There will be some actual content here sometime today, I swear. Just as soon as things stop exploding and my head actually straightens itself out to the point where linear thought becomes a possibility again. NURSE! etc. See you later.

Jesus, what an insane week…

Volume 2 of FREAKANGELS reaches print this week, from Wednesday in North America and Thursday in the UK. This is the paperback edition — the hardback ships in May, I believe.

Obviously, this is the hopeful end of our economic model: the hope that print-collection sales will recoup the costs of producing FREAKANGELS for the web. The weird thing is, I’m always bumping into people who tell me they don’t read FREAKANGELS for free on the web because they’re waiting for the trade paperback…

• Scobleizer The newspaper industry just gave away another free meal, er Twitter: do they have any left?
  In general, I have very little time for Scoble, and true to form there are about six things in the first half of this alone that make me want to beat the stupid out of him with a shovel. But there's also food for thought in there this time.
  (tags:web news )

Photograph and art direction by Marta Lamovsek. G’night.

For reasons currently beyond my understanding, IGNITION CITY #2 will be in better comics stores from this Wednesday (North America) and Thursday (the UK and other territories where Foreigners live).

As before, IGNITION CITY comes with three flavours of cover (and if you don’t like variant covers, don’t complain to me, because I’m not the publisher, and also stop other people from buying them, because that’s why publishers make them and I end up having to design three fucking covers for every issue). All following links will lead you to pages when you can find embiggened versions: This is the regular:

This is the Vintage:

And this is the Wraparound:

Must be up on adultswim.com, because they’ve landed on YouTube.

Episode 4, and Episode 5.

• Ólafur Arnalds – ‘Found Songs’ (Erased Tapes) – follow to download each day’s mp3 for FREE
  “Icelandic neo-classical composer Ólafur Arnalds embarks on a brand new collection of tracks entitled‘Found Songs’. Each track from this series will be created and released within 24 hours (as a free download, each announced through his Twitter account)…”
  (tags:music mp3 web )
• Avoid a future cataclysm: Forget the past – physics-math – 20 April 2009 – New Scientist
  "Consider a hypothetical machine intelligence that regularly backs up its memory. If it encountered a glitch, for example, it could reset its memory to, say, the previous day's state. Imagine that on learning of an impending disaster – perhaps a catastrophic asteroid strike on its planet – the machine resets its memory…"
  (tags:sci mad )

The new season’s skin is live, designed and implemented as ever by my lovely mechanic Ariana Osborne.  Thank you, sweetheart.

Selections from my internet spiderhole:

* Grim Meathook Future

* Blood Falls

* 8tracks Mixtapes

* Warren Ellis At London MCM Comics Expo

* Kleid gives you "All the Help You Need" in Dark Horse’s CREEPY #1 this July

I really need to sweep that place out today…

Off to the pub.

I’ve got a good two hours of work here left to do, but there won’t be any more broadcasts this weekend. Instead, you can visit an interview with my friend Katelan Foisy. She wears about a dozen different hats every day, but this interview with Asylum revolves around her life as a tarot reader.

She’s also Art Editor at Constellation magazine, which is a POD operation publishing through MagCloud. See? People are doing it.

Goodnight.

(FAQ: what’s a Closedown?)

Siege’s notes on the cover he created for the limited signed hardback edition of CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, which makes me smile every time I see it.

Came home to reports of it from various people, and the BBC confirmed it ten minutes later.

We will not see his like again. A strong man, an incisive mind and a fearless writer.

• The End of Form / The Beginning of Form – Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect
  "Why anyone would want wear 'data-glasses' only to have their view of the world overlaid with advertising?"
  (tags:tech ads )
• NASA may need extra $30b to stay on schedule to moon – space – 17 April 2009 – New Scientist
  "Without an influx of cash, cost overruns could delay NASA's return to the moon or prompt cuts to the agency's science missions to try to keep its moon plans on track"
  (tags:space )

Random selection of stuff that’s crossed my desk this week, including music by 65daysofstatic, Big Ned and Radikal Guru.

Head-emptying time, somewhat random and unformed as yet, beware:

"Bookazine" is a word I’ve been seeing more and more over the last couple of years. Dennis Publishing, who have been making them since 2004, say:

Essentially a Bookazine is a perfect-bound, magazine-sized soft back book focusing on a particular subject matter. These bookazines are sold on the magazine racks and are priced between £5.99 and £9.99 with production values to reflect this price.

Mortons Media Group, who claim to have created the term, say:

’Bookazine’ (A hybrid of a Book and a Magazine) is a term we have created to describe a glossy, A4 perfect bound (stitched paged) one-off product. Bookazines generally are between 116 and 132 pages, and are all printed on very high quality thick paper, with a glossy cover. Bookazines are specialist titles covering an area or genre, which also contain a small percentage of advertising to make the product more affordable

One-off items, then. But wait. LOFT is a magazine in bookazine format. They’re up to eight volumes.

‘BOOKAZINE’ because we want to create something worth keeping. A symbiosis
between a magazine and a book that goes against the dominant trend of consuming
and throwing away tons and tons of printed matter that we could have easily done
without from the beginning.

The COILHOUSE coven never deviated from the term "magazine" for a moment. I’ve not yet seen a copy of LOFT, but their statement seems right in line with COILHOUSE’s intent — it’s an object of permanence, not transience, and it’s a great big paving slab of a bugger.

When alt.country bible NO DEPRESSION died as a magazine (due, according to reports, to declining ad revenue), the University Of Texas Press stepped in to help reanimate it as a twice-yearly self-described bookazine. (FOLIO on this and other magazines dying of ad starvation)

This led to an illuminating comment by Robert Christgau:

…a long time ago I decided for journalism and against academia in my own career because I believed journalism with its profit motives was more conducive to adventurous thinking and good writing. I’ve done a fair amount of college teaching, in music history as well as writing, and am still willing to generalize that I get more intellectual stimulation from my journalistic friends than from the people I meet in academia–though if I spend all my time in academia I’d presumably get to be more selective. Now journalism as I engaged it turns to the public tit. Something’s off there.

While it might also be suggested that the ad-revenue model is just as big a tit, and more likely to give you some disgusting mouth disease — and while I live in a country where the government essentially paid NEW WORLDS to publish JG Ballard and Thomas Pynchon, so, you know, fuck you — I think maybe there’s another point hiding in there.

One is that the profit motive is not necessarily the same as stickering hooker cards all over your object. I don’t need an internet mediated by Google Ads framing bloody everything. Yes, if you’re doing a mass-market magazine, particularly in this economy, ad sales are probably crucial to maintaining a very large staff. Hell, if you’re going for half the culture like COILHOUSE I’m not going to look askance at a handful of full-page ads that fit the theme. But if you’re doing something like NO DEPRESSION, essentially a niche publication written by and for enthusiasts…

In my head, this sort of wheels around to PrintOnDemand and the unbook. I’m okay with paying ten quid for a biannual or quarterly journal that looks like a book. Given that people who are passionate about things are going to write about them anyway, I see no reason why niche journals run out of people’s front rooms shouldn’t say fuckit and go to POD, relieving themselves of the distribution headache and leaving them to focus on 1) the content and 2) creating awareness. Call it the pro-am solution — sometimes, professional writers just want to write.

(This would also seem to be one obvious end for the sf magazine: ref. Elizabeth Bear equating short sf with the club scene, Electronic Battle Weapon POD. EDITED TO ADD: I’ve just remembered that a fairly well-known speculative fiction magazine IS going to bookazine this year, though I don’t think it’s public knowledge yet)

(Perhaps interestingly, however, NO DEPRESSION can’t generate any kind of revenue from their website and have had to delete its editorial budget.)

You read COILHOUSE, right?

"Engineering!"

• Architecture Fiction: a proof of concept | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
  ""Architecture is a fiction," states Aaron Betsky in the first edition
  of Beyond that will appear this month. Beyond I is the first bookazine
  packed with short stories on architecture."
  (tags:books design architecture )

Slinka, as half of design unit Ego Assassin, makes clothes that you want to retroactively insert into every science fiction film ever made.* All that floaty toga shit in LOGAN’S RUN? No. Jenny Agutter in Ego Assassin latex. This dress is called Hel, and that’s Slinka in it. She eats like a pig, drinks like a fish and has no internal organs. I’ve known her for many years and I don’t think I’ve ever told her how happy I am that she’s finally doing something she loves, and doing it so fucking well. I’m proud of and amazed by her.

Goodnight.

* Okay, not every science fiction film ever made. I don’t think any member of the cast of THINGS TO COME, for instance, could have pulled it off. But let’s run it through a computer and find out anyway.