Editor and writer David Hepworth:

You can’t hide. I was talking to somebody in the record business recently who pointed out, rather mournfully, that it was no longer possible to hype people. What he meant was that it was no longer possible to convince them that something was more popular or widely adopted than it actually was. You no longer went into Radio 2 and told them that they should be playing a record because it was going to be popular among this or that demographic. You simply sent them a link to the You Tube page where they could see how many people had streamed the video. Digital is its own audit. This is something magazines are going to have to get used to.

“Digital is its own audit.”  That’s really kind of interesting to me.  I’m used to unique counts being obscured and lied about.  But I hadn’t considered the open-count public services.  And, of course, this is what Likes and RTs and +1s lead to.  A world where we encourage everyone to vote on everything (an element of more than a few sf pieces).

Cultural voting, of course, leads to the triage suggested in the quote: following counts leads inexorably to media that play only the things they already know people like.

Which makes me prize things like Mary Anne Hobbs’ Saturday night show on XFM all the more: because I know that for three hours I will hear things that I have never heard before.

Still.  Interesting point.

And then, before I get insane enough to do it, something wonderful usually happens to stop me.

Poor Charlie Stross.

Much as any artefact exposed to the maw of a small child eventually becomes soggy and turns brown (after it stops working, if moving parts are involved), I am coming to the conclusion that any comment thread on this blog will, between 100 and 200 comments in, circle around to become a discussion of:

* Space colonization

* Automotive technology

* Things that go fast and explode (rockets, military aircraft)

* Alternative energy (from solar through wind/wave to nuclear)

* Libertarianism (and everything is worse with libertarians)

And then he asks his audience – which is a fair bit larger than mine, these days – if he’s doing anything wrong, and wonders aloud how to develop a new audience of commenters.

283 comments (and counting) later, he’s got people ranting about libertarianism, cheap energy (the second comment!) and whores.  Oh, and “secular modern civilisation.”  I get mentioned a couple of times, in regard to the old Warren Ellis Forum and the Whitechapel board (although the poster missed that I turned the latter over to Si Spurrier last year and neither read nor write there).

Charlie’s been writing at his site for a year more than WEF operated, and four years into WEF we’d pretty much mapped out the memetic genome of the self-selected participants.  There comes a time when a hardcore regular attendance dismays new arrivals – as an American put it to me once, “it’s a bit like, ‘really? High school again?’”  And so, even when Charlie says something there that breaks into mainstream consciousness, his commentariat is unlikely to change much.  Also, they are defending that piece of virtual dirt, because they have made it into a place that is comfortable to them.  Charlie’s place is where they come to talk about rockets and whores, damnit.

Which brings up another thing, and I’m not going to ascribe it to Charlie, who is a nice man, but it’s real – sometimes, your commenters, by which you often mean your audience and your readership, are really fucking annoying, and sometimes you don’t like them.  Which you can’t say.  Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”?  Nobody.  “My audience are all complete pissflaps.  Have you read my website comments threads?  Utter inane gibberish.  I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.”  Who’s going to say that? 

I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives.  And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”

Just as I know that every writer has dropped the ball at least once and disappointed a reader.  Or exposed themselves as a total prick or a frothing nutter. 

The deep interaction between creator and reader that the internet has brought us is not always healthy for either side, nor does it always – or even often – bring out the best in either side.

So I do this: I have a twitter account where people can talk to me, and I have a website where I post my research material and show off interesting stuff I’ve found and talk about whatever’s in my head on any given day.  I feel like, that way, we get the best sides of each other.

(Speculation. The thing about the open house that comments systems constitute is this: you accept my invitation into my house, and then I get stroppy because I want to know why you’re pissing on the floor and refusing to talk about anything other than that one sculpture on my shelf that depicts a whore riding a rocket.  But just maybe you’re urinating in fear because you only came into the house to look at the sculpture and now I’m trying to fit you into the oven.)

Best of luck, Charlie.

