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What I really need is that One Desktop App To Rule Them All, if you’ll forgive the horrific nerd reference.

My poor choking laptop runs Windows XP.  I like a good Adobe Air app, though I do have horrible Silverlight too.  I run Chrome, which is fast and light, but I don’t want Google Reader open in a tab all the time.  I want realtime notification of what’s happening.  And I don’t want to be running half a dozen apps to do it.  Which, yes, sounds petty and all first world problems, but this is 2010 and there should be a single desktop app that captures all this stuff for me.

I thought Seesmic Desktop 2 was close. It gave me Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader as realtime streams with nice little notifications that popped up on the right hand side there, and then nicely went away again. It didn’t have plug-ins to reach some services I would have liked, but it was a good start. And then the Google Reader plug-in borked, and I can’t fix it. Multiple reinstallations and it just won’t work.

I’ve seen others that were almost it. Some that combine Twitter and Tumblr, which is good, but didn’t handle anything else. Growl looked like a possible, but fuck me that’s a lot of shit to install. Cliqset looked like it might be It, since it apparently handles 80 services — but they’ve hidden their desktop app too deep for me to find, and recent news suggests they’re having a little trouble.

Hootsuite? $5.99 a month? Bugger off. Lazyscope wouldn’t even authenticate my Twitter account.

I’m testing Tweetdeck, which is a clever thing, but, again, no Google Reader function. Same with Digsby and Sobees.

I want that One Thing that brings Twitter and fucking Facebook (including ability to post to my “fan” page there) and Google Reader and Tumblr and maybe even Flickr to my desktop in realtime, so that I can see everything, everywhere, and therefore control the world. Or something.

Suggestions are gratefully appreciated!

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[Official Warren Ellis Compound on that Facebook aggregates this site, and also my Tumblr reblogs, Flickr uploads and whatever else is in my clipboard when I’m surfing by. For those people who just can’t bear to leave the facey book.]

So I was invited to a Diaspora instance when the code went live, at http://diasp.org. Worked okay-ish for a couple of days, then less okay-ish, and for the last several days has been completely broken in Chrome. I used the Get Satisfaction link the site provides to explain my problem, to be told by an employee that "Diasp.org is not an official server, so I am not sure whats going on here." So, apologies to the eighty-odd people who’ve tried to add me as a contact on diasp.org, but I can’t get into requests management, and will probably just delete the site off my bookmarks…

And I can’t talk about any of it! Aaaaaah. This OMERTA shit is killing me.

(My agents study daybook entries to ensure I’m not getting drunk and letting Sekrit Informashuns slip.)

All this Invisible Stuffs is also eating my days. I’m stealing time to get this down from what I should be doing in this hour, which is writing a foreword for a book of Ellen Rogers photography. Which I think will be the third or fourth foreword I’ve written in the last five weeks.

I’m in this zone now where I’ve been working flat out all year but you won’t see most if not all of it until the middle of 2011. That, too, is weird.

One thing of sad note is that I’ve resigned my column at WIRED UK. I think they still have one in the pipe to use, and then that’s it. I don’t particularly want to go into details about the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it was probably time for me to go anyway, and I’ll always be grateful to Ben Hammersley and David Rowan for giving me the opportunity in the first place. Russell Davies was always the real intellectual anchor of the magazine’s Start section in any case, and I don’t imagine I’ll be missed.

I’m going to miss doing a column in a proper newsstand magazine, though. And, honestly, that column’s probably been the only sign to many people that I’m even still alive.

Also, here’s a thing: I took a look at this site’s analytics the other day, and The New Web is in full effect. Twitter “followers” go up, website hits go down. I mean, not by a hideous amount. But noticeable. More thoughts on this will follow, but, well, Bruce Sterling was expecting blogging to go away, and I presume that starts with the audience going away. Or, more correctly, with the audience wishing/expecting their social network service friends to curate the individual blog post, rather than sit on the blogs or aggregate the RSS themselves…

Speaking of RSS. I got myself all set up with Seesmic Desktop 2 and the Google Reader plug-in for it, and I was, for a week, all-fucking-seeing. Everything of importance to me streamed to my desktop in realtime. And then the fucking plug-in broke. I feel like I had godlike powers stolen from me by a fucking dog. I am cheated and wrathful.

Seriously, all I want is a nice big dashboard for Twitter and Google Reader, and maybe Tumblr, and maybe even Facebook if I actually start using that properly one day, that pops up nice little notifications in the bottom left of my screen when something new happens, and those notifications vanish after ten seconds. That’s all. It’s not much to ask. The future needs to stop being shit now.

And now I need to finish writing that foreword.  Begone, mortals.  Grrr.

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From downthetubes.net: UK indie comics distributor Smallzone launches Print on Demand service.

British independent comics distributor Smallzone – also the team behind Scar Comics – has just announced a UK-based Print on Demand service for all UK comic publishers.

“Now – finally – there is a true POD option for UK publishers,” enthuses Smallzone’s Shane Chebsey, “which means no more expensive shipping from the US and no more having to spend a fortune in big runs of comics just to get a reasonable price per copy… It also means that small publishers will no long be restricted to black and white interior art. Colour printing is now affordable on lower runs.”

Smallzone can also intergrate the retail service with the printing service so publishers don’t have to worry about finding storage space for their print run.

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In which we are on the move. Sort of.

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Wish I could make it to Reading for this, it sounds great: Weird Winter Tales

Date : Saturday 4th December 2010
Time : 12pm – 6pm
Location : Reading Central Library
Tickets : £3 or £2 with library card

Click for embiggen:

James Stokoe just put an entire fucking comic up for free at this link here.

The pages here were to be the prologue of a much longer book… but then Orc Stain came along which I decided would be a much better idea to pursue for the next few years. So now it sits idly on my hard drive, gathering e-dust. I don’t think I would be a decent human being if I released this prologue in print without finishing the rest of the book, but the magic of free internet lets me share it with you now.

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So, on my message board I’m running another artists’ challenge, and this one goes a bit like this:

1977. London. You have been tasked with producing the poster for Malcolm McLaren’s JUSTICE LEAGUE film.

And I just woke up, opened the thread, and found this piece of awesome from Annie Wu:

Good morning. This is warren ellis dot com.

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In Dagestan they just kind of leave combat hovercraft laying around. COMBAT HOVERCRAFT.

And also giant things that the photo essay writer thinks are probably ground effect craft but which I would refer to as HELLO CHRISTMAS I HAVE SEEN MY NEW RIDE THANK YOU.

On the top of cultural resource site UbuWeb right now are my ten favourite items on the site.

Hi.  Bit busy today.  But listen: I’ve mentioned Martin’s Jerked Meats here before, right?  UK purveyors of fine, tasty and often experimental jerky and fruit leathers and other good things.  Just got email from them (sent to all their customers), and the snow’s killed their most profitable market show of the year — after they drove twelve hours through the bloody snow to get there.  For a tiny specialty food company to miss out on a huge Xmas market… that’s going to hurt.  So they’re throwing freebies like their excellent Jack Daniels Jerky into orders over fifteen quid.  Frankly, meat (or fruit, or their vegetable options) makes a better gift than socks.