Supposedly, January 19 is statistically the grimmest and most hopeless day of the year – Blue Monday.

Write a message to the world on a bit of paper, hold it up, take a photo and send the photo to warrenellis @ gmail.com. (Or stick a caption on the photo if more convenient.) I will post as many as possible. We will embrace the misery and tell the world what we think of it.

Supposedly, January 19 is statistically the grimmest and most hopeless day of the year – Blue Monday.

Write a message to the world on a bit of paper, hold it up, take a photo and send the photo to warrenellis @ gmail.com. (Or stick a caption on the photo if more convenient.) I will post as many as possible. We will embrace the misery and tell the world what we think of it.

Supposedly, January 19 is statistically the grimmest and most hopeless day of the year – Blue Monday.

Write a message to the world on a bit of paper, hold it up, take a photo and send the photo to warrenellis @ gmail.com. (Or stick a caption on the photo if more convenient.) I will post as many as possible. We will embrace the misery and tell the world what we think of it.

Supposedly, January 19 is statistically the grimmest and most hopeless day of the year – Blue Monday.

Write a message to the world on a bit of paper, hold it up, take a photo and send the photo to warrenellis @ gmail.com. (Or stick a caption on the photo if more convenient.) I will post as many as possible. We will embrace the misery and tell the world what we think of it.

Supposedly, January 19 is statistically the grimmest and most hopeless day of the year – Blue Monday.

Write a message to the world on a bit of paper, hold it up, take a photo and send the photo to warrenellis @ gmail.com. (Or stick a caption on the photo if more convenient.) I will post as many as possible. We will embrace the misery and tell the world what we think of it.

Supposedly, January 19 is statistically the grimmest and most hopeless day of the year — Blue Monday.

Write a message to the world on a bit of paper, hold it up, take a photo and send the photo to warrenellis @ gmail.com. (Or stick a caption on the photo if more convenient.) I will post as many as possible. We will embrace the misery and tell the world what we think of it.

Apparently, January 19 is statistically the grimmest and most hopeless day of the year — Blue Monday, in actual fact.

Write a message to the world on a bit of paper, hold it up, take a photo and send the photo to warrenellis @ gmail.com. (Or stick a caption on the photo if more convenient.) I will post as many as possible. We will embrace the misery and tell the world what we think of it.

Bars & Tones from André F. Chocron on Vimeo.

Photo from BBC News:

Days behind on everything, lemme take a topslice here:

* Ben Templesmith doing DOCTOR WHO with Leah Moore and John Reppion:

* Jean Snow’s photos from Macau.

* Far left, Lenora Claire. Next to her, Zoetica Ebb. Far right, Molly Crabapple. This meeting can be found detailed in Revelations, just before the seas turn to blood and locusts eat all the iPhones.

* For those of us who spent a couple of days drunk, Jamais Cascio parses the Martian methane news.

* One of my favourite labels, Highpoint Lowlife, goes digital-only.

* Melissa Gira’s selling prints from her ’99 project beautifultoxin:

Episode 42 of a one hundred and fifty bleeding million episode story, live and free to air: FREAKANGELS 0042.

Is a book by my friend Lee Barnett:

This was the challenge I issued on my blog some time ago: Reply with a title (maximum of four words) about which you’d like me to write a fast fiction of exactly 200 words, together with a single word you want me to include in the text of the tale.

Because I’m an infant, I gave him the title "Doctor Silence’s Last Romance" and the word rectal. Many of our mutual friends in the writing game went easier on him. This fine volume, which I got to handle and flick through last night, collects a hundred and eighty of Lee’s responses in fiction to these challenges, and will run you the local equivalent of six pounds fifty. You can go here to buy it. Go and look.

All quiet here for a day or two. I’ve got a ton of work today and tonight (and a steak and a beer awaiting me at a restaurant), and then I’m off to London tomorrow for a meeting with a TV company, after which I intend to get bladdered in Soho and then spend the small hours writing in a hotel room.

For some perverse reason, I really like writing in hotels. It’s getting complicated, of late, by the increasing difficulty in finding hotel rooms that allow smoking (because, even when I was off the cigarettes, I’d have a cigar or two while writing in hotel rooms). But, provided they’re not averse to a bit of smoke, I’m actually looking forward to a couple of hours at a desk by a window with the Eee 901.

Also looking forward to having many drinks.

Dan Curtis Johnson:

Let’s face it. You’re in a blog rut.

Most of the time, you write about more of the same kinda stuff that you usually write about.

Maybe it’s your day-to-day life, the stuff you did. Maybe it’s topical news response. Maybe it’s short fiction. Maybe it’s re-linking random stuff you see on the internet. Maybe it’s LOLCAT porn. (I hope it’s not LOLCAT porn.) Maybe it’s here on LiveJournal, or it’s over on Vox, or Blogspot or Blogger or Blogblog or Postablogablowablog, or WordPress or Facebook or FacePress or FacePlant or maybe it’s just your Twitter account. It’s what you’re comfortable with, I know, I know…

…but why not try doing something different, just for a day?

Two weeks from today, Tuesday January 27th, is Lewis Carroll’s 177th birthday. Carroll, you’ll recall, wrote about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole and found herself in a place where all the rules had changed. In two weeks, on Lewis Carroll’s 177th birthday, you should do the same.

That’s right: the 5th Annual Rabbit Hole Day is coming.

When you wake up on the 27th, instead of writing about your usual work and school and politics and friends and news and stuff, experience life down the Rabbit Hole and write about the work, the school, the politics, the friends, the news, the stuff that you find there instead. Travel through time. Turn into an animal. Flee from assassins. Talk to your goldfish. Conquer Greenland. Sprout some extra limbs. Learn how to walk on water. Marry an insect.

Take a break from the Every Day and write about your Rabbit Hole Day. Your normal life will be waiting for you when you get back.

"Staying in touch with people."

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

17: Fireworks And Baby Heads

 

 The 4am: 17 - Fireworks And Baby Heads [23:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (11627)

Starhead – “Iconoclasm” (3:03)

Marazene – “AnTiThesis” (4:50)

The Thing with the Stuff – “Being Alive” (3:15)

Red Light District – “Right Behind You” (3:26)

Kemper Norton – “Son of Winterval” (6:39)

The Face of Human Error> – “The Interregnum” (2:16)

No time for extensive notes this time. Starhead are from Denton, TX. I didn’t even know they had people there. Marazene are from Chicago, and bring the epic sweep at the end of “AnTiThesis.” The Thing With The Stuff is from Mars. The Red Light District are from LA and look like they put on a hell of a show. It’s never a new round of 4am without Kemper Norton. And The Face Of Human Error is an experimental musician from Dublin.

Discover them now. I hope you like what you find.

The Ludovico Technique make a fine noise; growling, clanking futurepunk. Go and listen.

Turns out the lead singer’s a friend of a friend. Happy birthday, Ben.