From here:

Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists

And bugger me it’s chilly out here today. I am brought to you by the power of Google Chrome on an Eee 901. If you’re on a similar machine and are noticing unusual slowdowns and heavy battery use while using Firefox to read or write on the web, get it off your machine and install Chrome. All fixed.

I was worried for a while there that I’d need new kit. I mean, I carry too many devices as it is, these days. The time when I could travel with a Treo, a foldaway keyboard and an mp3 player are long gone — and even then, I wished for push email. Now I carry a (dying) Nokia N95 8GB, a Blackberry Curve, a Sony 32GB mp3 player and this Eee, in a canvas Whitechapel bag ganked from Avatar. (And if there are any of those left, I imagine they’ll be offered for sale on FREAKANGELS tomorrow.)

It’s possible that I could work on the new Nokia N900, if they’ve got the apps ecosystem sorted and the outboard-keyboard system isn’t weirded out the way it was on the N800 tablet (it refused to recognise so many keys that I couldn’t produce work on it with any efficiency), but I discovered years ago that having to answer a phone call on the same portable device you’re writing on can get a bit annoying. It’s all gotten a bit complicated. Also, I’m starting to get app envy whenever I look at iPhone 3GS ads.

Anyway. All of which is to say, I’m finishing up at the pub, and will be back later.

This is Warren Ellis dotcom. Hello.

I’m sure I’ve played this here before, but what the hell, it makes me smile. Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan doing "What A Wonderful World."

G’night, people.

All right. I give up. There is no escape from Facebook. So: I will approve any and all friend requests, whether you’re human or not, and I will simply trust you to help me break Facebook and give it the pain it deserves.  Help me make it whimper and die and leave me alone. It’s here. Go nuts. Please.

• Venezuela folk religion seen in secretive rituals
  "Thousands of Venezuelans congregated for candlelit rituals on a remote mountainside where adherents make an annual pilgrimage to pay homage to an indigenous goddess known as Maria Lionza. Some calling themselves the ?Vikings? pricked their tongues with razor blades, drawing blood that ran down their chins and chests. They said they could not reveal the esoteric secrets that govern their traditions…"
  (tags:culture )
• Unreleased tracks and demos, 1999-2006 | Seventh Harmonic
  "A collection of mainly instrumental tracks dug out from the archive to mark 10 years since the inception of the band. It moves through various stages, and all tracks are demos. Each track comes with its own imagery – click on tracks individually to see the artwork. If you like what you hear, check out the official releases on the right…"
  (tags:music )
• Ever Dream This Man?
  "From January 2006 until today, at least 2000 people have claimed they have seen this man in their dreams, in many cities all over the world: Los Angeles, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, New Dehli, Moskow etc. At the moment there is no ascertained relation or common trait among the people that have dreamed of seeing this man. Moreover, no living man has ever been recognized as resembling the man of the portrait by the people who have seen this man in their dreams."
  (tags:weird probably+a+marketing+stunt quite+a+good+one+though )

For the last several months, Ariana and I have been picking at the great volume of stuff I’ve written for the internet over the last seven years or so, on this site and elsewhere. And we’ve hacked and hammered and crammed until it fills about a hundred and seventy pages of your actual printed paper.

It will be available for ordering soon. But I’m so pleased with the cover Ariana built that I wanted to show it off in advance.

It uses meta-materials, previously applied to the "invisibility cloak" technology:

An electromagnetic "black hole" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.

"The firm said, so far, 30 people had applied for the positions – some of them in
Glaswegian."

It’s the season to sit indoors at the bloody computer all bloody day with gallons of coffee to stave off death, and therefore it’s time (god help me) for the annual Autumn Interrogation Of Warren at my message board, where I’ll try to attempt to answer any question that isn’t already covered in the first post. Or lie outrageously in a vain stab at making you go away.

The Autumn Interrogation thread.

Apparently Wizard are running ads in their magazines like this one, which a friend found in Toy Fare today:

The strong implication, of course, being that I’m going to be a guest at this convention.

First I’ve fucking heard of it.

I’m presuming this is some kind of impossibly convoluted but innocent mistake, as opposed to "well, if we just SAY Warren Ellis is showing up, then he’ll HAVE to." But I’ve had no contact from Wizard World about this or any other show, so, god knows what actually happened for this to have somehow gotten printed…

Anyway. I’m not attending this show, nor any other Wizard World show, in 2010. In fact, right now, I have no plans to attend any comics convention in 2010.

Yes yes god damnit the constant fucking ringing of the doorbell and the constant fucking ringing of the phone means I’m awake after basically no fucking sleep at all this is Warren Ellis Dot Com fuck you all to hell

Oh. Wait. Pupcake wants everyone at her Washington comics store to know that ANNA MERCURY 2 #2 is out today. What with the delays as Avatar switched printers, I’d forgotten that myself. How lovely.

stupid last.fm won’t let you embed their stupid last.fm player grumble mutter fuckit

To an old bloke like me, there’s a certain fond familiarity to the new record by The Medusa Snare, that puts me back in my bedsit in 1988. But, my god, "Slow Motion" is the pure strain. I mean, you can conjure up the influences as easily as I can — Velvets, seen through the fuzzed-out Spector of post-PSYCHOCANDY Jesus And Mary Chain and the autumnal rock romance of The House Of Love, etc etc — but the great shining tones of those opening guitar notes cut through like shafts of sunlight through cloud.

Somewhere, there will always be people making music like this. Because they have to.

"Slow Motion" by The Medusa Snare.

Good night.

• Global Guerrillas: SOME THOUGHTS ON EXTREMISTAN
  "….extremistan. That's Nassim's term to describe areas of our experience that defy statistical analysis, modeling and thereby prediction. Essentially, he makes the persuasive case that all of the topics covered by the social sciences (from economics to warfare) are now firmly in extremistan, rather than the gaussian and statistically predictive world of mediocristan. Outcomes in extremistan are opaque to prediction yet can yield system changing results. Additionally, he makes the case that we are moving more deeply into extremistan due to the rapid increase in our use of highly leveraged, tightly coupled, and blindingly fast network connectivity…"
  (tags:pol war )
• AR Wave: Layers and Channels of Social Augmented Experiences
  "Thomas Wrobel?s basic concept for a distributed, multi-user, open augmented reality framework based on the Google Wave Federation Protocol and servers"
  (tags:web ar )
• BBC NEWS | England | Cat registered as hypnotherapist
  "The regulation of hypnotherapists in the UK is so lax that even a cat can become accredited, the BBC has found. Chris Jackson, presenter of Inside Out in the North East and Cumbria, registered pet George with three industry bodies."
  (tags:crime )
• David Toop: Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (1995/2001) at Monoskop/log
  "Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Lee Perry, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Brian Wilson are interviewed in this extraordinary work of sonic history that travels from the rainforests of amazonas to virtual Las Vegas, from David Lynch?s dream house, high in the Hollywood hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo."
  (tags:book music )
• SovMusic.ru – Soviet Music
  " I am glad to welcome you to this modest site. I have tried to assemble here a small legacy of songs left from the Soviet era. All of them were at once widely known and popular in the cities and towns of our glorious Motherland."
  (tags:music )
• exp etc
  thirty-one Jandek albums!
  (tags:music mp3 )
• Asteroid isn’t just a dry heap of rubble – space – 12 October 2009 – New Scientist
  "Two independent teams have found what may be the first direct evidence of water ice on the surface of an asteroid. The discovery lends support to the idea that asteroids could have helped deliver water to the early Earth."
  (tags:space )
• Madagascar biodiversity under threat as gangs run wild – environment – 12 October 2009 – New Scientist
  "Roasted lemurs and criminal gangs exporting precious hardwood: this is the sad state of affairs for Madagascar's legendary biodiversity. Since a military coup forced the president to resign in March, conservationists and biologists have watched as loggers have stripped the country's forests and killed its animals for bushmeat."
  (tags:war pol eco )

Today, Wil Wheaton releases his new book MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE (a title I think I’m responsible for talking him into using). All details, including the explanatory and funny foreword, are here at this link.

(And, no, I can’t find it in myself to give much of a toss about Star Trek, even though I can feel Katie West glaring at me all the way from Canada right now. But Wil is a funny writer, and funny writers can make anything entertaining, including reviews of Star Trek episodes, especially when he was acting in them as a kid and forced to wear the worst clothes anyone outside of a max-security prisoner or someone from the 1970s was ever forced to wear.)

(I therefore commend your attention to this book as a Funny and also Interesting book that is otherwise about a tv series I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch. Put another way: I wouldn’t keep the tv episodes in the house, but I would keep the book. Yes? Yes.)

People who had problems with the time-travel theories in PLANETARY #27 should look away right now. There is a theoretical possibility that an elementary particle is reaching into the past to destroy itself:

…time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one…

From Italy, a tiny telefactored robot camera that you swallow. I suspect not everyone will be ready for The Spider Pill:

Experts believe the device, which is swallowed by the patient and controlled by doctors using a wireless connection, could transform the difficult and invasive process of diagnosing serious conditions. The pill, which contains a tiny camera, is also fitted with tiny legs that can be activated remotely once it is inside the colon or intestine.

The legs protrude outwards and are movable in order to make the device ‘crawl’ inside the patient like a spider…

IT’S CRAWLING INSIDE YOU LIKE A SPIDER

FEEL ITS LITTLE ROBOT LEGS INSIDE YOU

FOR SCIENCE

Yeah, possibly the uptake on this one might be a little slower than expected. Wonderful idea, though, and ripe for fucking-with in fiction. THE SPIDER PILL itself sounds like a title.

A brilliant essay on the adult film industry and its recession, the depths of its dissonance and damage, by Susannah Breslin. I would call this your essential read of the day: They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?

At the center of the screen, a young woman is perched on the edge of the couch, alone. As the camera closes in on her, she smiles tentatively and crosses her arms protectively.

Her look is that of a 21^st century Bettie Page. She has long, dark hair with short bangs and bright blue eyes rimmed with heavy black eyeliner. She wears a cropped black top with a plunging v-neck, a baby pink plaid miniskirt (not unlike the one worn by Britney Spears in the schoolgirl-themed music video for “… Baby One More Time”), and white high heels—otherwise known as “stripper shoes.”

“OK, so what are we going to do?” a man standing off-camera asks in a voice that sounds as if it has been digitally altered. “Should I just beat the shit out of her?”

Spiralling towards the end of the first sequence of these "comics and anything else that vaguely occurs to me in the writing of them" columns:

Bugger the robot head that steals my cigars. I love these Gil Kane BLACKMARK pages. It’s pretty generic post-apoc barbarian fantasy. Archie Goodwin, once again writing for Kane, does his best, but he had to follow the genre (”Obey and enjoy the genre,” Michael Moorcock once said), and, you know, it was the 1970s… it’s pretty prog-rock purple…

My name’s Warren Ellis. I’m a writer. Good morning.

(image: Stewart Bremner)

Lucy’s Lost Her Head Again.

(I still have this on vinyl somewhere.)

G’night, internet.