From May 2008.

A Radio 1 spokesman said: “Grooverider has paid a very high price for a serious mistake.”

His mistake, of course, was going to Dubai in the first place. Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t go to Dubai.

TOME OF BEELZEBUB AND CHRIST: anyone got the complete URL?

Well, that was an awesomely shitty few days. Let’s see if this week’s any better. Bad Signal’s still down, and this time I’m obviously going to have to move the service. Stay subscribed for now, in case I can get one last send through the system, but watch this page for news. Thanks.

Twitter with photo/video payloads, basically. I know people have been working on somehow bolting payloads on to Twitter itself, which I think utterly misunderstands the nature and usefulness of Twitter. (Not that Twitter’s worked for me since Friday night, but still.) This, however, may have uses for people not as a replacement service, but as an additional service.

• Category:Jackspeak – RRPedia
  naval slang
  (tags: localspace)

The Bad Signal list is down again. Hopefully this will just be another short outage.

Is live.

In which I torture another interviewer by basically not telling them anything, at length:

…she doesn’t live in the real world some of the time. Well, she lives in the real world. But she works somewhere else. Does that make any sense? Probably not to you. It makes sense to me. But I speak to computers and believe I hear them speak back to me from the future.

Taken from Harlan Ellison’s online community, reproduced in its unedited entirety below:

HARLAN ELLISON ON THE WRITERS STRIKE SETTLEMENT

YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO RE-POST THIS ANYWHERE:

Creds: got here in 1962, written for just about everybody, won the Writers Guild Award four times for solo work, sat on the WGAw Board twice, worked on negotiating committees, and was out on the picket lines with my NICK COUNTER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHE$$$ sign. You may have heard my name. I am a Union guy, I am a Guild guy, I am loyal. I fuckin’ LOVE the Guild.

And I voted NO on accepting this deal.

My reasons are good, and they are plentiful; Patric Verrone will be saddened by what I am about to say; long-time friends will shake their heads; but this I say without equivocation…

THEY BEAT US LIKE A YELLOW DOG. IT IS A SHIT DEAL. We finally got a timorous generation that has never had to strike, to get their asses out there, and we had to put up with the usual cowardly spineless babbling horse’s asses who kept mumbling “lessgo bac’ta work” over and over, as if it would make them one iota a better writer. But after months on the line, and them finally bouncing that pus-sucking dipthong Nick Counter, we rushed headlong into a shabby, scabrous, underfed shovelfulla shit clutched to the affections of toss-in-the-towel summer soldiers trembling before the Awe of the Alliance.

My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It gave away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some bullshit short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words; it sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before anyone even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we were meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The WGAw folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.

And I am ashamed of this Guild, as I was when Shavelson was the prexy, and we wasted our efforts and lost out on technology that we had to strike for THIS time. 17 days of streaming tv!!!????? Geezus, you bleating wimps, why not just turn over your old granny for gang-rape?

You deserve all the opprobrium you get. While this nutty festschrift of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won’t be saying nasty shit behind your back, remember this:

You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you, outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.

Please excuse my temerity. I’m just a sad old man who has fallen among Quislings, Turncoats, Hacks and Cowards.

I must go now to whoops. My gorge has become buoyant.

Respectfully, Yr. Pal, Harlan Ellison

###

“Astronauts aboard the International Space Station apparently have access to a gun. Russian Cosmonauts carry a gun on their Soyuz space capsule, which is attached to the space station.”

You know… given that astronauts have not only flown the Space Shuttle when drunk, but have also driven across America for 12 hours wearing a nappy in order to attempt to kill someone… is it really a smart thing to put a loaded gun on a space station?

The gun is located in a survival kit between some seats aboard the Soyuz spacecraft. All the crewmembers know about it, and U.S. astronauts who fly aboard the Soyuz are trained to use it.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

• Calais – Overview
  “You hand the web service unstructured text (like news articles, blog postings, your term paper, etc) and it returns semantic metadata in RDF format”
  (tags: web)
• TigerHorseSheepPigCow
  your actual lo-fi rock and roll
  (tags: music)
• Interactions between dietary calcium and caffeine …[Am J Hypertens. 1996] – PubMed Result
  “Caffeine consumption may contribute to hypertension since it increases urinary calcium excretion.” Interesting. Via Josie. Do I seem tense to you?
  (tags: med am+I+pissing+out+MY+OWN+BONES?)

Fancy putting one of these on your blog/journal for me? You can get rid of it after 12 noon UK time on Friday if you like…

Susannah Breslin’s one of the best writers I know. She’s also taller than me, and I’m six feet. For that alone, everyone should be hiring her. And I guess she’s wrapped her most recent project, because she’s now available for work. I know there’s a bunch of editors and publishers reading this. Click the link.

She even turned her hand to comics, once.

I have it on good authority that new, free science fiction stories will be returning on a monthly basis to Futurismic.com as of Monday 3rd March.

“Organic molecules ? in the form of methane ? have been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time.”

• Nokia Software Market – Nokia N95 8GB
  (tags: N95)

Old acquaintance John Picacio just sent me his cover for Michael Moorcock’s ELRIC: THE STEALER OF SOULS, first of a six volumes collecting the major Elric works. John’s decorated the interior with a swathe of new illustrations, by all accounts, and apparently the back’s stuffed with rarely-seen essays, extras, letters, and Moorcock miscellany. John adds: “Mike and I will be signing ELRIC: THE STEALER OF SOULS on Sat., Feb. 23 at Austin Books in Texas.”