• Cancer chemical in street cocaine
  Cocaine’s street price is falling because it is being cut with a carcinogenic agent: dealers in Britain are now selling the drug with purity as low as 30%. Phenacetin is one of the key chemicals now being used because it closely resembles pure cocaine.
  (tags: crime drugs)

Just a quick note: before I break my brain trying to puzzle out how to set up a viral networked text-broadcast system in SL, I thought I’d start slow and simple. Every day or two I’ll be writing a SECOND SIGNAL note that people can pick up from Integral Bay, which is at Gibbosa (152, 35, 29) if you don’t want to go inworld from that link. Just look for the big ugly SECOND SERVER device I stuck together in 30 seconds.

Is that everyone sends around that goddamn William Burroughs Thanksgiving prayer that everyone else has all seen a million fucking times.

Why can’t you people just pass smallpox-infected blankets among yourselves for Thanksgiving, as your ancestors intended?

• Hitachi: Commercial Mind-Machine Interface by 2011
  Hitachi’s new neuroimaging technique allows its operator to switch a train set on and off by thought alone, and the Japanese company aims to commercialize it within five years.
  (tags: sci tech mek bodymod)

Chris Weston puts the boot in:

Helicopters hang in the air above the square at strange angles, abandoned yet not dropping. In the distance, a grey smoke-trail jumps up into the sky as a military rocket bangs off its launcher. Girls linger by the edges of the square, skins mutilated by MISSING IMAGE placeholders. Boys collapse on the ground from ballistic flight and failed landings, like crap superheroes.

This is what people new to Second Life see.

I’m on Help Island, where Second Life users who left the gated Welcome Area too soon can get questions answered about the world and system. Right now, it’s kind of quiet. I’ve been touring the help areas. Yesterday I was at the Infohub in Mauve area — the infohubs provide a similar function to Help Island — and the place was just a nightmare of people screaming “Help!”

I’ve been on Help Island a half-hour. I’ve seen exactly one Second Life Mentor, one of the team of dedicated volunteers that serve the populace here. And that illustrates the problem. Tens of thousands of new users every week are swamping the support system.

In Mauve yesterday, a small group called FREAK CREW fired off a sumogun at the huge crowd at the Infohub. A sumogun fires a bunch of harmless replicating bombs that go off with much sound and fury. In the chat channel, they sound off as R2 BOMB. A couple of dozen people new to SL just saw the word BOMB and freaked. FREAK CREW followed up with a classic freakout, a massively replicating picture with a sound file attached yelling “Get Lost!” And then started randomly placing people into unbreakable cages. A few dozen new users thought they’d dropped into the apocalypse, the poor sods.

Funny: as I write this, someone’s just fired a sumogun on Help Island.

In deciding to take a look at the state of the infohub system over the last few days, I quickly found it was best to run shields and weaponry. The infohubs are being attacked pretty regularly, one way or another — I clicked into one earlier to find it being filled with fifty-foot-high pink boxes — and I do not enjoy being shot with things or trapped in cages when I’m just trying to look around.

Some of it is obviously just razzing the newbies. Some of it — like the “Get Lost” strike — seems to be spitting at new, unpaid account holders, who are being treated like devil-sperm by longtime, paying SL users. You can see it on the loathesome comments-section of the official SL blog — longtime users who pay a lot of money to be able to pretend to fuck glowing teddy bears in shiny purple floating penis-houses, and therefore resent people entering the world for free and using up valuable underage-bear-raping bandwidth.

It’s strange. I originally thought I’d be tracking the emergence of something with some serious potential. But, with two million accounts projected for the end of the year and the grid apparently already groaning under the load, I’m wondering if I’m not here to document its collapse. SL is making news for all the wrong reasons…

CNN, via Victoria:

Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent satirist behind “M-A-S-H,” “Nashville” and “The Player” who made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story conventions, died at a Los Angeles Hospital, his production company said Tuesday. He was 81. The director died Monday night, Joshua Astrachan, a producer at Altman’s Sandcastle 5 Productions in New York City, told The Associated Press. The cause of death wasn’t disclosed.

He was an evil old sod, Robert Altman. He always worked best from a position of contempt, and it colours all his films, even “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” and the way the camera traps poor pathetic Mona. But he leaves behind an astonishing, untouchable oeuvre: even largely forgotten films like “Secret Honor” and “Countdown” resonate. Robert Altman was the last great American director who wasn’t afraid to hate.

