Or not!

Work to be done!

Katelan Foisy painted me!

I am listening to this!

See you Monday!  Maybe!

Yeah, I’ve got nothing today.  Back tomorrow!

“helioseismology”

The New DC comics stuff looks so much like stuff I would never read that it oddly fills me with hope that they are targetting the core audience they want.  If a 43-year old man looks at most of this promo stuff and goes meh, then that’s very probably a good sign for them.  Best of luck to Dan D, Jim L et all for the imminent relaunch.

[edited to add: slow day on the comics news internets, eh?]

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Molly Crabapple

Good morning.  This is warren ellis dot com.

Image by Richard Kadrey, author of the Sandman Slim novels.

Things that had somehow never occurred to me:

The Amazon basin is a huge barrier to commerce. There is no road between Colombia and Brazil. According to the IDB, it costs a Colombian exporter slightly more than a Canadian to ship goods to Brazil.

(the Economist)

From a piece on Alan Howarth in this month’s WIRE magazine:

#spirittracks

Will Wiles (whose book CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS is now on top of my reading pile):

My piece on the hellish "rodent universes" of John Calhoun is now online at Cabinet magazine. Researching overcrowding, Calhoun built elaborate "utopias" for rats and mice, in which they enjoyed unlimited resources and freedom from disease or predation – but limited space. Once population density passed a certain point, the mouse heaven always became mouse hell, rife with violence, rape and asocial freakery. This research formed a cornerstone of the overpopulation and anti-urban doom-mongering of the 1970s – and informed fictions from Stand on Zanzibar to Soylent Green.

Give this three minutes or so to get going.  Around 2.45 it goes from a sedate apache lope to Godspeed!-y squall and hammers, and really starts moving from there.

Also, I recently discovered that 1) deviantArt is still going and 2) I still have an account there.  If people want to email the addresses of dA accounts worth watching to warrenellis@gmail.com, that’d be great.

Jones of BERG just showed me this:

POI – The Peckham Outer-Space Initiative is at the forefront of search & development, and tasks itself with the utilisation of space for not simply the preservation but evolution of the human species and its culture. A primary objective for POI is to develop and establish in-transit non-Earth living situations. These situations are proposed as solutions to current forms of planetary based society and living, and as such POI employs the manifesto/slogan:SHIPS NOT SHELTERS

There’s even a related book, which I believe I must own.

See, this is your proper British science fictional condition.  It’s the British Interplanetary Society, and Bernard Quatermass building rockets in middle England, and Archigram’s inventing nine futures per page on crap paper for tuppence-ha’penny.  That the book is grainy black-and-white is just perfect.  Using the spare resources of austerity to launch mad ideas into the noosphere.

Tongue-in-cheek and self-aware, and yet utterly determined to see the idea through.  It warms me cockles, it does.  I said cockles.

Alasdair Watson

from his tumblr 365bullets

This EP by Antique Shade is also a free download, if you click through.

Good night.

Sean Bonner

I had heard the stories about how the Kaibils were made to not only raise a pet dog and then kill it, but also to eat it raw.

Really interesting little bit on Al-Jazeera about the Kaibils, Guatemala’s special forces, and the Kaibil Academy that trains them and others.  A place that turns out incredibly honed and gifted mad people who then go on to work for the Zetas or the Hand With Eyes or for the patrons of state violence because the Guatemalan government hasn’t thought of a thing to do with the creatures they create at the Academy.

At the entrance of the school there is a sign: WELCOME TO HELL.

Also, take a look at this Google Maps hack that shows drug-war hotspots in the region.