• …and I find myself standing in the middle of the garden, muttering (to the tune of “Suffragette City”) the words “Frankenstein City.” #
• I really, really, have to stop standing naked in the back garden at night. One day the neighbours’ motion-sensor light will snap on… #
• so. tired. must. crawl. to. pub. #
• …6041 people following me on Twitter now? Really? What are you, Brain Custard Zombies or something? #
• Have to do a phone interview. Don’t wanna. Who wants to stand in as “Mr Ellis’ Temple Priestess” or “Home Security Agent” and do it for me? #
• I’m at the point now where I just think, y’know… fuck the bees. #

Absent WithOut Bloggery. Needed to spend a couple of days with this switched off. I can write and blog, but I can’t always create and blog, if you like. And I needed to generate some new project ideas. A tv company asked me to come up with some “springboards” (usually a short, unstructured paragraph roughly describing the kernel of an idea), and a director and I are trying to generate an animated serial project, which is involving the generation of several even rougher springboards to see what sticks. Which is why I was found muttering on Twitter last night about “Frankenstein City.”

Today, I have to get back to scriptwriting. Which is a different set of muscles. And I find that writing on the web keeps my fingers hot when I run dry on a script. I just toggle up the web, keep writing, and pretty soon the next piece of script will come to me and I’ll toggle OpenOffice back up and return to what I was doing.

That’s the trick, kids. Just keep dancing, and the rest will come naturally…

According to this, I’m on the Honorable Mentions list in the back of this year’s BEST MUSIC WRITING 2008 anthology. For the blogpost "John Allyn Smith Sails."

That can’t be right.

• I am awake. You may give thanks to your god. Also, wish a happy birthday to @cmpriest and @schulze #
• In my head, I like to NEXTWAVEize films. In MOONSTRUCK, when Cher slaps Nic Cage? He explodes. Much better film. #
• @davidsgallant in the NEXTWAVEized PASSION OF THE CHRIST, Jesus would have to explode on the cross, taking out the whole Calvary area. #
• And then a horde of robot Jesusi would shoot out of a supraspacial luge from Heaven to have clanky sex with all the bits. #
• Jesusi? Jesusoids. #
• @kellysue if you mock natural law by giving succor to dogs, these things will happen. Also, how do you fit 2 gallons of puke in a dog? #

• Good morning, scum. And a very happy birthday to both @wilw and @zoetica. #
• Proper English summer’s day: dark, rainy, chilly. Thank God. I am, after all, an Englishman, and unaccustomed to natural light. #
• and also happy birthday to @digitalyn (damned kids on my internet lawn) #
• Lauren Laverne and Tim from Ash agree that Kieron Gillen’s a psychopath, on national radio, hahaha - @phonogramcomic #
• @mollycrabapple has arrived on Twitter to spoil our fun. Everybody be very quiet. #
• @mollycrabapple make me, little girl #

I have massive amounts of Thinking to do, today. I actually have less inspiration in my whole body today than could be found in the arse end of a dead badger… but the clock, it ticks, and friends and acquaintances are waiting to be provided with project ideas.

So, while I can be contacted in the usual ways, I am otherwise Not Around today, and am unlikely to be doing any writing here.

Unless I start procrastinating wildly, of course.

• Humidity at one zillion percent. Need spacesuit, stat. Am about to brave oven-like outside world and dash to pub. Pray for me. #
• @sicksaddaria (salutes) (CGI’d flag flaps in slow motion in background) #
• My God, England smells like an open rubbish bag left out in the sun too long today. Which, in fact, it actually is. #
• @davidmead Canvey Island is ALWAYS the punchline. #
• Chilled German beer restores system. Restart with a shot of Tobermory. #
• Someone has stolen part of my brain. I blame you. #
• @cascio you stole the bit that ejects brain custard. Enjoy. #
• I said BRAIN CUSTARD! #
• One should be able to Frankmillerize films. By which one digitally removes all the dialogue and replaces it with the actors saying “WHORES” #
• Bruce Lee in Frankmillerized ENTER THE DRAGON: “Don’t think… WHOOOOOOORES.” #
• @wilw you are so going to Nerd Hell for that one. #
• @dirtysnowflake I posited earlier in the year that ENTER THE DRAGON is in fact the greatest movie ever made and should be remade constantly #
• This led inexorably to the concept of Daniel Day Lewis in MY LEFT FOOT OF FURY. #
• Children Of Dune, Steven Berkoff: “Well! Then! I say unto YOU! Send! Men! To summon… WHOOOOOOORRRESSSS” #
• Storm finally broke. The wind’s light, so I don’t know if it’ll reach London, but the lighting strikes look to be moving upriver. #

* Willow Bl00 is running a transhumanist discussion group in Seattle.

* Post-mortem dissection thread for the just-finished San Diego Comic-Con.

* Talking about the net-tv serial WORMTOOTH NATION, which seems to have caught the imagination of many.

* The Weekly Listening Thread is up.

* And some idiot in the Zoo has started a conversation about conspiracy theories.

But what?

• Man, it’s sweaty out here. Writing an episode of GRAVEL at the pub: dunno why I thought it’d be smart to introduce a new cast in issue 8… #
• @Emmavieceli — Relax. Lepers are hot. #
• (no, NO context for the rest of you. Lick my suppurating sores. Of love.) #

• 2.30am: ice-cold beer, brain electricity, and an excellent song called “Left To Blame” by Cheerful Nutjob. #
• It hurts to look at the sky #

The usual space for ranting and monkey-dancing is up.  I’m drinking beer and watching NETWORK.

• Hotdoll for dog
  just NO.
  (tags: sex just+wrong)
• NASA Exploring Sex In Space | The Frisky
  there’s been a push at NASA to start researching sex without gravity
  (tags: sex space)
• The Mire: 12 hour party people
  “One often got the sense in Berlin that whatever was happening, it didn’t really matter, nothing was at stake: pure pleasure becomes boring after a while”
  (tags: music culture)
• Wormtooth Nation - TheSkyisFree.com
  net.video series — only skimmed the trailer, but it seems to have strong neo-Victorian tone
  (tags: video)

I do an irregular podcast here, called The 4am. It’s composed entirely of music sent to me by bands and musicians. If I like it, I play it, basically. You can find the first 13 episodes in the sidebar player — they’ve been played some 55000 times.

Haven’t done one since March. Now I have a decent set of speakers for this laptop, it’s easier to resume. So I’m starting from scratch, for a second season of The 4am.

It won’t happen, of course, without new music. If you think you’d like to be on the podcast, please email me your music (mp3, 128k or better) at warrenellis @ gmail.com. That email address is only used for the podcast. Including a link to your site is always useful — saves me having to hunt around for it myself.

Tell your friends if you like. But I can only play mp3s sent by the artists themselves. if you send me mp3s from bands you really like, I just have to delete them. Okay? Thanks.

That’s it. No more. It’s over. I’m only sorry I couldn’t fit more of you in — the response this year was overwhelming, more than double that of last year. Apologies to the several hundred (!) of you I couldn’t show. It was actually really nice to see so many of you. There’s a little bit of public performance to doing a blog, and that sort of thing always works better when you can actually see the audience. And I know that some of you, at least, enjoyed seeing each other.

Thank you.

Maybe next week we’ll see how many of you want to shoot video. Heh.

(31)

• It’s Friday, it’s past noon UK time, and we’re back on the air. FREAKANGELS 0021: http://www.freakangels.com/?p=47 #
• I can make @leahmoore have heart attacks by remote control. Win. Who else can I make keel over? I have a hit list. #
• Nearly 5pm already. Shit. Okay. Powering up desktop feeds, opening email tubes, cranking up Winamp. Let’s see what the world’s up to. #
• Let’s have some signs of life from my friends in San Diego. I’m getting worried that you’ve all been yiffed to death or something. #

Nearly there.

(30)

(29)

You just can’t trust these people:

"Warren [Ellis, who wrote the project] was a decision to usher this into pg-13," dos Santos said. "There’s no cursing… there’s no blood. It’s ’Warren Ellis Light,’ his style is all over the project. It’s within reason, and in good taste. Not that his work isn’t always in good taste, but sometimes it isn’t in good taste."

Ellis even sent a message to SDCC fans through dos Santos. "He wanted you to all know that he’s in England, sitting in his living room, naked, collecting all of Hasbro’s money, and he wants to thank all of you for that."

Prints for sale:

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This time round, I received at least 500 more photos than I could possibly use. You people have amazed me. I’ve still got more to go through — and, yes, I’m looking at every single one of you — but in order to get this stunt wrapped semi-successfully today, I’m having to skim and post a representative selection.

The mosaic-making software is pretty random in how it crops and arranges the shots. So the second tier of this one is entirely serendipitous:

(27)

I noticed the other day that the new update of Twitter desktop client Twhirl includes support for the microvideoblogging service Seesmic. Microvideoblogging is probably a fairly absurd compound word, but it really does attempt to be a Twitter for video, in that it’s designed at least in part to facilitate both video statements and conversational call-and-response video. I think the limit on video length is a couple of minutes (can’t remember for sure, am at pub and basically can’t be bothered to check right now).

Flickr, of course, now supports short videos — 90 seconds, I think? Something like that.

And this week, I noticed a new entrant. 12seconds.tv. Applying the intent of Twitter to video. Like it says on the can: Twitter gives you 140 characters of text, and 12seconds.tv gives you 12 seconds of video.

I played with it a bit yesterday — tried three videos, only one of which played. But it’s a lovely idea. As is tying Seesmic into Twhirl, which puts “social video” (if you like) on your desktop.

I know a lot of people who love email because they hate the phone. But I also know a lot of people who’d rather phone, or send a photo, than write an email. And it’s that that has always made me wonder why videomail, in these broadband days of ours, has never made a bigger dent. Why I don’t get videomail in my inbox along with email.

Seesmic itself, I can’t get into. I don’t know anyone on the service, and clicking at random seems to either put you in the middle of a conversation you never heard, or gives you someone talking with an unhealthy level of excitement about how they’re going to eat a chocolate cookie. But if I had friends there, I’d doubtless be pleased that their sends were being interpolated with the Twitter device that lives on the desktop and pulls things down without my having to think about it.

12seconds may even prove workable for a more general populace, with its Twittery limitation. Regardless of its eventual fate, it’s an interesting iteration of the whole microblogging thing. And it’s one of the services that may eventually make my inbox more interesting.

(written on the Eee at the pub)

It’s Friday, it’s past noon UK time, and we’re back on the air. FREAKANGELS 0021 is up.

(26)

More new prints up at her Etsy store:

(25)

So, Dr Horrible, then. Unless you were offline during the month of July 2008, you heard about DR HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG: a musical comedy film produced for the internet by Joss Whedon, a man who has yet to be properly punished for once calling me his "youngling." Written by Joss, his brothers Zack (who co-wrote a pleasing episode of DEADWOOD) and Jed and Maurissa Tancharoen. A musical comedy, in fact, about a small-time mad scientist supervillain, the superhero he hates, and the Tess Trueheart drawn between them.

I only watched the end of it, because, as much as I love Joss, I hate musicals. Musical comedy makes my balls itch, frankly. And no-one wants that. It’s one of the things Joss and I will never agree on (like, you know, my being his youngling. Which I am not. At all). I think Gilbert & Sullivan are a cultural curiosity at best and I like ALL THAT JAZZ because Roy Scheider dies at the end. Joss believes that Gilbert & Sullivan are culturally relevant (and presumably still washes his clothes in a stream and goes on ether frolics) and is friendly with Stephen Sondheim.

But it was a lovely little production. Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion are always watchable, and some of the non-musical gags were inspired. (I actually later went back to the earlier episodes for the Bad Horse stunts.) And, clearly, it was forty-five minutes that delighted a great many people.

(Not interested in the fanwank about the ending, nor in Dr Steel losing his shit, so don’t even think about bringing me any of that. You’ll go right into the spam filter.)

Most interesting to me, though, are the guts of the idea. Joss Whedon blowing his savings account on staging a 45-minute serial for the internet (that will doubtless prove to be i2dvd — internet to dvd — apologies once again to Bill Cunningham for perverting his "d2dvd" coinage).

I was crapping away here the other day about the ratio of linkblogs to people actually
producing original content. And then Joss blows a couple hundred grand on not only producing a bit of original content with unusually high production values, but also an Internet Event. It was free to view if you attended within a stated time window. It was in fact Appointment Internet. That is not something that many people have ever managed.

And while there are elements of the project that only someone of Joss’ position could pull off — the money, the cast, the values, etc etc etc — I think there are still lessons to be taken from it that apply broadly. Not least of which are, Be Short, Be Bold, and Get It Done.

I can’t tell you how many new hopeful comics writers I meet who have never finished anything in their lives because their intended first project is a hundred-episode epic that creates a whole new universe or three. And I tell them all the same thing: you’re screwed. No-one will want it. Not until you’ve written something short, capable
of being produced on a budget, and finished. Your epic may be worldchanging, but no-one will ever know because no publisher will gamble that kind of money on an unknown. And that’s before you get to the vagaries of the attention economy.

Production values are nice, but not necessary to producing compelling work. People gave Dr Horrible 15 mins because it’s Joss, but five minutes is a great length for net video. 500 words, 5 pages, whatever. Be short. Be great.

And if you can get an evil horse in there, that’d be good, too.

• My sweat is the nectar of Genius. Who will tongue raw inspiration from my glistening folds & crevices? Hello, I’m at the pub. Can you tell? #
• Also? STILL not at San Diego. Hahahaha HEH. (thanks, @newageamazon ) #
• @savagex - no, not doing Jagerbombs. Something to do with not being an American fratboy with a half-inch dick, I imagine. #