March 13th, 2008 | researchmaterial
Ideas communicate. Love happens. Lives are fulfilled. Tell me something. Anything. I used to be a porn star. I was just here. I got drunk twice yesterday. Write on your left forearm. Cover your eyes. Get painted, use markers, make stuff up. Only the I is constant, by the wrist. The rest is up to you.
March 13th, 2008 | photography
March 13th, 2008 | researchmaterial
A new project from a Swiss team, T-shirt Monthly:
T-shirt Monthly is a t-shirt subscription: one t-shirt a month for six months, straight to your mailbox. Exclusive artwork by talented designers, screen-printed with love on American Apparel shirts.
March 13th, 2008 | brainjuice
Just a reminder that you can drop me tips, links, notification of special projects and events, dirty photos etc at designated drop point degaussing [-at-] googlemail com.
March 13th, 2008 | researchmaterial
Seriously. Shannon describes it as "a sex-positive procedure." I describe it as “fuel for recurring nightmares that could have you waking in a pool of your own liquid shit for decades.”
March 12th, 2008 | photography
March 12th, 2008 | Work, photography
Had these done today; one on each wrist. Couldn’t decide if I wanted them in red, like the comic, or black, which stands out better. Compromised to make the X stand out from the S.
March 12th, 2008 | photography, researchmaterial
As spring now dawns on the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, sand dunes near the pole, as pictured above, are beginning to thaw. The carbon dioxide and water ice actually sublime in the thin atmosphere directly to gas.
March 12th, 2008 | comics talk
Someone just emailed to tell me that comics artist Dave Stevens died yesterday. EDIT: from a rare form of leukaemia, apparently.
March 12th, 2008 | podcast
The 4am is a selection composed entirely of music sent to me by artists. If you want your music to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com. The 4am is mixed down to 128kbps, is of no set length and is released on no set schedule. If you like the 4am, please tell people.
The podcast feed for The 4am is: http://warrenellis.com/?feed=podcast
12: Opium Dens On Mars
Told you this’d happen more often.
Monsters Build Mean Robots – “The Freedom To Fire These Freedom Rockets” (6:45)
palliDust – “Temptation” (4:48)
Andy from Monster Build Mean Robots says, “Apparently, our sound is ‘supporting the body of the machine as it clicks, whirrs and rumbles inexorably onwards.’ Or so one reviewer from Brighton Source says…” This is Godspeed! style vicodin-Wagnerian postrock at its most crazed and majestic. Their new CD is out now — check Amazon UK. palliDust’s woozily beautiful electronica is the sound of that strange girl playing with your mind after putting something in your drink at the bar.
March 11th, 2008 | mobilesignals
Here’s a thing that bugged me while on the edge of sleep this morning. How many people have ever lived? And are there more people alive now than have died since the dawn of Homo Sapiens? Wouldn’t that be strange, if there were more people alive today than have ever died?
March 11th, 2008 | photography
March 11th, 2008 | comics talk
I don’t know Emma Rios, who is apparently a comics artist from Spain, but she just added me as a Flickr contact, so I thought I’d take a look at her Flickr stream and see who she is… and the stuff she’s uploading is terrific. Take a look:
March 11th, 2008 | music
Free from the band Verbatim: The Pizza Party EP
After working for the last 3 years on a forthcoming, massive, LP, Verbatim wanted to release music more directly. Pizza Party was borne out of that need. The band locked itself in a basement studio for one weekend under the condition that come Monday morning, they must release whatever they’ve done.
March 10th, 2008 | photography
March 10th, 2008 | podcast
The 4am is a selection composed entirely of music sent to me by the artists. If you want your music to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com. The 4am is mixed down to 128kbps, is of no set length and is released on no set schedule. If you like the 4am, please tell people.
11: Too Long Til Morning
I’m back, on an ultralight laptop, listening to everything on a good pair of noise-cancelling earbuds. So if anything sounds a bit weird, blame the earbuds. Since I don’t have my PC, I don’t have the 1GB+ pool of music sitting on my desktop to choose from, so I’m slowly reclaiming stuff out of Gmail. The 4am will now, fingers crossed, happen a lot more often, with smaller programmes (and probably fewer notes — this one’s run longer than I intended already, damnit). Track listing:
Badman – “Modern Species” (4:19)
Kemper Norton – “The Unhappitants” (4:23)
Levi Weaver – “Of Bridges Burned” (3:32)
Satan’s Monk – Pro-Life (Demo – Alt) (1:22)
It’s Sunday night, black and stormy, so if this one’s a little bit low-key and doomed-sounding… you understand, right? Course you do. I mean, there’s a lot of it around. The haunted Americana and bone-clatter drums of “Modern Species,” the exhausted doomed-romantic rasp of Levi Weaver (from his new album “You Are Never Close To Home, You Are Never Far From Home”), the baby-eating underground choir recorded by Satan’s Monk… it’s one of those nights.
Here’s what Kemper says about his piece: “”The Unhappitants” is a track about the present bleak economic situation, with all of us (well, some of us) facing creditsqueeze, gas bill rise, bankbust and shopping ennui. It’s supposed to console us at this time, hence the harps. Its title comes from Joyce’s word for humanity in Finnegan’s Wake, in a desperate attempt to give the piece some intellectual gravitas.”
March 8th, 2008 | mobilesignals
At the pub — or, rather, outside the pub — on a chilly afternoon that’s just starting to spit with rain. Once I’ve done these two cans of Red Bull, I have to head into town to buy a plug-and-play external DVD-ROM drive, and probably a USB hub. For tonight I attempt to reclaim my DSL.
As noted previously, the mobile-internet USB modem I bought from 3 has some issues. Not least of which is a 7GB monthly bandwidth cap. Which has been interesting in that it’s reminded me of exactly how much daily bandwidth I’ve been using for the last few years. On a normal day, I’d grab a tv programme, an album’s worth of music — and that’s getting on for a gig’s worth of material right there — spend an hour on Bloglines getting up to speed with the world, which usually involves watching more video and streaming more audio, move a LOT of email with images and documents, watch a handful of online communities, do research. And before you know it, rough calculations start reaching the 3GB/day level.
That’s a lot of data to eat. I’m watching the 3 bandwidth counter like a hawk, in case I can’t get DSL back up, and I’ve used more than a gig since Monday.
Somewhere along the way, I let bandwidth become one of the major food groups. Or, perhaps more correctly, my interests and choice of jobs have led me to the point where bandwidth has become one of the elements I require to get through the working week. And, like water coming out of the tap, you take it for granted until it turns into a brown trickle.
Wouldn’t be so much of an issue if anyone around here used wifi. But, as I’ve noted before, people around here think wifi is a euphemism for a stolen stereo.
Off to town. Here we go.
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