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…

Excellent article from Julian Smith for New Scientist about wingsuited skydivers trying to cut the last cord from old-style jumping, and effect chuteless landings. Excellent quote therein:

Von Egidy sees her suit as a step towards a grander vision of people soaring like birds, not just gliding. "There could be nothing more challenging on Earth than to explore the limits of direct human flight. We are in fact far better suited to flight than we believe."

Now that’s how to write a fucking lede.

I love Moon Wiring Club. And not just because I got their new record this weekend, which I am going to play tonight because I’ve been sick and/or unconscious with some weird bug since Friday morning. Oh no. (What if it cured me?) No, I love them because they do things like this, too:

In 1982, Gelographic RadioTelevision co-broadcast a test transmission for the tentative BBC5 channel.

Although the station idents were deemed a massive success, sadly the only known survivors of this viewing were unable to be traced, due to radiation issues. This archive footage has been recently unearthed, and provides a tempting glimpse into what those who watched through the smoked glass were able to see.

The musical accompaniment, acclaimed in some quarters, features on the new Moon Wiring Club album ’Striped Paint for the Last Post’, due ’sometime’ November. Certainly before the feast of Syllabub in any case.

Remember: confusing electronic music is a great British tradition.

Apple has filed for patent on a technology they call an "enforcement routine," that’ll display ads on pretty much any device with a screen and demand that you view them — or else you don’t get your device back:

Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.

Ariana again, on a FAQ: how was the SHIVERING SANDS book built?

This, on the other hand, is amazing.

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

"We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus," Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News…

(I’m in a foul mood today.)

All you people with your augmented reality unlocking the digital city outernet designing the sentient city rhetoric and toys? You know what you’re making?

Street Clippy.

Now fuck off and make something that’ll do useful work on a phone in a village, instead of something that’ll get you laid in fucking Hoxton. Make something that has meaning outside a major metropolis.

Oh jesus, I’m sorry, you were working on building the urban digital future playing Foursquare and I disturbed you.

(I’m off to kick the cats.)

(Yes, playing Devil’s Advocate a bit. But, see above about foul mood. An article I’m not linking to because they don’t deserve my ire just tipped me over the edge into shoutiness.)

Matt Jones on his generation of the GET EXCITED AND MAKE THINGS graphic: the point of it, its brief history, and its new Creative Commons license. All of which just gives me an excuse to post it again:

Ariana Osborne, designer of this place, SHIVERING SANDS, etc., talking about POD and the book, because:

…apparently, there’s a bunch of folks paying close attention to how Shivering Sands does so they can figure out if POD is “worth their time.”

And I have absolutely no fucking clue what that means, so I’ve just got to talk about it…

Nick Barrucci from Dynamite Comics asked me to do him the favour of posting this. This seems like an entirely worthy charity, well deserving of your investigation:

Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization, Inc. announced today that world renowned painter Alex Ross has donated an original piece of classic Catwoman art to Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization, Inc. (S.W.R.O.). The piece was created exclusively for Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization to raise money to help rescue animals. The piece will be auctioned through Ebay at the following URL: eBayISAPI.dll-ViewItem&item=250524615645 . The piece is signed by Alex Ross and measures 10.75 inches wide by 23 inches tall and has never been seen anywhere…

Full press release at the link.

I told you. I told you all. The Dog is the Enemy of the Human. But you wouldn’t believe me. Now look.

…dogs have a greater eco-footprint than gas-guzzling SUVs.

See? SEE?

Wonderful.  The first of three interviews, this one with Michael Butterworth, about the glorious and fraught history of what remains Britain’s most ambitious and most hated alternative publishing company, Savoy Books.  I’m even delighted by the page scans that decorate the piece.  I’m quoted in there somewhere, talking about the time they sent the co-publisher to prison…

Photojournalist specialising in fringe/criminal/pov environments. Superb, sometimes harrowing work. Personal site here, discovered via a collection of her St Petersburg images on English Russia.

The new haunted park of Europe, via Mammoth:

The European Green Belt is an initiative to develop a pan-European conservation system as “an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black Sea”. Picking out the Cold War line of division between East and West, the initiative aims to thicken and de-civilize that political line, so that the ghostly trace of a militarized landscape becomes a feral and wild preserve…

On Zo’s Style Dispatch for today:

(Be advised that Zo currently thinks she’s Batman and is also dreaming of me reading to her naked. If you see her approaching you, dart her in the neck or something.)

Sarah Deaton just made me look at this AND NOW YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT IT TOO GOD DAMN YOU.

Matt Jones:

My talk at DxF2009 in Utrecht last week was an hour’s wander around the idea of Time, particularly historical and cultural ideas of time.