Be aware: warrenellis.com may temporarily vanish. Looks like I may have to move website hosts again. After Globat’s customer service system pretty much collapsed, I moved to Dreamhost. Dreamhost are now freaking out about the amount of traffic this site gets (150,000 hits/2GB a day, on average), and are currently requesting that I either pretty much reduce this site to a .txt file or pay them $400/mo for dedicated hosting.

We’ll see how it goes. But, you know… don’t pound me with email if the site suddenly vanishes. It’ll just mean that someone’s pulled a plug and I’m having to go elsewhere.

(Close-up, for those people who can’t make it out, reveals copy of NEXTWAVE)

• Barbara DeDominicis
  electronic torch songs
  (tags: music)
• AVN :: Articles – Greedy Busts Out MySpace Parody, MyPlace
  For this quote: “She started deep throating the guy but she wasn’t used to it so she threw up a little.”
  (tags: sex)
• U.S. mint pushes new $1 coin with images of past presidents – Nov. 20, 2006
  Richard M. Nixon, who resigned in disgrace in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, will appear on the coin in 2016.
  (tags: wtf that+can’t+be+right noooooooooo)

Via Rich Johnston:

This one airs in the USA tonight. Through nefarious means, I have just watched it.

This is the one I’ve been waiting for since the pilot. This is the one that works. There’s one central concept I had to kind of roll with, telling myself that of course other people will find Harriet Hayes more attractive than I do. But all of a sudden there’s pace and attack and well-timed reveals and pretty much all of the things that were missing from the pilot until now. And, finally, a couple of lines that made me laugh.

If you liked the pilot, watch this one.

I mean, it still ain’t DEADWOOD. But what is? Even a chunk of the last DEADWOOD season wasn’t DEADWOOD.

Fraction just sent me this. I have to run it in its entirety:

Satire hands a right
Fox, Surnow prep conservative skein
By MICHAEL LEARMONTH

Now Fox News Channel, a primary source of material for Jon Stewart
and Stephen Colbert, is teaming with the exec producer of “24″ to try
its hand at a news satire show for conservatives to love.

Joel Surnow, co-creator of “24,” is shooting two half-hour pilots of
a skein he described as ” ‘The Daily Show’ for conservatives,” due to
air in primetime on Saturdays in January.

If successful, the show could take its place on the regular schedule,
adding satire to FNC’s formula of news and opinion.

“The way I look at it, almost every comedy show or satire show I see
uses the same talking points against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney,”
Surnow said. “The other side hasn’t been skewered in a fair and
balanced way.”

The working title of the show has been “This Just In,” but that will
change because AOL just launched a broadband comedy channel by that
name.

The pilot segs will be co-anchored by comedians Kurt Long and Susan
Yeagley and feature a family of correspondents. “There will be some
elements of ‘The Daily Show’ and some of ‘Weekend Update,’ ” Surnow
said.

Surnow originally pitched the show to Fox Entertainment prexy Peter
Liguori, who is searching for latenight programming for the Fox
network. Liguori passed but connected Surnow with Roger Ailes, who in
addition to Fox News Channel also runs Twentieth Century Television
and the Fox stations group.

Ailes, a big fan of “24,” got to know Surnow during a visit to the
set. As former producer of “The Mike Douglas Show,” Ailes knows the
variety show format.

“I want him to be as creatively involved as he wants to be,” Surnow
said. “He’s the perfect blend of politics and entertainment.”

Surnow said the show will feature man-on-the-street interviews and
“respond to the news of the day.” It will be scripted and may not
have in-studio guests, a point of departure from Stewart and Colbert.

The pilots will be co-exec produced by Manny Coto, also of “24,” and
run by Ned Rice, an eight-year veteran of HBO’s “Politically Incorrect.”

Comedy Central’s shows became hits during a time of Republican
dominance of politics. But now the tide has shifted.

“Everybody who is in power should get shots equally,” Surnow said.
“By January, we will have a whole bunch of new people to do material
about.”

The standard rule of thumb is that conservative satire doesn’t work.

Woo fucking hoo. This is not what I personally took from the aspirational concept of human spaceflight.

“HDTV provides up to six times the resolution of regular analog video,” said Rodney Grubbs, NASA principal investigator. “On previous missions, we’ve flown HDTV cameras but had to wait until after the mission to retrieve the tapes, watch the video and share it with the science and engineering community, the media and the public. For the first time ever, this test lets us stream live HDTV from space so the public can experience what its like to be there.”

Big fucking whoop. You can now transmit high definition tv from a whole two hundred and twenty miles away, showing us exactly what it’s like to live in a small room with only an airflow fan to save you from the smell of your own farts. I didn’t need HDTV or a principal investigator of fucking anything to bring me this news from the human frontier.

