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…

I’m off in my head today, in story-hunting mode. In lieu of actual content, let’s see what some people I know are up to.

Jamais Cascio is practising his stance for the day he takes over the world:

Katie West is… god, I dunno… pink?

She’s also in Matt Sheret’s PAPER SCIENCE, which I’m going to need a copy of, young man, if you’re reading this…

Zo is Zo:

Templesmith’s new book is looking good:

Bruce Sterling’s laptop:

(Bruce lives out of his laptop, and it accrues memetic furniture as it rolls around the world with him.)

Ellen Rogers photography for the Dec 09 issue of i-D:

(whom you know better as comics creator D’Israeli)

(is living in Greece for a while)

(and these are his photos of his time there so far)

Ben Templesmith is wandering the UK, watching re-runs of THE SWEENEY and peering through your windows at night. These are the details on where to see him, how to commission a piece of art from him for dirt cheap, and exactly what he’s prepared to do to you sexually under the current exchange rate.

(is living in New Zealand currently)

(and wearing R Stevens squid socks)

Behold the dress that bespoke pervert-enablers Ego Assassin made on request by/for the Hello Kitty 35th Anniversary Fashion Show on 14 Nov 09. Ego Assassin make many things. We like people who make things.

Good morning/afternoon. This is Warren Ellis dot com.

As I can feel unconsciousness coming on, I leave you with this:

Photo: Tazlimur
Costume, Hair/make-up: Jessica Rowell
Model: Zoetica Ebb
Couch courtesy of Allan Amato

Because Ariana’s sliiiightly crazy, she’s created a free HAPPY()SAD theme for Tumblr users. This is, of course, based on the HAPPY()SAD t-shirt she and Rich Stevens released yesterday.

I’m not sure how the universe has withstood Rich Stevens (DIESEL SWEETIES) and Ariana Osborne (SHIVERING SANDS, this site, designing various things of mine at Avatar) teaming up to produce a t-shirt, of all things… but this is the result.

Available to order now, ships in 1 - 2 weeks.

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

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…

1. Entrance to the Hotel Rivington, 2. prejuice, 3. New Hair, 4. New print: Honeydrip, 5. FA choker, 6. On final approach

Superb new prints from Laurenn McCubbin:

Wakey wakey.

Back to something like normal broadcasting today. But first, something to eat, and then to the pub.

(Image: Agent Redhead, photography by Beth Anderson)

"Chief Strange Horse":

I swear, these stories always break when I’m least ready for them. From Variety this morning:

Newly minted banner Vigilante Entertainment is launching operations by developing Warren Ellis’ comicbook series "Black Summer" with Ryne Pearson ("Knowing") tapped to adapt.

"Summer," published by Avatar Press in 2007, centers on superhero team the Seven Guns, a group of scientist-adventurers who modified their own bodies for street-fighting in order to take back their West Coast city from a corrupt police force, criminal local government and rapacious private security forces.

BLACK SUMMER remains available as a single graphic novel collection from better comics stores and, of course, Amazon.

1. Hween2, 2. Trick or Treat 1, 3. Halloween 2009, 4. Dr Who, 5. Happy Halloween, 6. Happy Halloween!

Did you read BONESHAKER yet? It’s probably my favourite "steampunky" novel, probably because it wears the steampunkiness so lightly, while genuinely having a touch of the punk to it (which, let’s face it, most steampunk doesn’t). It’s actually a fairly mental alternate-world story of mad scientists, outcasts, sealed cities, airships and, yes, zombies. And the whole melange works. More than works — it has a crazy prologue, a melancholy and foreboding beginning, and then about eighty pages in it starts stoking the furnace and rattles up to a glorious speed and doesn’t let up. It’s terrific fun. Also, Mike Mignola really liked it.

It’s just gone to a third printing, so all your decent bookstores and your Amazons will have it. I think that, in the US, Barnes & Noble are doing a special promotion with it for another week.

A book you might like. Writer and photographer Sarah Sharp (better known to warrenellis.com readers as Trixie Bedlam) travelled to all fifty states of the USA. And then made a book about it. Which you can preview here.

Let me be blunt: I’ve been posting her work here for years — just run "Trixie Bedlam" through the site’s search function. I love Sarah’s work enough that I helped fund her trip through Kickstarter. So I’m a little biased. But please, go and have a flick through the book.

And, if you feel like it, please log in there and vote for her in the Blurb book contest.

Mal has a new poster up at INPRNT:

If you go to Brian Wood’s flickr stream right now, you’ll find the first five pages of his new NORTHLANDERS sequence, THE PLAGUE WIDOW.

New photos of his time in Greenland and the Arctic. I’m just going to show you one of the new photos here, prefaced by Dave’s note:

Ice sheet sliding towards Helheim Glacier, Sermilik Fjord, East Greenland. to get a sense of scale, that ice-filled Fjord in the background is about 6km wide…

NIGHTMARE FUEL: a spoken-word podcast for Hallowe’en by a bunch of fine horror writers, including SD Hintz, Rob Callahan and my old friend MontiLee Stormer.  Perfect for a quiet Sunday night.

Well… it is, but I have a fair amount of stuff to slog through today, so I’m ignoring this place until tonight. I’ll keep twitter on, probably, and you can always send me interesting materials, nice things and dirty pictures at my "dump" email address, which is warrenellis [at] gmail dot com.

Slightly mental drawing below is by Annie Wu.

It is barely alive. It is Wednesday. It is warren ellis dot com. Morning. Look at this.

If you’re just a bit too zen for Matt Jones’ GET EXCITED AND MAKE THINGS, then maybe you need Adam Greenfield’s BREATHE DEEP AND LET GO OF THINGS shirt. "All proceeds will be directed to Human Rights Watch and a mixture of Buddhist charities," Adam says.

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.

I’ve mentioned the fine beers purveyed by the craft booze mechanics at BrewDog a few times here. This just turned up in my email. They’re selling shares in the company:

….we are offering you the chance to officially join the team and own part of our company, our brewery and our beers. Welcome to Equity for Punks.

We are looking for 10,000 BrewDog loving individuals to purchase shares in our company. This is your chance to buy into the BrewDog dream and share in our vision.

We believe the best way to further the growth of BrewDog is to ask you, the people who enjoy our beers, to be involved in BrewDog’s future.

Eliza Gauger, creator of the drooling-alien-baby-head bug for io9.com, recently created this lovely little mascot for Donna Ricci’s Clockwork Couture: