• Raw horsemeat ice cream. Really. @ snaps.lumra.com

  (tags:food )

• SASLIK
  Incredible Russian-Finnish menu. Must eat there one day
  (tags:food )
• Hungry enough to eat a horse? by Don Chance Issue #88
  "There is a ferocious ongoing debate in the U.S. over the right or wrong of hippophagy (or making a meal out of Ol? Lightnin?)…"
  (tags:food recipe )

A bit of fun, really. Print it out, clip it out, fill it in and take it in to your nearest comics shop this weekend or next week. Or even sometime over the next three weeks.

(Avatar even supply a high res PDF version)

What people I know are doing and seeing:

1. Velvet Wesley Paint By Numbers #1, 2. Henry Helper, 3. i promise, 4. 012809, 5. Neil & I ghostly, 6. Victorious!

oh god i just woke up

Don’t give me any static about variant covers: if people didn’t buy ’em, Avatar wouldn’t print them, and they’re orderably individually, not randomly, from your local comics dealer.

The Regular Cover (order code FEB094078):

The Widescreen Cover (order code FEB094080):

The Retro Cover (order code FEB094079):

• we are enoughrecords

  (tags:netlabel )

Ignore this if you received it on Bad Signal. Otherwise:

I’m informed that yesterday (or today, if you’re in the UK) you got the new PREVIEWS. And that the Avatar Press section of the new PREVIEWS features the solicits for IGNITION CITY.

Would you, kindly shopkeeper, like to read the script for IGNITION CITY #1? I have it here in easy-to-use RTF format. Not for sharing with your clientele, of course, but provided for you to make a better determination of how many copies of my lovely comical book to order. I’m very fond of IGNITION CITY, and would like you to read it.

Just drop a note to warrenellis @ gmail.com with the name and address of your store and your Diamond ID — so I know I’m not just sending these to crazed fans who want to kill me because they love me so much — and I’ll email you back a copy of the script for your personal use.

Ta.

I just want to get these down in some kind of order for later consideration. See previously: Papernet: Papercamp announcement: Papercamp 1.0.

As noted previously, my interest in this revolves around making printers spit out sheets of paper with interesting things to look at and read on them. This all stems from Aaron Cope’s 2007 talk on the Papernet, and Schulze & Webb’s 2006 "social letterbox."

It occurs to me that the social letterbox isn’t a device, not in the first instance. Because there isn’t a social letterbox device and software bundle, and wishing ain’t going to make it so. In the first instance, the social letterbox is a dedicated email address and a printer you never uncouple from the computer (because you’ve got a USB hub, or, like me, you’re too lazy).

The social letterbox may just be as simple, in the first instance, as a dedicated Gmail account, where I can just press Print without opening the attached document. In kicking this around within a Secret Society, my friend Alasdair Watson knocked together a proof-of-concept in an hour — email comes in, paper comes out. Automagically, like a podcast that spits out paper.

I wouldn’t want the word "papercast" to get out in the wild, you understand. It’s horrible, and it would hang around my neck like a burning tyre until I die. Alasdair notes:

I love the idea of being able to get up in the morning and have the overnight reading ready for me to hop on the bus with. Hell, even if I don’t ever make the mailbox public, all I have to do is lash it to some RSS-to-email functionality, and presto - a custom POD newspaper every morning.

How is that a bad idea? It’s not like a fax machine, where some bastard buys your number and there’s a sheaf of junk hanging out of the thing in the morning. It’s roll-your-own one-sheet POD. And it’s also subscription-based POD, if you know someone who semi-regularly does interesting things with a sheet of paper and decides to share. They’re either sending directly to your letterbox-email, or you’re on an announcement-only mailing list (or Google Group). Or, as I say, as simple as me pressing Print so they’re spat out for me to take to the pub, or on a train journey. And if they’re not especially personal, I can just leave the buggers on the table or the seat when I’m done with them, too.

I remember, years ago, the artist Laurenn McCubbin saying to me, "I can design the shit out of a piece of paper. But designing websites and stuff? Forget it." And you know she’s not going to be the only one. But this papernet thing can in fact be about designing the shit out of a piece of paper.

This is getting tl;dr, but this is starting to tie up in my head with the emerging notion that this might be the Year Of POD, that not everyone wants nothing but plaintext in their lives, not everyone has a mobile device that does everything they want, and that, sometimes, paper is better.

I shut up now.

These are, I’m told, the work of one Sergei Larenkov, and they are wonderful. He’s reshot WW2-era photographs in the present day, from their original perspectives, and then faded the original in. Just look:

The effect is similar to those occasional freak photographs purported to capture ghosts on film.

I prefer to imagine a WW2-era photographer developing his or her prints, and discovering strange colour images bleeding in around the edges of their shots.

If I somehow contract The Jellyfish Flu next time I’m down on the seafront, I’m blaming you.

OH JESUS CHRIST NO

The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature. Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die. Dr Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute said: "We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion."

Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self.

What people I know are doing and seeing:

1. Hoody pizza fagin, 2. Speaking at Phoenix Comicon 2009, 3. 365-007, 4. My Back Tattoos, 5. 27/01/09, 6. Nursing a Grudge

More properly, SF/F Magazines, but I want to preserve the search string. SF Scope has the confirmation:

Realms of Fantasy is closing down following publication of its April 2009 issue. Managing Editor Laura Cleveland told SFScope the news came very suddenly, indeed, even Editor Shawna McCarthy (currently on vacation in Italy) hadn’t been informed yet. The only reason we got the story is that rumors broke through the blogosphere today.

RoF was often cited to me as, if you like, "the fourth of the Big Three."

Some people will find meat for the "embrace digital or die" argument in RoF’s somewhat stunted website, which has apparently gone without an update since early 2006, and is filled with bad and broken links.

* New Tigrics EP from Highpoint Lowlife, a mere three Yanqui dolla through PayPal.

* Eliza Gauger:

* Jamais Cascio on the argument against the use of enhancement biochemistry.

* Another of Siege’s slightly creepy Long Portraits, this time of Molly Crabs:

Long Portrait: Molly Crabapple from Clayton Cubitt on Vimeo.

Collecting issues 0 - 7 of the series. Forthcoming.

It is Dan Curtis Johnson’s Rabbit Hole Day on the internet.

(Melinda Uden’s the first in that I’ve seen this morning.)

Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling commit an act of new fiction:

“The colliding branes will crush the stars and planets to a soup of hard radiation,” she assured Angelo. “Then they rebound instantly, forming brand-new particles of matter, and seeding the next cycle of the twelve-dimensional cosmos.” She spread her two hands violently, to illustrate. “Our former bodies will expand to the size of galactic superclusters.”

What people I know are doing and seeing:

1. BB Gadgets & Video crews, in limo’s mirrorred ceiling, Vegas, 2. model museum-goers, 3. As beautiful as painful, 4. 365 2009: 25.01.09, 5. Me at the RuPaul party @ WOW by Tom Andrews, 6. Day 21

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

Christ. Magazine Death Pool, so you can watch print magazines slide into the grave one corpse at a time.

No SF MAGAZINES tag on this: although the rumour mill is full of the story that all three major American sf print magazines will go bi-monthly by the end of the year.

Morning.

* A little disturbed that R Stevens has taken to calling himself "Sex Batman" in private messages.

* Happy birthday Melissa Gira, who commented earlier: "Today I’m 31. That’s like 80 in Facebook years."

* Ben Templesmith’s PRESIDENTS OF THE USA is out next week, from IDW:

* Zofia Szeretlek:

The new Animal Collective album isn’t a bad album, by any means. What it is, is relentlessly bright. It sounds like a rain of silver dollars clattering down on a magnesium countertop for an hour. It stays in that upper register for so long that it is, to me, the aural equivalent of eating something with so much sugar in it that my teeth start to hurt. It’s diificult to listen to the thing all the way through because I find myself wanting to buy shades for my ears, just to get rid of the fucking glare and hear what else is going on. If I could slice off all that toppiness, I imagine I’d find a very good Animal Collective album — certainly an interesting one, a biographical step on from Panda Bear’s solo work, moving from the euphoria of finding joy in your twenties to three childhood friends feeling slightly adrift in the onset of real adulthood. It’s a collection of ideas for a Great Album, but the execution and production isn’t quite there yet.  Animal Collective fans thought MERRIWEATHER would be a game-changer.  I think it’ll be the next one, once they’ve got the distance to look back with clarity on what will be ten years in music.

• Jack Schulze: Comics, Maps and taking the Red Pill at Goldsmith, University of London (Monday January 26, 2009) - Upcoming
  Wish I had time to get to this. If you're in London on the 26th, you should go. Schulze is clever and connected. He is also excellent at swearing.
  (tags:comics peopleiknow design event )

The 4am is a selection composed entirely of music sent to me by artists. If you want your music (and, hell, I’ll even take field recordings and spoken-word) to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com. Include your website address, please. 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 4am shits fireworks and baby heads.

The podcast feed for The 4am is: http://warrenellis.com/?feed=podcast

18: Machinespeaks

Maddest Kings Alive - “Measles” (4:02)

Clique Talk - “Sputter” (6:29)

Xykogen - “My Unquiet Mind” (4:04)

Bokeh - “In October We Will” (7:28)

Electronic noises, this week. Just brief notes again, sorry:

Maddest Kings Alive get as close to 8bit postrock as I’ve ever heard. Or will probably ever hear. Clique Talk are from Chicago and I know nothing else about them save that they claim to be fanboys. Xykogen have a new, free album out this month, at this link. Bokeh is Mandy Matz, known to longtime readers & listeners as Theory Anesthetic, working with Mykel Boyd, multitalented founder of the Somnimage label.

I hope you like what you find. Next week will probably be all guitars.

EDIT: apparently the mp3 Xykogen sent me was fucked up somehow, and they desire that you go here to listen to “My Unquiet Mind” in the form they intended (and also you can download it and the rest of the album it’s on for free!).

Debuts in April. The following image is being sent as a big poster to comics stores next week, I’m told:

So, are people rolling their own private microblogging networks yet? And knocking together mobile pages and writing/hacking desktop apps to work with their private microblogging networks yet? It would seem to me to be the obvious outgrowth of the Twitter phenomenon: ambient communication for secret societies.

(Which you can take to mean "gated communities," "dev teams" "people who like their privacy" or "bomb-throwing anarchists.")

Doesn’t replace the gated message-board community, of course, because microblogging is obviously shit for long thoughts. Doesn’t replace Twitter’s old "killer app" of sending & receiving tweets as SMS, either — but I live in Britain, and they turned SMS off for Britain, so I use custom apps like Twibble or mobile pages anyway.

I’d happily run two microblogging desktop apps: one for Twitter, and one for My Spooky Friends Net. And, after a while, I’d probably stop using the Twitter app, I’d imagine.

Just thinking out loud.

So Matt Jones got Papercamp 1.0 off the ground on the 17th. (See last October’s post on the Papernet.)

Jeremy Keith liveblogged Papercamp. As I didn’t have a chance of making the event itself, I’m grateful for this. Some interesting ideas in there — and some mad ones, like hacking a till printer. Not much there that has immediate application to my own fields of interest, which naturally revolve around making printers spit out things to read and look at, but some near misses and a lot to think about.

• Smallest known exoplanet may actually be Earth-mass - space - 19 January 2009 - New Scientist
  "A new analysis suggests the rocky body weighs just 1.4 Earths - less than half the original estimate."
  (tags:space )
• Medical “Mini-Submarine” To Blast Diseased Cells In The Body: A Fantastic Voyage Brought To Life
  "Our lab is creating biological nano-machines," says Dr. Peer. "These machines can target specific cells. In fact, we can target any protein that might be causing disease or disorder in the human body."
  (tags:med tech )
• Seven-year-old Indian girls ‘marry’ frogs
  "The marriages were conducted as part of a centuries-old "Pongal" harvest tradition to "prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village"."
  (tags:weird cult )
• German Woman Missing 12 Years Found Alive in Swiss Woods - International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News
  "A German woman missing for 12 years has been found living in the woods on the outskirts of the Swiss capital with nothing more than an umbrella and tarpaulin for shelter, police said Monday."
  (tags:crime weird )

On Whitechapel, talking about his new series of hardcore spookcrime books:

Warren mentioned on Twitter that he’d received a draft of my new book, Sandman Slim. He’s part of our assault on the more famous and our attempt to TAC weld me to their large coattails. I’m too far away from England to blow Warren personally and my beard is probably too scratchy, so if someone wants to put on their kneepads and get to work in my place, I’d appreciate it.

(More about the novels at the link.)