Also, buy a bigger oven.

Today I am deep into the copyedit on GUN MACHINE and not coming out until it’s done.

So look at this instead: by and of my friend Cassandra Melena, who graduates from Tom Savini’s Special Make-Up Effects school today. Congratulations again, Cass.

* Listen to some of the 55 podcasts backed up in the computer
* Rewrite rough notes on Possible TV Thing 1
* Rewrite rough notes on Other Media Thing 2
* Seriously reconsider ever doing a podcast interview again after realising halfway through the Disinfo interview that I was basically making no sense at all
* Do another section of copyediting on GUN MACHINE
* Finish structure notes on Novel 3
* Put more ideas into the GUN MACHINE PR notebook
* Pretend I have cleared my email inbox
* Set reminders to get out of bed on Saturday because I have to go to London to do 45 minutes onstage at Kapow Comics Convention
* Write MACHINE VISION 006
* Re-read and annotate friend’s radio play outline
* Find something disgusting to email GRAVEL director Tim Miller in revenge for the horrible shit he’s been emailing me first thing in the bloody morning
* Try to remember the five other things I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten
* Try to be in bed by 3am
* Crawl under desk, cry

Molly Crabapple sent me this out of the blue this evening.

Regular broadcasting resumes on Monday.

A slow day on twitter with Warren Ellis, 2 BROKE GIRLS staff writer Morgan Murphy and IRON MAN 3 writer Drew Pearce.

Still pacing around a bunch of foggy ideas here.

Podcasts: I don’t listen to enough podcasts, and I’m bad at keeping up with the ones I’m subscribed to.  I recently bought myself a bluetooth earpiece, so I can more easily keep up with podcasts while remaining easily contactable, and also functional while I move around a house with people in it.  The current list, which I need to add to once I start properly managing what’s here, is:

Unreported World, journalism from Channel 4.  

Four Thought, short talks from BBC Radio 4, frequently presented by comrade Ben Hammersley,

The Future Human Podcast. Little Atoms, from Resonance FM.  (science, ideas and culture)

The History of Rome, by Mike Duncan, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg from BBC Radio 4, because I’m a history buff and these are a source of great pleasure to me.  IOT, especially, makes my occasional train ride to London very nice.  And the Psychedelic Salon, because I like old Terence McKenna lectures.

Music podcasts:  Rob Booth’s Electronic Explorations, Broken20, Soft Oblongs, Dublab,

Basically, I’m not absorbing nearly enough new information via audio, and need to work on that a bit.

Audio seems to be somehow harder to build into the day.  I’m not sure why.  Probably because most podcasts are still emulating classical radio (and god knows I wouldn’t want IOT, for one, to be any other way), and so they demand primary attention.  I can’t be doing a lot else when playing a podcast.

A few people in digital circles have been talking about audio in relation to information radiance.  Secondary Attention, which is the attention we give to “glanceable” screens, status pop-ups and tickers.  This also obviously relates to Continuous Partial Attention.

Here’s an example of Secondary Attention in a live context: Guardian Ambient Headline Radio.  Warning: will not work in all browsers.  Developed by Dan Catt, one of the last things he did for the Guardian.  This is the most recent version – a previous version had much better music!  It’s a New Aesthetic-y degraded image from a news photo, the headline the article came from generated as a text, and when it cycles to the next headline, a logotone fires and a speech bot will read out the headline.  With ambient music playing the whole time. 

(This is how he thought of and made it.)

Imagine one of those hooked to Google Reader.

(Tangent: Julian Bleecker of New Future Laboratory has been talking vaguely about something called Ear Freshener  — I can’t find a single post that encapsulates whatever he’s planning, but these are some earlier thoughts of his about sound as interaction design)

I need music while I’m working.  Russell Davies, who’s been talking about secondary attention sound for some time now, can’t handle music radio.  But we agree that having ghost agents whispering in the corners would be useful.  I’d even be okay with my phone singing to me more.

