Dennis Culver’s BACON ZOMBIE:

Yes yes YES I KNOW I’d said I’d stop talking about them, BUT… from today’s ANSIBLE email blast from Dave Langford:

GORDON VAN GELDER’s _The Magazine of Fantasy & SF_ is switching to bimonthly publication. ’Rising costs — especially postal costs — and the economy put us in a position where we either had to raise our rates severely or cut back somewhere. Given the state of the economy, I decided a cutback on frequency made the most sense. We’ll lose a little more than 10% of our content this year, but publishing on a bimonthly schedule should put us in a great position for the coming years.’ (2 January)

Combine that with ANALOG and ASIMOVS’ recent format change that cuts out 4000 words/issue and introduces other publishing efficiencies… well, I guess it’s good that they noticed something’s wrong, right? In any case, that’s the trifecta.

Signs of creative life elsewhere, mind you:

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 16 episodes in warrenellis.com’s sidebar player or here — they’ve been played some 64000 times.

And, for various reasons, I’m now pretty much out of music to consider for it.

Therefore, I need 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.

Notes here.

Gillen does his annual pick of 2008’s pop litter.

I personally detect a certain mongoloid poptimism creeping in, and really want to twat him with steel gardening implements over a few of his selections. Which is good. Gillen’s 40 of the year is always an entertaining and thought-provoking read.

And, yes, I don’t have it together enough for big round-up posts yet, so it’s going to be tumblestyle for a few days.

Over at Whitechapel.

And we’re back.