I was wondering why I hadn’t heard much from Svetlana Chmakova lately. But Fred Gallagher just found this news story:

My Life Me, a new animated series created by Svetlana Chmakova of Tokyopop’s Dramacon and animation vets JC Little and Cindy Filipenko, is going into production for an eventual fall 2009 release. Fifty-two 11-minute episodes are slated, along with 26 original shorts for mobile and VoD platforms. The target audience is kids 8-12.

The show will be produced using digital animation, and will use manga aesthetics, including black and white comic panels that drop behind the characters to express their suppressed feelings on screen…

Nice work, Svet.

1. Tunnels are quiet photogenic, 2. P6020249, 3. IMG_0704.JPG, 4. Adam’s Commission – Nun Sketch, 5. Janet pola 08.jpg, 6. fluffy little clouds

At the end of the month, I’m off to Chicago to guest at the WizardWorld Chicago comics convention.  The name is a bit of a misnomer: it’s actually held in Rosemont, some way outside Chicago, basically just a convention-centre compound.  I will never actually get to see Chicago.  The experience will be not unlike a forty year old man visiting the city in LOGAN’S RUN.  Only without the sex and the mass suicides at the end.  That would be a fine way to end a comics convention — everyone into Carousel so Warren can watch you explode.  They ought to lay on that sort of show just for me, and I am therefore disappointed that they don’t show their guests of honour the correct volume of love.  There are never enough exploding people at these things.

As is usual when I do my annual American show, I’ll be doing a late-night talk on the Friday. The way these things work is that I am helped to a stage and then take questions from the audience until everyone gets sick of me. These gigs are sometimes curtailed by the fact that you can’t smoke in most of America anymore. Though I did light up during my San Diego talk anyway, and probably narrowly missed being arrested as, I don’t know, a lung terrorist or something.

This year at Chicago, Avatar Press (who arranged my appearance) have beaten expectations. They have somehow gotten my Friday night talk accredited as Performance Art. And it seems that under Illinois law performance artists can smoke on stage in pursuit of, well, the performance. And there’s a bar in the hall.

This means that, since I can remain drunk off my arse and wreathed in smoke for the entire gig, I will probably be talking well into Saturday. And probably to myself.

But if you’d put yourself in the situation of having to answer questions in front of several hundred people, wouldn’t you want to be shitfaced and chainsmoking too?

The only drawback to the plan is that my signing schedule is, to put it lightly, punishing, and the press time will go on top of that. So the chances of my actually seeing anyone outside convention time are minimal to forget-it. My schedule usually commences at 9am and finishes out around 1am.

Please don’t be offended if I don’t shake hands with you. I shook with every proffered hand at my signings at Heroes Con a couple of years ago, and by Saturday afternoon I was having to ice my hand down. And since I use that hand for typing and earning bill money, that’s not good. I sign for literally thousands of people at these things now, and it turns out a thousand handshakes a day just pulps my right hand.

You may kiss the hem of my garment instead.

Last year I had singing zombie girls, but this year I kind of fancy a call to prayer before my signings begin. What do you think? Too much?

• Mobile phone signal can ‘sniff’ out friends – Lancashire Evening Post
  The Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (Sniff) uses mobile phone signals to locate friends and partners, regardless of where they are in the UK.
  (tags: phone comms sns)
• Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered – Yahoo! News
  “…our visual system has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future…”
  (tags: neuro)
• Computer trained to ‘read’ minds – Innovation- msnbc.com
  A computer has been trained to “read” people’s minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words
  (tags: neuro tech computers)
• Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps – life – 04 June 2008 – New Scientist
  “Having partially developed inside caterpillars, the larvae of the wasps manipulate their hosts into watching over them as a mother or bodyguard might.”
  (tags: that’s+just+a+fucking+disturbing+headline)

As noted earlier in the week, Kid Shirt tagged me in the Seven Songs Meme that’s doing the rounds:

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to."

These things circulate like a dose of the intellectual clap. "I fucked this disease into your brainmeat. Confess your shame in public and then fuck it into seven other people." You find yourself looking at your friends and fellow-travellers, wondering which of them you hate enough to infect.

1: "Denaissance" – Kemper Norton Collective

I once played this on a podcast, but I’m listening to it again since Kemper included it on his recent CD-R. Again and again. Because it’s joyous, in its own doomed and drunken way. It’s big and it stomps and there are lots of instruments and lots of people singing and playing and just fucking daring the sun to go down.

2: "Live at ICC, Tokyo" – Philip Jeck

Do not listen to Philip Jeck on earphones in a darkened Oslo hotel room at three in the morning. Philip Jeck’s association by others with the emergent field/passing game of sonic hauntology is half-founded on the fact that he can haunt a room. I never really "got" Jeck until I saw him live — he creates a thoroughly supernatural chill in acoustic space — and I found this recording afterwards. Put it on my phone to listen to during my recent trip back to Norway. Usual hotel room insomnia brought on by sleeping alone. Pushed in the earbuds and pressed play. Fuck me, that was a mistake.