My focus was time as a material for interaction design that we should deconstruct and reconstruct in order to create products and services that take advantage of new real-time web technologies.

Tonight at my internet cave:

* The London MCM Expo Aftermath Thread - Thoughts or comments on the show? Got photos?

* REMAKE/REMODEL: Super Ann - a tougher than usual R/R for any artist who wants to play. JUDGE DREDD artist Paul J Holden has already had a go.

* Comics on Sale this Week (Oct 28)

* Solipsistic Pop - a UK comics anthology - leading up to its big launch at ICA in November.

* Warren’s Ancient Jukebox - still trawling through the depths of my memory and YouTube mostly for my own amusement

* The Autumn Interrogation Of Warren 2009 - on and bloody on.

Some of these have been seen here before. I’m assembling, trying to get it all in front of me and see what it is. This is like the bit when Rolf Harris paints live on tv, and there’s just a bunch of random marks on the canvas, and he winks at the camera and says "Can you tell what it is yet?" And I can’t. But the marks — or, at least, the pre-treated canvas before I start making marks — are kind of interesting. There’s no process to the creative process. It’s just trying a bunch of stuff and doing anything that might work until you get where you want to be.

Anyway. Consider this your Weekend Web Zen or something.

The post-reality movement’s two signature artistic forms are the talking head video broadcast, and the op-ed. One wouldn’t think of these as being art works, as in carefully crafted fictions, but really, you have to see news in the post-reality movement’s view point. It isn’t about news, or facts, it is about how those facts are presented. Like a portrait, the idea is to flatter the consumer, not to present a realistic depiction. Real-esque is closer to the goal. If the patron looks at the portrait and likes what he or she sees, then the artist keeps getting to make more of them.

(Corrente)

The recourse to History proposed by experts of postmodernity is a cheap trick that allows them to avoid the question of Time, the regime of trans-historical temporality derived from technological ecosystems. If in fact there is a crisis today, it is a crisis of ethical and esthetic references, the inability to come to terms with events in an environment where the appearances are against us. With the growing imbalance between direct and indirect information that comes of the development of various means of communication, and its tendency to privilege information mediated to the detriment of meaning, it seems that the reality effect replaces immediate reality.

– Paul Virilio

Amnesia is a critical part of our repertoire of distraction that enables us efficiently to recycle each mistake, each crime, each stupidity that we imagined was safely disposed of.

- Rem Koolhaas

ESCALANTE: Matt Webb for BERG gave the keynote at Web Directions on 8 October 2009. A 50-minute mp3 at the link.

The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures.

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web - breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero - for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design - playful and rational all at once - to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

Science fiction, hiking, squirting information into people’s brains, media design and cultural invention. Is very good.

An interesting overview of how we might be headed for a very literal kind of "information culture," written by John Lobell — with a wonderful, headlong rush of a summation which I reprint below because I don’t want to lose it:

From Newton’s Space through Einstein’s Spacetime, we now live in a non-space, each point of which constitutes an entire four dimensional geometry. As more of our personalities can be stored and transmitted, and as technology makes time, distance and energy meaningless to human existence, we approach a cosmic nature in which all of reality is integrated into the personality.

The world becomes less matter and more information; translatable, storable, and transportable at the speed of light. The human personality as contained in its biological housing can be indefinitely preserved in liquid nitrogen. Translated into genetic code it can be stored and shipped on DNA. Translated into digital code it could be projected across the universe.

The new world created by a new perception becomes a timeless spaceless flux of simultaneity. Nations dissolve into projections of cosmic consciousness. Buildings and cities become the magnetic tapes and the fluidic valves that house and transmit projected consciousness. Photo-etched onto ceramic micro-circuits; structured on self-reproducing DNA, personality survives the ravages of entropy. Cities empty and circuits are occupied. The computer chip replaces Palladio.

A short film written and directed by Artur Llobell.

Sepsis from Esteve Boix on Vimeo.

A week ago, the BBC ran a story about how smartphone sales aren’t being impacted by the recession. Today?

Nokia has reported a loss for the July to September quarter after sales sank by almost a fifth.

I turn up this story immediately after reading that the Nokia N900 tablet/phone doesn’t do MMS. Which might not be a big deal for many, especially in the States, but it’s really kind of useful to me and my family.

I’ve been a Nokia user for more than ten years now. I had that slidy-clicky phone before Keanu had it in THE MATRIX. Nokia made me an early camphone user — hell, I was in an exhibition of camphone photographers in America. I liked that most Nokia phones looked and felt like they’d been sawn off girders by cold miserable Finns and then stuffed with difficult gizmos by pale intellectual Finns and then filed and decorated by scowling hipster Finns.

