I got the cover design for CROOKED LITTLE VEIN last night.

I like this an awful lot. All of a sudden I feel like A Real Novelist. It’s simple, understated, stark, and you can see my name on the cover from eighteen fucking miles away.

The black background will be gloss, the white letters will be matte, and the snake will be silver foil. People will rub themselves against the cover, grope and stroke it. Which, thinking about it, will ruin the sales. Ah well.

(Note also that if you go to the Amazon.com page for CLV, you can currently pre-order it and William Gibson’s SPOOK COUNTRY together for a bigger discount.)

The internet keeps telling me that an apparently rather good free magazine called ARTHUR has collapsed. The internet cannot, however, tell me why I have never ever seen one of these things during its reported four-year run, despite the occasional poke around for it in London. Was it an America-only thing?

MySpace say “If a widget violates our TOS, we block them. Breaches would include any person, widget or software that violates copyright, poses security risks, distributes pornography or engages in commercial activity.” So they’re blocking widgets by the likes of Imeem and Revver. Goodness, why would the purveyors of MySpace Video, owned by News Corp, want to block a Revver widget? I can’t possibly imagine why they wouldn’t want people to use widgets from a company that allows people to get paid for their videos.

But if all this is true, why does MySpace allow page-customising sites like FVX to make people’s profiles completely bypass almost all internal MySpace links and direct clicks to them instead?

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  In what has to be the most innovative promotion scheme since the leaked sex tape, NIN have treated their fans to a game that includes tour merchandising, a dizzying network of websites and, umm, bathrooms in European concert halls.
  (tags: brand pr music culture)
• BBC NEWS | Health | 1.7m ‘will have dementia by 2051′
  More than 1.7 million people in the UK will have dementia by 2051, costing billions of pounds each year, experts have forecast.
  (tags: med i+already+have+it)
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  Female koalas indulge in lesbian “sex sessions”, rejecting male suitors and attempting to mate with each other, sometimes up to five at a time
  (tags: sci)
• pasta and vinegar » The ubiquitous computing of today
  “An indefinitely postponed ubicomp future is one that need never take account of this complexity.”
  (tags: sci net culture future)

Seriously. Cyborg pigeons. I give up for the day. Who’s coming? We can huddle together against the evil stomping onslaught of The Future.

The Jubilees

Kelly Sue just said:

Apparently, rape victims in Missouri are billed for their rape kits. They have to pay for their evidence collection.

Oh no. Oh my god. A voiced alarm-clock with messages spoken by Stephen Fry.

“Who then was the being whose blond hair inexplicably became wrapped around Peter Khoury’s penis?”

Drug glands? Why bother! Fix-teeth are so much easier:

Forgetting to take medicine may be a thing of the past as researchers close in on creating an artificial tooth which automatically releases medicine. The Intellidrug device is small enough to fit inside two artificial molars in the jaw, the Engineer journal said.

(website)

“Die Gestalten Verlag proudly presents the launch of the new online store and platform for characters: Release The Freaks. It is the premier destination for character art presenting an unparalleled collection of designer toys…”

(details)

(Grand Fools)

(My coldest summer)

(The Mill)

“I Want You To Know” – Charlotte Hatherley

“Rides The Rails” – The Besnard Lakes

(all mp3s provided for review purposes only, deleted in seven days, contact if you need them lifted earlier than that)

Preview of the new comics series by Matt Silady. Superb, courageous cover design, too.

Blurbs for the back cover of my forthcoming novel that you’re already sick of hearing about CROOKED LITTLE VEIN are coming in:

“Crooked Little Vein is perfect Warren Ellis — ruthless, unforgiving, and oddly beautifully bitterly human. Plus it’s packed with all my favorite references: porn theories, Alan Alda, seventy-one year old serial killers, and an alternate U.S. Constitution bound in alien skin. Get ready for a wonderful kick in the teeth that’ll make you lick your bloody lip with masochistic joy.”

- Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Fate

“I think this book ate my soul. Warren Ellis has mapped out the psycho-sexual underbelly of America with a foreigner’s clarity and a lunatic’s glee. Funny, inventive and blithely appalling, this book is Dante on paint fumes.”

- Joss Whedon, creator, writer and director of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series

“Warren Ellis writes like a bi-polar Raymond Chandler. Crooked Little Vein injects at least two welcome elements into the tired, clogged mystery field: a a little death and a little life. It’s also funny enough to make you shit standing.”

- Kinky Friedman, author of Ten Little New Yorkers

The novel’s Amazon page is here. It’s not out until July. It’s currently ranked #408 on Amazon’s sales list, and although we all know that number’s a bit artificial, it still makes me smile a bit.

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  (tags: space pol)
• Jesus: Tales from the Crypt – The Middle East Blog – TIME
  James Cameron claims to have the bones of Jesus.
  (tags: religion sci weird)