3: "Late Night" – Belong

Someone else playing with haunted audio: the sound of an obscure cover version playing on an AM car radio as you walk past it at night. Washed out by the ambience of 21st Century life. Almost but not quite lost in it: that gorgeous sad-smile chord change at the top of the chorus still comes through. It’s a thing that makes me pensive.

4: "Ghosts IV 32" – NIN

My favourite piece from GHOSTS I-IV. That prowling, pulsing rhythm has a real motorik feel to it, that slightly sleazy driving-at-night propulsiveness. It’s the piece on GHOSTS that I can slip into and go with.

5: "Reed Sodger" – Clive Powell

Yes, still obsessed with this, a couple of months after I first wrote about it here. It probably comes out of my current fascination with "haunted music/music that haunts." With the weird accompaniment of distorted and filtered instruments, it’s almost like the clearest Electronic Voice Phenomenon you ever heard — the strong, sweet voice of Northern Britain of decades and centuries past coming back to us through the DOCTOR WHO time-tunnel howlaround effect.

6: "Guest Informant" – The Fall

Ancient, I know. I’m in the process of replacing all my crumbled old Fall tapes and unusable Fall vinyl with CDs. The "Brix years" of the Fall tend to be looked down on a bit, these days, and my own favourite Fall is still HEX ENDUCTION HOUR… but I rediscovered my love of this garagey bit of impenetrable twanging madness off FRENZ EXPERIMENT. I spent a significant chunk of winter 1988 trying to work out what the hell Brix was yelling in the background all through the song. Turns out it was "Baghdad/ Space Cog/ Analyst." The new album’s not bad, either, Mark E Smith full on as The Last English Psychotronic Bluesman…

7: "We’re Gonna Rise" – The Breeders

Weird thing. This came up on my mp3 player just as I was finishing the last page of Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD in the departure lounge in Oslo Gardermoen the other week. It’s insidious like "Fortunately Gone," the opening song on their very first album, but in a different way. It creeps up slowly, winds its way into your head, and before you know it you’re just kind of looking out the window wistfully.

Looking back, it’s all very quiet stuff. It’s been a very quiet spring. I just downloaded the new Ladytron, let’s see if that sets me up for summer.

Maybe I’ll try and sling all these, sans the Jeck, up on a muxtape tomorrow.

Now, the horrible part. I have to fuck this tag into seven other people.

Matt Fraction, of course, because I know that it’ll nag at him and he’ll eventually produce a masterpiece of obsession. Eliza Gauger, because it occurs to me that I have no idea what she’s listening to right now. Wil Wheaton should do one of these. I think Patton Oswalt should, too, but I doubt he’ll have time. Kieron Gillen is an obvious tag. I’m really kind of interested in how Susannah Breslin would respond. And I’m going to tag Ariana Osborne, to force her to write more. Heh.

EDIT: Simon Reynolds tagged me after the fact.

Laurenn just sent me this Wonkette story about Barack Obama having a small chat with Joe Lieberman, who in American political terms is the suppurating wart at the base of Satan’s cock:

“Obama dragged Lieberman by the hand to a far corner of the Senate chamber and engaged in what appeared to reporters in the gallery as an intense, three-minute conversation.” Obama’s stance was “intimidating,” according to the reporter, who is most likely a white person… “Using forceful, but not angry, hand gestures, Obama literally backed up Lieberman against the wall, leaned in very close at times, and appeared to be trying to dominate the conversation, as the two talked over each other in a few instances.”

Kelly Sue and I just said “LBJ-style!’ at exactly the same time. Kelly Sue, however, has breeding, and didn’t follow it up with “Obama should have shanked the prick and left him to bleed out.” No, that was me. He lies the way you breathe. But some people like him:

This guy.

1. “Magic Gas”, 2. He’s out!, 3. Make You Cry, 4. destructive thinking, 5. Rattlesnake Mountain, CPTV, 6. evolutionary mandala (colored)

When, on my mailing list some months ago, I expressed a preference for Barack Obama in the Democratic selection process, I received an email which read, ”Oh, I see. You’d support a black man but not a white woman.”

That kind of fucked-up paralogia seemed to infect the entire Clinton campaign, reaching its perverse crescendo when she trumpeted her support among uneducated white folks. Her press ops, as one wag pointed out, stopped just short of her being photographed taking a shit in an outhouse.

