For a while, I had a capture of my twitter feed running here. It ended up doing something weird to my API calls, stopping me from running my desktop client, so I killed it. Which is probably just as well, as I talk a lot of shit on Twitter. It’s basically mental slurry, the wet lumpy bits from a day spent at the keyboard vented off into a trap so the buildup doesn’t blow some crucial valve in my head. Look at these, from the last two months or so:

* Pitstop for food and a bit of the election debate: Gordon Brown looking unsettlingly Nixonian

* An orange tie, Nick Clegg? I don’t care who you are, an orange tie looks like you’re leaking neck pus

* Someone has polished David Cameron’s chin into a shining Failure Bump

* This is fucking grotesque. I’m off to get drunk. And then I’m running for Prime Minister

* Unaccountably filled with alcohol. Also, I can unaccountably still spell "unaccountably"

* @kumimonster i may possibly have just signed an email as "Prime Minister Batman"

* Tomorrow I will begin my political campaign by changing my twitter ID to PrimeMinisterBatman. Good night, bat-chums.

* Prime Minister Batman is tired and would like to go to bed now.

* In solidarity with @kellysue and her slow birth labour, I am now dilated to 8 cm.

* one little comment about being dilated to 8cm and everybody unfollows you YOU CAN’T EVEN SEE MY CERVIX YOU COWARDS

* I would like to add two new rules to the forthcoming UK election.

* 1. The winner gets to execute the losing party leaders on live TV. It’s only fair.

* 2. In the event of a hung parliament, all party leaders have to kill each other simultaneously on live TV.

* (3. I get to run Britain from an orbital death-ray station. That rule will be a slightly harder sell, I know.)

* US newspaper circulation down 8.74%. Homeless people have less to sleep under.

* Good morning, sinners. You may bring me unicorn bacon now.

* fuck you i am batman #warrenellisisbatman (no, no context for you)

* As everyone else is saying: the deep and archaic strangeness of a British sky without plane contrails dawns on you slowly.

* Contrails are back. The sign of an old friend, the sign of being able to reach over the world again.

* Redbulling with cigarettes and looking for the new temporal curve

* My brain is standing up like an electric meerkat

* Another rock star Friday night in the life of a working writer: overclocking my brain & being overpowered by a hot laptop.

* Watching the Election Debate. Like looking at three abortions crawl out of a bin and try to dance for coins.

* Misheard Nick Clegg and thought he was praising "the unsung hero of heroin"

* can you have beer as a power totem animal?

* Making culture is a shamanic conversation: we spend our days talking with dead ancestors. Good morning.

* Soon I will have 365,000 followers, and so can finally sacrifice 1000 souls a day to scabby Elder Space Gods for a year.

* I shall relate the details of the project in my forthcoming book THE TWEET OF TWITHULHU.

* Ooh champagne no I couldn’t possibly no wait come back here give me that fucking bottle

* The vodka martini: 2010s creative fuel or 1950s wifebeating fuel? We shall see.

* Oh no not more champagne oh all right then if you’re forcing me no no leave the crate here I SAID LEAVE IT

* No, seriously: Zombie Jesus reproduced by egg?

* Is Zombie Jesus gone? Is it safe to come out yet? These savage primitive cults confuse and worry me

* Of all the April Fool’s gags, the idea that Pete Doherty could play two shows in a row without nodding out is the dumbest.

* I think it’s way past time this script started doing what daddy says. (takes off belt)

* "Apply cunning" is good general advice for the day, I think. We could all use a cunning plan, after all.

* Or a cunning stunt.

* FAQ: No, I don’t have an assistant. I don’t have minions. I don’t have slaves. It is very sad, yes.

* BOILING SPACETIME

* The moral of TAKEN: Daddy knows best. Don’t make daddy kill a shitload of foreigners and then say "I told you so."

* Formspring: where essential human mystery goes to die the death of a thousand clicks.

* I do not understand why I have not been approached to run the UK Space Agency.

* Ah, yeah. Maybe they read the bit in WIRED UK about my interest in an orbital death ray. Still. Bad show.

* "Success is buried in the garden of failure." Quote by Rick Wakeman, of all people.

* These are my good deeds for the day. I shall go back to hunting possible "assistants" with rohypnol harpoons now.

* am manfully fighting the urge to unscrew people’s heads and check inside their brain-caves for bad wiring

* attotechnology: for when nanotech starts sounding all flabby and 20th-Century

* The thing about this part of London is you can’t tell who’s a dotcom worker and who’s a homeless person

* I has a pint, awaiting next meeting where I will apparently be poked with twigs. Probably a sex thing.

* ambient awareness – subcritical sociability – Dymaxion Chronofile

* Honestly, the only thing that interests me about SXSW these days is getting video or transcript of the annual Bruce Sterling rant.

* (Even though I suspect that one day soon he’s going to lose it and just yell "FUCK YOU, MOON PEOPLE" at them for an hour.)

* Child: "How do I look?" Me: "Like something Viv Westwood scribbled on a napkin 30 years ago." Child: "I hate you old man"

* dr zaius is my co-pilot

* dear producers: each time you stick that bloody wub wub sound on your shit techno and say I HAS MADED DUBSTEPS god rapes a seal

* The London Olympic stadium is starting to look like a giant radio dish pointed at space. Which would be more interesting.

* I like to think that, somewhere in the world, there is a sexual position called The Shatner.

* If Andy Warhol had had the internet, would he have interviewed himself on Formspring all day?

* I still recall my mother’s first words to me: "I haven’t killed anyone in years, but never think that I’ve forgotten how."

• Think Progress; Arizona Expands Its Discrimination: Teachers With Heavy Accents Can?t Teach English, Ethnic Studies Are Banned
  'Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Arizona Department of Education ?recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English?:' What the fuck is going on out there?
  (tags:pol )
• Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: Augmented-Reality Floor Tiling
  "Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada have developed floor tiles that can simulate the look, sound and feel of snow, grass or pebbles underfoot. Such a tool could perhaps be used for augmented reality applications, tele-presence, training, rehabilitation or even as virtual foot controllers. The modular "haptic" floor tiling system is made up of a deformable plate suspended on a platform. Between the plate and platform are sensors that detect forces from the user's foot. And the plate can give off vibrations that mimic the feeling of stepping on different materials. A top-down projection and speakers add visual and audio feedback."
  (tags:tech ar )

Yoga Records brings us this incredible reissue of Edward Larry Gordon’s private press LP from ’78 of zonked zither/kalimba mind excursions. A street musician keen on overtones and the healing properties of music, these two 25-minute-long tracks are endlessly inventive and shimmer with loveliness.

Samples at the link here. Gorgeous stuff, especially the second sample. Nice work, Yoga Records.

For the people who were having trouble getting hold of DO ANYTHING via mail order: khepri.com now has it in stock.

Home from London, after a mental-health day taken to go and see Francois Roche lecture. Absolutely fascinating, as expected, and it was lovely to see Francois and Stephanie again, however briefly. I got invited to dinner but had to tear off somewhere else, and at that latter appointment had slightly too much to drink to safely manage a transfer to the intended last stop of the night, so I decanted myself into my hotel room and was considering opening another bottle and finishing the job when my email retched and spat forth that which I will now refer to as Project H, a six-issue comics serial with a veeeerrry long lead time.

At some point I’ll type up my notes from the Roche talk. I didn’t try to note down his train of thought — frankly, I’m not sure that’s completely possible — but I did jot down the terms and phrases that were particularly interesting or resonant to me.

Here’s a showreel of Francois and Stephanie’s, that I just found on The You Tubes.

("Viab" is a great word. It’s the term they use for the mechanical tentacle they built that sprays generative architecture in bio-concrete.)

Came home, wrote some Project Nowhere at the pub (approaching a complete first episode now), caught up on the internet a bit, and now I’m listening to Leyland Kirby and wondering what’s next.

Siege:

Jodi/Ego Assassin:

Cherie Priest by Libby Bulloff

Nearly done with volume 4.

Off to London again, to see Francois Roche lecture, powered by a shot of The Black Blood Of The Earth supercoffee provided by Funranium Labs…

Henry Leo and Tallulah Louise.

Kelly Sue and Matt, you did good.

G’night.

I wrote a whole thing about how working for 2000AD, even just to have done it (as one commenter suggested), wouldn’t be a good thing because they keep all the rights, but I decided not to post it because it was a bit too shouty towards people I don’t even know and none of it was new.

But I did want to say:

Can you imagine a time when your favourite comics creators and stories were published together in the same comic every week? Because that’s what I grew up with. Hell, even into my twenties, I could pick up a copy and get prime slices of Milligan, Hewlett, Bond, Ennis, etc. The British comics anthology model, a weekly 32-page(ish) unit.

I mean, that’s why people still want to work for 2000AD. It’s a cultural touchstone.

But the idea’s the thing, isn’t it? Once a week, big slab of culture, comics stories the likes of which you couldn’t find anywhere else.

Not that it’ll ever happen again. Takes a crazy amount of capital and a scary amount of admin to get it to happen as a thing sold in newsagents. I can’t even imagine the horror of getting it on American newsstands, and god only knows the American comics stores would hate and fear it.

You could do it online, so long as no-one was getting paid. But the clue to the trouble with that idea is in that previous sentence too. That’d be something to see, though — once a week this glorious Thing appears, mad with hubris and crackling with ambition and wriggling with foul ideas and bad jokes. (Or even, hell, instead of one thing with five stories a week, imagine each piece of it on a different weekday, so Story 1 is always on Mondays, Story 2 is always on Tuesdays, etc.)

It’s true that the nature of the web does away with a lot of the necessities behind day-and-date release. But there’s also something nice about "appointment internet," even when it’s just a day out of the week. 2000AD was always Saturdays. FREAKANGELS is always Fridays, of course.

Anyway. Completely rambling. But it’s a nice thought. And not the worst model to drag out of the past and dust off a bit.

• Lessons from the Brain: Toward an Intelligent Molecular Computer | Michigan Tech News
  "A team of researchers from Japan and Michigan Technological University has built a molecular computer using lessons learned from the human brain."
  (tags:computing neuro )

"A man has died after an eel that was inserted into his rectum gnawed away at his bowels, causing agonising injuries which were eventually fatal."

Brief notes at my board about comics, serialisation, free gifts, etc:

…it’s the long haul of novel production, rather than the fast fiction of serialisation. I was talking to someone about 2000AD the other day, and how I’d love to be published weekly , and in Britain, and on newsagent shelves: but, of course, 2000AD doesn’t offer creator ownership (except in one or two very rare cases), and, frankly, it’s not like 2000AD does so much with its IP that there would be any financial gain in giving them the rights to new material…

Please welcome to the world Tallulah Louise, daughter to Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, sister to Henry Leo and born into a circle of friends that wraps so far around the world that she’ll never know what it’s like to be lost.

Welcome to Earth, kid. It’s going to be fun.

"The Haunted Ballroom" is, to me, the very essence of the Caretaker project. The Caretaker has since sloughed his skin and moved on to become Leyland Kirby, whose SADLY THE FUTURE IS NO LONGER WHAT IT WAS has been mentioned here.