My poor ancient Archos Jukebox FM Receiver is old and suffering now, and is being retired from the field and given pride of place as desktop storage. Which put me in the market for a new mp3 player.

Amazingly, I find myself once again in possession of a Sony Walkman.

Of all the things to once again possess. I’ve just written something for The Wire music magazine about personal soundtracks, and the Sony Walkman is what started it. I don’t think, holding my original tape-playing Walkman in my hands, it even occurred to me that such a thing could or should hold a library of music and a day’s worth of TV shows. When I showed this tiny, heavy thing to Lili, I’m wondering now if she was thinking, "yeah, it plays music, but what else does it do?" She didn’t ask, but, knowing her, I wonder if that was going through her head. Whether that’s what goes through the heads of her Western generation, the third (?) internet generation. Where’s the controller? What else does it do?

Having only had the thing a few hours, I fat-fingered the slightly awkward mp3 slider bar while playing her a piece of music on it, watching her fingers twitching. A one-second slip, and she was in there, "give me that, old man," tapping the touchscreen (that she’s never used before). She’s the generation that listens to music on YouTube — and I was about to comment that she’s of the generation entirely used to overcompressed music, until I realised that I grew up listening to toppy medium-wave radio, where people specifically recorded for its quirks. Bass almost completely disappears in pop music until 1988, when it becomes a club and rave experience again. The Associates rigged an entire drum kit with nothing but snares so the sound popped on radio. The only real difference between YouTube and BBC Radio 1 is that she gets to search and choose exactly what she wants to listen to, circling outwards to associated links to find similar and new things. Control.

Clay Shirky’s line about how anything that ships without a mouse is broken — that’s her generation. (I still think he was just one foot behind the time — I understand he was working from an anecdote, but I can’t help thinking the word he should have used is "touchscreen.")

I found Lili crosslegged on her bed earlier, her guitar in her hands, earbuds in, watching something on her open laptop. I suspect it was either a guitar lesson, some tabs she’s been looking for, or listening to Theory Of A Dead Man and trying to detune her guitar to C-sharp to capture their tone. That’s how she treats the laptop — what else does it do? And the very conjuring of all those elements in the first line illustrates that her generation do not live with their heads in a laptop or a DS Lite or whatever. Less so, even, than the previous generation. It’s a fully integrated part of their lives, a Swiss army knife for the world. What else does it do?

If I tell her I have a YouTube app on the Sony Walkman I’ll never get the bloody thing back.

(I’m sure I was going to write about something else, but then I got off on a ramble. Oh well. File it under Brainjuice and move on.)

(Did I mention Lili won a Young Engineers award last week? She came home today with some weird mathematics award I don’t quite understand. I’m slightly afraid she’s going to operate on me in the night and I’ll wake up as a cyborg slave.)

I recently took delivery of another crate of beer from the magnificent Brew Dog. This beer is called Zeitgeist, and it’s a black lager. I think the womb creatures I live with are going to finish the crate before I get anymore: its handfuls of berries, malt and hops have been greeted with unanimous praise at Ellis Castle, and one of them proclaimed it their new favourite. I frankly love it, and have a bottle open right now.

BUT! yesterday I got an email from Brew Dog themselves, and in the interests of saving me a fuckload of typing, I present it below. Short version: they’ve given me a discount code to give to you. I will help you get excellent beer at a stupidly cheap price. Because I love you. And also: they want you to blog with them.

…we have recently set up a new brand and website called Zeitgeist. The military line up of characters in sheep masks was designed by a local student.

Our zeitgeist website is now up and running. www.zeitgeistbeer.com

There is a very unusual hook behind the Zeitgeist website. The blog will not be updated by us, but by the customer!

We want to give up ownership of the blog, website and brand to the people who drink the beer. The idea is to create a whole alternative community online on the Zeitgeist site. People can blog on www.zeitgeistbeer.com about anything: beer, art, film, culture. They can upload movies, pictures and say anything they want. The idea would be that the discussion has an alternative vibe which ties in with the non-conforming message of the beer. This is a brand controlled by the people not a brand which controls them.

All someone has to do to be able to blog is to buy some beer from our online shop.

The idea of having an open blog, updated by the consumer is a new and radical approach and is going to need a bit of a push to get the awareness going on it. This is where you can maybe help a little!

I have a 70% discount code – SHEEP – all set up for you to give to your readers on your website so not only do they get some great black lager at an unbelievable price but they also get to be one of the first people to update the Zeitgeist blog!

Basically: go to the site, order a shitload of fantastic beer for pennies, join an insane groupblog of very clever drunks. Who loses? No-one. Except maybe the rest of the world.

This is Warren Ellis dot com.

(Matt Jones)

This is the bones of the talk I gave at Dundee University last month. Didn’t have time to write a full formal paper. I get massively extemporaneous when I do these things, moving in and out of the notes, so this isn’t everything I said. But what the hell. I was writing on the assumption of a mostly academic audience, so I recapitulated some old thoughts and re-used the old Harvey Pekar line I’m so fond of trotting out. Also, this was all written in pencil, in my hideous chickenscratch, in a notebook, a couple of hours before I took the lectern. Anyway. Here it is.

Hello. Forgive me from working from notes. No time to write a full talk in the end. Because I’m a working writer in a deadline business. Which is why I’m here.

I think I’m supposed to be talking about my career in comics, providing some kind of summation to a conference about the relationship between comics and time. To which I’d first offer this, inscribed on a stone plaque embedded in the courtyard wall of the hotel across town I’m staying at:

"God give the blessing to the paper craft in the good realm of Scotland."

That stone was cut in 1870.

120 years later, I’m in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who’s just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire eons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops… reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective.

He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.

That said, we can now thank Grant for solving the mandate of this conference while in the grip of profound psychotomimetic hubris, and move on.

What I do is the Paper Craft, and there are few better places to talk about it than here in Dundee, where ink has run in the town’s blood since even before 1870, but thick and dark since 1905, when DC Thomson was founded, Britain’s oldest continuous publisher of comics… making this place the storied city of Jam, Jute and Journalism.

I’ve been writing comics since the 1980s — grew up reading Alan Grant (who was in the audience) — and doing it full time for approaching twenty years. I do a lot of other things too — first novel a couple of years ago, journalism, animation, anything that looks like it’ll pay a bill. Because I’m a working writer. But comics were my first love, and I still spend most of my time writing them. I love visual narrative, and comics are the purest form of visual narrative.

I’ve worked in television, and there are a hundred people between you and the audience. I’ve worked in film, and there are a thousand people between you and the audience. In comics, there’s me and an artist, presenting our stories to you without filters or significant hurdles, in a cheap, simple, portable form. Comics are a mature technology. Their control of time — provided you’re not intent on reversing universes (or even if you are) — makes them the best educational tool in the world. Hell, intelligence agencies have used comics to teach people how to dissent and perform sabotage.

When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure… Comics require a little more of your brain than other visual media. They should just hand them out to being to stave off Alzheimer’s.

Although I think a headline of "Grant Morrison staves off dementia" might be a little premature.

The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: "Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures."

And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there’s really no-one to stop you.

© Warren Ellis 2009 all rights reserved etc etc

Attend! Details of our favourite avant-decadent print fetish object can be found here at this electrical information-bridge. Click elegantly, spawn.

So I can’t light a cigarette in a bar in Arizona, but you can walk into one with a loaded gun, get completely trolleyed and be fully defended by a state law that doesn’t remotely consider this a dangerous and inevitably tragic situation.

Around 80 people die by gunfire per day in the United States. That’s about fifteen deaths per one hundred thousand people, per annum. In 2005, the number of children killed by gunfire would have filled 120 public school classrooms. Since 11 September 2001, somewhere in the region of 220,000 people have died by gunfire in America.

Nick Harkaway just turned this up on Twitter: hfradiospacewx. It’s "Space Weather and Radio Propagation Information," as provided by these people, who apparently could use a dollar or two through Paypal to keep going.

It’s complete gibberish to the untrained eye:

Warning (1591): Geomagnetic K-index of 4 expected… Solar Wind: 519 km/s @ 3.0 protons/cm3… Flares: 6h hi (none) 24h hi (none) …No space weather storms are expected for the next 24 hours…

It is, in fact, The Shipping Forecast for space.

How brilliant is that? All it needs is an equivalent for "Sailing By" to precede it. Maybe a bit of Eno.

A shortish one this week, because next week’s is a longish one, and there wasn’t a better place to chop the piece. This one here contains some restatements and continuations of thoughts previously jotted down here:

…it’s big, and mythical (self-mythologising), and intensely interesting because it denotes the presence of an active and playful imagination trying to rewrite and redress its own environment and process…

Site’s been down for the last several hours. No idea why. But here we are again. This is Warren Ellis Dot Com. Good afternoon.

(the brilliant Dave Walsh)

• Toxic Substance Allows Birds to “See” Magnetic Field
  toxic superoxides!
  (tags:sci weird bodymod )
• Spillway: Major Project 1: Care of Wooden Floors
  Will Wiles' book: "I am not very good at exciting one-sentence summaries: In the past I have described it as "an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em written by Franz Kafka", "a sort of satire on minimalist interior design" and "a little like Mon Oncle vs Lost In Translation"."
  (tags:people books )

Matt Jones at Spreadshirt:

Chad Michael Ward took Katie West out to The Salton Sea.

Did you order Katie’s book yet?

New music from the guy described as "punk folk" by rocksellout.com. Me being far gassier, I said of his stuff: "Just him and a guitar – an angrier, wittier Billy Bragg is one way to approximate his style, though that’s far from exact, and he’s a lot more original than that."

The four new ones are on the top of the player. If you haven’t heard Sam before, check out "The Dirty 13" lower down afterwards, it’s my favourite of his older stuff.

Sam Russo, ladies and gentlemen.

My great friend Sarah Sharp, who operates under the name Trixie Bedlam from time to time, has a project. You’ve seen her work here before: she’s an exhibited art photographer, among many other things. She’s hit 36 American states out of 50, and she’d like to do the rest, and get a book out of it. And she’s been accepted by the Kickstarter program to set up a pledge system for it. It’s really very simple: you pledge a little money, she makes Kickstarter’s nut and they fund the project, and she gives you art in thanks. Check out the site: every pledger gets art from Sarah in return for their gift.

Click the link for details. Thanks. Also, ignore her when she says she’s a girl detective. She really isn’t.

Clockwork Century: hub for the alternate history created by Cherie Priest for her incredibly good forthcoming novel BONESHAKER.  You can also find there a novelette set in the same world, TANGLEFOOT, that’s available for free reading.

There’s little scarier for a writer than the idea of losing your eyesight. Perhaps you could find your way clear to adding a little help for John Ostrander, co-creator of one of the most groundbreaking comics of the Eighties, WASTELAND.

That’s right. Accepting Warren Ellis Dot Com into your life gifts you an entire mysterious new hour every day. Tell your friends. Good morning.

QUATERMASS, or, as it has been renamed since, THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION, was the final QUATERMASS television presentation. (Many years later, a radio presentation, THE QUATERMASS MEMOIRS, tied the man’s life together marvellously.

Professor Bernard Quatermass, founder and head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, the other great hero of British sf television, had been off the screen since 1959. The first three QUATERMASS serials helped define television drama. Imagine an sf television series that emptied out the country’s pubs once a week. That was THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, QUATERMASS 2 and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. Nigel Kneale, creator and writer of all the QUATERMASS projects, offered this to the BBC, who refused it. And so Euston Films produced it for ITV in 1979.

Kneale was one of my great influences. And just tonight someone pointed out to me that (only) the first of the QUATERMASS episodes is on Google Video. It may seem a little old and creaky to you, but please do bear with it.

We’re working on FELL #10 right now.