Infographic by Danny Jones, found via Kitsune Noir.

Sarah Sharp:

What a brilliant pitch. I suspect the hand of Fiona Romeo in this. Solar Stormwatch:

Solar scientists need you!

Help them spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

This is my friend Ryan Keely posing with her preferred plane reading before boarding at Vegas airport. You know it makes sense.

This is warren ellis dot com. Good morning

• U B U W E B – Film & Video: Beth B – Thanatopsis (1991)
  "Beth B, in collaboration with legendary downtown performance artist/musician Lydia Lunch, creates a chilling yet poetic vision of despairing nihilism — literally, a "meditation on death." In this noirishly rendered narrative, a woman negotiates the banalities of life. In her hypnotic voiceover monologue, the narrator (Lunch) repeats "Annie get your gun," a warning of impending doom. "
  (tags:film )

TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #012: DISEASE:

What? People ASKED for this shirt. ASKED.

We also offer a couple of perennial items, including:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

Why is it so cold in this country? (Well, it’s probably not, it’s probably just me trying to adjust to British weather after being out of the country for a week. BUT STILL.)

This is a pretty picture by Matt Brooker. This is warrenellisdotcom, and today we are shivering and throwing things on fires. Good morning.

From Jhonen Vasquez:

I want a Flintstones-like garbage disposal, or, in this case, because of this horrific cupcake I ate, a creature I can vomit into.

Good night.

John Twells (Xela) just mentioned them on twitter, so I looked them up, and then I found this:

The MySpace page I linked also has lots to listen to. It’s like, remember how you didn’t really like deconstructed experimental postrock anymore? Well, actually, yeah, you do.

Avatar Press asked me for another WOLFSKIN story, since apparently the original WOLFSKIN book sold quite well. As it happened, I had the synopsis for an unsold fantasy GN sitting in a folder. I rewrote, expanded and broke it down a bit, and then let Avatar hand it to Mike Wolfer to turn into scripts in much the same process we use on GRAVEL. Gianluca Pagliarani, the superb illustrator of AETHERIC MECHANICS and IGNITION CITY, was brought on to draw it. Avatar tell me that this is the last week retailers have to order it, so, if you want a copy, ask them for WOLFSKIN: HUNDREDTH DREAM #1 (of six).

(larger sizes)

What follows is how the original synopsis begins:

We begin with a sight the characters will never see: a shot of Earth from space, showing that the world has a single continent, Gondwanaland-style.

We zoom in on the northern part of that supercontinent – Scandinavia, the British Isles, Iceland all fused together, Iceland forming the most northern point, and then ocean between it and the North Pole. The Norwegian/Finnish fjords are slightly southerly — the Icelandic area juts out, a big peninsula that reaches further north than the rest of (this area of) the single continent.

We zoom in on the fjords. And down on Bergna, a fjord community; homes in the mountainrange that embraces the fjord bay. Down in the bay, traders throng. Stories are shared. People loudly proclaim their intentions, their destinations, their commissions, gathering passengers and companions and comrades. There are yells: “Quest!” or “Contract!” or “South!” or “Swords!”

Standing by the harbour, among the fish stands and wolfpelts, ILDSEN: watching sadly as Noi (Chinese) travellers strike a metal wand against a metal plate to shoot sparks into an oil lamp. Once, that was exclusively his job. He is a magician who makes fire. But artifice is growing, the use of tools becoming broader and more complex. And the more that fabrications and machines appear, the weaker the magic grows. He’s adrift in his own home.

There’s a millennialist tension to the place. This is a culture approaching the edge of an industrial revolution. Everything is changing.

Someone calls Ildsen’s name. A courier who tacks down the coast from the High Northish ice plains arrives here monthly, and always carrying a letter from Ildsen’s friend, Gisli, headman of a small township out there called Vé.

Ildsen, having little else to do, sits on the dock and reads the letter…

I think Eliza’s lost her shit. Please ensure she doesn’t die. Full statement here, and here’s the topslice:

There’s aSWEATSHOPin about eleven hours that is cutting out even more slack between patrons and the artists they feed. I mean, haven’t you ever wanted to just dangle a gobbet of lemon chicken over an artist’s snapping, slavering maw?

