingly useful post on Techcrunch lays the problem and the possibilities out:

The key weakness in Twitter (and therefore opportunity for a new decentralized approach) is the fact that so much Twitter activity occurs off Twitter.com. Users are getting very used to using desktop clients (Twitterific, Alert Thingy, Twhirl, etc.), IM, SMS, and other interfaces to talk to Twitter. Those third party applications can be tuned to lock in to the new decentralized Twitter-like service instead or in addition to Twitter itself.

There also look to be possibly useful bits in the comments section.

• thinner netlabel
  (tags: netlabel blogs music mp3)

Produced with Adi Granov, who, on the basis of this work, was hired as visual consultant to the IRON MAN film that opened this week. I’m told you’ll see a few elements of IRON MAN: EXTREMIS in the film.

• GROU.PS :: connects obsessively!
  a sort of social-tool tetherer thing…
  (tags: sns web)

It’s Saturday night, and we are open at Whitechapel for venting, incoherent shrieking,
Proclamations and furious masturbation while speaking in tongues and firing yams
out of your bum. And if you don’t have any of that, tell me your name, show me
your face, and tell me what you want.

A good morning. Thanks to History Of Guns and Line Out Records for the new History Of Guns, ACEDIA, and to Thermidor for his 1929 (I should scan the stuff inside the box next week).

An Antarctic fur seal has been observed trying to have sex with a king penguin.

The South African-based scientists who witnessed the incident say it is the most unusual case of mammal mating behaviour yet known….Why the seal attempted to have sex with the penguin is unclear…

That’s it. Boris Johnson is tipped to become Mayor of London and now seals are raping penguins. I’m opening a bottle of whisky and a tub of paracetemol.

Episode 12 is up for your free viewing pleasure.

And you don’t have to wait for the reminders from me. You can grab yourself the Freakangels RSS Window for your own site:

• KABUTOGANI - Lyon - Electronica / Experimental / Other - www.myspace.com/kabutogani
  (tags: music)

sodger (Nth N’d) - the scarlet ladybird: "Reed, reed sodger, flay away / and
make the morn a sunny day"

R.[Richard] Oliver Heslop’s ’Northumberland Words’ (2 vols, English Dialect Society, 1893-4)

The song "Reed Sodger" is made of fragments of songs and folk rhymes from Tyneside and Northumberland - about throwing Ladybird into the air "Reed, reed sodger sodger fly away / And make the morn a sunny day", a May carol sung in streets of Newcastle…

John Barleycorn Reborn track listing booklet

There has been outrage in Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian’s declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet.

The tax authority’s website was inundated by people curious to know how much their neighbours, celebrities or sports stars were making.

The Italian treasury suspended the website after a formal complaint from the country’s privacy watchdog. The information was put on the site with no warning for nearly 24 hours.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Italy posts income details on web

• Most People Are DJs
  “I do a weekly podcast called “Most People Are DJs” from a belief that the banality of radio has turned us all into DJs. DJ is also a metaphor for choosing to live the way you want to.”
  (tags: podcast)

Sacred Bones Records’ MySpace page, being well impressed by NICE FACE’s howling lo-fi electro-voodoo stomp “Things In My Head.” (Which, I should note, is 2.42.)

http://www.eclecticmethod.net. Video mixtapes, video remixes, live video DJ shows and other peculiar experiments that involve beats, images and science.

ZeitGhost Mix 2 13.4.08:

Yeah, I know. But here’s the thing. My friend Zoetica Ebb and her boyfriend were in a bad car accident a little over a week ago, and Zo’s tiny, weird dog Moo was in the car with them. In the post-crash chaos, Moo, unharmed, freaked out and legged it. And hasn’t been seen since. Zo’s been putting up fliers all over town for a week, but the local cleaning teams have been taking them down again. On top of that, some sick fucks have been sending her on wild goose chases.

If you’re in the area, go here for details, and here to grab the PDF of the flier. There’s a reward for a safely returned weird-looking little dogthing.

I’d appreciate any help you can give. Because the dog has probably hooked up with other dogs and we could be mere weeks away from some kind of dog insurrection.

• Weblog Tools Collection » Blog Archive » Woopra and WordPress: Unofficial Coolness Guide
  “Woopra is a stats tool for websites that lives as an application on your desktop (among other places) and can provide live webstats on your visitors. “
  (tags: web wordpress)
• Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday, the graphic novel sequel to Alex Cox’s cult film “REPO MAN”
  The official (graphic novel) sequel to REPO MAN, including several pages.
  (tags: graphic+novels)
• MySpace.com - BLACK WHALES - SEATTLE - Indie / Garage / Surf - www.myspace.com/blackwhales
  (tags: music)
• Street Radio, oral tradition digitally spread - Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism
  “The network has ten public nodes, broadcasting some stories selected from the Southamptons Oral History Archive and adapted to match the site’s characteristics, where the nodes has been implemented”
  (tags: radio tech art)