I left for Berlin Friday.  On Saturday, a water pipe in the bathroom, upstairs, sprung a leak, which spread downstairs to soak the washing machine and tumbledryer.

I get home Sunday night and put the chickens away.  We have three rescued ex-battery hens.  Came from the British Hen Welfare Trust, whom I recommend.  A gift from me to Niki, who loves them.  I notice one of them isn’t sleeping with the others as usual, but standing alone on the other side of the coop.  I make a note.

And go back to my office.  Longtime readers will know that I have a terminal allergy to house dust.  My family, however, seems never to remember this.  Lots of dusty boxes and books got moved into my office when the leak sprang.

Today is Niki’s birthday.  It’s also the anniversary of my Dad’s funeral.  I’m having a monster allergy attack, the second really bad one in as many months.  This afternoon, the chicken stops eating and drinking, and flops on the ground.  By 615, we’re at the vet with the damned bird, who tells us it’s a respiratory infection, gives her a shot and tells us it’s 50/50 whether she’ll see the morning.  He gives us a mix to give her, telling us to syringe it into her through a straw.  You think we can find anyone who’ll sell us straws?  Juice carton straws are too sharp, and we can’t even find a Bic pen to disassemble.  So we syringe it right into her beak and hope it goes down the right hole.

Then the chicken shits all over me.

Which at least indicates the antibiotic shot is working.

I’m about done with Monday now.

The informational website for the comics project SVK by myself, Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker and BERG has gone live.  GETSVK.COM.

SVK will not be sold like normal comics.  The email alert system at the site is there for a reason.  Sign up.

The TRANSMET Dr Sketchy’s is on right now in NYC, and Melissa just sent this shot over of Jiz Lee as Spider Jerusalem and Ryan Keely as Channon Yarrow:

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Someone just pointed me at this.  It comes with the comment

This just reached my desk. Flyer being handed out in Fourways

Dunno if I believe a word of it — although the cited website works —

DR Uba: The doctor who will never hide his face to the public of change his name

– but if it’s fake, it’s very funny in a horrible ohgodno kind of way.

EDITED TO ADD: mystery solved. It’s apparently marketing for a film called NIGHT DRIVE. Fun piece of work.

EDITED TO ADD: and then @nic0 on twitter showed me this:

Apparently the guy got stabbed in the end.

SECOND EDIT TO ADD; I’m down the rabbit hole now, Peter Gasston just told me that he used to be called, I shit you not, Unbeatable Atif:

Berlin, actually.

I’m speaking at the Cognitive Cities conference on Saturday, along with Ben Hammersley and Adam Greenfield.

And I’m still writing the talk, because I am a technological peon who still writes talks and then reads them, rather than ad libbing in front of Powerpoint slide things that actually took longer to make and assemble than it would have taken to write a talk. I am very behind the times, and therefore expectations for wakefulness during my talk should be lowered. Like a blanket of Ambien floating down over your head.

Am off on Friday, at which point this site will probably devolve into a flurry of quick posts from the road.

Currently waiting on the nod to mention a thing in Ireland next month.

Today I got a lovely and fascinating thing in email from a film company, a look at some pencils for the first "new" issue of CASANOVA which is just mental, and a read of the fantastically beautiful new comic NONPLAYER by Nate Simpson, which you yourself can see a preview of right here at this link. The whole thing is just a fucking stunning piece of illustration.

This is a pretty picture by my friend Liliana B, who’s selling her prints on Etsy now.

I just heard reports that writer & producer Dwayne McDuffie is dead.

We talked – and occasionally argued – for years, at my message board.  I had huge respect for both him and his work.  Later, he was good enough to hire me to write a JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED cartoon for him.  I had a terrific time doing that: turned out he was great to work with, too.  if you had to pick out ten people in this poxy business whom you’d stand in front of when the shit started flying, Dwayne would be on most people’s lists.

I can’t wrap my mind around the notion that he’s not here anymore, to be honest.

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Incredible lap steel harmonics. Click through to purchase.

That said, I’m mostly watching the news rather than working on the lists, sketches, notes and design documents that such a project begins with (for me). Everyone has a different process. And, in fact, quite often, every project has a different process.

Hell, I was even watching Al Jazeera on the iPhone (propped up against some bottles of spices) while cooking chili in the kitchen earlier.

Sudden random thought: someone should totally do a web magazine that released as a six-page block on a weekday like FREAKANGELS. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? And people could still read it on their fucking iPads (have you noticed how horribly entitled people with iOS devices can be? "Tailor everything to meeeee, i have teh Future Box and you must bow down").

I am also trying to finish writing my talk for Cognitive Cities in Berlin on Saturday, which right now is just sort of a howling, tumbling mess of ideas that have nothing to do with "cognitive cities." I feel like I should apologise in advance for what is, right now, just about twenty-five minutes of incoherent shouting about ghosts and UFOs.

To your left, one of the few photos in existence to depict Molly Crabapple’s actual height of three feet one inch. Ganked from her Tumblr.

Details of the next Outer Church night in Brighton, in March.

While that’s happening, I will be being shot for that goddamned DVD again in London, and then travelling to Ireland for a thing I don’t think I can talk about yet. And then I think I will be going back to bed for an unspecified period but certainly not less than one month.

This is just a triffic photo by Templesmith that’s here because it’s a triffic photo. You can find us both on Instagram pretty easily.

Note to self: investigate novel shown at left sometime soon. (As found at this thread on my message board.)

Talking of novels, Joe Hill is doing a thing in support of his new book that you might be interested in. US and Canada only for now, UK/Aus/NZ soon, he says.

Aviation tumblr xplanes is on a flying saucer kick right now. Loving seeing those old Avro designs again. Go take a look.

This guy Seamus Bellamy keeps asking me to tell people that his book JOOMLA FOR DUMMIES is out. So I have.

And, finally, there’s a preview of the new CROSSED book, PSYCHOPATH, by David Lapham and CRECY artist Raulo Cacares, over at Bleeding Cool. Assume that there will be chopped-off bits of people, sprays of infected blood, vomit, semen, swearing, cannibalism and other things you probably wouldn’t want on your dinner plate.

The story of the man who stuck his head into an operating particle accelerator. Fascinating.

As he was leaning over the piece of equipment he stuck his head through the part of the accelerator that the proton beam was running through. Supposedly, he saw a flash that was “brighter than a thousand suns” at this point. Interestingly, he did not feel any pain when this happened.

Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before…

Yes. I would imagine so.

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