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BAD SIGNAL

* The Cure are doing an interesting marketing thing. "Their brand
new studio album will be released worldwide on 13th September,
with 4 consecutive, different single releases preceding the album
on the 13th of each month: 13th May, 13th June, 13th July and
13th August."

• @Gustavius you are a simpleton. Stab yourself in the balls with a can-opener immediately, and count yourself lucky you got off light. #
• good morning human maggots give us a kiss #
• People are actually complaining because Twitter will “only” let you follow 2000 people? What’s the point of following 2000 people? #
• …of course, now I’m wondering if there are people I should be following who I’m not following. (Also, JJ? I love you but you’re nuts.) #
• @moonandserpent well, yeah. I’ve always kept my list down to friends, fellow-travellers and other scum. #
• @mrtonylee you just wrote a comic called MILF MAGNET. I don’t want people to get the impression that I know you. #
• I’m SO glad you got a Twitter account, @mollycrabapple … #
• Condition: Brain Custard #
• @foxtongue MONKEY flavour #
• Loving this clip from Frank Miller’s new comedy softcore movie THE SPIRIT: http://tinyurl.com/5e2dy3 #
• Later on, Sarah Paulson, as sweet innocent Ellen Dolan, sucks off a donkey called WHORE that has been dressed as a leather nun. #

• Extinction ‘by man not climate’
  Large prehistoric animals in Tasmania may have been wiped out by human hunting and not temperature changes
  (tags: history eco)
• Skinner to release one more album
  "I did a five-album deal and I don't think it would be right to be making Streets albums after that." (Stopping after the first one wouldn't have been so bad, either)
  (tags: music)

But what the hell. A guy called Robert writes to say:

My girlfriend, Becky, recently gave birth to my one-and-only
daughter on August 2nd. Her pregnancy was blissful, for all of the first
three weeks. After that, she was dealing with hyper-emesis (much puking,
not able to eat, had an intravenous Pikline installed), gestational
diabetes (hard to exercise when you’re hooked up to a Pikline, and not
eating…) and then she had chest pains. Which she went into the ER for,
a few days before the 2nd.

She had a pulmonary embolism. The words the staff used were that
she was VERY lucky she came in when she did. Lydia Grace was born at
11:27pm on the 2nd. She weighed 8.5#, and measured nearly 19".
Thankfully, as hellacious as Becky’s pregnancy was, Lydia is as beautiful
and healthy as we could hope.

Now the small/LARGE favour: I would love it if you could post the
picture of Lydia on your site, as a delightful surprise for Becky, who
could use some perking up. She’s been a real trooper, and I know she’d
get a huge kick out of it.

Lydia’s a good name. Welcome to Earth, little darling.

• I am a wonderful human being with the aura of a sun and the testicular fortitude of a young tyrannosaur. Sometimes you must be reminded. #
• Sorry. Should quit forcing these ideas & images into your head. A stinking, brownish rain of memetic semen in the folds of your naked brain #
• for fuck’s sake @zdarsky — bacon is NOT “God’s Scabs.” You, however, are Satan’s fermented placenta #
• Oh, I think it’s time for a beer. What do you think? Beer? #
• Public Service Announcement: yes, Gmail is having server-wide issues, it’s not just you. #

On my internet shithole today:

* The band Double Helix are offering their debut album free to Whitechapel.

* Thrown up an Events thread for people looking to advise an internet cave full of freaks about their upcoming gigs, exhibitions, tours, shows, classes, talks, extended drinking sessions, crackhouses, whatever.

* Whitechapel has an active community of artists who share their pieces, works in progress etc.

* How do you define journalism?

* Was anyone here at the COILHOUSE launch party?

* The latest on Anonymous vs Scientology.

* "Magick For Dummies."

And, you know… other stuff.

• Isaac Hayes: Xenu awaits. #

• I would really rather be in Los Angeles today. And you won’t hear me say THAT often. #
• It’s the COILHOUSE launch party in LA tonight, you fools: http://tinyurl.com/5os9kg #
• @shinalucard13 – last time I went anywhere near Phoenix, there was a bizarre storm that flooded the area. I considered this a subtle hint. #
• @zdarsky keep your internet VD away from my friends. I know where you’ve been. #
• @theremina the last thing you have to worry about is thereministrating. Remember impromptu theremin solo in Camden Town? #
• @theremina okay, pretend it’s Camden Town and I’m getting you drunk again. #

• @spiraltwist when a child hugs you and says they love you, you say “I love you too.” Don’t cost a thing, and sometimes it goes a long way. #
• Because being a child can be weird and scary, & sometimes loving and being loved is all that makes sense to them, & not all of them get it. #
• And now I return you to your regularly scheduled programming: how to turn kittens into cocksocks! #
• All you need is love (and metal darts): FREAKANGELS 23 – http://www.freakangels.com/?p=49 #

I guess word got around when I dropped a mention into Bad Signal yesterday, so I may as well reprint it here:

Oh, I got released from an NDA the other day, so I can finally say that I wrote a bunch of the groundwork, backstory and structure on the forthcoming EA videogame DEAD SPACE, which recently got a comic prequel from the hands of Antony Johnston and Ben Templesmith. I believe there was at least one other writer on the project, but I’m sure there’s some of me in there somewhere.

The EA team were a lot of fun to work with. I wrote all my DEAD SPACE documents…god, a long time ago, I don’t even remember… 18 months back? Two years? A long time ago. Game-making is a slow old business.

This is the third game I’ve been employed as writer on: the others were HOSTILE WATERS (known in the US as ANTAEUS RISING, I believe) and COLD WINTER.

All you need is love (and hundreds of flying steel darts).

The cover to the September 2008 PREVIEWS Catalog order form:

• @sispurrier @blackbeltjones no, that biblical rain + lightning would appear to be right over my house #
• @mrtonylee if there’s a God, he only loves you because he likes having something to laugh at #
• #braincustard #
• Even as a small child, I wanted a death ray. #
• My grandad had a false leg. It took me years to realise that he made it out of other people’s legs. #
• It also took me years to realise that “get in the back of the fucking van” was not a chat-up line. #
• (other classic chat-up line of the Seventies: “Does this smell like chloroform to you?”) #
• Between that, the music and the clothes, it’s really a miracle anyone was born in the 1970s at all. #
• “Do my tight peach paisley flares and pink gullwing-collar shirt with claret tank-top turn you on? Honey, why are you sewing yourself up?” #

Six coloured lettered pages, at CBR. And, yes, this is indeed a page from an X-Men comic:

Years ago, back when I was prone to laying down for many hours in conditions of significantly altered consciousness, I had an Idea. Following the pattern of behavior that makes such people so unpleasant and scary to decent folks, I spent the next several weeks explaining my Idea to everything that moved, and a few things that didn’t. Because you know what it’s like when you’re pretty sure your brain has exceeded the speed of light and your heart sounds like a badly abused motorcycle engine and you think that maybe other people can hear it so you need to stick eggboxes to the walls and tape rubbish bags to the windows and play Diamanda Galas very very loud at 4am to drown out the sound and paint special pictures on the door with your own blood and semen to keep the police and the Upside Down People away and anyway. Idea.

Teleportation should be a matter of simply proving you’re somewhere else.

A teleportation device would be a little computer set up to run a single equation. And this equation would prove that you’re somewhere else entirely. You’d plug in the coordinates of where you want to be and press Enter. The machine would run, the equation would solve, proving to the entire spacetime continuum that you are in fact in the other place, and suddenly you’d be in the location relating to the provided coordinates. You wouldn’t appear inside another object, because the universe doesn’t like that. The only tricky bit, I figured, would be that the Earth moves through space around the sun and the sun moves through space with the Milky Way and the Milky Way is subject to the expansion of the universe. But people are clever and would find ways to allow for spacetime drift. I think that if you’ve cracked the mathematics to convince the universe that you’re somewhere else entirely, these small details would be easily attended to.

And the best bit is that it wouldn’t require the power demanded by "classical" teleportation — which, some say, demands the energy output of the sun in order to briefly render the teleportee into a controlled Hiroshima-scale nuclear explosion. I figure you could run my teleport device on a couple of AA batteries.

This is, of course, why I don’t really take drugs anymore.

NO HERO #0, the first chapter of the story, is still available — if your local comics store doesn’t have a copy, ask them to order it for you, it’s only one American dollar.

NO HERO #1 is coming in a few weeks.

You saw this, right?