The Guardian has this, and it does tend to conjure the image of a large mammal bleeding out from a wound it can’t see or find properly:

Nokia blamed a shortage of components for its poor third quarter performance compared with the wider market. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, its chief executive, said "We would have sold more devices and smartphones in the third quarter without the capacity constraints. The constraints did in fact hit the smartphone part of the business more than the rest of the devices."

I’m no kind of economist, but it does occur to me that a company in the smartphone-making business would usually ensure it has enough bits to make its smartphones with before it starts making them.

Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at industry specialist Gartner, said sales of Nokia’s flagship N97 smartphone do not appear to have been exactly stellar. "Despite their positive comments on the N97 I am reluctant to say that sales of 1.8m for a flagship product are good enough. Moreover, as Nokia stated at the beginning of September that N97 shipped 1.5m devices since the launch we can see that sales are actually not accelerating."

I was warned off the N97 by several people in the know, one of whom described it as "shocking." I’ve already spoken here about what I think of Nokia’s Ovi app store. I thought about getting a Palm Pre, having used Visors and Treos for years. But then I changed my mind. Ultimately, the point of the device is less what it does when it comes out of the box than it is what I can make it do once it’s out of the box. I’ve been fiddling with, cajoling, hammering and tinkering with phone brains for years, trying to get them to do the stuff I needed them to do — because no one device is perfect, right? But it’s gotten harder and harder to do that with Nokia devices — and the applications ecosystem isn’t there. I have an ebook reader for the Nokia 810 that only scrolls down. And, sure, that’s the clever experimental Maemo crew there, and it was very much a clever experimental device. But that’s the state of apps for the 810. Should I really expect better from the N900, which also runs (a new version of) Maemo — and, already, doesn’t do MMS?

It took a little over a year for iPhone (combining 2G and 3G units) to clock up a million sales in the UK, as opposed to the seven months it took Nokia to sell a million N95s when it launched in ’07 — a device comparable in complexity and price. But iPhone was selling from a single network. When iPhone became available from three networks rather than one in France, sales went up 136 percent.

In the top six iPhone markets that are still exclusive… we believe that Apple’s market share could rise to 10 percent, on average, in a multiple carrier distribution model from 4 percent today.

Meanwhile, Nokia posts its first loss since 1996 (only partially due to a write-down on a possibly injudicious deal with Siemens) and its market share plummets past 40%. They’ve been bleeding share on various stages all year.

And my Nokia N95 8GB has, since I started typing this with frozen fingers in the pub, lost packet data three times (and thrown up alerts) and restarted itself twice. All of which is to say that, as a non-city-dwelling person with no local wifi, who needs a 3G-networked communications device in his pocket that does more than make phone calls… I’m going to miss having a tough, powerful little Nokia in my hand. But I need more than Nokia’s prepared to design or sell. And for everything the bloody iPhone doesn’t do, like outboard keyboards, and for every annoying thing about it, like probably having to install the terrible iTunes to manage its apps… it does do several things I require of a street computer. Including MMS and cut-and-paste.

None of which was of interest to anyone but me. Morning. This is Warren Ellis dot com.

A bit of a boingboingy title, I know, but there’s no better way: a giant Russian WW2 monument that used to have an "eternal flame" gas torch got converted to a phone tower with (pixel!) flames painted on the transmitter housing. English Russia has the story and, as ever, some of the best pictures on the net:

From here:

Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists

It uses meta-materials, previously applied to the "invisibility cloak" technology:

An electromagnetic "black hole" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.

"The firm said, so far, 30 people had applied for the positions - some of them in
Glaswegian."

People who had problems with the time-travel theories in PLANETARY #27 should look away right now. There is a theoretical possibility that an elementary particle is reaching into the past to destroy itself:

…time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one…

From Italy, a tiny telefactored robot camera that you swallow. I suspect not everyone will be ready for The Spider Pill:

Experts believe the device, which is swallowed by the patient and controlled by doctors using a wireless connection, could transform the difficult and invasive process of diagnosing serious conditions. The pill, which contains a tiny camera, is also fitted with tiny legs that can be activated remotely once it is inside the colon or intestine.

The legs protrude outwards and are movable in order to make the device ‘crawl’ inside the patient like a spider…

IT’S CRAWLING INSIDE YOU LIKE A SPIDER

FEEL ITS LITTLE ROBOT LEGS INSIDE YOU

FOR SCIENCE

Yeah, possibly the uptake on this one might be a little slower than expected. Wonderful idea, though, and ripe for fucking-with in fiction. THE SPIDER PILL itself sounds like a title.