May 24th, 2006 | comics talk
Video games are some of the strongest memories I have from my youth, which is sad and pathetic but not limited to me, I think. When you spend hundreds of hours playing these things, they inevitably become part of the fabric of your life, and Scott Pilgrim reflects that. Rock music and video games were a huge part of my youth, and now I can spit them back out in the form of comics/manga, so we get all three.
May 24th, 2006 | researchmaterial
A nice introductory profile of Sasha Shulgin:
The jolly, white-haired and bearded chemist, who resembles a rather malnourished Santa Claus after several nights on the tiles, claims he has always been motivated by a higher purpose than just getting high.
“My art is being able to make new compounds that can be used as tools in new ways,†he says picking at a piece of quiche on the long wooden dining table in his photograph-cluttered dining room. “I’m exploring these areas to develop tools for study of the mind. The purpose has always been that, in time – probably not in my lifetime – people would have access to these materials and actually go into the mental process to try to work out the mechanism of the human mind. Not the brain, but the mind.â€
Shulgin’s own mind is still working well. His body may be failing him – “I’m virtually blind in my left eye and my teeth are falling apart†– but his brain is fully functioning and, throughout our interview, he only occasionally fails to recall places rather than people or the complex names of chemicals…
May 23rd, 2006 | comics talk
… returned from my local printer yesterday with a couple of surprisingly-heavy boxes full of postcards advertising Phonogram, each one sporting the B-side strip. Now we want to get them into the hands of people.
This is where you come in.
While we’re planning to get the postcards to local comic shops directly, for our initial sending out we’d like to stay true to our punky fanzine roots and get other humans involved.
Basically, do you have a local comic shop you enter regularly? Would you be willing to take a small pile of these lovely /objects d’art/ in and ask the proprietor to have on the counter? Do you wish to join arms in a grand fraternity of Phonogam and chant to our dark and nameless Gods?
If the answers to all of the above are yes, drop me a line at Kieron dot Gillen at Gmail dot com and I’ll get the little parcel in the post to you.
May 23rd, 2006 | Uncategorized
May 23rd, 2006 | researchmaterial
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season will be “above normal”, according to the US climate agency.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts there will be 13-16 named storms, four of which will be “major storms”… reaching category three or above.
“Although we do not anticipate reaching or exceeding last year’s extraordinary tally of storms, these forecast numbers exceed the seasonal forecast average…”
May 22nd, 2006 | researchmaterial
The 33-year-old man, identified only by his surname, Zou, charged partygoers 30-50 yuan (US$3.70-US$6.20) for prurient services offered at his “Hot Dream Party for Cool Beijing Boys” events, the Beijing News said.
Zou pleaded guilty to the charge of “gathering people for the purpose of sexual promiscuity,” it said.
Homosexuals were strongly persecuted after China’s 1949 communist revolution, condemned as products of decadent Western and feudal societies. Official attitudes gradually have changed since the late 1980s, and in 2001, the China Psychiatric Association stopped listing homosexuality as a mental illness.
Looser enforcement of laws on homosexual behavior has allowed small but thriving gay scenes to emerge in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities in the developed east. (AP)
May 22nd, 2006 | researchmaterial
No one who last June heard the story of “Child B” would have failed to have been moved. The eight-year-old child, brought to the UK from Angola, was beaten, cut and had chilli rubbed in her eyes after her aunt and two others believed she was a witch. The girl’s aunt, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and two others, Sita Kisanga and Sebastian Pinto, were jailed – but the case sparked widespread fears over whether a new form of child abuse centred on African “healing” customs had arrived in Britain.
Child B was not the first such child abuse case to emerge from African communities. The appalling death of Victoria Climbie in February 2000 included an element of belief in possession and witchcraft. Separately, police are still investigating the identity of “Adam”, the torso of a Nigerian boy found in 2001.
And amid these terrible stories, and fears of others, there remains enormous confusion over the extent of the problem.
A Metropolitan Police report last year suggested that abuse linked to churches was rife. That report into the hearsay and claims, intended to help focus police activities, became embroiled in a row when some groups accused officers of a racist witch-hunt, no pun intended. And so, a year on, nobody is nearer the truth. Except perhaps for the Department for Education and Skills (DFES).
At a conference on Monday, leaders of Congolese churches in Britain are calling on ministers to urgently publish research they commissioned into the allegations of witchcraft and possession. The research is understood to have been completed and is sitting on a desk somewhere in the department. A spokesman for the DFES, which has responsibility for child protection policy, says it is being considered by ministers, but will give no publication date, despite widespread expectations that it would have been released in March. Recently revised guidelines from the department do however underline that faith groups should have child protection policies in place…
…Project Violet, the Met’s unit investigating faith-related child abuse, (says) of the 42,000 child abuse allegations the Met has dealt with in the past five years, 52 of them were related to allegations against African spiritualists offering “deliverance” from possession. Eight of these have ended up in court, although other investigations resulted in action by social services…
May 21st, 2006 | Uncategorized
May 20th, 2006 | Uncategorized
May 19th, 2006 | Uncategorized
May 19th, 2006 | Work
I just found the following post in the comments section for “FELL #5 Out Today”:
Any place to order FELL #5 over the net? Asked for it at a comicbookshop where I live (Oslo), (and) their response was that they had stopped taking it in as it sold out too fast!
I really want the name of this shop, so that I can have my friends in Oslo burn it the fuck down.
If there are any Scandinavian stores carrying FELL that’d help this guy out with an internet sale, please speak in the comments section. Thank you.
WarrenEllis.com runs on a Wordpress engine. If you've read the whole page you may want to return to the top, subscribe via RSS, or find Warren on Twitter @warrenellis.
