At my nationalised internet health service today:

* The Weekly Listening Thread (17aug09) – wherein we supposedly talk about what music we’re listening to this week.

* Warren’s Ancient Jukebox – in which I dump fun music stuff I find on YouTube instead of littering this site with it.

* Last time you read ‘Available Light?’ – someone discovers a book I did nine years ago. Cue people saying "wossat? never ‘eard of it guv"

* The Self-Portrait Imagethread (Aug 09) – needs more pretty and interesting people, fewer unshaven pasty guys in old t-shirts. I do not post there for fear of blinding people

* Comics Shipping This Week (Aug 19)

Good morning, freakshow. This is warrenellisdotcom, facing another hideous week.

(Star St.Germain)

• BLAST (magazine) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "BLAST was the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain. It had two editions, the first published on 2 July 1914 and the second a year later. Written primarily by the Anglo-American artist Wyndham Lewis and covered by a notorious pink cover referred to by Ezra Pound as the "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus", the magazine has become famous as emblematic of the first modern art movement in England, and is now recognised as one of the seminal texts of 20th-century modernism."
  (tags:print magazine history art )

It’s funny. When I’m scripting, it’s rarely a problem to update this site with bits and pieces several times a day. When I need to do the work of thinking, which is a significantly different enterprise to writing… I never seem to get much done here. Thinking requires staring at the wall for hours, clicking through research, fiddling with the playlist, scribbling in notebooks (this year I made a conscious effort to start using paper and pencils again), staring at the wall some more…

And now it’s a hair before midnight, Friday’s over in less than ten minutes, and the day’s been lost to people bugging me, a development project moving to pilot phase, and just sitting here thinking.

So, yeah, that’s why there’s been nothing here today. Oops.

• Beyond the looking glass…
  "researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Fudan University in Shanghai describe the concept of a "a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities" like a "'hidden portal' as mentioned in fictions." "
  (tags:sci tech )

It’s Friday again.  And guess what?  Kait is still crazy.

A recent discovery.

• NME down more than 25% year on year | Media | guardian.co.uk
  "IPC Media's NME, which was overtaken by Future Publishing monthly Metal Hammer for the first time in the second half of last year, had an average weekly circulation of 40,948 in the first half of 2009, down 27.2% on the same period in 2008."
  (tags:print deathofmedia )
• London’s earliest timber structure found during Belmarsh prison dig
  "predates Stonehenge by more than 500 years… The structure consisted of a timber platform or trackway found at a depth of 4.7m (about the height of a double decker bus) beneath two metres of peat adjacent to an ancient river channel"
  (tags:history )

All I really know about her is that she’s on Twitter as "kerridarling" and that she now wears these:

…Laurenn McCubbin?

Course you do. She’s been busy lately. But now she has a big gallery show coming up, and to mark it she’s selling a signed, numbered print for $50 a pop. Which, given her CV, is a stupid low price. Treat yourself.

Good morning. This is warren ellis dot com, making your world a nicer, dirtier place.

This is an ad for Johnnie Walker whisky. Not a brand I’m especially fond of. But this five-and-a-half-minute film, with actor Robert Carlyle narrating the history of Johnnie Walker, is really very well done. Yes, it’s an ad, coming from the ad industry’s vile notion of "helping companies to tell their stories…" But Johnnie Walker’s been around a long time, and has an actual story to tell. More importantly, this is a story elegantly and charmingly told, by one of my favourite actors.

• Video: Dining at an aerobanquet of Futurist food | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

  (tags:food art video )

• Shapways : 3D Printing in Stainless Steel
  "Shapeways has now added stainless steel to their list of available materials to 3D print from"
  (tags:fabbing tech )
• Brazil TV host turned politician ‘ordered killings to boost ratings’ | World news | The Guardian
  "A Brazilian politician who fronts a popular television crime show is being investigated for allegedly ordering a series of executions in a bid to boost his ratings."
  (tags:crime media )
• Fox News gets okay to misinform public, court ruling | Media Reform | CeaseSPIN.org
  "The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves."
  (tags:news crime media )
• NASA Wants To Move The Earth
  "Scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet overheating: move it to a cooler spot. All you have to do is hurtle a few comets at Earth, and its orbit will be altered. Our world will then be sent spinning into a safer, colder part of the solar system… plan could add another six billion years to the useful lifetime of our planet ? effectively doubling its working life."
  (tags:space mad doooooom dooooooooom )
• Bacteria make nanomagnets for navigating the oceans – life – 12 August 2009 – New Scientist
  "The genetic code for nano-sized biological magnets called "magnetosomes" has been cracked."
  (tags:sci nano )
• Rovers rev up for Google’s moonshot jackpot – tech – 11 August 2009 – New Scientist
  "a pack of private teams are racing to send robots to kick up lunar dust and claim the $20-million Google Lunar X Prize announced nearly two years ago."
  (tags:space )

I’m still clearing the place out after leaving it fallow for a week, but there’s a few bits and pieces:

* Tell Ellis Of Your New Comics (12aug09)

* The FRANKENSTEIN’S WOMB Talk Thread

* City Gone Feral

* Electric Sheep Comics back online!

* Tumblr

* Jeff Parker & Steve Lieber’s UNDERGROUND

You’ve got to admit, he’s in good shape. And he’s not afraid of wax, either.

(from Paul Sizer’sChicago Con 2009 photoset)

Via English Russia:

Lebedyan town in Lipetsk region is known for the greatest juice producing plant in Eastern Europe, but very few people know that the most unique and weird underground station in the world is located there as well. It was constructed just 2 meters beneath the surface of the earth. The works began in 1984, and 166 people were eager to start as soon as possible, but when they learnt that the money would come only when the construction paid for itself, they all backtracked in a second. So, the whole project was to be implemented by the one who brought it up, Leonid Muliarchik…

This is, for better or worse, Warren Ellis Dot Com. Hello.

(Maddie Greene)

"Hypnotized". A videotape transfer of the full version. I think I played my 12" copy of this smooth in 1989. G’night.

• Boffins test cancer-stinging ‘nano-bee’ swarms in mice ? The Register
  "American medi-boffins say they have developed a way of using tiny nanotech devices, which they call "nanobees", to carry a potentially poisonous drug safely into the body for the purposes of killing cancerous tumours."
  (tags:sci med nano NANOBEES NOT+THE+NANOBEES THEY'RE+IN+MY+EYES )
• Scientists explore how the humble leaf could power the planet | Environment | guardian.co.uk
  "Researchers at Imperial College London embark on 'artificial leaf' project to produce power by mimicking photosynthesis"
  (tags:sci eco )
• BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Traces of planet collision found
  "Astronomers say the cosmic smash-up is similar to the one that formed our Moon some four billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth"
  (tags:space )
• Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Plasmodium Computing
  PLASMODIUM COMPUTING! "ideal substrate for future and emerging biocomputing devices." BIOCOMPUTER ANDALE ANDALE ARRIBA ARRIBA
  (tags:sci tech computing )
• Smallest Known Exoplanet Has Solid Surface: Discovery News
  "The smallest planet yet detected outside our solar system appears to have a solid surface, European astronomers said."
  (tags:space )
• Nepal villagers flock to worship malformed baby | World news | guardian.co.uk
  "Thousands of people have flocked to a remote Nepalese village 2,000 metres up in the Himalayas to worship a baby born with four arms and four legs, revering him as the reincarnation of a Hindu god."
  (tags:cult weird )
• Video: The worrying number of young people being murdered in Chicago | World news | guardian.co.uk
  "Ed Pilkington visits President Barack Obama's hometown to investigate the startling number of schoolchildren being killed in the city"
  (tags:crime grim+meathook+future gmf )
• Motivations for Licking / DNA Profiling – Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect
  "think of a future perfect of 'dna stamps' that when licked contain all the data needed to look up the sender and auto-complete an address"
  (tags:sci mad )

Amanda Palmer:

a russian fan handmade this shirt for me. i’m on the fence about it. but it’s also kind of awesome.

This is warrenellisdotcom. Good afternoon. No time for big entries this week, as I’m in column-writing territory and cannot use up The Mojo, so it’s going to be tumbles and stabs.

(Thank god for riotclitshave)