On Tumblr last night, someone asked me the following question:

you always find incredibly interesting info to do writing about. how do you find this stuff

And I gave it an answer, but on reflection the answer seems too brief and shallow to describe how I do this thing.  (And it also led to yesterday’s post, as a start to this trickle of thought.)

I’m not very good at it, any more.  I’ve let things slide over the last couple of years.  I was burned out for much of 2010, and 2011 was all about writing GUN MACHINE.  This year so far has been all about fighting bad habits and trying to be more present in the world and its information flow.  Some of what follows is in flux, because it includes things I haven’t fixed yet.

Websites: I manage all my blog reading via Google Reader, and the Reeder app for iPhone and iPad.  I will also sometimes skim via Flipboard, and sometimes throw up Reedlines on the iPad when it’s docked, using the device as a glanceable second screen. 

(I could be running Google Reader in a livestream column in Seesmic Desktop, but I’m currently not. Neither am I currently running Google Reader in a ticker on the side of my screen with the Snackr desktop app.)

I live in Chrome, and have an extension that allows me to subscribe to a site with Google Reader in one click.

Now, because someone else on Tumblr said “yeah okay but I am lazy so what do you actually read,” a selection of the 100 or so sites I currently follow:

All, Everyone, United - http://alleveryone.blogspot.com

BERG - http://berglondon.com

BLDGBLOG – http://bldgblog.blogspot.com

Chris Heathcote: anti-mega – http://anti-mega.com/antimega

Collapsonomics! = http://collapsonomics.posterous.com

Disquiet – http://disquiet.com

Eye blog – http://blog.eyemagazine.com

Fokkawolfe - http://fokkawolfe.blogspot.com

FP Passport – http://blog.foreignpolicy.com

Global Guerrillas – http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas

Global: James Bridle | guardian.co.uk – http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/jamesbridle

Informed Comment – http://www.juancole.com

Interconnected – http://interconnected.org/home

Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect – http://janchipchase.com

magCulture.com/blog – http://magculture.com/blog

mammoth – http://m.ammoth.us/blog

Near Future Laboratory – http://nearfuturelaboratory.com

Notes on metamodernism -  http://www.metamodernism.com

Open the Future – http://www.openthefuture.com

PhysOrg.com – latest science and technology news stories – http://phys.org

Religion News Blog – http://www.religionnewsblog.com

russell davies - http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/

Secrecy News – http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy

Sentient Developments – http://www.sentientdevelopments.com

The Mire – http://www.thewire.co.uk/themire

The New Inquiry – Shines Like Gold – http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/shines-like-gold/

Ultraphyte – http://ultraphyte.com

Urbanscale - http://urbanscale.org

Wired: Beyond the Beyond – http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond

I will just leave you to discover what these places are.  I realise, that, for the intrepid, the above list was way too exhaustive and dull, but I really do get asked this sort of thing.

I never clear Google Reader every day.  During any given week, I will read most of what Reader gathers in that week.  And that’s okay.  No dietician is going to bitch at you about leaving food on your plate.

For some people, a hundred-odd blogs is a very mild intake.  Back in ‘07, tech blogger Robert Scoble was scanning more than 600 feeds a day, and, according to this article, that was down from 1400 in previous years.  (He currently follows 32000 people on Twitter and has 5000 people in G+ circles)

Let me try this on you: the world was always bigger and denser and more eventful than mainstream media could ever communicate. 

I read a newspaper every day, and I watch a well-produced, intelligent news analysis programme every night, and I have been known to leave 24-hour news running in a video window all day, and that still doesn’t give me a world picture in the way that my blog capture does.  I don’t know how I did without Foreign Policy’s Morning Briefing for so long.  The music scene is so exploded now that whatever I do I’m barely scratching the surface, but if I was just reading the bloody NME or something I’d be clueless in comparison to reading All Everyone Uniited and Reynolds and Fokkawolfe and etc.

