By the band Dark Mean, from their EP entitled FRANKENCOTTAGE. I’ve been there, and I approve of the sentiment. You’ve been there too, I’m pretty sure.

Good night, internet.

(link degrades in seven days, mp3 provided for review purposes only, contact if you need it removed)

More media-engineering brilliance from the mad scientists of Schulze & Webb:

Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months.

Obviously less useful for my Foreign Johnny readers, unless you’ve worked out how to access the BBC from abroad.

At bleedingcool.com:

Aha. Can you hear that? It’s the Villain’s soundtrack. That awful whistling sound. A sound that comes from before recorded time itself. It is the sound, gentle reader, of Stan Lee’s ocarina…

1. bump, 2. wonderland, 3. the swan whisperer

Apparently inspired by my ROTOR idea, TAG is now live:

TAG is a project where every week, a theme is chosen, and every day, one of our artists creates something based around that theme, using a variety of mediums from prose to audio to video to images and so forth.

And it’s actually rather good:

This is Warren Ellis dot com.

The shortest and most accessible piece of Philip Jeck I have immediately to hand in mp3 form. As I’ve said before, I didn’t really “get” Philip Jeck until I saw him perform live, but you’re very probably much less stupid than I am. Philip Jeck makes fine night music. Although it’s probably not wise to listen to a great deal of his work in the dark in a Finnish hotel room in the middle of the night while exhausted and slightly drunk.

This is “Wipe,” from his album “7.”

Good night internet.

(link degrades after seven days, provided for review purposes only, contact me if you need it gone and it’ll be removed immediately)

Currently occurring in the depths of my internet knocking-shop:

* Post your Dr. Sketchy’s Artwork - The boss herself, Molly Crabapple, comperes a thread where Dr Sketchy’s visitors and customers show off their work. Join in.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: International Patents, Inc. - the weekly space where I call out some ancient character from the public domain and have artists reinvent it for the 21st Century.

* The LongBox Digital Comics thread - this one’s going on and on. Will Longbox be the iTunes for comics? Will Longbox kill the comics shop?

* Whitechapel UK Midlands Meetup - where they will all huddle in some shitty pub and mutter together in their funny accents

Monthly reboot in a couple of days’ time.

• test tube - [tube157] DOPO - Blue Lands

  (tags:music mp3 )

From: Warren Ellis
To: Bad Signal mailing list
Subject: [Bad Signal] Steam
Date: June 27, 2009 - 7:17 pm EST

Back in my hotel room to write this talk, and I put
Glastonbury up on the tv while I write. Springsteen’s
on. Not a huge fan of the man, though I admire
his industry. The man puts in a day’s work on stage.
And he’s sweating, working hard. Got his foot up
on an amp as he sings. It’s just him, right now, the
stage is blacked out, and there’s one spot behind
him. And he’s hot, and it’s cold night out there, and
he’s steaming. And he’s just blown the authenticity
thing and gone into supermystification, because it
looks like he’s got an electromagnetic halo, curls of
glowing, pearly white light rising up from and playing
around his head and shoulders while he stands there
in near-silhouette….

He looks like he’s The Last Rock Star, the Ascended
Master who glows in the dark.

At lunchtime, while everyone else was at the conference.

Home now. Will post the notes that I based the talk on later in the week.

It’s Friday, it’s just gone noon UK time, so it’s FREAKANGELS episode 0060, free to air.

And now we go dark here for a while, as I go into prep for getting up at some appalling time in the morning on Saturday to fly to Dundee, where I appear on Sunday evening in conjunction with the TIMEFRAMES event at Dundee University.

Here’s the link to the programme and other information.

As you’ll see, I’ll be signing books at sometime around six pm, and a while later I’ll be talking about god knows what as the final keynote speaker.

Pray the weather’s good, as I don’t have a smoking hotel room and will therefore have to work outside for two days.

Hopefully I’ll see a few of you in Dundee. Otherwise, I’ll be back here Monday. I imagine I’ll be on twitter the whole time giving my usual terrible Narrative of doom.

Behave yourselves and don’t break anything.

The first decent write-up I ever had outside the comics press was written by Steven Wells. And I never got to thank him. And now Steven Wells is dead. And these are his last words:

And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity — the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans — the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks.

You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.

Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.

Proper fucking writer.

Come on. It’s a tradition now, right? Gardner Dozois releases a new YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION containing his Summation of the doings of the year, and I pull out the sf magazine circulation numbers from it and depress everybody. (Cue blog posts beginning "Warren Ellis makes Doom Pronoucements Yet Abloodygain…")

The 2008 sf magazine numbers as per Mr Dozois’ discovery:

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION drops 2.7% in circulation, to a hair over 17000 copies. In the previous three years, it had dropped 5.2%, 13.6% and 23%. That’s 500 missing readers in 2008.

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT drops 5.1%, to a hair under 26,000 copies. 1400 missing readers in 2008.

MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION drops 2.7% to 16,044 copies. Again, around 500 missing readers in 2008.

REALMS OF FANTASY is awaiting revival, I believe.

Mr Dozois continues to peg INTERZONE at "2000 to 3000 copies," which is what he says every year, and I would love proper figures on INTERZONE’s circulation. And, in fact, I think it would be a wise thing for INTERZONE to release such, to combat this constant carping that it’s a "semi-professional" magazine.

Notes: all of these must be selling digital copies that aren’t getting factored into the circulation. Some of those missing readers must have been converted into digital customers. Those numbers would tell a tale. No, print is not dead, and neither are periodicals. All the magazines save INTERZONE are in the middle of format and/or frequency shifts.

I said last year that I wouldn’t run these numbers. That said, I expected the last year to show these magazines display no response at all to their numbers. Instead, one went bimonthly and two changed size and cut some content. Neither of which strike me as proportionate responses. I could almost understand a resolute "we ain’t changing nothing. This is what we do and we’re going to sit here until they prise our red pens from our cold dead hands because we’re providing a service for the fans who like it old school." I could respect that. I’m glad they don’t have guns and stockpiled foodstuffs, but you know what I mean. I’m not sure that actions commensurate with cutting bits off themselves and cooking and eating them to stave off starvation is really due the same kind of nod.

The 2009 numbers, which Dozois will publish in the summer of 2010, will show how practical these moves proved to be.

"Sf magazines" is the string to use in the Search box to find all my other reports and thoughts on this topic over the last three years. Some of them started some arguments. Can’t imagine how. I am, as you know, the very soul of joy, and filled with light.

My favourite sf magazine? FLURB, without a doubt. Richard Kadrey, Kek-W, Simon Logan, Rudy Rucker and John Shirley in the same place? Beat that with a stick.

As illustrated by Raulo Caceres:

1. stranded, 2. toys get bigger, 3. holding down the lakefront

CLICK THROUGH FOR BRAINEATING FULLSIZE IMAGE

Zo agrees. It’s waaaay too early in the bloody morning. Ssssssh.

I saw a tv interview in which Lonnie Donegan (the secret font of rock’n'roll) explained how Van Morrison basically issued instructions for the Belfast gigs that would become the SKIFFLE SESSIONS album. “Chris Barber will play bass.” “But ‘e doesn’t really like playing bass, Van…” “Shot op. And no overdobs.” “We can’t fix it in the studio?”

And it’s Van Morrison, the old monster himself, who gets caught out by the no-overdubs rule. Because halfway through “I Wanna Go Home,” an iteration of “Sloop John B” (which I wrote about a bit here), Lonnie Donegan opens up his pipes and reminds everyone that he’s Lonnie fucking Donegan and he can blow the doors off the room if he feels like it, gets a round of applause at the end of his bit, and that and Van Morrison realising he has to follow that has the old monster cracking up on mic…

“Sloop John B” was one of my dad’s favourite songs, and he was in a skiffle band as a kid because of Lonnie Donegan, and I’m still glad I got to play him this before he died.

Van Morrison, Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber: “I Wanna Go Home.”

Good night, internet.

