• Frozen Cities / Liquid Networks: Infrastructural Autonomy
  The following project, developed by Amrit Phull and Claire Lubell, in the Frozen Cities/ Liquid Networks studio at the University of Waterloo, examines how new infrastructure can be produced in the Arctic that allows for the transference from air to shipping logistics and, while doing so, addresses the issue of food production and coastal erosion in the Arctic.
  (tags:architecture eco )
• Japanese spacecraft to land in Australian outback
  An Japanese spacecraft which has journeyed to an asteroid is expected to return to Earth at a remote site in the Australian outback in June, the government said Wednesday.
  (tags:space )
• Blipfoto – the daily photo journal for everyone
  "Welcome to blipfoto ? the zero-fuss website that lets anyone join in and publish one photo a day."
  (tags:web photography )

internet cave of warren

* New Comics Talk (21apr10)

* The DO ANYTHING Book Thread

* WEBCOMICS WEEK (April 19-25 2010)

* MCM London Expo – Who’s Going?

* Musicians & Bands: Plug Your Work & Gigs

* Life in 2050 exhibition (LONDON)

A new ambient/abstract spooktronicky EP by Taphead, available to stream online or download for free.  A definite Night Music entry, except that I’ll forget to post it if I wait ’til tonight…

Shackleton and Vengeance Tenford, "Death Is Not Final."

Making me want to dig out some Muslimgauze.

Gonna be a quiet day here. Will probably just broadcast bits of music. Lots to do here at Ellis Laboratory. And I have only just woken up and I feel thoroughly knackered. Please go out and buy DO ANYTHING.

(Photo by Lex Machina)

Google "RxRy." G’night.

Edvrd Rvrfy Guitr – RxRy – RxRy 2010 from Rx Ry on Vimeo.

(from the final Alexander McQueen collection)

Untitled 44 from kleer001 on Vimeo.

• Golden Apples, Crimson Stew | HiLobrow
  "The elite, however, were dining on the less fortunate, and probably to a significant extent. Estimates surpass thirty thousand sacrifices a year towards the end, and even more during the dedications of temples. Not all of these were eaten, obviously, but when they were, what were they eating people with?"
  (tags:history )
• 1. Time. History Under Atemporality | varnelis.net
  "Notwithstanding the claim that network culture is ahistorical, in this chapter I suggest that it is possible to create a fold in that condition, understanding network culture as a historical process, an intensification of pre-modern, modern and postmodern temporalities as well as a unique condition of its own. Now whereas a historical account of the disappearance of the modern sense of history is a tricky proposition, it is also by no means an epistemological contradiction. For if quite recently we still had the capacity to think temporally, going further back in time reveals that modernity produced a sense of historical consciousness. Thus, by understanding just how and why individuals began to think about the world temporally, we may throw our own era into heightened relief."
  (tags:theory culture )
• 3D printer could build moon bases
  " An Italian inventor, Enrico Dini, chairman of the company Monolite UK Ltd, has developed a huge three-dimensional printer called D-Shape that can print entire buildings out of sand and an inorganic binder. The printer works by spraying a thin layer of sand followed by a layer of magnesium-based binder from hundreds of nozzles on its underside. The glue turns the sand to solid stone, which is built up layer by layer from the bottom up to form a sculpture, or a sandstone building."
  (tags:architecture space fabbing )
• Quote of the Week: Jaron Lanier?s ?Gadget?
  "We are not at the end of musical history, nor is it in sight. Enchanted by new tools, we may be basking for the moment in that very newness, but only to make sense of them, to adopt them into our practice. We may as a culture simply be covering the past as we give those tools a test ride."
  (tags:music culture writing )
• R. Budd Dwyer – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "Children, however, responded to (Budd Dwyer's suicide) by creating a cycle of black comedy jokes similar to those that circulated after the Challenger disaster. A study of the incidence of these jokes showed that they were told only in areas of Pennsylvania where uncensored footage of the press conference had been shown by networks."
  (tags:social )

* Notes From Warren 20apr10

* WEBCOMICS WEEK (April 19-25 2010)

* T-shirts Of The Week: Mid-April Post-US-Tax Resurrection Blowout

* SHUDDERTOWN; March 2010 from Image/Shadowline (announcing a free online issue, among other things)

* Comics on Sale This Week (apr 21)

* This Week from Avatar: DO ANYTHING v1 & GRAVEL 18

On release in North America from tomorrow, and in Britain from whenever the Icelandic Sky Shit breaks up – DO ANYTHING: Jack Kirby Ripped My Flesh, a short book about comics and things.

You can still read the whole thing online in its original serial form, too.

I’m quite fond of this little book. Here’s the cover: design by Ariana Osborne, art by Jacen Burrows, published by Avatar Press. USD $5.99 or nearest local equivalent.

"…a grand tour through comics & culture as seen through a burgled robot head. The robot head of Jack Kirby lives on Warren Ellis’ desk. It knows everything and is connected to everything. You must obey the robot head of Jack Kirby.

"There are many ways to look at comics. In this book, we see the medium through the hazy android eyes of Jack Kirby (actually the stolen and repurposed head of the missing Philip K Dick robot, which Mr. Ellis confesses to swiping off the back of a plane), taking a rattling ghost-train ride through the history of comics. David Bowie, the CIA, mad architects, Will Eisner, Frank Zappa, Tintin, the designer of Skylab, a train station in Paris, Arthur C. Clarke, the circus, the Black Panther Party and William S. Burroughs: all of these things are connected by Jack Kirby, all part of the secret history of comics, and all illustrating the special nature of the medium as the place where you can do anything."

Oh god. The trailer made it to YouTube, and people are taunting me with it. Let’s get this over with. I have, at best, a face for radio. Unfortunately, I don’t have a voice for radio. This is horrifying and I don’t want to look.

The trailer for CAPTURED GHOSTS, a forthcoming documentary about my work.

Professor Sir Peter Cook cracks me up. Southend boys, mate. You can’t trust us an inch. Photo by Matt Jones, whose birthday it is today.

Good morning, scumbubbles. This is warren ellis dot com, broadcasting from Southend-on-Sea in Essex. My name’s Warren Ellis, and I write comics and books and things. And now I’m going to the pub. Selah.

• Ubiquitous Service Design
  "…we must develop a vocabulary that includes what Karl Fast calls "medium-independent conceptual constructs." In other words, we need better ways of talking about information interaction across channels."
  (tags:design theory )
• russell davies: pretending apps
  "Because I don't think Dan's gone far enough. I think he's suggesting that we can learn from Movie OSs to make things more usable and easy to grasp. I think we should do it to make them more fun."
  (tags:design computing )
• Tri-Axium Writings excerpt – Vol. 1: World Music – organissimo jazz forums – The best jazz discussion forum on the web!
  "the present reality of western information dynamics is geared to focus more on the surface of a given focus, as opposed to 'what is most true' about that focus, and this phenomenon has come to profoundly distort our perception of everything – including creativity. The end result of this cultural attitude sheds light on the times we now live in, for, to many people, the meta-reality of a given creative projection is a subject not worthy of serious thought. …every day the realness of creativity becomes less and less clear – and this is true on many different levels."
  (tags:writing nutter weird )

Since Monday is rarely a good workday — it tends to get broken up by admin and emails and bits and pieces, so I don’t get the space for a good long train of thought — I’m spending a couple of hours tuning my RSS feed capture.

My RSS reading comes in three flavours. I have a desktop app, Feed Demon, that brings things to me in close to realtime. Feed Demon got subsumed into Google Reader, so, when I don’t want realtime, I can bring that up in a browser. And I have an app called Reeder for the goddamned iPhone, which is a glorious thing so long as I’m in a civilised part of the world and therefore have 3G.

I currently have 119 feeds in my capture. Today I’ll be weeding some of those out — some of the music blogs got killed by Blogger, some other sites I follow have wandered off into the tall grass or otherwise grown less interesting to me.

I am hunting the New. It’s all out there. You’ve just got to find it.

More vague early-morning rambles from me:

…part of comics’ gift is in the pace of reaction. They sit between music and books in terms of the speed in which contemporaneous works can be brought to market or otherwise disseminated. As Paul Gravett and Peter Stanley said, more than twenty years ago, about the new photocopier technology and the emergence of an enabled and mobile small press: comics are fast fiction…

I write about things I like, here, in the hopes that you like them too and that they become more widely known. It’s about the attention economy and doing what’s right, rather than getting hold of boxes of swag.

I’ve written here before about the wonderful group Natural Snow Buildings. I believe I also mentioned how pissed off I was that time conspired against me and I didn’t get to see them (on the same bill as Grouper and Fennesz) recently. I don’t know them or anything. I most recently linked to their free-download album THE CENTAURI AGENT.

A box just arrived via FedEx from my book agent. It is filled with records, tapes and CDs. And on top was this note:

My day is officially made. Mehdi and Solange, thank you. That was incredibly kind.

(also, I think I just received the soundtrack for the graphic novel I’m currently writing.)