• Autarky – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "An autarky is an economy that is self-sufficient and does not take part in international trade, or severely limits trade with the outside world."
  (tags:pol what+a+good+word )
• Obsessed with the production design of The President’s Analyst
  Jones Design Fugue ftw
  (tags:design )
• Genetically Modified Utensils – Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect
  "Given our ability to (genetically) modify foods what would make the ultimate fruit/vegetable for resource efficient growing + nutrition + quality assurance + shipping + display + carrying + consumption + disposal?"
  (tags:future )

Thank you.

(and thanks to whoever it was who sent me the link over twitter)

Well, I was going to load up a new 4am podcast, but two of the tracks have chipmunked and I’m out of time to fix them. So, apologies to the people I told to expect a new one today, and I’ll give it another shot at the end of the week…

• Planetary Skin
  "NASA Ames and Cisco Systems Inc. are developing "Planetary Skin" — a marriage of satellites, land sensors and the Internet — to capture, analyze and interpret global environmental data, using a comprehensive sensor network in rainforests around the world."
  (tags:sci tech space localise spimeworld eco )

• Eating Bark: eglin fps-85 radar building
  "Imagining the universe as seen by a building used to track orbital debris"
  (tags:art sci architecture )
• totalitarianism today: The Russian government rewrites history. Again.

  (tags:crime pol )

• Teacher sells marijuana to his students @ www.dosenation.com
  "He was growing cannabis at his dacha and then was selling it to his students. At first he persuaded two of his students to try marijuana for free. Teenagers liked it. When some time later the teenagers asked him to give them some more the teacher demanded payment."
  (tags:crime drugs stupid )
• Utah tries to outlaw bars, being drunk @ www.dosenation.com
  "A Utah Senate committee has approved a bill that would hide the preparation of alcoholic drinks behind 10-foot-high walls in restaurants and make it illegal to appear drunk."
  (tags:crime stupid )

Rudy Rucker’s webmag of weird fiction and stuff, FLURB, has reached its seventh iteration, with an excellent line-up including Kek-W, Richard Kadrey and Simon Logan.  FLURB is rarely less than fascinating.  Go and read, all for free.

Am clearing out Bloglines while I have an hour of relative peace and my left eye has stopped twitching from HATESTRESSKILL week. Here’s a nice Annie Wu sketch:

• Instapaper (analogue edition) (blog.thoughtwax.com)
  Guy built up a hefty backlog of unread online articles, couldn't face reading them all on laptop or phone screen – so he dumped the lot to PDF and uploaded the PDF to Lulu and bought it as a book to read at his leisure.
  (tags:papernet )

A skeleton key for comics:

So, every week or two, I set all the artists at my message board a challenge called REMAKE/REMODEL. I pick a character — usually some ancient pulp character from the claggy depths of the public domain — and tell the artists to reinterpret said character from a modern perspective.

This week, I set them the character Ivan Brodsky, about whom the sainted Jess Nevins writes:

Brodsky, Ivan. Ivan Brodsky was created by “Victor Rousseau,” the pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emmanuel (Jim Anthony, Clifford, Ronald Gowan, Professor MacBeard, Dr. Martinus, Pennell, Shawm, Thorne), and appeared in eleven stories in Weird Tales in 1926 and 1927, beginning with “The Case of the Jailer’s Daughter” (Weird Tales, Sept. 1926).

Ivan Brodsky is a Big-Headed Dwarf Genius Occult Detective. Ivan Brodsky, the “Surgeon of Souls,” works as a “professor of nervous diseases” at a London hospital. He is a “dark, sinewy, undersized man, with a great head absurdly disproportionate to his body, and flashing eyes that seemed to pierce through you and read your thoughts.” He is “a cross between two races whose blend of shrewdness and mysticism was probably accountable for the production of so remarkable a personality as his own.” He is unassuming and doesn’t socialize, but is “all-dominating” in his hospital, where he performs experiments for treating “obscure brain lesions.” He is an expert hypnotist who receives cases from around the country. His particular cases involve psychic matters of reincarnation and possession, and he believes in an “oversoul” to which individual souls return, so that the execution of a brutal murderer will “be the release of just so much additional force of evil” to the oversoul.

Yeah.

Here’s a selection of what the Ivan Brodsky challenge gave birth to. Please do look up the individual artists in the thread itself:

The end of Book Two.

"Nuhh mmnnaaa hnnggaaa mffffnnn!"

Congrats to Ben Templesmith on selling the film rights to his carnographic graphic novel WELCOME TO HOXFORD.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant sf novel RED MARS is now available as a free PDF download from its US publisher.  Direct link to PDF, and their Free Library page listing it and other available free downloads.  Be warned: RED MARS is first of a trilogy, and there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself craving the others (GREEN MARS and BLUE MARS).

Friend-of-a-friend, performer Hollis Hawthorne got hit-and-run by a car in India, and is now in a coma in a tiny rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury. Good news: one of the best hospitals in the world has agreed to treat her for nothing. Bad news: said hospital is in the USA, and it’s apparently going to cost USD $150,000 to airlift her out of India. And the hospital won’t cover that. Basically, the longer it takes to move her, the odds of her dying in a bed in a rat- and ant-infested Indian hospital increase.

The full story is here at Coilhouse. The charity team Friends Of Hollis are here.

Wil Wheaton’s releasing his production diary from the episode of CRIMINAL MINDS he did as an mp3 audiobook.  No DRM, five Yanqui dollars, even a free preview.  Go and learn of it.

Massively random thing that I’m just trying to get down on the screen so I can see it properly:

So Wil Wheaton released his new book SUNKEN TREASURE as a POD book. And it was doing fine. And it occurred to him that, hey, maybe people would like it as an ebook. He only had the ability to do it as PDF, but, what the fuck, he decided to give it a go and priced it at USD $5 a pop. No DRM.

In 48 hours, he’d sold as many PDFs as he’d sold print versions in the previous four weeks.

Also of interest:

Print sales in the last 48 hours have been better than print sales in the last 5 days.

People bought it as a PDF, liked it, and decided they wanted a print copy for the house.

The thing that caught my eye about the Unbook was the idea of accepting a book as a version: an evolving beast that spits out periodic iterations of itself before crawling away to mutate some more. And it occurred to me today that that actually ties into the idea of the Battle Weapon — the 12-inch released to test new experiments in music (more commonly known as dubplates these days).

(See also "short fiction as the club scene," short/flash fiction as the dubplate)

Paid-PDF as a Battle Weapon? A v0.9 release of a book or collection of ideas? Not quite the "electronic Advance Reading Copy" that people like Baen release in digital formats, maybe — but it could be. It could also be much more beta than that. Novelettes and bags-of-notes. Who knows? Let it mutate.

Just as I was writing this? A blog entry from Simon Reynolds pops up in the side window. Relevant part:

the blog for Kevin Pearce’s new e-zine Your Heart Out, which he will send to you in PDF form if you ask nicely and you can print out if you so choose (a crafty fusion of the possibilities of the internet with the tangibility/cherishablity of the old-style fanzine, eh?)

I will therefore invoke Papernet here to preserve the search string.

"Ashes Is White," from the 2008 album ISLAND DIAMONDS. Video by Luis Naranjo.

Beethoven’s Triple Concerto by William Orbit from his PIECES IN A MODERN STYLE (2000).