(link degrades in seven days, provided for review purposes only, please contact if you need it removed and it’ll be done straight away)

Marian Churchland is a comics artist who recently blew everyone’s shit away on a three-issue stint of Richard Starkings’ longrunning ELEPHANTMEN series. She’s going to be a huge fucking deal within two or three years.

But right now she’s selling off her original comics pages for cheap.

(Her husband is Brandon Graham, who’s going to be a huge fucking deal this year or next if there is any fucking justice in the world)

• ‘Lightbulb’ molecule has a bright future - tech - 23 June 2009 - New Scientist
  "A single molecule that reliably emits white light could speed the development of low-energy LEDs for the next generation of light sources and displays, say chemists."
  (tags:sci )
• Brave New WurzelWorld®
  Suzanne Gerber (Miss Wurzel Tod of old) has decided that arts magazines are broken and puts forth her diagnosis and terrible Treatment Plan. Resonates with some of the things written here about magazines of late
  (tags:magazines print peopleiknow )
• The Invincible V
  very pleasant electronic noises, yus
  (tags:music )
• Brain adapts to prosthetic enhancements - life - 22 June 2009 - New Scientist
  "This is the first evidence that tool use alters the body [map]…"
  (tags:bodymod )

A tale of two internet acquaintances: Zoe Keating spotted a letter Amanda Palmer wrote to a music blog about marketing, and Zoe twittered the key points, which are:

from @amandapalmer re #LOFNOTC: "total made on twitter in 2hrs = $11,000; total made from Ben Folds-produced major label album = $0"

cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0

Go and read the letter. Even though @amandapalmer is, as she likes to say, Amanda Fucking Palmer, there’s lessons and food for thought in there for everyone trying to reach people through the interbutt.

warrenellis | I see @amandapalmer saying "(I’m) glad girls dont get visible erections" and think: no, it would have made life so much easier…

…I endorse jameth for the LiveJournal Advisory Panel Election, for he has fine character references from the internet criminals of my acquaintance and he is, I have been given to understand, about the lulz.

Note written on table of Brian Michael Bendis at Heroes Con this past weekend, by someone who apparently waited there for an hour before finding out/being told Bendis wouldn’t be signing until after the panel he’d been scheduled to do:

People often ask me why I do so few conventions, you know.

Via bigblueglobe, this fascinating photo and note:

…the Inca ruins at Moray. The only known circular terraces in the region, it is believed that they were used for agricultural experiments since each of the terraces has its own microclimate…

Click through the link above for whole post and larger version.

Continued musings on the severed robot head of Jack Kirby and all the connections that run through it, at Bleeding Cool Dot Com.

Raymond Loewy is currently orbiting my house in a Studebaker Atom Space Shuttle. Let the bastard have his laughs. We’ll fix his shit later.

Matt Fraction once described this (after emailing me with “aaaaa what the fuck was that”) as the sound of “clowns going chickenhawking in darkened playgrounds.”

I love it. It’s still my favourite piece by the band. I give you “Want You” by Afrirampo. Pleasant dreams, internet.

(link degrades in seven days, provided for review purposes only, contact me if you need it removed and it shall be done immediately)

Just noticed this, from coverage of Digital Humanities 09:

Jeremy (Douglass) talks about Warren Ellis’ Freakangels. We could quantize pages by panel count on each page. Or we could treat all the pages as a single sequence of images, auto-detect each frame on each page and number them all in order. We could quantize by the aspect ratio of the frames: one beat for a quarter-page frame, two beats for half-page frames. All kinds of “DNA sequences” could be constructed, and then we could try to extract information. Jeremy is working on software that auto-detects information and then, in Mac OS X, inserts it into image files as label and content information. Poof, Finder becomes a visual browser…

A short collection of "official" materials regarding Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion concept. Which actually killed a bloke.

DYMAXION

DYnamic — MAXimum - tensION

At the heart of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion concept is the idea that rational action in a rational world demands the most efficient overall performance per unit of input. His Dymaxion structures, then are those that yield the greatest possible efficiency in terms of available technology.

In this section you will find resources and information about some of Fuller’s most compelling applications of this set of criteria including the Dymaxion House, car, bathroom, etc.

As failed futures go, this one always struck me as particularly sad.