Fraction kicked this interview with Mitch Hurwitz over to me last night, in which he discusses the series of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT he’s done at Netflix.  As with Netflix’ previous two original offerings, all fifteen episodes of the series will be released for streaming simultaneously.  Also, he knew he was getting all fifteen episodes up front.

And he gets into some interesting stuff about how that environment allowed him to structure the show in ways that were new for him:

Anyway, I started sketching it out, and I had this funny idea for Maeby. It doesn’t quite fit into the master family story, but it’s funny for Maeby, and I do have this funny bit for Tobias where he writes pop songs. He’s written a song called "I Kissed a Boy." I just had all these crazy notions, and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the task of squeezing all these unrelated stories into a movie that has a central plot.

Then I had this idea. "Well, what if there’s an anthology show?" I’ve been in TV for a long time, and one of the ideas that gets pitched a lot is the idea of an anthology show. Those really worked in the Fifties and Sixties with shows like The Twilight Zone, Route 66 and Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a different thing every week.

So I thought, "I might have an opportunity now because of what may or may not be an abiding interest in these characters. I could do an anthology series, like Maeby, episode 3 or George Michael, episode 5." I just loved this idea.

I was working on simultaneous storytelling – "This is what happens from 2006 to 2013." The characters are going to bump into each other. You gotta know that George Senior is going to run into Michael. You can’t just have George Senior doing his thing.

We ended up with an eight-hour movie of Arrested Development where the pieces do kind of come together. Not only was the show told out of sequence, it was shot out of sequence.

And, whether it’s occurred to him or not, he’s talking about big interleaved novelistic structure.  Which, it seems to me, is entirely perfect for a release system where one can (if one’s blowing off work for the day) watch the whole damn thing in a single sitting.

From a recent story about Google Fiber entitled "Good news for Google Fiber: Broadcast TV audiences are cratering faster than ever":

Google Fiber and its ilk may be the final straw that will break the back of broadcast television. Once high-speed video downloading becomes widely available, instant access to VOD services will make them even more appealing…

…What makes this possible is the complete paralysis of the broadcast dinos. All the majors are frozen in terror, repeating old behavioral patterns that turned self-destructive years ago. NBC spent the annual defense budget of Mauritius to promote “Ready for Love,” a tired Bachelor clone. ABC is going to build its autumn slate on “Scandal”, “Revenge” and “Betrayal,” as well as a hasty spin-off of its fading “Once Upon a Time” franchise. ABC also handed Robin Williams a comeback vehicle. Sensing desperation, audiences are tuning out in disgust.

Not untrue, so far as it goes. And, without figures to hand so yeah pinch of salt, but I think the US network tv “hits” of last season, like REVOLUTION, would have been woeful cancellation fodder even four years ago.  I don’t know that the hit on Robin Williams is especially called for: the man’s a giant, but I haven’t seen the pilot of the show in question and I haven’t completely forgiven him for PATCH ADAMS.

I’m kind of curious as to how it apparently took Google Fiber, in this writer’s estimation, to make Netflix irresistible.  In the office here at home, I’ve got about 20 mbps down and Netflix fairly rips along.  Perhaps we’re talking about a higher resolution stream or something.

I think it’s worth admitting, now, that “television” has become one of those legacy words, like “phone,” that we use to point at a thing, without really fully describing it.  What do you mean, now, when you say “television”?  HOUSE OF CARDS and HEMLOCK GROVE?  HAUNTING MELISSA on the iPad?  Serialised (periodical) narrative?  Shot for a small screen?  Maybe.  It certainly doesn’t mean what it used to.

(And, obviously, I’m only talking about scripted tv there.  You could make an argument that “pure” television is presentational, or “reality,” or documentary.)

The term is becoming protean. The scheduling of television has quickly become meaningless, and it’s hard to describe to kids of a certain culture how there was once a time when you had to watch tv shows when they were broadcast, in realtime, because you might never see them again.  Time was, the BBC wiped their own tapes.  Now a significant number of people watch most of their selected BBC output in a timeshifted manner through the iPlayer.

When Amazon start commissioning drama series to follow their comedy and kid’s slates, television is going to take a new turn.  Not only are Amazon in a position to take chances, but they have possibly the best analysis in the world of what people watch and will pay money for.  Just crunch down that DVD-box-set data by year and genre.  Amazon could actually own genre drama television within eighteen months if they chose to, either by Nate-Silvering those numbers or simply by creating five times as many productive relationships with important creators than anyone else can.

Cable, both basic and premium, have gotten their whacks in, but the full-on “disruption” of American tv by deep-pocketed internet business is going to be really interesting, not least for what disrupts them.

Developing/not fully baked.

I remain peculiarly fascinated by certain kinds of marketers.  And, as a writer who still lives and dies by social awareness, I’m always watching the changing seasons of social media.  (Even though I can feel the required energy for it ebbing away daily.)  This post by Guy Kawasaki caught my eye.  It’s a supercharged, super-expanded version of some of what I do/did, but he has nothing to sell but ads.  It is, presumably, just a way to keep a bucket of social capital topped up.  Which, one way or another, seems to turn into money.