There’s a case to be made that the core of her campaign’s failure was that she was running against John McCain for the justplainfolks vote, instead of running against Obama and his “politics of joy” (a term I, not he, lift from one-time Dem hopeful Hubert Humphrey). There may be a better case to be made for her campaign simply being a shambolic display of entitlement and two-faced political hackery. The actual numbers don’t really speak to the genuine disgust her tactics raised in many people, hardening and broadening the schism between pro-Obama and pro-Clinton in the Democratic base.

On the Clinton side, of course, there remains a certainty that Obama is “all talk,” and untested in national politics of any kind — that there’s more to a leader than talk. Certainly he makes interesting counterprogramming to McCain, who is unafraid of mentioning that he ate water rats in Viet Nam for 18 years at any opportunity and has been in politics since Ben Franklin was a boy.

This is the point at which I get interested. As longtime readers will recall with tiredness, I’m fascinated by American Presidential elections, and over the last twenty years I have a flawless scorecard for picking the winner. This, I’m not ready to predict yet.

I want to see how he does against McCain on the stump. He’ll cut a better figure, and that gift for rhetoric will soar — but Obama doesn’t have the same advantages going in that, say, Bill Clinton had against Bush Senior. Clinton played the debate hall like a rock-star king, but he also had working experience as a governor that he brought into play brilliantly. The test of Obama will be how he behaves when McCain puts him into a corner.

I imagine the Republican machine isn’t completely happy today. They have the ”experience” card, but they really wanted Hillary Clinton. They’ve been waiting for Hillary Clinton. They know how to run against her. Some of them have been licking their lips in anticipation of the most sickening public political evisceration in decades. Remember when Hillary declared she and Bill were under siege by a massive right-wing conspiracy? A UK newspaper did some digging, and found it. Interviewed them and everything. And those people didn’t suddenly go out and get hobbies. Obama is a different animal, and harder to run against in many ways.

I like what I know of Barack Obama. I’m glad it’s him. I have concerns — about the strength and breadth of his platform, and, frankly, about his safety, in a country where supporting a black man over a white woman is apparently worth confronting someone in email over — and I distrust the messianic Obamania I see here and there. I understand the sentiment and its roots, but I don’t like it: it invites the universe to fuck with your life. But, from my perspective over here in Britain, he has something America needs in a leader right now.

It would also be nice, really, if Americans abroad could have some dignity and respect returned to them.

• Incan lost city looted by German businessman
  The “lost city of the Incas”, Machu Picchu, was actually discovered forty years earlier than thought, and ransacked.
  (tags: history)
• Phoenix digs up possible ice on Mars – space – 02 June 2008 – New Scientist Space
  NASA’s Phoenix lander may have already hit pay dirt with its first scoop of Martian soil – it contains white streaks that could be water ice.
  (tags: space)

The IEEE Spectrum "special report" on The Singularity makes for interesting reading, but I’d like you to try something as you click through it. When you read these essays and interviews, every time you see the word "Singularity," I want you to replace it in your head with the term "Flying Spaghetti Monster."

(My personal favourite right now is "The Flying Spaghetti Monster represents the end of the supremacy of Homo sapiens as the dominant species on planet Earth.")

The Singularity is the last trench of the religious impulse in the technocratic community. The Singularity has been denigrated as "The Rapture For Nerds," and not without cause. It’s pretty much indivisible from the religious faith in describing the desire to be saved by something that isn’t there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn’t there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist. It’s a new faith for people who think they’re otherwise much too evolved to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other idiot back-brain cult you care to suggest.

Vernor Vinge, the originator of the term, is a scientist and novelist, and occupies an almost unique space. After all, the only other sf writer I can think of who invented a religion that is also a science-fiction fantasy is L Ron Hubbard.

I know, right? Seriously, bear with me. In order to recoup the massive expense of flying me on a high-altitude spyplane to the WizardWorld Chicago convention at the end of this month, not to mention the cost of the hideous amount of technology I require simply to stay alive and keep my forebrain connected to the internet at all times (and I’m still thinking about founding a Church, and that takes money too, y’know)… Avatar Press are releasing this surreal object at that convention. The Doktor Sleepless Plasma Globe Bust is limited to five hundred units, and costs USD $80.00.

Let me light up your life. Or possibly your toilet.

Is putting humans on Mars important? Yes. Humans need land to live on, and, in a dynamic environment, they need land to move to. Closed systems are bad because they remove options. A single planet is a closed system. And the thing about land is, as a history teacher of mine used to say, they don’t make it anymore.

Put aside the grim meathook future of our coming environmental doom for a moment. What if something drops on us? What if some natural freak event like a sequence of volcanic incidents drops us into faux-nuclear winter? We’ve come close to that before, in the 1880′s. What if something no-one ever thought of happens to make human life no longer viable on this planet? Do we just shrug and say fuckit?

I believe that exploration is necessary to the human spirit. But even if you don’t share that particular delusion, I think most people would agree that any kind of extinction is bad. Except maybe for dogs.