Well, thanks to the brilliant minds behind SWEATSHOP,now you can!

That’s right. Sunday SWEATSHOPcuts out the middle man, and letsyou, the faithful patrons of the arts, feed the artists directly…

From the album SITTING UNDER THE LANTERN’S GLOW. You can find Relmic Statute on eMusic, I think. It’s quiet. Play loud.

• Matt Jones on mujicomp and mujicompfrastructures at Technoark
  "…ubiquitous computing needs to ?become sexy and desirable? able to be appreciated as cultural design objects rather than technology? they should be tasteful, simple, clear, clean, contemporary, affordable in order to be invited into the home?."
  (tags:cities digital tech comms computing peopleiknow )
• I launched a new thingy
  Sean Bonner follows in the footsteps of T-shirt Of The Week. This should be fun.
  (tags:merch )
• Spillway: I Have Always Relied on the Strangeness of Crowds
  I do love it when Will Wiles shoves people through the logic mill face-first.
  (tags:writing )
• Making a podcast ? some notes and observations ? Roo Reynolds
  Roo Reynolds on the ins and outs of making a podcast in 2010. All my podcasting knowledge comes from the first year or so of podcasting as a form, so this was interesting (if very complicated-sounding to my dinosaur ears)
  (tags:podcasting )

Colfax are on RTFM Records.  Video by Nicky Cairney.

This is warren ellis dot com. We do not recognise weekends. We are here until we drop.

(Melyssa Anishnabie)

(link)

(Matt Jones)

Home. At least for a while.

It may finally be time I ascribed Project Names to things, so that I’m not continually referring to them as That Thing I Can’t Talk About #34. But this will inexorably lead to assigning codenames to the related players.

So, I could say that I must meet Agent J next week in pursuit of Project Drill, and then sit down with Agent L and a tv company about Project Plato… and I will have largely preserved the required secrecy. But I will have also made myself look like a knob.

Home for a while, anyway. Decompressing after travel, catching up with the world, following up on email and keeping abreast of various career strangenesses. This year’s been a real rollercoaster so far, and it’s not even February.

In other news, the role of Publisher at DC Comics has apparently been split between five people. I am reminded of when the role of Editor-In-Chief at Marvel was split between five editors. The kindest thing they were called was "the five families of New York," GODFATHER-style. It did not end well. One hopes things will go better for these people. I must admit some surprise that Diane Nelson appointed five guys. Also, that the Five Swell Guys are really considered managers and doctors of the extant library, rather than generators of new IP: Jim Lee hasn’t created a new property since 1997, I think Geoff Johns has only one created property in his oeuvre. I think there’s a definite signal that the next few years are all about exploiting the library and managing what they’ve already got, rather than generating new IP. Which may well turn out to be a smart move, I dunno. I’m far from the smartest guy in the room about this sort of thing, as the clear visibility of the light smear of brackish water in the bottom of my bank account can attest. Still, I like Jim and Dan DiDio immensely (I’ve only met Geoff Johns once, very briefly, and for all I know that nice-guy smile was hiding a small chunk of baby melting under his tongue), and I wish them all the best in a gig that is, frankly, not going to be the easiest job in the world.

• Week 245 ? Blog ? BERG
  PROJECT LANGUAGE: "During the development of Shownar… we found ourselves having to refer very precisely to weird abstract concepts that arose from the data. To have conversations without misunderstandings, we made up words and put a long dictionary on the wall with the title ?Teach yourself Dutch.? Because for some reason the project lingo got called Dutch. It?s not really Dutch. It?s English. But to an English speaker listening in on us talking in this lingo, it wouldn?t be comprehensible. El Morro has its own Dutch. Dutch, the project lingo, is never just a shorthand. It expresses things that, eventually, cannot be fully expressed in regular English. It ends up having its own grammar, and members of the team end up having to become fluent speakers of it…"
  (tags:language culture peopleiknow nutters )
• Pontone Spectral Cassettes, Vol. 3 | Pontone
  "in which in we present our favourite tracks from ?balearic bliss-drone?/?nu age noise?/?oceanic synth noise? scene." Sound from a warm zone. Downloadable or streaming. Via Simon Reynolds' BLISSBLOG.
  (tags:music )

Clayton "Siege" Cubitt: