1. Boo!, 2. Halloween!, 3. Halloween, 4. I spend my Samhains like I spend my Christmases, birthdays and divorces: Alone with my Cyprane® inhaler., 5. Sputnik!, 6. Wormwood-O-Lantern

Released on Bandcamp today. You can listen to its hauntophonic joys here, or click through to buy the digital download (which contains other goodies) for an absurdly reasonable five British pounds. I listened to the whole thing a few weeks ago, and consider it an excellent entry into the field of Confusing English Electronic Music as well as a finely eerie Halloween soundtrack.

Spooknificent 31-minute mix by Demdike Stare, part of Unsound’s podcast series.

Spooknificent is an actual word. I am not drinking.

UP#13 Demdike Stare’s Unsounded Podcast by unsound

Kemper Norton. “Allantide is Cornish for Halloween.”

Café Kaput: Samhain mixtape..

The Outer Church: ONE MORE STORY: THE OC HALLOWEEN MIXTAPE.

I have been informed (by text message, by Anna Petterson and Emma Vieceli) that FREAKANGELS won Best Webcomic tonight at the Eagle Awards.

I have told the relevant people to give the physical award — which, sadly, is still not a large bird of prey — to Paul, because he’s certainly earned having a large metal thing standing in his house leering at him the recognition.

I have been further informed that I was awarded Favourite Writer, but that can’t be true, as I’ve already won one of those, and also my name isn’t Alan Moore or Geoff Johns. I calmly await the inevitable retraction.

Kat Foisy just sent me this, by her friend Jill Tracy, and I don’t know how I haven’t heard/seen this before. I’m slipping, obviously.

And we’re back on the air.

(via)

I will be buying one of these tomorrow. You can read a preview of it here.

(image by Paul Greer)

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 few months:

* If I can just fit my head inside this pig’s arse, my David Cameron halloween costume will be complete

* I’ve run out of Red Bull. MOVE TO COMS CHANNEL S ACTIVATE RESTON5

* busy gluing baby doll heads on to a lurex thong #halloweencostumes

* Damn. I’m gonna have to write another comic for Marvel now, just to try and out-crazy @BRIANMBENDIS ’s MOON KNIGHT.

* Send warm bodies. I must leech their essence to survive this new ice age.

* Buying the RED graphic novel is scientifically proven to make you more attractive to any and all mammals. And some fish.

* Am carefully coughing on all the tables in the pub. Fuck these people, with their health and snot-free heads.

* I’d like to write a Kindle Single next year, I think.

* @cully_hamner Fuck you. Toronto made it snow inside my testicles and you got a bit warm in lovely New Orleans. SNOW INSIDE MY TESTICLES

* It is so cold, rainy and vile out here that it could still be summer.

* Ed Miliband made Labour Party leader. Britain sinks deeper into its sofa, heartbeat slowing with raw excitement.

* I could quite fancy being a Baron. There’s a Baron Strange, you know. Suave.

* His full title is the Baron Strange of Knockin. Marginally less suave.

* Huh. I was nominated for a British Fantasy Award. This means I am one of the more fantasised-about people in Britain.

* Remember: if you ever watch an edition of X Factor, Satan gives Simon Cowell another ten years of life.

* Okay, who thought it was a good idea to have the Pope meet schoolboys on his Scottish visit? He has a white van, guys.

* I bet that with a just little biohacking, heroin could go from scary drug to low-carb superfood in no time

* Soaking brain in pool of whisky to see what blackened ideas float to the surface. No paddling.

* On September 11, 1940, George Stibitz operated the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line.

* I like to believe that he transmitted an ASCII image of a cat watching you wank.

* When my daughter is bad, I force her to watch "Jozin Z Bazin" as punishment. Am I infringing her human rights?

* I was hoping for a whole series of MACHETE films. MACHETE FOREVER. DRIVING MACHETE. ALL THAT MACHETE. CITIZEN MACHETE.

* Also THE FIRST MACHETE CLUB and THERE WILL BE MACHETE.

* Daughter snarkily amazed that I cooked a stirfry and didn’t kill her. In retrospect, and for different reasons, so am I.

* Neil Gaiman told me to be merciful to the weak & fearful. A prize to the first reader to mercy-kill and skin one of them for me.

* my brain is awake but i think my body died. dragging self to pub using only prehensile frontal lobe. could take a while.

Foggy morning from Veronika von Volkova on Vimeo.

“In the middle of the city, on that little hill that we affectionately call ‘the mountain’.”

I’ve decided that I caught this flu off Lenny Henry. I saw him for lunch with Hilary Bevan Jones at BAFTA the other week, and he insisted on hugging me. "Commit to the hug!" he bellowed, rubbing himself against me in ways I choose not to elaborate upon. I only found out later that he’d just gotten back from some heartbreaking tour of African death holes. Lenny is a large and hale man who can afford to pay other people to have his diseases for him. The likes of Biafran Poison Monkey Virus do not concern him. Me, on the other hand… not so much.

I did find out one fascinating thing from him that day. The BBC operates this section called something like BBC Hostiles — threat analysis and security for BBC employees in hotzones, red-line communications between the field and head office.

So Lenny Henry gave me a disgusting disease by forcing a committed man-hug upon me. But I did learn about the BBC black ops unit. So I suppose it evens out. Also, if you catch the death flu, you end up with hallucinatory terrordreams on the second night wherein Jeremy Paxman is M.

I am, finally, starting to feel better. But I’m still not going near Expo, and I’m still producing enough plumes of atomised muck to be infectious. Besides, the work’s piled up while I’ve been limp and crap. And on top of that, one of the girls’ rats has to go to the vet tomorrow morning for an operation to remove a tumour. (Which is a minor thing: rats are prone to tumours, and this one is small and mobile, they can just snip it out.) The name of the rat in question? Lenny. Wasn’t my idea, Lili named them. (She had lunch with him once and really liked him, I guess.)

Developing new comics ideas today, while I’ve got some mental clarity. Tomorrow and for the rest of the week, it’s back to finishing off outstanding comics jobs for various places. But today, because I’m feeling a bit better, I’m letting myself do the fun stuff: thinking of new things.

Yeeees. No, me neither. This person.

"You’ve made your bed, Toronto, and you’ve decided to not have me in it, writhing and screaming about gravy."

Looking forward to buying this:

(image by Shannon M)

Yesterday I managed to send out an episode of FREAKANGELS and a short foreword to a science book. Today I just want to lay down, hold my head and moan weakly until some kind soul gives me a lethal injection. But no. I actually have to come up with a couple of new comics projects, which means I have to scoop out all the muck that’s been festering in my head for the last few months and sieve it in the hope of finding some cohered lumps of story in there.

Am also looking forward to getting Charles Burns’ X’ED OUT in the post tomorrow. Fascinated at the idea of Burns riffing off, of all things, Tintin (with, I suspect, a bit of Yves Chaland mixed in there with the Herge and the Burroughs and the Manson).

I continue to be nothing but relieved at RED’s performance in the States. It’s at a cumulative USD $43.5M or thereabouts.

It appears that Zo is selling prints again, for a limited period: