Funranium Labs, creators of the Supercoffee Of Science known as THE BLACK BLOOD OF THE EARTH, offer a discount code.  I can vouch for the excellence of their shipping.

Announcement of a new comics project by Rufus Dayglo.  Facebook page.

"Perhaps in the future, we will not need a constant manned presence in the lower Earth orbit," Roskosmos deputy director Vitaly Davydov told journalists in Moscow.

Roskosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said in a recent interview that he regretted Russia having put so much emphasis on manned space flight, rather than looking into more financially rewarding spheres like telecommunications.

(link)

A photo essay at English Russia.  I have to cull a few of these for myself, but you should check out the whole thing.

Steve Renn

via April Cacioppo, thanks

Steve. His fucking parents had named him Steve. To say, "his fucking parents" did not mean he didn’t love his parents or the other way around. He didn’t love his name. In fact, to say that he merely hated his name would have been an oversimplification akin to stating that the universe has some stuff in it. His parents hadn’t even had the presence of mind to give him a middle name that wouldn’t compound his misery: his full name was Stephen Harold Evens. Evidently—he often thought—they hadn’t even considered what his initials spelled. Ever since he was a young kid, he’d wanted a different name, and felt like he wouldn’t be himself until he found one that was his. He felt like the Steves of the world were car mechanics or producers of pornography of a questionable quality.

Would you like a free book?  Course you bloody would.

After losing his job as a librarian under mysterious circumstances, Early’s life takes a turn for the strange. A friend he hasn’t seen for over a decade shows up at Early’s girlfriend’s apartment, with a mute giant in tow, and proceeds to show Early and his girlfriend magical wonders. Soon Early’s girlfriend is missing, and he must follow his mysterious friend on a journey of discovery and dread that will show him shadowed Roads, ancient secrets and new worlds.

+++ Cracking up at “ZARDOZ Week” on Mounds & Circles+++

Veronica Ibarra

photo – site – prints

At Bristolwhip.

So I was listening to bits of the new Balam Acab album on YouTube – like this – when I discovered that I’d never played “Oh, Why” here. And I can’t imagine why. So I’m fixing that. But first, “Expect”:

The new album, WANDER/WONDER, was released yesterday. From Tri-Angle Records, it’s around on vinyl, CD and digital. Check your usual places. I’ll buy mine from Boomkat. And now, “Oh, Why.”

I am currently using my illustrative style to form fictional but plausible unions of biological and man-made structures on canvas. In my studies of science, I have observed many structural similarities in nature which man has also used to achieve a similar function. One example of this is found in the end point of a circuit, called a lead, located on a computer board. This structure looks very similar to a nerve cell ending called a bouton. Both constructions serve the purpose of communicating electronic signals but one is built by man and the other occurs naturally. I paint wallpaper in my compositions to enhance and compare the elegance that I see in bones, veins and nerves. I would like viewers of my artwork to think about the patterns and beauty in these parts of our bodies instead of seeing them as a reference to death…

Site.  And prints, skins, and iPhone case designs.

(via Deb Chachra, thanks)

This week is heavy lifting on the novel.  It’s been a hell of a month, and progress has been slower than it should have been due to various Real Life nightmares that required my attention.  Therefore, there will be very little actual writing of new material on the site this week.

However, I’d like to keep the site warm.  So, every hour or so, I will post something before I go downstairs for my cigarette.  Probably a photo, or music, or a piece of art.

If you have things you’d like to send me to keep the flow of stuff going, my “public” email address is warrenellis@gmail.com, and it gets checked once a day or so.  I will also accept photographic pledges of allegiance.

Related articles

• Laurie Penny’s PENNY RED (warrenellis.com)
• The No Longer Weekly Katie West (warrenellis.com)
• Sneaker Pimps (warrenellis.com)
• Who I Am And Where I Am (June 2011) (warrenellis.com)

Found on their facebook page:

Hello everybody! So, after all the speculation and absolutely no hype, we are pleased to announce the publication date of the first e-edition of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine. The auspicious date will be the 10th of November (2011) The web magazine will include no less than four original stories by new writers, audio visual content from both the British Library and the Greenwich arts festival and features by some very well-known and well respected names from all areas of the genre. Our submission guidelines will be posted on our FB page so, New Worlds will be once more, and we hope in time to approach the heights that the name has reached in the past… but in the future! Watch this space for subscription prices and FAQ’s.

The submission guidelines were actually posted on the page a few days before the above entry.

The dedicated website still hasn’t been set up, and is defaulting to http://81.21.76.62/newworlds.co.uk/index.html at this time.

The comics daily-deal website Thwipster has declared it to be Warren Ellis Week.

Not quite the official global holiday one would hope for, but it’ll do for now.  Thanks, people.

Right now, you can get the hardcover of FREAKANGELS Vol 1 for 32% off.

Just saw this Wikileaks-released cable flagged on Twitter:

The real reason this contact has such trouble is that the most conservative Saudis oppose the celebration of birthdays as un-Islamic; however, the reasons Customs officers cite are typically more specific and bizarre. She said that during her efforts to gain the release of her most recent shipment from customs, she was told that Barbie (pictured on cups she hoped to sell) was a Zionist figure, while pictures of Spiderman on paper plates shooting webs really symbolized a crypto-Christian sign of benediction.

So Ed Brubaker, on Twitter, was talking about not starting a story until he knew how it ended, concluding with the thought:

This prompted the following thoughts by Brian Bendis:

If I’d been around at the time the exchange was happening, I might have pointed out that Brian’s favourite novels weren’t cancelled. They simply reached their natural ending. But I think that would have been unproductive, because on second reading I saw Brian’s underlying point.

Brian (and Joe Quesada, I guess) see digital comics as potentially doing to the serialised graphic novel what the mp3 did to the album. Digital comics services are still very much all about the single rather than the graphic novel. They’re not selling TRANSMETROPOLITAN as ten collections. They’re selling it as sixty singles. Mp3s are priced individually at most music services because people will buy the bits of an album they want. The days of being able to force the sale of a complete unit of songs, in a predetermined running order, are long gone. And I suspect what’s being said here is that there’s a belief that comics could go a bit like that. I also suspect it’s a bit of wishful thinking, hoping that waiting-for-the-trade will go away if you write technically infinite storylines that put the focus back on the individual single, and the individual single being the point of instant gratification that you load on to your tablet.

That said, if you deliberately write against collection as a method to embrace digital distribution…

…well, as I’ve said before, Archie Goodwin once told me that the only qualititative difference between superhero comics and soap operas is that superhero comics replace love scenes with fight scenes. And those shows only end when they get cancelled.

It’s an interesting discussion to have. It would even more firmly separate Marvel and DC (whom I imagine are on the way to this kind of thinking already) from, well, pretty much everybody else.

This is basically a half-baked capture of the relevant points that I’ll come back to at a later date. Have to take my daughter shopping now. For books.

The daily Reuters news galleries – all these images are from Reuters photographers and all rights reside with them and Reuters – are always an unsettling window on the world.  Here’s a selection from today’s spreads, without attribution or explanation.

Coloured by Matt Wilson.  From SECRET AVENGERS #16, out next week.  Preview here.

Been looking forward to this.  Click through to buy the download for a fiver: