Issue 99 of ICON magazine, in which the design & invention unit BERG, publishers of SVK, refer to me, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson as “giant uncles or adopted parents.”  I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than the year they spent calling me “Big Chief.” Obviously, I see a beating in their future.

Speaking of Sterling, he took this photo at the weekend:

And, to get the day loping along, a bit of kosmische from Jon Brooks:

Langwelle (demo version) by cafekaput

A kind bystander helps Templesmith sedate his sentient and footloose beard, Marvin.

I used to be good at this blogging thing, and tens of thousands of people used to visit here every day.  And then I seem to have kind of forgotten how to do it.

LEFT: Molly Crabapple's art for the COILHOUSE magazine party in NYC on the 21st.

In other news, I had to switch my novel-writing software from OpenOffice to, for the first time in probably ten years, Microsoft Word. OpenOffice has developed this weird quirk on my machine where it randomly loses bits of the novel, and disappears other bits that only emerge when I do a copy/paste of the entire document into Google Docs.  (When I was writing Spirit Tracks, some arcane quirk would render bits of the piece invisible in OpenOffice, yet visible in Google Docs.) Since this is the longest continuous document I’ve written in OpenOffice on this machine, I decided not to reinstall it (or install LibreOffice), but to activate the pre-installed MS Word.  My instinct is that it’s a stability issue in OpenOffice, and I don’t know if the chink was in there before LibreOffice forked out of OpenOffice, and I do not have all fucking day to fart about with such things.  Except that, of course, I’ve had to re-learn Word.  And MS Word calculates word counts differently.  So suddenly I’m a thousand words behind where I thought I was, and I won’t be certain that there weren’t uncaught losses to the novel until I do my final proof, and arrrgh.  Nothing’s ever easy, is it?

So I should have been closing in on 40,000 words tonight, but instead I’m at 36500.

And now I’m going back to work, having provided no entertainment or information whatsoever.

Dave Walsh

Padraig

Squall approaching from Achill

DEATH BAR

Things to do:

Need to come up with the story for my final issue of SECRET AVENGERS, as we just locked the artist for it.

Smash OpenOffice with my bare hands for continuing to randomly lose pieces of my novel and arbitrarily alter the word count when it’s not losing pieces of novel.

Observe that MagCloud are due to announce a new format soon.

Mention this, noting that further details are imminent:

Find the time to write some script on an unannounced comics thing I’ve been working on slowly.

Stop sleeping long enough to write the audio thing I’ve been talking with an acquaintance about.

Register faint concern and displeasure at being referred to as “a giant uncle” by BERG in the new issue of ICON.  (Though it was generally a really nice piece.  Thanks for the copy, Will.)

Xeni Jardin

G’night.

I was looking for something else entirely, and happened upon this, from 2009:

Police in Australia have released an X-ray photograph showing the 35 nails that were shot into a man’s skull in a brutal murder last year…

I don’t know if they ever caught the killer.  Matching nails to a single nail gun must be nigh on impossible.

Rachel Goodyear

(via Suzanne Gerber)

Every time I look at Marian Churchland’s blog lately, I just don’t even

Via English Russia, you may start your Dieselpunk Blade Runner engines now:

Via Kevin Slavin:

The day after the market saw 844 stocks trigger short-sale restrictions (meaning they dropped more than 10% in one day), not even the robots were able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and at least 21 stocks ended up flash crashing for a millisecond or much longer during today’s trading session. Below are the charts of the 21 identified victims of overzealous ask-side (algorithms)…

Or, put another way, this is the picture of an otherwise invisible hailstorm of Stock Exchange micro-transactions failing at lightspeed.

Also, Todd Lappin saw this happen:

Good morning.  This is warren ellis dot com.

I have signed three boxes of signature sheets for the last FREAKANGELS limited edition hardcover. Also:

Kim Boekbinder successfully reinvented the way she does shows, and illustrated a new path for working musicians in the process. Now she’s applying that to the tour. A ten-date Oct/Nov American tour where each show is pre-sold, and the level at which it is pre-sold determines the nature of the show. It’s quite fascinating to me. Click through and take a look. Maybe she’s playing your city. And Molly Crabapple is doing a unique poster for each date.

Also, I do like me some drums. And this was working for me in the early hours of the morning. Blawan:

I may rig the site for a spate of more regular posting tomorrow.

It once occurred to me that, sooner rather than later, the only way London coders will be able to access government computers will be to spray machine-readable code on walls in view of CCTV cameras.

And then Matt Jones wrote The Robot-Readable World.

DEATH BAR

Also I wish I was going to this, in Brighton, on Thursday, because High Wolf is playing, whom I love, and also The Wyrding Module, whom I’ve just discovered tonight.  If you can get to Brighton, you should go.

Also Katie West took this photo below, and I wish I were there, too.  But I have a DEATH BAR to battle.

DEATH BAR I hate you.

Even in this somewhat dubious report on the SDCC panel about that damned documentary they’re making about me, mentions of this are made.

Ellis’ huge nexus of contacts was never understated

And also "a query was made about how Ellis does not seem to relate to the comics community anymore." (Wanna read about just one of the reasons why?) Which of course just brings me back to this thing I wrote the other week. That query’s got some truth to it, obviously (another example is that I hand the Whitechapel message board over to Si Spurrier this Friday), although I do still monkey around with a few things behind the scenes, consultation and the like. And I can still send people a bit of traffic from time to time.

But I’ve reached the point in the novel now where I’ve emptied out a chunk of my headspace into it, and earmarked the other barrels in the back of my skull that’ll be tipped into the pit of the novel over the next several weeks, and my brain is registering clear areas. Which it doesn’t like, as it is a greedy organ trained to hoover up whatever is in front of it. It wants to make new connections and process new things.  And making new connections does bring me moments of delight like this:

And, yes, surprisingly, it turned out that she did not think I was the Australian musician Warren Ellis. (Whom I haven’t heard from since Nick Cave suggested on French television that he put a hit out on me. Hm.) The email conversation that followed just made my afternoon, and this evening has put me to thinking.  About the nature of engagement, even as I continue to disengage from so many things.

I tell you now: I never feel like I don’t have a whole career’s worth of work left to achieve.  There is still so much to do.

DEATH BAAAAARRRRR DEATHBAR

(to the tune of “Stingray”)

“The elevator doors opened again to reveal a very large man brandishing a blood-stained antique phone receiver in a plastic bag and proclaiming ‘I found this up him!’”

(For those just joining us, the DEATH BAR monitors my word count on GUN MACHINE, the novel I’m writing for Mulholland Books, set for release in autumn 2012.)