Today:

"Oooh. Is a baby efflant. What happened to it?"

The baby wanders toward the water. She stumbles on the slippery riverbank and slides into a slurry of clay, sand, and fresh snowmelt. She struggles to free herself, but every movement drags her deeper. The mud gets in her mouth, her trunk, her eyes; disoriented, she gasps for breath but gets a mouthful of muck instead. Coughing, gagging, caught in a riptide of panic, she makes a dreadful high-pitched shriek that brings her mother running. Inhaling with all her force, the calf sucks the mud deep into her trachea, sealing her lungs. By the time her mother reaches the bank, the baby is partially submerged in the ice-cold mire and flailing feebly, rapidly sliding into shock. The mother screams and mills on the soft bank

"AAAAAAAAA"

TOUCH THE FUCKING ELEPHANT

"AAAAAA NO DON’T MAKE ME AAAAAAA MUMMY"

I AM YOUR FUCKING MUMMY TOUCH THE FUCKING ELEPHANT

According to The Hollywood Reporter and other locations — I’m going to throw the traffic to comics news site Newsarama — Bruce Willis and Richard Donner are apparently circling the film adaption of RED, the graphic novelette I did with artist Cully Hamner some years ago.

I have no further knowledge of this. But I’m all right with Bruce Willis, actually. Funny thing is that people are talking about this being part of a "second act" for him at age 54, but I always imagined the protagonist of RED as being in his early sixties…

• Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Afghanistan and Black Globalization
  "… (the Taliban) now lives off of an economy (opium production valued at $2-3.5 billion a year) the size of many small states and its ability to "tax" this production is estimated to be approximately 15% (strangely, this is just below the same level of taxation the US government has found to be sustainable…"
  (tags:pol crime war )
• G20 officer resigns over comment
  Pc Hayter, from the Royal protection unit, allegedly wrote: "I see my lot have murdered someone again."
  (tags:police crime )
• ComingAnarchy: Stop Calling Them Terrorists
  ".. the Somali pirates were actually a result of the strong civil society in the northern horn, unrelated to the Islamic extremists in the south, and regardless, irrelevant to Al Qaeda and the major factions in the war on terrorism…"
  (tags:pol war )
• NASA may abandon plans for moon base – space – 29 April 2009 – New Scientist
  "NASA will probably not build an outpost on the moon as originally planned, the agency's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, told lawmakers on Wednesday. His comments also hinted that the agency is open to putting more emphasis on human missions to destinations like Mars or a near-Earth asteroid."
  (tags:space )

This Is What It Means To Be Ben Templesmith:

Dan Curtis Johnson’s on holiday:

Zoetica Ebb has tagged this modelling shot for MA46 with "LOLwhore":

Photo by Melissa Gira:

This is painter Zofia Szeretlek and I have no idea what she is doing, except, maybe, see above:

And here is Bruce Sterling looking relaxed, international and yet faintly sinister, as if lost in the contemplation of a future where ubiquitous computing nets deny people Tamiflu. And not minding it too much.

Comics artist and cosmic cowboy Tony Moore — who introduced me to the term "Kentucky chrome" for duct tape — attempts to educate me about country music.

Basically, just go and read this. Wherein Jamais Cascio deploys Future Science in downloadable form for free and has a little fun with the minds of the unsuspecting.

It’s going to be a tumblelog kind of day, no time for connecting up big thoughts.

• Modern life’s pressures may be hastening human evolution
  "It's even conceivable, he said, that our genes eventually will change enough to create an entirely new human species, one no longer able to breed with our own species, Homo sapiens."
  (tags:evolution )
• The Art of Penguin Science Fiction

  (tags:covers design sf )

A quick glance at my internet spiderhole says:

* REMAKE/REMODEL- Detective Eye – wherein artists redesign old public-domain characters for the hell of it. This is a terrible one. All are welcome to play.

* The word on shitgaze

* American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse

* Comics on Sale This Week (29 Apr 09)

Eight tracks currently passing across my desktop, including music by Bleeding Heart Narrative, Clark and Crystal Stilts.

• Universal to remake ‘Videodrome’ – Entertainment News, Gotham, Media – Variety
  "The new picture will modernize the concept, infuse it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller."
  (tags:film ung )

"At Jakarta’s international airport, a thermal scanner checked passengers’ temperatures."

Matt Jones: Went to bed last night half remembering Warren saying in the pub that GLOBAL FREQUENCY was his take on (Gerry Anderson’s) Thunderbirds. Did I imagine that Chief?

Me: Nope. In many ways, it was. I defined GLOBAL FREQUENCY from the start as Rescue Fiction. if not explicitly Post-9/11 Rescue Fiction. Because Thunderbirds is the anti-Superman. Now, I just woke up, so it’s okay if that doesn’t make sense. But immediately after 9/11 I found people on message boards ACTUALLY SAYING OUT LOUD that they wished Superman were real because he would have saved the WTC. And that is an anti-evolutionary wish. What you say is, I wish the dozen or so people who knew this was going to happen could have informed someone who’d actually listen and that we had had the sense/madness to engineer a mechanical response to someone attacking NYC with flying death tubes

Thunderbirds: Darwin’s Airforce

Matt Jones: 2000 giant lighter-than-air pollution-eating biomimetic heavy-lifting portuguese men o’war that swarm slowly in groups proportionate to threat-level over soon-to-be disaster areas predicted by the planetary-skin, acting as an early warning visualisation in the sky (shite, it’s the thunderbird jellyfish! we’re frakked/going to be ok!!!) manufacturing synthbio antigens that rain like snowflakes.

Me: …I’m going down the pub now. I think my brain has internal bleeding.

I now own a couple of packs of Field Notes notebooks. (Purchased via The Paperie in the UK, as PayPal still fail to validate my account.) I was attracted/amused by their appearance on the website — the slightly flecked, unprocessed-looking brown card covers are millennial culture-code for "authenticity" (ref. Godspeed You! Black Emperor CD sleeves, Muji).

These notebooks are actually quite beautiful. Am particularly amused by the five-inch ruler printed on the trim-edge of the inside back cover, which also contains a funny list of "Practical Applications."

The slightly olive cast of the card cover, the sturdy feel of the thing, and the usefulness of things like the printed ruler (seriously, that’s something I’m going to use, I’m forever squinting at publication formats and guessing) and the recording template in the inside front cover… it does conjure, for me, memories of discovering artifacts from times of working austerity. My grandad still had his old ration book on the sideboard in 1975, as if convinced that it’d be handy again one day soon. Aside from it being just a really nice object to handle and use, a Field Notes notebook feels like an apt thing to have in my hand this year. Futura type and postwar olive.

Good job, Field Notes people.

Also funny: a Field Notes tag on Flickr.

• Pubcrawler mobile bar hire
  "The Pubcrawler meets you for your occasion with a drinks reception, you climb aboard, start cycling and you're off, travelling the streets on the amazing mobile bar. Your effortless cycling motion powers the rear wheel, which then drives The Pubcrawler forward. Amazing!"
  (tags:drinking science awe )
• Lost in Space | Articles | Features | Fortean Times UK
  "There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space."
  (tags:space weird )
• America’s Nuclear Flying Saucer – Military.com Content
  "The official designation for America?s nuclear flying saucer was the Lenticular Reentry Vehicle (LRV). It was designed by engineers at the Los Angeles Division of North American Aviation, under a contract with the U.S. Air Force."
  (tags:space mad )
• ADAM STRANGE on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  The first of Paul Pope's pages for DC's WEDNESDAY COMICS
  (tags:comics )

Remember Warren’s Rule: if I’ve been awake less than two hours, it is Morning, no matter what the clock says.

I haven’t done the Monday cleanout of my internet compound yet, so let’s see what’s there right now:

* Ian Talty – obit thread for a Whitechapel member who died yesterday during an urban-exploration outing.

* GI JOE: RESOLUTE – ALL Episodes

* Warren Ellis At London MCM Comics Expo

* Grim Meathook Future – has turned into a discussion about The Coughing Pig Death

* What are the strongest and/or the most surprising albums of the early third of ’09?

* The IGNITION CITY #2 Talk Thread

* The FREAKANGELS Vol 2 Reader’s Thread – Anyone discovering Vol 2 for the first time?

From Topless Robot:

You know how we all complain that so-and-so raped our childhoods? Well, this is the exact opposite. I used this line in my Twitter, but I stand by it — G.I. Joe: Resolute is like Warren Ellis made tender, passionate love to our childhoods, and he had an enormous dick.

Rrrrreally not sure how to feel about that one.

• Bruce Sterling – Design Fiction – interactions magazine
  "A strictly literary approach to this experience hurts our ability to comprehend what The Pillow Book is doing. This ancient ?book? is related only distantly to our books; in function and audience, it has more kinship with a small-scale blog."
  (tags:design writing books sf history )

I’m not the only one left who subscribes to print magazines, right? I just renewed a bunch of subscriptions over the last month, so, in some ways, this is me making notes to myself.

The Wire. Weird thing. Their website was misbehaving, so I phoned them to renew my sub. And the woman taking my details paused and said: "Warren Ellis…the comics writer?" At which I kind of coughed. And she said, "Oh, it’s so nice to know you’re a reader." Weird.