“It is the creation of art through the curation of time.”

A great essay by Clayton Cubitt.

Curation, curation everywhere. And what of photographers? The curation of moments. Of perspectives. Of angles. This has always been so, although the technical limitations of primitive photographic technology falsely imposed a performance art aspect on the medium, a "dance" if you will. The notion that a large part of the creativity of the medium was the ability to recognize and capture moments in real-time was the central conceit of the Decisive Moment. But in fact, much of what Cartier-Bresson describes is not about the art, but mainly about the tools that he had access to…

I love that this even exists.  Funny as all hell.  Even funnier, to me, is that I really like the design.  Available from Inquisition.

Lots of really interesting imagery at her portfolio site.

The network is the drone’s native environment. So, we must – like our colleagues in biology – see them as part of this wider ecology, if we want to better understand their use and their meaning.

A great “state of play” talk by Honor Harger, who ran the IMPROVING REALITY thing I spoke at last year.

Anab Jain gave an updated version of her barnstorming “Design For The New Normal” talk at NEXT13 that was heavily buzzed about.  Shamefully, NEXT13 hasn’t gotten a video of it up, but Anab has put up the text and slides of the talk.  It’s an upgraded download of the present strangeness, and very much worth your time.

I’ve got my head in a weird and fun piece of work today, so please allow me to distract you with the unusual things kept in Brooklyn by our friends at the Invisible Gallery.

SUB-MACHINE GUN is the simplest thing in the world.  A collection of screenshots of bad films with bad subtitles.

There’s something about the way interesting comics work, in them: the juxtaposition of image and text in discordant, dissociative ways.  Also they just make me smile.  But I love the strangeness of these little captures, and they way they make me think for a moment.  Also, it turns out your robot will live.

Provided the embed works, this is a talk Bruce just gave in Berlin. Bruce’s talks are always good. He references Anab Jain’s talk, but I don’t think that’s up yet. Anab’s bit at Improving Reality last year was massive. People like Anab and Bruce do some of the best science-fictional thinking around, up on their feet at places like this.

If you haven’t been looking at the Scarfolk website religiously, then, frankly, there’s nothing I can do but post things from there until you start behaving yourself.

Capture by Justin Pickard, entitled “The Science Fiction Condition.”

[“the science fiction condition”]

Google+ is apparently a success, according to many tech reporters.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people are using G+ to post inside Circles.  Some 11,000 people have added me to G+ circles – but, apparently, none of the ones they post to.  Of the 150+ people I had in circles, precisely three of them posted content I could see.  When I posted content, only a thin fraction of those 11000 people could see it, because at some point I got tuned out by the system.  G+ is therefore useless to me, and I just nuked my circles.

Facebook Pages allow some 16% of the people who clicked Like on a Page to see the posts from that Page.  Regardless of whether or not those people specifically requested those posts in their News Feed.  If a Page owner wants to access the eyeballs of more of the people who clicked Like on a Page because they wanted to see that Page’s posts, that Page owner has to pay to Promote those posts.  I would currently have to pay USD $10 to ensure that all the people who Liked the official Warren Ellis Page on Facebook actually saw one single post.   Facebook Pages are therefore useless to me. 

(Of the 150+ people I had as Friends on my personal page, maybe five people were aware I was actually there, so I’ve nuked my friends list there, too.)

None of this is important, you understand.  But I’ve not been paying a huge amount of attention to social media this year.  Until it became time to start thinking about raising awareness of GUN MACHINE.  So I’ve had to dig into this a bit – I’ve been talking about this in the newsletter, too. 

Facebook, in search of monetisation, has killed engagement – unless your brand is so big that you are in fact desperate to pay for connection.  Because small brands like me can move around, but big brands have to be seen in the big places.  The Facebook Page is now completely broken unless you open your wallet.

And who the fuck even knows how Google+ works now.  It is, in its way, the most “service-y” of the social network sites – now the dust has settled, it really seems to be a souped-up version of Google Groups, with built-in discovery and significant tech enhancements like Hangouts.  A service, not a network.

None of this is important, but it is interesting to me. 

Facebook will have to rely on big companies for one of its revenue streams, driving the small-fry like me out of the Pages system and possibly off Facebook entirely.  People like me will probably keep a FB account alive, though, and maybe even use it to log into things, thereby sending data back that they can sell in another revenue stream.  FB won’t care that I’m not running a Page. In theory, by usurping the “single sign-on” role that things like OAuth were supposed to fill, Facebook gets data to sell without even having to run a social network.

Google doubtless gathers enough data about me in other ways that my non-use of G+ won’t matter a whit.  They felt that they had to have a social network, but they are not a social network company, and don’t need to run a social network in order to do their business.

Perhaps you could add “the death of the social network” to “the death of blogging” in the media-headline scare list.  Replace it with pervasive digital loyalty, maybe.

Whatever it is, it’s no bloody use for hearing from people, or talking to a crowd.

