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

 

 The 4am: 18 - Machinespeaks [22:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (10246)

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.)

Seriously. Your brain will probably not thank you.

No. Really. Look, I’ll give you a hint as to what’s in there, okay?

(via Dirk Deppey)

A wonderful bit of Design Fiction on English Russia: a collection of Lunaro notes, from the althistory where Russia colonised the moon:

* People Who POD: discussions with people who publish on a Print-On-Demand model.

* Diamond Raises Minimums: newsgathering and talk about the thing that could conceivably send a lot of comics publishers to the POD model.

* An apparently endless thread about the most recent episode of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: IN SPACE EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOU FUCKING CRYING.

(Actually, I greatly enjoyed the new episode. But, you know. It and DOCTOR WHO did seem to make Crying a very important trope in sf tv.)

* The I Did Not Need To See That Imagethread. Because I hate you.

* Today’s NEWSKRUSHER.

I’ve been following the Livejournal community Abandoned Places for a few years now. Recently, the group seems to have caught a new lease of life. It’s basically dystopic Architecture Fiction porn: the active members of the group simply go out and photograph interesting abandoned locations. Something fascinating turns up every single day. I’ve been remiss in not recommending it to you before, and I shouldn’t keep it to myself any longer.

• The Angry Brigade – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "The Angry Brigade (also known as the Stoke Newington Eight) was a British libertarian communist militant group responsible for a long string of bomb attacks around Britain between 1970 and 1972." Came up in conversation with Schulze/Jones/Watson/Barnett the other night
  (tags:pol crime weird )

"Size."

Last batch, as I’m knackered. Apologies to the THREE HUNDRED people whose images I couldn’t use. Also apologies for the occasional bad cropping, but my eyes is gone now.

Normal service resumes tomorrow — probably hourly, god knows what’s gotten backed up today…