Songlines. (Somehow I didn’t notice my subscription had lapsed, which is worrying and possibly indicative. I may have been lulled into a coma by coverage of Rodrigo y Gabriela.)

The Believer. Not sure if it’ll survive another subscription cycle, to be honest.

Fortean Times. Not what it was, but reliably entertaining. I’ve been reading FT since back when it was in 6.5×4.5-inch format, and will probably never shake the habit. Gets passed around a lot.

McSweeney’s counts as a magazine, doesn’t it? Well, it does now.

Arkitip. This is a new subscription – I closed a deal for a film treatment and treated myself.

I should re-up with The Economist, which I let slip a few years ago.

Coilhouse. I make the girls send me free copies because I’m a bastard.

I also get free copies of SFX because I write a column in it. I write a column for WIRED UK but apparently don’t get free copies of that. We live in times of austerity.

I let all my subscriptions to the sf magazines lapse. I don’t think I even opened the last copy of ASIMOV’S I received. I see from the website that INTERZONE has picked up, at least visually, and their rhetoric is setting the bar high for themselves. From the current issue’s editorial, at what appears to be a temporary link that won’t survive the month:

…the cultural landscape has never looked shallower or more derivative. But if, as Jung asserted, the psyche creates reality every day, the genuinely resonant and original stories we receive at Interzone constitute a shield against this barrage of mass media crap. Independent publishing must survive the current crisis: any hope our culture can escape its corrupting obsessions with money and celebrity lies in writers like ours, and readers like ours.

I seem to remember noting the other day that MagCloud now ships to the UK. Anyway, its shipping costs are very nice, better than Lulu’s in fact, and they take credit cards as well as PayPal. So I just ordered an issue of something pretty much at random, to see how these POD-magazines look…

So… seriously. I’m not the last print-magazine subscriber standing, am I?

Addendum to this post: I’ve just been forwarded, via the good offices of Paul Di Filippo, a listserv post from sf magazine INTERZONE’s cofounder David Pringle:

"Don’t think it has been mentioned (?) on list, but ’the last (Ballard) short story’, The Dying Fall, was published in today’s [25 April 2009] ’Review’ [separate section] of the Guardian. 1.5 (newspaper) pages long, and illustrated with a picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa…"

First published in _Interzone_, April 1996!

Does _The Guardian_ tell its readers that? No. They’re trying to pass off the story as a new-found "last story." Thus are magazines in our field shabbily treated.

Technically, they’re correct that it was his "last short story," because Ballard wrote no more after that as far as I’m aware.

I’m pleased the paper has seen fit to reprint it from our pages after 13 years — but I wish they had been more honest in their presentation.

YouTubed at this link, for both of you who have been following along.

Reuters:

Tests have confirmed that eight New York City schoolchildren had a type A influenza virus, likely swine flu, city Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden said on Saturday.

BBC:

A new flu virus suspected of killing at least 60 people in Mexico has the potential to become a pandemic, the World Health Organization’s chief says.

On the ground:

I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from ’under control’… two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were. The official number of deaths is 20, nevertheless, the true number of victims are more than 200…

The whole thing aired last night in Canada on Teletoon, and airs late tonight in the USA on Adult Swim. Check your listings.

FAQ: a lot of people seemed to think that the "satellites" were in "space," despite the contrary being stated on two or three separate occasions in the series itself. This had led to people calling me names for sending people into space via balloon. I would direct you to Project Manhigh, which was mentioned in the show. Also, the stratosphere — I used the word several times in the show — is not space. And the "satellites" were Stratellites or Stratospheric Airships, a concept I encountered many years ago, one of which has already been successfully flown at an altitude of 74000 feet, or 22 miles. Which puts it well inside the stratosphere, which starts 6 miles up and transitions to the mesosphere at 31 miles up.

See? Isn’t paying attention science fun?

Comics retailers! Please to order the first issue of ANNA MERCURY 2: ULTRASPACIAL DREADNOUGHT VANAHEIM next week or I’ll have mind-controlled slaves burn down your shops!

Of course, if YOU, gentle reader, would like to secure a copy of this work, you can grab the order codes from the ANNA MERCURY microsite and communicate them to your retailer.

A citystate from the strange superdimensional space of The Constellation sends a probe to Earth. To decide whether or not to make contact, the London office of the Constellation Project must send an agent through the fabric of the universe itself to the city of Three Souls Town, apparently populated by an oppressive society made of kidnapped humans. But that’s not how it starts. It starts with Anna Mercury, Earth’s top transuniversal explorer, UNDER RAY-GUN ATTACK IN A CITY BEYOND SPACE ITSELF!

G’night.