And I live in a country that won’t even fund its own astronauts. I have to acknowledge that, even as I curse the ISS for being an orbiting bullshit scow and Nixon for approving the stupid fucking Space Shuttle to buy aerospace money/votes in an election year…bah. I’m having a drink now.

I’m sorry. The guy really does look like a Muppet to me. Anyway, two gems from thinkprogress just popped up on my radar, indicating that McCain, the cuddly Republican, has pulled a hard right. Which means he’s deadly serious about running in ’08, the poor doomed old bastard.

First of all, McCain’s flipflopped on Roe vs Wade (you mean he told a San Francisco newspaper he supported Roe vs Wade in 1999? Surely not. That means he’s a… politician! Shitheads) while on American TV:

I do believe that it’s very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should — could overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support.

Oh, but it gets better:

In 2000, John McCain called Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance.” Now, he has hired the debate coach from Falwell’s Liberty University, Brett O’Donnell, to advise him on his communications strategy. O’Donnell has been executing Falwell’s strategy to train scores of debaters to confront “the culture on moral default.”

Oh, and:

Today on ABC’s This Week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) acknowledged that his plan to escalate the Iraq war by sending at least 20,000 more troops “would put a terrible strain on the Army and Marine Corps.” “Absolutely, it would be terrible,” he said, “we’re going to be asking people to go back again and again, maybe even extend their tours.”

The old boy’s plainly got brain bubbles. The question is, are they the kind of brain bubbles that the hard right and the evangelical right like, over there?

• The Black Angels
  Playing live at KEXP
  (tags: music)
• The Questioner
  experimental guitar music
  (tags: music)

• SF Cover Explorer
  covers from the visual index of science fiction cover art, courtesy Terry Gibbons/ – move the mouse over the covers to see more information, click to see the cover full-size /- covers are arranged horizontally by time, and vertically by average hue
  (tags: web sf covers design)

powered by ODEO

When was the last time I wrote a character wearing shades? Was it Spider? Jones has his goggles, but he doesn’t wear them much.

I was watching this video Fraction sent me. It’s a collection of the last thirty seconds of teasers from a bunch of CSI MIAMI episodes — the bit before they smash-cut to the main title sequence. Now, you know how CSI works — the teaser sets up the crime, the protagonist cranks off a smart line, smash in the titles. Right?

This video — it’s on YouTube – is surreally compelling. David Caruso – the Carusobot, as we know him — hits every one of his last-line zingers with the same cadence. “What are you going to do, Carusobot?” “We-e-e…are going to find ourselves a bear rapist.” Crash in The Who, main titles.

But in almost all of them, he does the same action. “We-e-e…” …and he puts on his shades before doing the rest of the line. (Apparently, they’re referred to on set as “the sunglasses of justice”.)

The shades are crucial to CSI MIAMI, as they are to cyberpunk fiction (and the techno-thriller, both of which CSI shares DNA with). For the Carusobot IS a deranged, implacable machine. You cannot see his eyes. He therefore shows no human emotion. It’s the Uncanny Valley equation: you can pull the face into any expression you like, but the eyes are dead. In cyberpunk, as Bruce Sterling said in MIRRORSHADES, the shades are vital both to conceal emotion and to hide the fact that you’re unslept, drugged half to death and blatantly insane.

(Also: THE BLUES BROTHERS.)

To don the shades at the beginning of a story is the equivalent of Superman changing into costume (or, in a more obscure read, James Spader putting on a black shirt at the top of SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE).

With so many stories behind me, I have to be careful about repeating visual tics. But I love the idea of putting mythic weight behind something as simple as putting on a pair of shades.

The semiotics of shades. I tell you, I am fucking losing it…

(crosspost from Bad Signal)

Apologies to anyone trying to read the site over the last hour and finding it cycling through different designs. I feel like the place needs a repaint.

NOTE: I am just testing pre-baked themes. Nothing here is permanent, so don’t freak out if you come in and everything’s flowery…

• Special Report on Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years – New Scientist
  What will be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years? As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations we asked over 70 of the world’s most brilliant scientists for their ideas.
  (tags: sci future)
• Toilet evidence links Dead Sea Scrolls to sect
  archaeologists have discovered the latrines used by the sect that produced the scrolls, discovering that efforts to achieve ritual purity inadvertently exposed members to intestinal parasites that shortened their lifespan
  (tags: religion history)

(no desire)

Xeni’s in Guatemala. The hotel decor would be less scary if the government security forces weren’t still killing rural families over “land disputes.”