Mars is the best local option for setting up a colony and, eventually, a second life for humanity. It’s a bit of a crap option: no magnetic field to speak of, cold as hell, and currently no guarantees of usable water. But Venus is a shithole, Mercury’s a suicide trip and the Jovian system is a radiation trap. Forget everything you heard about asteroid habitats, it’s bullshit. Right now, it’s Mars or an extrasolar planet, and an exoplanet is going to stay out of our reach, barring a dramatic breakthrough in propulsion engineering, for at least fifty years.

There has long been a movement to preserve Mars. It’s said that terraforming Mars is nothing but another wart extruded from the human imperialist tendency, and it should remain the equivalent of a national park, unspoiled. The same people have said that if we go to Mars, we should ”do it with class,” eschewing nuclear-drive options.

I’m currently working on a project written from, if you like, the pro-Mars Id. The chances are good that in fact there is no life on Mars beyond the odd super-tough bacterium. And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs — which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive — on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.

So my characters — and the dark side of my conscience — say what are we waiting for? Let us now bend Mars to our will (and I’m aware of the overtones of both ”run a railroad” and ”will”) and fix the place up for human habitation. Let’s cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don’t know how much time we’ve got left. Let’s get a bit of air pressure happening, see if we can force out some of that water, do what it takes to at least get some overground stations into a safety zone.

Because it’s not doing us any good as a national park. And we are barely clinging to the surface of our world. And not through any fault of our own. Successful human life was a fluke on this planet even before we started poisoning ourselves. Playing the “we need to learn how to look after our planet before we go to another” lament is utterly beside the point. Think about your favourite art, your favourite memories, the best things people ever did. Does that have to go away because some people want Mars to always look like that quarry in Wales where they always shot DOCTOR WHO episodes in the 1970′s?

Fuck the Martian bugs, one of my characters says. In forty years I want my grandkids to email me from a .mars address. It’s not like we have to hunt whales or give a Tasmanian Devil face cancer to do it. It’s just sitting there. Why not bend it?

1. Madrid? Yes it is!, 2. Untitled, 3. Take one, 4. kiss2, 5. sardograff1, 6. Joy and Lenora Claire 28th bday

Decades before people were hyping themselves in rap, Bo Diddley was doing nothing but singing songs about Bo Diddley (while ripping the piss out of “Hush Little Baby”) and inventing the Bo Diddley beat (while actually trying to teach himself some old Gene Autry saw).

The first time I remember hearing Bo Diddley was actually a clip played on some BBC TV music quiz show, probably in the early 80s. I said something like, “what the hell…?” and my dad said, “Ssh. Listen. Listen to his guitar.” And that was it. Because it’s the sound of your heart skipping a beat. Boom-ba-boom-boom bam-boom. I don’t think Bo Diddley met a second chord in his life, he made Status Quo look like Segovia for that. It’s all about that beat. “I play the guitar as if I were playing drums,” Diddley said. See, my dad had been a drummer, and that’s what he picked up on.

People thought he was weird because he had women in his band — musicians like Peggy Jones and the Duchess, who could crank out primal blues riffs that would’ve made John Lee Hooker stand to attention.

Bo Diddley died today, aged 79.

Ack. I’ve been tagged for the Seven Songs Meme by that bastard Kid Shirt.

Um… maybe tonight. Or tomorrow.

365 Days Of Blasphemous Horrors: Every day at WEIRD TALES Magazine’s website, a new painting right out of Cthulhu culture by musician and artist Steven Archer.

1. Up II, 2. Untitled, 3. Girls in dresses, 4. on fetishizing the person and not about the person; or, how to adore the wearer and only maybe the worn, 5. IMG_1633, 6. Place des Vosges

Mapping nanospace. Or, more properly, nanospaces. But I’m a sf writer, and you had me at mapping nanospace:

Molecular "robots" have been developed by chemists to explore the unmapped chemical environments of living cells and transmit back the results.

The new molecules encrypt measurements of two different chemical features of cell membranes into light signals to be decoded by the British and Japanese chemists that built them. One measurement is encoded as in the light’s intensity, and the other into in its wavelength, or colour. Being able to map the variables they measure could help biochemists probe the mechanisms by which cells generate energy, or how signals travel through nerve cells.

"Concepts of nanorobotic vehicles and of mapping out nanospaces have emerged from science fiction into experimental science for the first time…"

And, somewhere, Patrick McGoohan’s getting an itch on the back of his neck, as a Swedish firm rolls out a prototype of an inflatable robot vehicle-sphere that could, within ten years, be thrashing the Martian landscape at thirty klicks an hour:

This turned up in the post out of the blue this morning. Seems I have Sean Wallace at Wildside Press to thank for it, so thanks. It’s an advance review copy, or ARC — the book doesn’t hit the bookstores until August. Hopefully I can start it tonight.