Not sure why I find this interesting.  Perhaps the little zen-garden trap door marks? Perhaps, simply, that this is a rare sight.  From this story, about the hanging of a woman who killed six people while performing exorcisms.  The story has interesting notes in itself:

In court it was revealed that the victims were those who had started to doubt Eto’s “spiritual ability,” as well as followers who refused to loan her money.

The prosecutor said Eto “tried to make herself a deified ruler and killed people who threatened her authority in her bid to stop her lover Nemoto from being taken by a female follower.”

Eto’s defense attorney had argued that she was not guilty due to mental incompetence as a result of having been ‘possessed.’

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…is basically the best title ever.

It is taken from a letter Johannes Kepler wrote to Galileo Galilei in 1610, musing on the future of space travel. "Provide ship or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes," Kepler hypothesised, "and there will be some who will not fear even that void."

I love that so much. 

This is a Kickstarter project, to complete the editing and sound design of a film:

…a surreal, semi-fictional, sci-fi ecological documentary.

I imagine the artists as a team of specialists sent on a mission in the future to rebuild the Arctic environment after it has been almost completely destroyed by global warming. With no master plan, maps or blueprints, each artist recreates the Arctic of his or her own (flawed) memories, fears and desires. Through the film’s narration I will also address darker contemporary concerns: global warming, the Arctic resource race, the political tension of a militarised Arctic and the disappearance of the last great wilderness.

A phrase I found in John Robb the other day.

This is something I didn’t know about:

…there’s a group of gardeners in San Francisco that are spreading organic graffiti across the city.  How?  By grafting branches from fruit trees onto ornamental trees that have been planted along sidewalks and in parks.  They are using a very simple tongue in groove splice that’s held together with annotated electrical tape.  Good luck to them.

From Gardner Dozois’ summation of the 2011 field in his 29th edition of The Year’s Best SF, available from bookstores and Amazon in the US and soon in the UK.

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION is doing very strongly in digital editions.  Overall circulation is 22593, up by about 1500 units or 7.3%.  7500 of that overall number is down to digital subscriptions, and an average of 290 digital units sold per month on top of that.

That’s a terrific thing for them.  A 7% increase in circulation is something of a turnaround.  And suggests that the increase is down to new (or returning) readers, rather than a migration to digital from the existing base.

Their print subscriptions are at 12469.  Their average newsstand sale is at 2334.

ANALOG is at an overall of 26440, which is a rise of 0.2% on the previous year. 4100 digital subscriptions, and an average of 150 digital units per month in addition.

This tends to suggest that in a couple of years’ time, ASIMOV’S numbers will be on parity with ANALOG’s.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION’s overalls dropped from 15172 to 14162.  They don’t release digital figures.

INTERZONE’s numbers are clearly not available to Mr Dozois, as he has forever stated that INTERZONE circulates 3000 copies per issue.  This is obviously nonsense.  Either INTERZONE have found three thousand people who cannot die, or he just doesn’t know the numbers.  Although the former explanation would further illuminate the mystery of how INTERZONE keeps on keeping on without any visible means of support.  I have always had a fondness for INTERZONE, but I am (pleasantly) baffled by their economics.  A recent post on their forum indicates that they’re looking at a format change that will put a spine on the magazine, shrink the page size a little bit – and add many more pages and more content.  Which sounds a bit like a magic trick.

It still seems to me like a space ripe for disruption.  Take a look at these reach numbers for online sf magazine CLARKESWORLD.  (Get well soon, Neil, by the way.)

You can compare these to 2009’s figures, if you’re interested.

My public email address is warrenellis@gmail.com, and I'm @warrenellis .

In 2005, Bruce Sterling, in his role as Visionary-In-Residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, worked with students to generate a bunch of design looking forward to 2010.  I just found some shots of their work hiding in the back of my Flickr stream, and they’re kind of interesting to look at from here.

Don’t pay attention to the Arnie thing so much.  Look at the smaller headline in the left, and the slugline above the logo.

Copying these from the notebook before I lose it.  I want to come back to a bunch of these: one of them led to a long Twitter conversation between Deb Chachra, Eleanor Saitta and myself that I need to return to soon.  So, anyway.  Jottings for the outboard memory.

Notes I worked from:

*  What is the legal status of the weather?

*  Are we in fact tending to imagine a city-state?  A city that borders on a closed and self-sufficient (resilient) energy state?  Singapore rather than Brussels?

*  Sonic architecture – footfall energy harvest – road energy harvest

*  Repurposed ambient urban drones

*  The ethics of machine reportage

*  The lessons of archaeo-acoustics – can cities be designed for sound?

*  acoustic mirrors in architecture

*  Buildings that breathe

Notes from things Simon, Rachel and Bruce said:

*  Futurism as radical reductionism

*  Capital as simplification – human life happens in the friction

*  To be an ecological human means understanding our bacterial nature

*  Dematerialised Urbanism

*  Predator Lidar

*  Cities as habitats that domesticate the human

*  Architecture forces solutions on materials

*  It costs $1000 to grow three inches’ worth of tissue culture

[top image cropped from a bad iPhone shot of one of Rachel’s slides]