If you didn’t get MACHINE VISION 038, the latest step of my newsletter, yesterday – check your spam filters.  Gmail, Comcast and Verizon users especially should take a look.

If you didn’t see it, the web version is at this link here.  If you’re not a subscriber, you can still look, too.  And, if you’re interested, you can subscribe at this link here.  You only get emails from me, and, at this point, I’m only going to be posting a newsletter a couple of times a week.

(Older subscribers will laugh at that, because I can go weeks at a time without posting, not least because, unlike my old list, there’s not really an easy mobile option with this system.  But things are a little more sorted now.)

Anyway, if you are a subscriber, I’d appreciate you checking your traps this week.

Please be advised that ARIADNE AND THE SCIENCE is on pause because Molly’s travelling.  Back soon.

For many reasons (work-related, health-related, burying-more-pets-related, just-bloody-tiredness-related), I just haven’t been able to get going with warrenellis.com so far this year.  So I’m switching the site to Pause for a couple of weeks.  Normal service will resume with a new episode of SPEKTRMODULE on March 9 or thereabouts.

In the meantime, I want to leave these things here:

Last year, I did a thing for people who make comics called Three Panels Open.  Literally, a three-panel comic.  The only rules were that it had to be legible at a width of 640 pixels, which is the width of the content bar on this site, and that it had to be three panels long.

Perhaps you’d like to do a three-panel comic to be posted here.  If so, email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.  Same rules apply: three panels, and it can’t turn to mud when I run it at 640px.  The ones I like best will be run here from March 10 – 31.

Also, I’m opening up the GUEST INFORMANT skein to submissions, after a fashion.  If you’re working in the arts and sciences and you’d like to talk at my readership here about your work or something related to it, drop me a note at warrenellis@gmail.com about what you’re in the mood to write and we’ll sort something out.  You can see all the other Guest Informants at this link.  They include novelists, journalists, musicians, data griots, researchers, artists, designers, futurists and nuclear physicists.  (Some of those posts are huge.  I tell people, “I’d be happy with two hundred words!”)  As you’ll see, each Informant post can come with links to whatever you’ve got going on.

Also also, I really think that the Station Ident should come back, and that the top of each week should have a logotone.  By “really think” I actually mean “literally just thought of this and laughed because it sounded like fun.” 

The Station Ident is a photo or other image and the words "this is warren ellis dot com."  Something arty, something filthy, something strange, something funny: don’t care, so long as it’s original to you. Snapshot or illustration, Photoshop or fansign; don’t care, so long as it has the following words in it somewhere:

"this is warren ellis dot com"

Email it as an attachment to warrenellis@gmail.com, my public dump email address, if you feel like playing. Please include your name and a website if you have one, or plug a work of yours if applicable. Ideally, it’d be 640 px across, but I can resize stuff. And I’ll use all the ones I like, eventually.

(I might even bring back the Closedown, or amalgamate it with Night Music.  I’m old enough to remember closedowns.  Also, the last ice age.)

And… that’s it.  Now I need to get into some development work and serious thinking.  See you in a couple of weeks.  Be good. 

Regulars will have noticed two things. One, I haven’t been around much, and two, comments are gone.

Second one first. Comments here have, by and large, been a bit dull for a while. Some nice surprises sometimes, and some smart people, but also too often falling into the “I don’t really want this on my website” bucket. This isn’t going to fall into the slightly barbed mea culpa about switching comments off that the act seems to usually entail — no discussion of the “blogs are conversations” bullshit. Whenever I kill comments, I invariably decide to try again several months or a year or two later, and I’m sure that’ll happen again. But, right now, it’s time for them to go. (That time being usually indicated by my having to go into a comments thread, ask people to read what I actually wrote instead of what they think I wrote, and then explain the whole thing again in simpler language, very slowly and loudly, as if trying to direct a foreign tourist to the train station.)

The other thing: Lili’s cat’s dying, and I’m currently the only one in the house in a position to check on him regularly. Therefore I don’t have a lot of focus right now. I don’t think he’s got more than a couple of days in him, poor little bugger. We saved his life, sixteen years back, but I always thought that the damage done to him might have an effect on his life expectancy, and now he’s slowly winding down. I call him Lili’s cat because they became best friends when she became old enough to eat solid food. He’s always liked his food, and Lili went from “that small loud thing I avoid” to “that small loud thing who — hey, she’s offering me food. I like food. This small loud thing isn’t so bad.” And they’ve been inseparable ever since. So, yeah, the next week isn’t going to be fun, and there may not be a lot happening here, not least because I’m having to get up hourly to see to him, which I’m about to do right now. G’night.

