SFTV: PHOENIX FIVE
May 11th, 2008 | researchmaterial
Anyone remember this?
May 9th, 2008 | photography

Solo Tales of Professor Swift
Originally uploaded by The Searcher.
May 9th, 2008 | Work
We’ve reached the halfway point of the first volume, so we’re taking a week to catch our breath. But there’s still something new to read there.
May 9th, 2008 | researchmaterial
Teaser for the IRON SKY project that I mentioned here last year:
(thanks, Bill)
May 9th, 2008 | researchmaterial
Issue 20, featuring the excellent "A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica" by Catherynne M. Valente and an interview with my old friend John Picacio:

May 8th, 2008 | photography, researchmaterial
This is just the presage to a frankly brain-burning day on ModBlog. Can you identify the mystery meat?
It’s worse than you think. Don’t look.
You should look at this one, because it’s kind of romantic, really. In an indescribable WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THAT kind of way.
May 8th, 2008 | music
This has been doing the rounds, so I apologise if you’ve seen it. But you need to see it. Credits at the end of the video.
May 8th, 2008 | music, researchmaterial
OMODAKA is the name of the project developed through a trial and error process of mutational fusion of music and motion graphics. It will knock over your existing image toward a music video by a beautiful trajectory.
(via Mez, thanks)
May 8th, 2008 | comics talk, people I know
Features Steven Shaviro’s presentation “’You Will Never Own a Jetpack’: Warren Ellis’ Science Fiction Comics” (on the Saturday, 3A, 1:30pm):
This paper looks at the science fiction comics of Warren Ellis: Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, and the currently ongoing series Doktor Sleepless. These comics are about the social effects of new technologies. They bring us a wavering and uncertain vision of a highly technologized future, and ponder the possibilities of change in a world pervaded by a sense that the future itself has largely been played out.
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (1997), and Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003).

May 7th, 2008 | photography
May 7th, 2008 | brainjuice
I would buy records from a notional record label that released no records at all but produced beautiful sleeves, posters and stickers from bands and performers who didn’t actually exist. I would, as people once said, buy the shit out of that.
I would have bought an awful lot more from ZTT Records in the 80s if there’d been no records in the sleeves.
May 7th, 2008 | about warren ellis/contact
I’m off on the road again this month.
On 23 May, I’ll be speaking at the Norwegian Film Institute. (Also appearing during this seminar are the major European comics figure Igort and the brilliant Killoffer.)
I will also be appearing at the Oslo Comics Expo (fuck-all details on website at present) on Saturday 24 May at 17:00, doing an onstage Q&A. No plans for a signing.
In real terms, this means that I arrive in Oslo airport tired and confused at 11 o’clock at night, attempt to get to central Oslo on my own without getting mugged or raped, locate my hotel, confirm that it’s not a crackhouse or a knocking-shop for backpackers, fail to sleep because I’ve timeshifted an hour, pass out around dawn, wake up five minutes later, jabber incoherently for two hours to a room full of filmmakers who don’t actually speak my language anyway, spend the next 24 hours staggering around town using the only two words of Norwegian I can remember ("thankyou" and "beer"), throw up over a small group of people at Comics Expo who were only standing there because they were looking for Killoffer, and then get myself conveyed back to the airport by ambulance on Sunday.
WIN.
See you there?
May 6th, 2008 | brainjuice
Received from a 24-year-old man in Florida:
why should i read new universal if it has nothing to do with wolverine….is there a wolverine in new unviersal, have the howletts become prominant in this universe? I would read new universal if it had wolverine. I honestly do like what you do.
May 6th, 2008 | researchmaterial
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately: growing your own Twitter clone that gives a private circle of people access to both the crowd and the single user via desktop and mobile device. Other people are just looking at the possibility of growing clone services that aren’t reliant on Twitter’s groaning infrastructure. A surprisingly useful post on Techcrunch lays the problem and the possibilities out:
The key weakness in Twitter (and therefore opportunity for a new decentralized approach) is the fact that so much Twitter activity occurs off Twitter.com. Users are getting very used to using desktop clients (Twitterific, Alert Thingy, Twhirl, etc.), IM, SMS, and other interfaces to talk to Twitter. Those third party applications can be tuned to lock in to the new decentralized Twitter-like service instead or in addition to Twitter itself.
There also look to be possibly useful bits in the comments section.
May 4th, 2008 | Work
Produced with Adi Granov, who, on the basis of this work, was hired as visual consultant to the IRON MAN film that opened this week. I’m told you’ll see a few elements of IRON MAN: EXTREMIS in the film.
May 4th, 2008 | brainjuice, music
A good morning. Thanks to History Of Guns and Line Out Records for the new History Of Guns, ACEDIA, and to Thermidor for his 1929 (I should scan the stuff inside the box next week).
May 2nd, 2008 | people I know, researchmaterial
An Antarctic fur seal has been observed trying to have sex with a king penguin.
The South African-based scientists who witnessed the incident say it is the most unusual case of mammal mating behaviour yet known….Why the seal attempted to have sex with the penguin is unclear…
That’s it. Boris Johnson is tipped to become Mayor of London and now seals are raping penguins. I’m opening a bottle of whisky and a tub of paracetemol.
May 2nd, 2008 | Work
Episode 12 is up for your free viewing pleasure.
And you don’t have to wait for the reminders from me. You can grab yourself the Freakangels RSS Window for your own site: