End of September.

No, it’s not. Because Jess Nevins made me look at these.

Average age of a reader of Asimov’s or Analog? 59.

11,000 subscribers to F&SF? Really? This has to be partial information, right?

Check out the gender splits.

Back to work with me.

• Increase in sea levels due to global warming could lead to ‘ghost states’ | Environment | The Guardian
  "Global warming could create "ghost states" with governments in exile ruling over scattered citizens and land that has been abandoned to rising seas, an expert said yesterday."
  (tags:pol dooooom )

So here’s a pretty picture by Eliza Gauger instead.

The usual:

Alf Tupper, Tough Of The Track, welder and Olympic-level runner, powered by fish and chips and genetic-level hatred of coppers and the upper classes, overcoming constant crushing hardships to win every race and rub posh people’s noses in it. HOOK JAW, possibly the only shark with its own anti-corruption comics serial…

Topslice of the noises my computer’s been making lately. Includes Broadcast & The Focus Group, Fuck Buttons and High Wolf .

• HOBO CULT RECORDS
  a free-release netlabel run off a Blogspot site. Must dl some stuff off it tonight.
  (tags:music mp3 netlabel )

Mamoru Oshii.

First, the short film ASSAULT GIRL 2.

Now, the trailer for the full-length ASSAULT GIRLS.

(details)

At my internet spiderhole this morning:

* How Many Londoners Are Here? - a quick census, for important and sekrit reasons

* Zinepal: Newspapers For Printers, Magazines For Phones

* Eliza Gauger’s SWEATSHOP

* WITCH DOCTOR: "Rock, Paper, Scalpel" exclusive Whitechapel preview

* Warren’s Ancient Jukebox

* Photographers (Sept 2009)

* Cryptozoology

• Sword Heaven on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Downloads

  (tags:music )

• Brain Scans Reveal What You?ve Seen | Wired Science | Wired.com
  "Scientists are one step closer to knowing what you?ve seen by reading your mind."
  (tags:sci neuro )

I’ve been so buried for the last month that I’m barely noticing what my friends are doing. Apparently at some point Afua Richardson (illustrator of comics series GENIUS, among other things) started doing an internet TV show about music? Only just noticed this on Twitter today…

• MONU MAGAZINE ON URBANISM BOARD (BUREAU OF ARCHITECTURE, RESEARCH, AND DESIGN)

  (tags:magazine )

Mp3 previews of the newest release from Ghost Box. I love Ghost Box. If you don’t know the label, here’s their own description:

Ghost Box is a recording label for artists that find inspiration in library music, folklore, vintage electronics and haunted television soundtracks.

I’ve been listening to their last release, Belbury Poly’s LIGHT FROM AN ANCIENT STAR, all year.

Back to work, I have a treatment to kill before I can have fun on the inertnets.

In which things get worse.

• McSweeney’s Launches iPhone App - mediabistro.com: GalleyCat
  "McSweeney's, the Dave Eggers-founded publishing outfit, has entered the smartphone age with a brand new iPhone and iPod Touch app that sells for $5.99 in the Apple App store"
  (tags:mobile phone mag tech publishing deathofmedia )
• Audi Exo Concept | SwipeLife
  "the Audi Exo concept, a human powered vehicle that employs the latest exoskeleton and robotic technologies"
  (tags:design tech )
• World around us: The 10 Most Puzzling Ancient Artifacts

  (tags:weird )

• BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Death for Tanzania albino killers
  "A court in north-western Tanzania has sentenced three men to death by hanging for killing a 14-year-old albino boy"
  (tags:crime cult magic )
• Closet-Dwelling Ghost Haunted Carradine — Popeater
  "A few months before his body was found hanging in a Bangkok hotel room closet, David Carradine sat down to discuss a ghost he believed was haunting him … from a closet."
  (tags:weird oh+shit )

Heavy thinking day today. Come back tomorrow.

Javier Mariscal’s exhibition at the Design Museum features notes by him written on the walls. This one resonated with me completely. I wouldn’t be anywhere today without the photocopier, after all. Not to mention making black marks on small sheets of white paper.

Twenty years from now, someone’s going to be assembling an installation and saying exactly the same thing about web pages.

• weetstraw.com - Russian Book Jackets

  (tags:design books )

The new collaborative project by Broadcast and The Focus Group.

COILHOUSE are extending their deadline for their Small Business Ads section to September 30.

Which means you can advertise your stuff in my favourite magazine for as little as 99 US dollars.

• polis: In Suspense
  "The program for airport terminals is becoming so demanding and complex that we are experiencing a phenomenon of a select few architectural firms designing nearly all of the new terminals around the world. It is hard to come by a more clear and striking image of globalisation than seeing airports in Philadelphia, Abu Dhabi, and Tianjin all designed by the same company"
  (tags:design architecture culture monoculture )
• Muslims mass-producing children to take over Africa, says Archbishop -Times Online
  "One of the most powerful figures in the Anglican Church believes that Africa is under attack from Islam and that Muslims are ?mass-producing? children to take over communities on the continent"
  (tags:cult mad pol war )
• Stone Trees of Yakutsk
  "One of the cool natural breath-taking places in Russia are the ?Lena?s stone forest? or ?Lena?s Stone Pillars?."
  (tags:photography fantastic )
• Research team launches search for serpent-like Vancouver Island lake creature
  ""Something just went 'ping' on the alarm on the fish finder and we saw this absolutely massive object in the midst of various fish," said John Kirk, president of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club. "
  (tags:weird )
• Morgue Royal North Shore Hospital body
  "SECURITY at one of Sydney's biggest hospitals is so lax that anyone can walk into the morgue and claim a body without showing identification, prompting fears that corpses could be wrongly removed or defiled."
  (tags:crime )
• How elephants ‘talk’ to each other through the ground
  "The American Physical Society (APS), in the latest podcast of 'Life Lines', has explained how elephant vocalizations travel through the ground for great distances, and how other elephants can understand them, just as they understand acoustic sound, which travels through the air."
  (tags:comms weird )
• Using Magnetism To Turn Drugs On And Off
  "Researchers have devised a drug delivery solution that combines magnetism with nanotechnology. "
  (tags:med nano )
• Dolmen with petroglyphs found near Villupuram
  "A big dolmen with four petroglyphs that portray men with tridents and a wheel with spokes has been found at Kollur, near Tirukoilur, 35 km from Villupuram in Tamil Nadu."
  (tags:history )
• SPACE.com — Eerie Cloud Created by NASA Rocket Experiment
  "An eerie cloud that glowed briefly in the night sky Saturday was no UFO. It was created by humans - more specifically a NASA rocket built to make clouds that shine at night."
  (tags:weather eco space )

I wonder why I never saw this before. Just turned it up on the end of a chain of search links. An unaired ad for Playstation. Apparently it was very expensive. Pulled for fairly obvious reasons. The music is an Alphaville song, "Forever Young," remixed by V/Vm. Interesting. Must find out more about it sometime.

A thousand words sketching connections between two dozen people, and half a dozen different terms for "comic," and probably only this bit makes sense:

(1976 soundtrack: “Anarchy In The UK”; “The Boys Are Back In Town”; “Oxygene”: Bowie’s STATION TO STATION. Joy Division have formed. Black Flag have formed. Throbbing Gristle have formed. Brian Eno’s all over the place, recording, producing, collaborating. Eno on his art education in Ipswich, sixty miles northeast of me: “Everybody thought they could do anything.” Things are in the saddle.)

I would like to spend more money buying magazines at MagCloud, but, even with previews, I often feel like I’m buying blind. If you’re publishing a magazine at MagCloud (like my friend Kat Foisy and her CONSTELLATION), maybe you could mention it in the comments?

Sir Norman Foster — whom I believe is technically Baron Foster of Thames Bank? — is reportedly having his architectural firm pitch to ESA’s Aurora programme, to "investigate adapting materials found in space for building purposes, using data from the original Apollo moon landing, and new information gathered by robot vehicles on Mars. Among the objectives would be building permanent structures on the moon."

A spokesman at the London headquarters of Foster and Partners confirmed "there is a tender" but refused to elaborate on Foster’s plans to conquer outer space, possibly by adding a nice glass dome.

There will be many "space Gherkin" jokes. I find this peculiarly fascinating, on an order with Raymond Loewy having been involved with the design of the Skylab interior. It comes close to the space dreams of Sixties radical architectural theorists, Archigram being the obvious reference. Sir Peter Cook of that storied group once wrote:

Can the near-reality of the rocket-object and the hovercraft-object…. carry the dynamic building with them into life?

Because you are educated people. Right?