Just got note from kind host:

1-2 hrs of downtime today occurring sometime btwn 7:30-11:00 pacific time. all sites affected.

The new season’s skin is live, designed and implemented as ever by my lovely mechanic Ariana Osborne.  Thank you, sweetheart.

I’m in the midst of having some kind of brain seizure, and have reactivated comments on an experimental basis. Note that all comments, in the early phase of this trial, are moderated, and so they will not appear on the page immediately after you post them.

The experiment will last until people start pissing me off again.

Apparently the host server wigged out overnight and while I was out with my family today. The main result of this seems to have been some weirdness in the RSS service, and it turns out some of you may have gotten up to two dozen repeat posts. Here on the main website, the Twitter feed repeated itself twenty times, and on the LiveJournal feed at http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/ there are eight repeats of the most recent del.icio.us dump (and god knows why that happened). The latter, I’m afraid, I can’t clean up, because there’s no instantiation of it on the main site. Sorry about that.

In other news, I have a joint of pork from a rarebreed-pig/boar cross. Much darker than ordinary pork. It is in fact Dark Pork. Which will probably soon be a series from DC Comics. This will go well with the bottles of beer I bought from the Felstar Brewery out of Felsted, an hour north of here. One’s called Dark Knight and I swear the other is called Spooky Chick. Spooky Chick is in the refrigerator.

I do an irregular podcast here, called The 4am. It’s composed entirely of music sent to me by bands and musicians. If I like it, I play it, basically. You can find the first 13 episodes in the sidebar player — they’ve been played some 55000 times.

Haven’t done one since March. Now I have a decent set of speakers for this laptop, it’s easier to resume. So I’m starting from scratch, for a second season of The 4am.

It won’t happen, of course, without new music. If you think you’d like to be on the podcast, please email me your music (mp3, 128k or better) at warrenellis @ gmail.com. That email address is only used for the podcast. Including a link to your site is always useful — saves me having to hunt around for it myself.

Tell your friends if you like. But I can only play mp3s sent by the artists themselves. if you send me mp3s from bands you really like, I just have to delete them. Okay? Thanks.

If you’re reading this on a LiveJournal syndicated feed, such as warrenelliscom or warrenelliswire — stop. Unsubscribe from those feeds and add http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/ , which I am turning into a crossposted LJ later today. The advantages of this include creating a working archive of the site on LJ (syndicated feeds, including all the comments, get wiped after 14 days or so), and my being able to received comments and conversations generated on the LJ.

For the rest of you: LiveJournal is a once-popular social-blogging service that was run into the ground by SixApart, and is now largely a repository for amateur writing about Harry Potter being jerked off by hobbits. In space.

Ariana’s just rolled out this season’s redesign of the site. Yeah, we do it seasonally now. We’re just that stupid and easily bored. So if you hate it, just wait three months. This time around, I decided I wanted a big change in theme rather than design (although Ariana’s built all kinds of clever bits into it). This summer, we’ll probably go nuts. Right now, it’s spring, and we’re just waking up.

Thanks, Ariana. Again.

Of course, with spring now supposedly here (he said, looking outside at the snow), it’s time for the seasonal site redesign, and Ariana and I started talking about that last night.

I tend to go, in stages, from maximal to minimal and back again. I’m currently on the backswing up to maximalism. As tempting as tumblelogging always is — and if there were a way to port the radical new Silo Tumblr design to WordPress, I’d be all over it — I always grow too fascinated with the swirl of information in which we netlife live. And find myself wanting to replicate and/or depict the sense of that.

So…yeah. Reskin comes soonish. Stuff will probably break.

I think I’m going to start a little mp3blogging again, too.

Okay. If everything’s gone to plan, then the site should be up and running at a new ISP, having jettisoned Dreamhost for good. My last conversation with Dreamhost having convinced me once and for all that they’re a gang of chimps. Note for the future, guys — when you send someone a nastygram telling them they’re overusing system resources, and that person writes back to ask what system resources, replying with the equivalent of "I dunno. Stuff" really just makes you look like wankers.

This site may disappear for a few hours. Maintenance is being performed. Do not tremble. All is well. We have the technology.

Sort of. I’m on a tiny, beautiful ThinkPad provided by Avatar Press, connecting through a tiny, crappy mobile-broadband USB dongle. I am, as they say, running on impulse speed right now, and will probably remain so for the next few days.

Bloggery will recommence in the morning. Slowly.

Rejoice.

(Or not.)

Just a reminder — all site commentary has been moved over to http://telepho.ning.com/.

Comments should be activated again, briefly, while I work some things out and until people start pissing me off again.

“Wanking for coins”

TUN3R.com: new favourite webtoy.