• As The Crow Flies
  The New album from The Advisory Circle, As the Crow Flies, will be released on vinyl, CD and download on 8th July.
  (tags:music )
• Announcing "Toxic Tourism"
  Will Wiles' second book: "Provisionally titled "Toxic Tourism", it will be an unconventional travel guide to three places in the former Soviet Union: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Aral Sea"
  (tags:books peopleiknow )
• ‘Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis’: A Recorded Presentation by Erik Swyngedouw
  "Swyngedouw points to a climate of global consensus that has become pervasive over the past twenty years, effectively suppressing dissent and excluding most people from governance. He explains this consensus as limited to a select group (e.g., elite politicians, business leaders, NGOs, experts from a variety of fields) and perpetuated through "empty signifiers" like the sustainable/creative/world-class city. He argues that this consensus serves a "post-political" neoliberal order in which governments fail to address citizens' most basic needs in order to subsidize the financial sector and take on grandiose projects designed to attract global capital."
  (tags:cities pol social money )
• Featured Quote: Susan Sontag on the Photographer as Flâneur
  "…photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes… "
  (tags:quote writing social )

The little bot Tom Armitage made to inform on the activity of London’s Tower Bridge has gone.  It operated through a Twitter account, and it appears the City Of London has caused Twitter to reassign the username to them as an “official” account.

A few months ago, I said in Berlin, “Cognitive cities require the approval and collaboration of city authorities. The same people who make flyposting illegal.”

It’s sad, and somewhat annoying – especially for Tom – but a better example that these streets are not our streets won’t be found in Britain today.

(That doesn’t mean there won’t be one tomorrow, or that there wasn’t yesterday.)

Related articles

• 29. Our Streets (warrenellis.com)
• 19. The City Is There To Haunt Us (warrenellis.com)
• 25. Flyposting Is Illegal (warrenellis.com)
• 23. Whose Streets (warrenellis.com)

• Adaptive Journeys
  “A way to make cities, and especially London, a tiny bit better.”
  (tags:cities )
• Bo.Lee’s “Shadowside” at Blackall, London
  special attention to the Ione Rucquoi art
  (tags:art )
• Ham ‘N Mutherfuckers
  another massive Stokoe art download
  (tags:none)
• Tomorrow’s World
  “Themes and moods for documentary, scientific and industrial subjects.”
  (tags:music history )

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write comics, graphic novels, books, journalism and anything else that people pay money for. Sometimes I even go out in public. I live in south-east England.

I’m the writer of the graphic novel RED, the film version of which (starring Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman & Helen Mirren) came out in October. I’m the writer of the GRAVEL graphic novels, under development for film by Legendary Pictures. I also wrote the novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. I have an Amazon.com page here. (Ignore anything it says about LISTENER, that book was lost and cancelled years ago.)

A collection of the writing I’ve done here and elsewhere on the internet, SHIVERING SANDS, was published in 2009.

Quick links: Whitechapel (message board) – Twitter – an Official Warren Ellis Page on that Facebook thing – a store of Things at CafePress – Tumblr – personal facebook page

(I do have a personal page on that Facebook thing, but I only add people I know, really)

You can also find me on Instagram as warrenellis.

For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or tell me about new music or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I check once every day or so: warrenellis@gmail.com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out (there’s a FAQ for that). Always interested in new music, new art, new connections, dirty pictures, madness etc.

If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical… um, well, you can’t, right now. My book agent got flooded with stuff of late, and I feel terrible about drowning them in things like that.  So we stopped that.  But apparently The Post Office here in the UK has changed the way it does PO boxes now, and I cannot puzzle it out.  So.  Eventually I’ll have one of those.  Or not.  Sorry.  You can always just email me about it.

Related articles

• Why I Love Katie West (warrenellis.com)
• The SVK Torches Are Here (warrenellis.com)
• The New Aesthetic (warrenellis.com)
• Some Random Saturday Night Notes (warrenellis.com)

Rich Johnson, on the current commercial comics landscape: “We’re firmly back in the Nineties, aren’t we?”

I swear, nothing else could make me want more to just say fuckit and do nothing in comics but digitally-distributed work.  With the novel and the other stuff, I’ve already massively reduced my comics output.  But “the Nineties are back”?  Just makes me want to take myself out of the equation entirely.  I already had to fight the Nineties once.

Broke the two humps that had set into the second 5000 words of the novel and am moving again.  Have filed the scripts for four of my six issues of SECRET AVENGERS for Marvel.  Contracts for Odd Digital Thing have arrived.  Draft Zero of Film Treatment Thing has passed muster, and I’m driving it to Draft One, although, as with all of my treatments and outlines, it won’t be any good until Draft Two.

And you may have noticed that I’m not posting here much either.  I’m pretty much down in the mines for the next several months.  Which is where I am now returning, grumbling about fucking Nineties comics and the lack of idiots geniuses queueing up to pay me for digital comics.

• Entry, descent and surface science for 2016 ExoMars mission
  "Once on the surface, the DREAMS (Dust characterisation, Risk assessment, and Environment Analyser on the Martian Surface) scientific payload will function as an environmental station for the two to four days of the surface mission." TWO TO FOUR DAYS. How utterly fucking embarrassing. That's the best we'll have in 2016. A demonstration article that is intended to work for two to four days. I should have a fucking homestead on Mars by now.
  (tags:space )
• Paperlinks Brings Business-Optimized QR Codes To Life
  "Paperlinks creates QR codes for businesses and brands but with a particular focus on the design of the code itself. The actual code can incorporate the logo of a brand or business. The beauty of Paperlinks is that instead of leading peoples to a web page (as most QR codes do), Paperlinks app and codes open up a landing page with the company’s logo and other modules, which can include Tweets, calendars, video, contact info, photos and more."
  (tags:papernet qr )
• The Life and Madness of Edward H. Rulloff | Victorian Gothic
  "Rulloff was a murderer and a thief whose savant-like intelligence and erudition have invited comparison to Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. He committed robberies throughout his life in order to fund his grandiose research into the science of philology; an obsession that may have had unrecognized origins in a deep-seated sense of remorse."
  (tags:crime history )

“How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalised in space?”

“Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with a technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard – touchable holograms.”

Brian Wood is offering a free download of the entire 132-page Public Domain 2 artbook.

• Paranoia Man by Charlie Huston | Mulholland Books
  "Mutant robots rule the world. Until disproved, this is my working hypothesis."
  (tags:writing )
• Findings indicate the edge of the solar system is filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles
  "A new computer model of the solar system based on data from the Voyager space probe indicates that the edge of the solar system is not smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles."
  (tags:space )

Damn.  Things I wish I could be at.  Not only are François and Stéphanie just really nice people, but look at the way they generate ideas.

FR: Our concept of the skyzoid machine is based on Marcel Duchamp’s Bachelor Machine. It’s a machine which is not cybernetic. In other words, it’s a machine that does not define only on its  efficient mode of production. The skyzoid machine pretends to do something while doing something else, thus creating a confusion about the degree of its functionality, the extent by which it belongs to science. Immediately, it questions the limits of the technology and its place in production. So the machine actually participates in creating a blurriness.

AN: Do you mean that even the machine participates in the production of culture?

FR: Yes, the machine’s role is not to simply produce something in the phantasm of efficiency. The machine is both a freak and an operating system at the same time. We try to introduce an unpredictable behavior, or a fuzzy logic, to explicate the confusion between what “they” pretend to do and what “they” are actually doing. In other words, the skyzoid machine completely changes your relationship to reality, leading to paranoia. Because all paranoia produces a parallel reality in your mind, filtering perception, you can perceive it and describe it through fiction. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland operates on an immediate level when he introduces illogic through pure logic, what in French one would call le malentendu. Malentendu – the wrongly heard or misunderstood – is a tool of linguistic exchange; it is a kind of stutter. We need misunderstanding or stuttering in order to communicate.

