Slinka:

Alister B:

Brainwreck Photography:

Matt Jones (further to GET EXCITED AND MAKE THINGS):

And Clayton "Siege" Cubitt:

Concubine from Clayton Cubitt on Vimeo.

• Experimental Ebola Vaccine
  "It was a nightmare scenario: A scientist accidentally pricked her finger with a needle used to inject the deadly Ebola virus into lab mice. Within hours, members of a tightly bound, yet far-flung community of virologists, biologists and others were tensely gathered in a trans-Atlantic telephone conference trying to map out a way to save her life."
  (tags:med sci net )
• Printcasting | People-Powered Magazines

  (tags:papernet )

Is Friday, is gone noon, is FREAKANGELS.

• Newgate novel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "The Newgate novels (or Old Bailey novels) were novels published in England from the late 1820s until the 1840s that were thought to glamorise the lives of the criminals they portrayed. Most drew their inspiration from the Newgate Calendar, a biography of famous criminals published at various times during the late 18th and early 19th centuries"
  (tags:books )

From Ben Templesmith. Store link, and Ben’s explanations.

One member of Gang Gang Dance, one member of Growing. Words that come to mind: squalid, ritualistic, haunted, feral, clanking, doomed. It first recalls late No Wave stuff, some of the sort of things that the likes of Lydia Lunch and Clint Ruin got up to in the late 80s. There are a few moments of wonderful hammering unpredictability in there. It’s really blowing out the cobwebs tonight.

The Egyptian government has sought to dispel rumours that a mobile phone text message "from unknown foreign quarters" is spreading around the country and killing those who receive it.

A wondrous story picked up by AFP:

The extraordinary move by Egypt’s health and interior ministries follows press reports that an SMS containing a special combination of numbers killed a man in the town of Mallawi south of Cairo.

"He died vomiting blood, followed by stroke, shortly after he received a message from an unknown phone number," the Egyptian Gazette reported on Wednesday.

Silver Pines: Texan dreampop with a touch of psych.  Very pleasant afternoon listening, I’m finding.

Ganked from Russell Davies’ flickrstream:

The first of Jamais Cascio’s new columns for Fast Company:

We’re in an arms race with advertisers (and spammers, their less-reputable cousins): As fast as we improve ad-blocking technology, they improve their ability to get past it. This will only get worse as the Web becomes something we carry with us as a constant presence. But what happens when you combine increasingly immersive digital tools and aggressive competition between advertisers and filters? Unintended, and potentially quite unsettling, consequences.

The one-dollar promotional "After WATCHMEN" edition of PLANETARY #1 is available in stores from this Wednesday (Thursday in the UK), apparently.

(FAQ: your PLANETARY #27 update)

Remember when I told you this was going to be the year that POD finally broke wide and mainstreamed? And you all laughed? Behold:

Warner Bros on Monday became the first studio to open its film vault to "made-to-order" DVDs, as it sought new revenues in a slumping DVD market by making it possible for fans to buy decades-old films.

Warner Bros, owned by Time Warner Inc, made an initial batch of 150 titles available for purchase online at www.WarnerArchive.com , including 1943 comedy-romance "Mr. Lucky" starring Cary Grant and the 1962 release "All Fall Down" with Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint.

The on-demand service allows Warner Bros. to avoid the risk of manufacturing too many copies of old or obscure titles and shipping them to retailers because customers directly order only the titles they want to buy.

DC Comics, of late, has not been a foment of innovation. But today (I don’t pay an awful lot of attention to comics news) I tripped over a write-up of a new thing they’re doing, run by their brilliant art director Mark Chiarello (also a fine illustrator in his own right): Wednesday Comics.

The publication size is 14 inches wide by 20 inches tall, so it’s big. That’s the front page – so when you open it, it gets 28 inches wide, so it’s an enormous page. So for 12 weeks, that “cover” will be an installment of the Brian Azzarello/Eduardo Risso Batman story. Page 2 will be Sgt. Rock, and so on. So essentially, it’s 12 big-ass pages. Each story takes up one whole page, with no staples. It’ll be just like the Sunday funnies you read as a kid.

As an aside, it’s not just a comic book page that’s been blown up really large – it’s an average of sixteen panels per page.

Twelve weekly issues, twelve one-page stories (either a standalone or an episode of a 12-part serial). The sort of thing that, really, only DC Comics could pull off. I’m delighted to see them setting off a firework like this. Creators involve apparently include Neil Gaiman, Adam & Joe Kubert, Paul Pope, Dave Gibbons, and Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner.

This is one of those things I tend to re-watch annually: had a torrent off it taken from its original transmission on the BBC until the DVD came out. Everyone knows I’m a space freak, and this is prime space porn, a docudrama of the weird struggle between Korolev and Von Braun. The effects are superbly subtle, and it was simply a beautifully staged and produced piece of work, prime BBC. Writer Christopher Spencer does a generally fine job of dramatising Deborah Cadbury’s book, enough that you forgive him his shaving of events and details for tv. Steve Nicolson as Korolev gives a standout performance: he should have immediately been given his own detective show after this. Or possibly KOROLEV: ROCKET DETECTIVE OF THE 21st SOVIET CENTURY. Anyway. Beg, borrow or steal:

Map representing the location of the 30 biggest "mega-slums" in the World:

* Adam Greenfield: the elements of networked urbanism.

* Congrats to Cherie Priest on selling the sequel to the magnificent novel BONESHAKER, the much longed-for DREADNOUGHT. Wil Wheaton’s pants just exploded with joy.

* COILHOUSE #3 must be imminent, because the blog’s in lockdown again.

* Katie West is suave:

* Eliza Gauger’s Sketch-A-Day:

Are our institutions prepared to cope with the effects of a “space weather Katrina,” a rare, but according to the historical record, not inconceivable eventuality?

America’s National Research Council has issued a book, free to read online, on understanding the societal and economic impacts of severe space weather events. It is rich with Grim Meathook Futurity.

Electric power is modern society’s cornerstone technology, the technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend. Although the probability of a wide-area electric power blackout resulting from an extreme space weather event is low, the consequences of such an event could be very high, as its effects would cascade through other, dependent systems. Collateral effects of a longer-term outage would likely include, for example, disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure; and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration. The resulting loss of services for a significant period of time in even one region of the country could affect the entire nation and have international impacts as well.

The evil geniuses at New Scientist summarise it with a speculative scenario:

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

• Magazine Constellation | Issue Aries-Taurus 2009 | MagCloud
  Issue 2
  (tags:magazine peopleiknow )

The Guardian on the launch of WIRED UK:

…there will still be a mixture of homegrown material and features glommed from Wired’s American edition, alongside an eclectic slate of contributors that includes the distinguished (Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield) and the rabble-rousing (Warren Ellis, the expletive-addicted comic book writer).

Bollocks.

Halfway through this, at present. There’s something about Bruce’s writing that I always seem to forget, between novels: that he really does write the most loathesome, appallingly repellent protagonists in contemporary popular fiction, and somehow gets away with it. There’s no reason why I should be remotely interested in whether or not Vera and Radmila live — hell, I should be rooting for natural disasters to pancake the crazy horrible sows and everyone they know, there is literally not one decent person to be seen in this book so far — but yet I’m still reading. That takes some skill.

• Sacramento and Its Riverside Tent City - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com
  "A tent city is burgeoning in Sacramento, Calif., prompting local officials to consider whether such an encampment should be made permanent, with plumbing and all."
  (tags:pol gmf )

Friday night LA time, the COILHOUSE coven ceases to take orders for their luvly t-shirts. Place your order now. Bought #2 of the magazine yet?

For men. For women.

Bruce "I made kids cry at SXSWi" Sterling:

I know this sounds opaque, but I heard British novelist M John Harrison yesterday describing how the construction of identity is changing because "culture," the factors that acculturate people, have been smeared all over the planet by the Internet. And he sees this is as a challenge for novelists because literature is a description of how people are; it’s about structures of meaning and feeling. And the structure of literary language needs to respond to, or even *lead,* new structures of meaning and feeling.

Simon Crubellier:

I’m an idiot (slaps forehead)

Opensourced Second Life as Augmented Reality overlay. Whack that shit on a pair of lenses.

Prim buildings on wasteground. Jet cars weaving around real cars on real roads. Giant robots peering around the corner of the street.

Build your avatar and load it onto a wearable AR beacon. Let people watch your avatar rez over your realself.

May turn this into a real thought at the weekend. Or not.

(yes am aware SL is D-E-D dead because it is apparently unscalable and doesn’t work most of the time that’s why I stopped writing about it so it’s just an example/marker but still )