To answer the original question: the only way to find interesting things to talk about is to be open to the world as possible, and tune your machinery to bring as much of it to you as possible, without getting to the point where you’re getting no time to process it.  At some juncture, you have to stop reading and start writing.  You have to have it in yourself to know when to close the window and say, no, okay, I need to actually think about this now.  It is seductive to let successive ways of incident and ideation just wash over you, and a fascinating way to spend your time, but until you use the information, it’s not a productive lifestyle.

So, it’s a case of sitting on Google and searching keywords, and it’s also looking at what the interesting people you know or follow are reading.  And who the people they’re reading are reading.  Like anything, drilling down to find the good stuff is actually work.

If I had a better desktop app for Google Reader, I’d go for it in an instant.  Very bad.  But I would.  (I wish MetroTweet, my current Twitter client of choice, would hook into Reader.  I love their big bold update popup windows in the screen corner.)

Coming back to this.  Needed to ground it with the practical numbers and basics first.

A not-fully-baked consideration.

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

I re-read Charles Stross’ ACCELERANDO at least once a year.  More often, I’ll return to just the first three chapters once every few months.  Published in 2005, and written in serial form from 1999 to 2004 – and you can grab the whole thing for yourself, free, from this link here – ACCELERANDO is a sprawling (yet massively condensed and concentrated) piece of radical hard sf about the deep computational future.  It’s also about Manfred Macx, “venture altruist,” staying ahead of the memetic curve with an exotic set of information-processing hardware.  Let’s run a bit of that opening again:

He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.

He’s doing that with, essentially, Google Glasses and some wearable computers to beef up their utility.  It’s what I’d do today with a smartphone.  In fact, I last did it on Thursday.  Macx’s kit is based around the glasses.

I got asked a question on Tumblr yesterday — which I’ll get to in a later post – that set me to thinking again about Manfred Macx, who can’t do what he does without processing vast amounts of information each day.  So I’m cropping out the bits of ACCELERANDO (with apologies to Charlie, obviously), to illustrate how this parallel-future character goes about his business, and what a fictional set from 2004 says to us in 2012.

His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery.

I like to think that this bit is Bruce Sterling at age 70.  That’s a man who processes a lot of press releases.

He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?"

I might be the only person I know who doesn’t use IM at all.  That said, this book is pre-Twitter, and I can certainly get a “please RT” vibe off that…

Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.

I think I’ve probably gotten into the concept of agalmics and how it relates to the attention economy before now.  Attention Philanthropy is the takeaway, and how this site mostly works – using whatever profile I have to direct you to works of interest.  How much text do you take in every day?  Is it even possible to quantify it by bytes anymore?

Also: I watch no videoblogs at all.  The only informational video I get is watching Newsnight on the iPad.  I should probably review the field again.

his glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the moment and urgently needs to catch up.

Do you ever feel like that upon waking?  Six hours behind the moment.  Sleeping took you off the road to the future.

He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he’s still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site.

Kick that one around.  It contains the point that he’s not just taking in information, but processing it and excreting more information.  Also, extruding it out on to a public space where people can fiddle with it.  (Of course, Charlie still has comments enabled on his site.  I am less sanguine about that sort of thing.)

The point is crucial.  If we’re not doing something with the information we’re taking in, then we’re just pigs at the media trough.

What is also happening here, of course, is that he’s doing the work of a public intellectual.  “Critical creativity,” as I think Umberto Eco once put it.  Only without the requirement of space in a newspaper or magazine, of course, which is what the internet brought us.  And, as the net trends towards microblogs and status updates, it is also what we’re taking away from the internet now.

Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he’s got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list – the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors.

I’m reminded of Bruce again, here, and the fact that his Twitter account is locked.  20,000 people are allowed to follow his account – in actual fact, the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favours.

It feels like there’s a lot to unpack in that couple of sentences.  The patents he mentions go into a special “Free Intellect Foundation,” which is a more careful way of basically just flinging a complete idea out into the wild.  Agalmia: gift culture.