It’s actually kind of exhausting to listen to François for protracted periods, because he is so clever, so attuned to both the big idea and the jewelled detail, that any narrative he commences soon feels like a download too large for your brain to contain.  But I recommend it to anyone.

• Found Objects: THE ROSICRUCIAN COSMO-CONCEPTION or MYSTIC CHRISTIANITY An Elementary Treatise Upon Man’s Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development.

  (tags:magic history )

Ganked from the Instagram of Matt Jones for BERG:

It’s real.  It lives.  And, as you might be able to work out, it comes with a marvellous foreword by William Gibson, among other goodies.  And now it waits to be packaged with the SVK UV torch, at which point it will be offered for sale by mail order only.  Not long now.

Bugger me, the insane thing lives.

Get signed up for the email alert when it happens.>

Related articles

• The SVK Torches Are Here (warrenellis.com)
• SVK Approaches Invisibly (warrenellis.com)
• Warren Ellis Uses UV in New Comic (graphicpolicy.com)

Jones just sent me this link:

You’ve probably heard of Kickstarter, the website where people post pitches for creative projects and invite the public to contribute money to fund those projects. You’ve probably heard that comics material is a popular category on Kickstarter. If someone told you that Kickstarter funded roughly the same amount of comics material as DC Comics’ Vertigo Imprint, you’d look at them like they were crazy…

• UbuWeb Sound – History of Electronic / Electroacoustic Music
  History of Electronic / Electroacoustic Music (1937-2001)
  (tags:music )
• Serpentine Gallery: Mark Leckey in discussion with Matt Webb Wednesday 8 June 2011
  "Matt Webb will be talking to Mark Leckey about his Serpentine show, the cult status of smart objects and the multiple relationships we form with technology."
  (tags:peopleIknow events culture )
• project:PONTONE
  "Here at the Pylon, we kind of feel sonically-separated-at-birth from Pontone and wanting to pay tribute to this fine institution we asked Marcin and Piotr to take over exotic pylon for an entire month and to our delight they agreed!"
  (tags:podcast )
• Neolithic Britain revealed
  "Previously it had been thought that causewayed enclosures spread slowly across the country over five centuries, between 3700-3000BC. However the research team was able to show that these enclosures actually spread within around 75 years."
  (tags:history )

In my sky cave, taking time out to think and plan as I write the novel and the film treatment and the other things.

Also, enjoying the confusion in the digital comics space.  What shakes out of all this should be interesting.  And you have to kind of admire DC Comics’ style in trying to fuck everyone at once and calling it a group hug.

• Philip Taylor Kramer – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "Philip Taylor Kramer (July 12, 1952 – February 12, 1995) was a bass guitar player for the rock group Iron Butterfly during the 1970s. After this he obtained a night school degree in aerospace engineering, worked on the MX missile guidance system for a contractor of the US Department of Defense and later in the computer industry on fractal compression, facial recognition systems, and advanced communications. His disappearance on February 12, 1995 caused a mystery lasting for years."
  (tags:weird 60pp )

I do actually feel bad about typo-ing DC’s current event comic Flashpoint as Fleshlight in an email earlier today.

Not least because in my head all these comics now have titles like Fleshlight Legion Of Doom, Fleshlight Emperor Aquaman and World Of Fleshlight now.

I do not need a world with Fleshlight Emperor Aquaman in it.

I’ll be writing the foreword for the documentation of this fairly demented project, for reasons that will become clear when the eventual book is produced.  Molly Crabapple’s Week In Hell:

To celebrate my 28th birthday, I’m renting a room, locking myself inside for five days, covering the walls with paper, and filling every inch of that paper with art.  I might go insane, or it might be awesome.  I’m inviting you along for the ride.