Well, I was going to direct your attention to the much-threatened opening of OurMedia, a gloriously free system intended to host creators’ Creative Commons-licensed media forever, with unlimited bandwidth.

But, of course, the site doesn’t work.

Cue people who’ve been working in internet businesses for ten or fifteen years telling you that “they didn’t expect such traffic” and etcetera.

UNDERRATED: issue 5 of an impressive PDF magazine about music. It’s free, so grab one.

“Not For Human Use” my arse.

“Free accounts will have more storage and uploads — pro accounts too — AND they’ll be cheaper.”

Still plugging new bands and making your ears bleed on a regular basis.

Songs made freely available for download on the internet by the artists, put into a single file and released as a podcast mixtape for several hundred of my closest friends.

Podcast address: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com/rss

Direct download: here

All previous mixtapes: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com

The Queen’s composer has ruffled feathers after police found the body of a swan at his home.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music, was cautioned over the discovery of the remains of a protected species at his house in Orkney.

He said the bird died after hitting a power line. When police called at his home he offered them swan terrine.

Sir Peter said he did not believe he had done anything wrong but, given his position with the Queen, he was prepared to spend time in the Tower of London.

Swans are protected under UK legislation. However, in the islands a Norse right called Udal Law is still assumed to hold sway, possibly making swans the property of the people…

“…They fall down dead and I’m afraid some people eat them. You take them home and you hang them for four days and then you take out the breast meat and the good leg meat, you give the rest to the cat and dispose of the rest.

“I didn’t realise the police had also taken some wings from previous swans which were hanging in the shed. I was going to give them to the school because they use them as Gabriel’s wings in the nativity play…”

“…I offered them coffee and asked them if they would like to try some swan terrine but I think they were rather horrified. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

I’m reopening my old message board, in a different location, for 12 hours today — starting now.

http://warrenellis.suddenlaunch3.com/

Free forum, phpBB software — so there’s a fair chance it could die on its arse within a few hours.

It is open for 12 hours — from roughly now until 2am UK time. (Or until I get sick of it, which could be some hours earlier.)

Obviously, it’s not in the old location — I don’t even have a Delphi account anymore — so you’ll have to register. And phpBB is ugly as sin. But what the hell. Real names only, please — otherwise how the hell will people remember you from the old one? NOTE: the password email the system sends can end up in spam filters, so check it.

12 hours. I realise everyone on the old WEF is cast to the four winds now, but I’d really like to hear from as many people from the old place as possible. And if you weren’t around before, fuck it, come in and say hello anyway.

12 hours starts now.

– W

A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said.

It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds. When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons.

These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.

But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it. Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.

The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball’s core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as “Hawking” radiation…

Computer chips capable of speeding data around by rippling the electrons on the surface of metal wires just got a step closer, researchers say.

Mark Brongersma, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, US has found a new way to model the three-dimensional propagation of these ripples – called plasmons – in two dimensions. He says the new model is much simpler and more intuitive than existing simulations and will be crucial in the design of plasmonic components for computer chips.

Plasmons travel at the speed of light and are created when light hits a metal at a particular angle, causing waves to propagate through electrons near the surface.

Currently the biggest application for plasmons is in gold-coated glass biosensors, which detect when particular proteins or DNA are present – the bio-matter changes the angle at which light hitting the surface produces the most intense plasmons.

But scientists would love to use plasmons to ferry data around computer chips because they could operate at frequencies 100,000 times faster than today’s Pentium chips, without requiring thicker wiring…

(Found by Paul Di Filippo, thanks)

By constant and annoying demand, I re-present the first Superburst Mixtape. Originally hosted on a different system to the one I use now, a system that tended to break the second I touched it.

The direct download is here.

And now, finally, all the Mixtapes to date are now stored here on LibSyn.

Last time I’m going to mention it, but a few more votes here will put the Mixtape on the front page of Podcast Alley, giving these musicians some much-needed exposure.

Songs made freely available for download on the internet by the artists, put into a single file and released as a podcast mixtape for several hundred of my closest friends.

Podcast address: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com/rss

Direct download: here

(Almost) All previous mixtapes: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com

If you like Superburst Mixtape, go here and vote for it. Getting on to the front page of sites like this will help draw attention to the artists in the Mixtapes, and another fifty votes will do it.

And tell your friends.

everybody’s hiding something

FELL: one detective in the worst town in America.

FELL is a monthly comic book by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith, to be published by Image Comics from autumn 2005.

FELL is represented in film, tv and other media by Angela Cheng Caplan.

Left lateral view of a dog after a barium enema:

Now, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Seriously. There’s no way you’ll be able to hide your reaction once you’ve seen this picture.

Siege found this. Siege is my perverted Brain-Clone Nemesis.