He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that.

Aah, when we thought there’d be a trackable reputation economy.  Cory, what damage you wrought on the poor innocent heads of the socially optimistic.  Charlie himself ended up taking down Klout last year.

In other senses, of course, this does exist.  Checking Likes, Instagram and Tumblr hearts and even +1s.  Your reputation’s only as good as the last piece of content you gave to a social network.  How much time do we spend assimilating content and spitting the tastiest bits back out into the world in order to gain reputation as a gifted regurgitator?  Where we’re adding no more to each piece of information than the identifying DNA in the smear of saliva we leave on it?

The metacortex – a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot pet) – is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge.

I kind of want to mention Weavrs here – I still have to find the time to train the one I spawned last year, but (with all respect to the developers) I doubt I’ll ever be able to make it do what I want.  Intelligent Agents are going to be a pipedream for a while longer, I suspect.  Which makes me sad.  But there’s something here – Weavrs and other software instances like Google Alerts can enact discovery, and bring us information we wouldn’t necessarily have the time or awareness to grab manually.  This makes me want to spawn new sets of Google Alerts.  I only have a couple running right now, for hauntology and radiophonics, which I set up a couple of years back.

"Do I know you?" he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.

"Amsterdam, three years ago." The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear.

"Annette from Arianespace marketing?"

Not really in the flow of what I’m trying to talk about here, but: facial recognition software yoked to a contacts system hooked into a well-maintained calendar.

His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention.

Six hours behind the moment again.  But this is (in part) the same experience as picking up a smartphone with notifications enabled.

"What’s life coming to when I can’t cope with the pace of change?" he asks the ceiling plaintively.

Manfred is thirty when he says this.  I’m forty-four.

Am finding the time to cook a little bit, lately.  Nothing flashy.  I did a pasta sauce from scratch which I’ll probably note in MACHINE VISION this week.  But I also did a quick lunch, which went like this:

Small roasting tin.  Slice up a handful of tomatoes – I had 12 cherry tomatoes still in the veg box – into halves and quarters, and lay them skin side down in the tin.  Drizzle over a little olive oil, a tiny pinch of sugar, a twist of salt and a dash of balsamic vinegar if you have it.  It will all look quite appetising.  Enjoy it, because it’s the last time this tin will look appetising for some while.

Bang it in the over at around 190C (Gas mark 5 or 375F) for half an hour, or until the tomatoes are starting to char.

Get the tin out, and smash the tomatoes up a little bit with a fork, to release a little liquid.  Leave the oven on.

Now… what’s in your fridge?  I had a handful of Swedish meatballs and a couple of spring onions.  So I sliced those up and scattered them over the tomatoes.  I attempted to make a couple of shallow indentations in the mess.

(I wouldn’t recommend bacon, or chorizo, because they’d release fat into the tin, and I think that would end badly for you.  But if you habitually keep cooked meats in the fridge, as I do, this is a great way to use stuff up.)

I then took two eggs, fresh from the chicken’s bum, and carefully cracked them into the two indentations.  If you have some smoked paprika in the house, sprinkle some over the yolks.  Bang it back into the hottest part of the oven for ten minutes or so, until the whites go white rather than that sort of phlegmy transparent disgusting nonsense.

At which point you get baked eggs with smoked paprika tops on a bed of (whatever was in your fridge), spring onion and quick-roasted tomato.

Which, yes, does look like some terrible accident happened in your roasting tin involving a chicken and a dog that got run over by a bulldozer while throwing up.  But it tasted really good, and took no time at all.  It’s mostly just slicing stuff and tossing it into a tin.

