My copy of THE RINGS OF SATURN is the 1998 edition from the Harvill Press. The binding’s grown brittle, and the pages are snapping out of the spine as I turn them. The book’s falling apart behind me as I read it. I feel like I need to dash to the other side before the words come away under my feet.

(From Magdalene Veen and the band Abney Park)

Superb article by Justin Taylor on what I thought was a piece of 70s apocrypha, Luigi Serafini’s illustrated alien manuscript The Codex Seraphinianus.

The Futurist: A Future Timeline for Automobiles

The Futurist: A Future Timeline for Energy

The new album by The Crimea, available for free download at this link. They made it free after being dropped by their record label. Frankly, only the last track has the swagger, scale and invention that I originally associated with them upon hearing the first version of their “White Russian Galaxy” in 2003. I have a theory that every band has one single great song in them, and I suspect that, for The Crimea, “White Russian Galaxy” might be it. I need to give this album a few more listens. Go and download it. But listen to the Psychomodo-style riff and stomp of one of the great lost pop songs of the 2000s, while you’re at it:

“White Russian Galaxy” – The Crimea

(2003 CD single – mp3 for review purposes only, removed in 7 days)

Had to doublecheck first the date (not April 1) and then that they weren’t talking about “cake”:

Nick was likely taking a new, sometimes hard-to-detect drug concoction called “cheese”—a mixture of heroin and cold medication. One Saturday night in June that year, Nick, 16, came home from a party in an apparently altered state. Dave was worried, but decided to let his son sleep it off. The next day, when Nick failed to emerge from his room, Dave went in. “It was not pretty,” he recalls. “He was already gone.”

A Sunny Day In Glasgow

Courtesy of Neil Gaiman.

(edie and andy)

Well, this is just fucking weird.

I just heard from Rich Johnston, who gave me the following list of Eagle Awards given out in Bristol on Saturday Night:

Favourite Comics Writer
WARREN ELLIS

Favourite New Comicbook
NEXTWAVE

Favourite Comics Story published during 2006
NEXTWAVE

Favourite Comics Villain
DIRK ANGER

Roll of Honour
WARREN ELLIS

This is so wrong.

Late last night, I received the following message from Brian K Vaughan:

…for what little it may be worth to you, you won about 600 Eagle Awards tonight, including best villain, best writer, and “Roll of Honour.” Isn’t that last one normally reserved for dead people? Either way, good show, old timer.

(And your “Roll of Honour” trophy is embarrassingly large. Even a feeble elderly person such as yourself will be able to kill any home invader with it.)

I never win comics awards. And Google can’t actually find any details on the results of the Awards, which apparently were given yesterday evening at a comics convention in Bristol. In fact, even though the results were given out some 12 hours ago, they’re not on the internet. Which is kind of eerie. I suspect Vaughan, a newly-minted staff tv writer, has quickly gone down the route of flavoured crystal meth and anal cocaine rubs, and is just making shit up. Don’t do network television, kids. It’s just bad for you.

myspace

email diary

livejournal

my messageboard

my messageboard’s social network system

flickr

last.fm

Second Life columns at Reuters

CASTLEVANIA: DRACULA’S CURSE workblog

(These are the active ones: have previously had presences on places like Xpeeps, Comicspace, MyNetSpot, Consumating, Suicide Girls, but have pared things back to the ones that are personally useful and/or interesting. Haven’t got rid of Facebook yet, but am obviously going to because it’s useless.)

Email is still warrene @ aol.com.

The Wired groupblog Table Of Malcontents, whose owners recently chose not to support its own writers, won’t be around for long, says Eliza Gauger:

Table of Malcontents is being gassed by Wired. You have until June 30th to enjoy the gutted, stinking remains of what was, briefly, the absolute only source of steampunk hentai you would ever need. A moment of silence, please. Followed by a moment of gurgling screams.

“I find three miserable naked men in a sex club looking for a mistress to savage their little avatars. A vast vampire-themed club with not even the undead laying around. A space station that feels like it’s re-enacting the final days of Mir, all the service modules undocked and waiting to be deorbited. A massive replica of a STAR TREK Starfleet vessel with all hands missing, shipwrecked seven hundred meters up.”

It’s okay to be scared shitless:

A Pakistani public information campaign about what to do if you stumble across stray radioactive material is raising hairs on the necks of Western arms control experts.

The ads, which appeared last week in several Urdu-language newspapers, featured the large, yellow radiation symbol and a warning to report any lost or misplaced isotopes.

(From PALE WITNESS)

(Free Yourself)

(logan stretch)

“Why I don’t want children:

I think it’s selfish to get a pet that will outlive you.”

.

Originally uploaded by kristamas°.

(it’s not that easy being green)

DJ Spider says:

The creators of Viagra are going to come up with a cure for the premature female orgasm.

Yup. I’ve never heard of it either. But apparently that whole AIDS epidemic is under control, because this took a bit of priority.

(details in link and beyond)

http://www.gopingme.com:

Ping Me is an interactive reminder service. You set up “pings” to be sent to your mobile device or email account at a certain date and time, and when you receive them you can reply, causing them to be rescheduled. So if you set up a ping to remind you to “call your mother” and you get it while you’re at the pub, you can reply “3 hours” or “tomorrow.”

Man, and I thought VESPERTINE was worthless. All is forgiven, little glitchy bollocks record. If I’d known VOLTA was coming, I might not have snapped you in half and thrown you in the bin to ensure you didn’t somehow reproduce.

Actually, I would have. And I’m going to do the same with this. This is just gutless, half-blind grabby-handed cultural tourism from a woman who may not even realise she has nothing left to say. If there’s fascination in VOLTA, it’s in watching a corpse continue to twitch years after it pissed on its chips.

I so loved the Sugarcubes, and DEBUT, and HOMOGENIC, that I keep buying Bjork records unheard, on the benefit of the doubt. This is the last one. I’m all done.