Related articles

• Drone Porn And The New Aesthetic Sleepbot (warrenellis.com)
• GUEST INFORMANT: Anonymous (warrenellis.com)
• GRAVEL Director Announced (warrenellis.com)

I’d been reading again about Speculative Realism.  From a sourced Wikipedia entry, I tripped over this:

Expressing strong sympathy for panpsychism, (Graham) Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone"

Finally, subjects for philosophy that can’t argue back.  If you ignore armies.  And the ethical considerations around terming an army an “object.”  Which I won’t ascribe to sophomoric political naivete because I don’t know the man.  Elsewhere in the piece, this approach is described as “metaphysical realism,” as different from “Speculative Realism,” the latter term presumably being considered too on-the-nose as descriptor for the practise of sitting around and wondering what makes stones sad.

Anyway.  I was reminded of something someone else said once, and found a fair approximation of the notion in a piece he wrote:

Perhaps the Sun can think in a way barely imaginable to our more limited power of thinking, its thoughts interfacing with its ever changing patterns of vibratory activity. In this way, it is scientifically imaginable that the Sun could be conscious.

That is, of course, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, most recently the author of a book entitled in this country THE SCIENCE DELUSION.  The “Trialogue” discussions he had with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, in which he speculates about the specific psychic realities of suns, have been floating around the net as mp3s for years.  Dr Sheldrake, much like David Icke, presents as a perfectly nice and deeply committed man who wears terms like “deluded crank” with a degree of self-aware equanimity.  It strikes me that he could make a killing in philosophy today.

I’d been reading about it again because object-oriented ontology (short version: “how dare you wave your human privilege over stones”) and metaphysics had reared their Vitamin-D-deficient heads in relation to various discussions about The New Aesthetic.  And by “discussions” I mean, in most cases, people standing up and blustering a lot, frequently from the position that they wish they’d thought of it first or want you to believe they thought of it first.  Or, as an anonymous wit put it the other day, “that person who stands up in Q&As and goes “I don’t really have a question…””  Lots of philosophising, often using these recent tools. 

And mostly missing the point (especially when calling it “an art movement”): it’s already happened.  Bruce Sterling termed the NA tumblr a “gaudy, network-assembled heap made of digitized jackstraws,” which is a very Bruce Sterling way of handling James Bridle’s flat declarative “(it’s a) series of artifacts,”  But it surrounds the actuality, which is that it’s raw reportage.  It’s an unsorted Wikileaks dump of evidence that The New Aesthetic has been here for years, and it slid into view so insidiously that we didn’t even notice it.  We were all looking at tiny bits of it.  Everyone (in the fringe-y design-y tech-y circles that I exist on the outermost edges of) has gone nuts about it because so few people had had the massed raw evidence presented contextually to them like that.

The New Aesthetic may indeed have an ever changing (or at least oscillating) pattern of vibratory activity, but I don’t think whole thrust of the NA aggregation really supports the notion that it’s conscious.  And ferreting out a specific psychic reality may lead you down the path of machine awareness and cosmic layers of psyche, but I would suggest that that gets you only a few years of fun in a Weimar Cabaret bierkeller while your neighbourhood’s been marked up for drone vision.

I would go maybe this far down that road, if you want another quote to play with.  Here’s Charles Fort: “A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.”

Well, that got out of hand, for a ten-minute thought dump.  Not Fully Baked.

Seriously.  Just living in Interesting Times, work-wise, that are keeping my brain away from things like emblogenism.  I really have gotten bad at this, haven’t I?

My friend Cassandra Melena has released a new postcard. All attempts to keep up a certain posting frequency here have been thwarted.  I have been in a lot of phone conferences and a lot of email chains over the last few days.  While still technically “unemployed” – I haven’t settled on the subject of my second novel in the Mulholland Books deal yet – I seem to be talking to a lot of people about things. I’ve got at least two phone conferences booked for tomorrow, now, and more will probably be added, and they are all with very interesting people and I am looking forward to them, but of course they are not the sort of thing you can talk about. I’m sure some other stuff has happened, but I can’t think of any of it right now.

TRANSVERSE by Carter Tutti Void is a very good record.

Read full review of Transverse – CARTER TUTTI VOID on Boomkat.com ©

In an epic speculative post about commercial home-mapping services, Jan Chipchase drops this lovely idea bomb:

After seeing the nano-quadcopter presentation at TED 2012 – including this, but with a lot more background, insights into their capabilities, and a video of a quadcopter entering and mapping a building in real time – technically impressive stuff. First responders. Military. Pornographers. Research. Retail. This changes many things.

I think it might take me a while to fully digest this post by Matt Webb of BERG about products.  I have, for my entire career, staunchly fought against my work being called a product.  But there are a variety of lessons here, old and new – here’s an old one, which easily applies to book/comics covers –

products have to be shelf demonstrable — they can tell their story in 15 seconds, with no interaction beyond looking.

– that I think will be very much worth my time to think about.

Young James Bridle here apparently quoted me at SXSW earlier today, according to the little flurry of @s on Twitter, including the mordant Bruce Sterling comment: “Now Bridle is quoting Warren Ellis. It’s like a radically pixelated old home week in here.”  He was doing a thing about The New Aesthetic, which I’ve mentioned here before.  (You can get a quick catch-up by checking out the New Aesthetic tumblr.)  He’s now writing a fortnightly column for The Observer, and this link here should collect the pieces as they happen (first one’s up right now).

(Also: Bruce did his own fairly brain-burning NA capture of the NA thing at SXSW.)

In a perhaps similar mode, and found via tecxnotes, I will close this with 2SLEEP1:

2SLEEP1 is a 66-minute playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep.

It’s the New Aesthetic Sleepbot.

Which was very interesting, actually.

I don’t believe I’m allowed to mention why I was there, but I can assure you that it had nothing to do with national security or any actual function of government.  You are all safe.

It was all part of An Interesting Thing that an old acquaintance of mine has put together.  If said Interesting Thing survives the panel-beating that we’re all taking to it, then I imagine it’ll become public in due course.  You may be amused to learn, as I was, that I was drafted in as “the voice of not-sanity.”

The phones get taken away as soon as you enter No 10, of course, after going through an airport-like security process.  “It’s like an airport, except we don’t want your shoes.”  So I didn’t even attempt to get shots of the interior, which is very townhouse-like, only with state dining rooms.  Not all that interesting.  What I enjoyed more was the company: technologists, diplomats, political operators, educators and other arcane specialists, the sort of people I don’t often get to talk with.  The company alone made it worth an 830am meeting (830am being in all other ways a time that I do not believe humans should be forced to exist in).

So that happened.

This is journalist Laurie Penny, who was the other guest of the inaugural Outer Church community broadcast at London Fields Radio.  We were interviewed by Joseph Stannard, recent Guest Informant and vicar of the Outer Church parish, on Tuesday afternoon. By “interviewed,” I mean that they gave Laurie and I a steady stream of coffee and we basically talked Joe’s ear off for hours.  I believe the recording will be made available on London Fields’ Radio’s Mixcloud page towards the end of the month.  So you too can hear Laurie explain how I ruined her life.

In other news, I received the following shot in email from Michael Avon Oeming the other day.

It’s very probably got something to do with this and this and this.

And my final issue of SECRET AVENGERS came out.  I have no future new* comics work planned at present.  Which is weird.

*  just finishing off a couple of things.

If you own a Kindle, you will be aware that the screensaver image isn’t supposed to look like this. This is how I found my Kindle 3 (or, as we’re supposed to call it these days, Kindle Keyboard), late last night.  A frozen mass of e-ink visual glitch.  It’s actually kind of interesting-looking.  Unless you want to read a book.  And I was looking forward to a long last attack on Iain Sinclair’s GHOST MILK.  Flicking the power slider did nothing.  Holding the power slider for five seconds did nothing.  Holding it for twenty did nothing.  A full minute.  You get the idea.  I put the thing on charge, just in case, and came back to it this morning.  It was, as you see, quite buggered, and utterly unresponsive.  Dead.  An ex-Kindle.

  What you do, at this point, is go to Amazon (or, in my case, Amazon.co.uk) and go through their help structure.  And do all the things again.  And then press the button that says Contact Amazon.

At this point, I did not have high hopes, and assumed I’d be buying a new Kindle Keyboard at full price.  The device had been out of warranty for well over a year.  I pressed the button, and gave them permission to call me to (eventually, hours or days after I’d pressed said happy button)  discuss what I assumed would be another hundred-odd quid out of my pocket.

I was surprised at the instant callback.  Less surprised at the customer services person who had to ensure I wasn’t an idiot by making me do All The Things again, and then had me describe what you see above.  And then she transferred me to another department.  Where someone else had me do All The Things again again.

And then said, “Okay, well, you’re out of warranty, so we’ll send you a new one tomorrow and charge you [a fraction of the price] for it.”

I made her repeat the price again, because I swore I’d misheard it.  I hadn’t.  The new Kindle is dispatched, being tracked, and will arrive in the morning.  The whole process took less than five minutes from pressing the button on amazon.co.uk.

Isn’t it strange, to be so shocked by actual efficient, friendly and delightful customer service?  To have a global electronics company say, “well, hell, we’re sorry about this, how about we sort this out quickly and cheaply for you instead of humping you right in the eyesockets and stealing your wallet?”

In other news:

*  commencing the short revision on GUN MACHINE this week.

*  receiving interesting emails from Mike Avon Oeming – looks like our schedules are syncing again.

*  in the distance, tongues of fire emerge from the siege engines of the remote Whedon compound.  Also, a weak coughing sound.

*  and Templesmith took this, which presumably means he’s not yet dead.  Unless it means he’s about to be summoned into the realms of the Outer Gods:

That’s what they’re calling it in Scotland: winds gusting to 165mph.  We’re getting the barest edge of it down here in south-east England, but it’s enough to make it bitterly cold.  Hence and therefore, I made fire with sticks.  Like a man does.

And while freezing my bits off, I found literally one minute to record a spoken introduction to a forthcoming remix album by WHITE TRIANGLES.  You can find that piece at this link.

(I have a horrible voice.  Why do people ask me to do such things?  It’s all I can do to force myself to record the spoken-word for SPEKTRMODULE.  Thanks to the 1600 people who’ve listened to the second one, by the way.)

Only just stepped into my office for the first time today, at nearly 8pm.  Some serious time off has been required since the last rush and push to finish the novel.  Editor and Agent have now read GUN MACHINE, and pronounce it tolerable.  Actually, they were much more complimentary than that, but, as has been pointed out to me in the past by people who are wrong, I don’t take compliments very well, and also I can, with a week’s distance, start seeing all the things that are wrong with the book.  So next week… sigh… I start revising the novel, with a view to sealing a locked manuscript before Xmas.

That’s right, you hack!  Merry Xmas!  This year, you get to review all your own stark fucking stupidity in an intense two-week burst!

I know writers who enjoy the revision process.  I am not one of them.  Probably because, as a comics writer of two decades’ sentence, I am conditioned as a first-draft-is-the-only-draft pulp hack.

Also I am being utterly shamed as a scrawler by DAILY SHOW writer Rob Kutner, whose Kindle Single book THE FUTURE ACCORDING TO ME is really funny enough that I’m going to have to have his hands broken.

In the future, you can change your parts as easily as you change your pants.

This gives all of mankind access to hawk-like eyes, ears that can hear a pin dropping onto a pillow thousands of miles away… At least, that’s the theory. In practice, people pretty much just swap genitalia.

Blurring gender lines make business-world sexism and homophobia unsustainable, verging on hilarious. Dual-installment capability makes masturbation a thing of the past, and unplanned self?pregnancy the crisis du jour…

But new photos by Ellen Rogers always make the day better:

And so does this: a new song by Julia Holter, whose album TRAGEDY was a highlight of the year, and whose next album arrives in 2012 from RVNG:

Julia Holter – Marienbad by RVNG Intl.