Closing up shop until January. Will be adding new content and things here in 2012. If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see, or changes to what’s done here going forward, you can email the dump at warrenellis@gmail.com. Have a good break. And a fine new year. G’night.

No, seriously, that’s what Red Dog Saloon in Hoxton calls this. Best burger I’ve had in ages, too. Lunch with Jones and Schulze of BERG. Also there was beer. Winterval begins.

(now having coffee in Carnaby Street. Bloody Xmas shopping.)

• Saudi woman executed for ‘witchcraft and sorcery’
  "Amnesty International says the charge of sorcery has often been used in Saudi Arabia to punish people, generally after unfair trials, for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion."
  (tags:crime )

SPEKTRMODULE 03 Comfort And Joy 49 minutes and 54 seconds

Direct mp3 link.  Press Play on the player then find the menu button in the bottom left for other functions.

None of me talking in this one.  I just wanted a nice long mix.  Send thanks or complaints for lack of my horrible voice to @warrenellis or warrenellis@gmail.com.

1.  logotone

2.  “Seed & Light” – Charlatan  (album: “Equinox”)

3.  “Of Woods & Snow” – Anji Cheung  (album:”Ritual”)   

4.  “Mindless Reverie” -  Mordant Music  (album: “ModernismuseuM / MMegaplekz”)

5.  “November Sequence” -    Pye Corner Audio with The Advisory Circle   (single: “Study Series 07: Autumnal Activities”

6.  “Montana Mountain Groan” – Run DMT  (album: “Dreams”)

7.  “When It Gets Dark Outside I Tend To Go And Play Inside” -  EL Heath  (album: “Winter Soundtrack”

8.  “Adagio For String Portrait “ – Rene Hell  (album: “The Terminal Symphony”)

9.  “Christmas (Pale Sketcher Remix)” -  Jesu    (EP: “Christmas EP”)

10.  “horizone” – partli cloudi    (album: “rotten wood”)

11.  “The Winter Olympics” – Chris Rehm  (album: “UNSCHÄRFE / SHIMMER”)

12.  “Tee Pee Sleep” -    je suis le petit chevalier    (album: “Discovering Mathematics 2”)     

13.  “December 1971” -    Current 93     (album: “Baalstorm, Sing Omega”)

14.  “The Winter Of 1539-1540” -   Goldmund    (album: “The Malady Of Elegance”)

15.  “Silent Night (Noapte De Vis)”-   Glasvegas    (album: “A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like A Kiss”)

16.  logotone

PREVIOUSLY: 1 – Fire Axes In Space | 2 – The Lane

• Skull Candy
  "Ad-hoc interview with a member of BOPE – background reading particularly the report entitled “They Come in Shooting” by Amnesty International recommended. Their working schedule changes daily spending a straight 36 hours in the field. “I carry three or four spare mobile phone batteries”."
  (tags:crime )
• Man questioned over woman burned alive in lift | World news | guardian.co.uk
  "A man is being questioned by police in connection with the death of a woman burned alive in the lift of her New York City apartment building."
  (tags:crime )
• Links for December 15th
  ""I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects."
  (tags:stuff )

Produced on an iPad, of all things.  (WhatNot)

• The Future is a Virus (my Swedish Twitter University "talk")
  "In my view, futurism ("strategic foresight," "scenario planning") is a vaccination for our civilization's immune system."
  (tags:future )

RIG sent me a FRSTEE. Something is wrong with its head. I have a hydrocephalic FRSTEE.

Annie sometimes has work for sale at this link here.  She posts new stuff at this link here when she remembers.

I am presuming this woman is making many thousands of dollars somewhere, and keeps a dA profile just for fun.

Golau Glau, whom you might have heard a little of on the last SPEKTRMODULE podcast, have released a Xmas EP that is free for the downloading.

What I’d like to play for you is a beautiful radiophonic updating of the old Christmas folk song T’Owd Tup.  Proper Yorkshire hauntology.

Deb Chachra just pointed me at her photos from the Diefenbunker:

A four-story bunker, built during the Cold War as Canada’s communication and governance hub in the case of a nuclear attack on Ottawa. Now a museum.

It’s now a museum, with a website you can visit.  I love the retrotech stylings, as you can imagine, but the signage also fascinates me.  From this perspective, it’s the set dressing for a post-atomic comedy of manners.  Lots of people quietly and politely drinking their reconstituted Mil-Ko under an admonishing banner, trying to suppress the fallout-era social faux pas of just screaming and screaming.

“Creating an electrified torture rack for my penis!”

Or, to paraphrase William Gibson, the penis finds its own uses for things.  That’s a consumer-grade TENS machine, the sort of thing you can pick up on Amazon for forty quid.

Oh.  Yeah.  You might not want to click through on it.  Should have mentioned that earlier. 

Did you ever read CROOKED LITTLE VEIN?

(previously on Conan! What Is Best In Life?)

• NASA Builds Six-Foot Crossbow to Harpoon Comets | Wired Science | Wired.com
  COMET HARPOON GUN
  (tags:space tech )
• More evidence found for quantum physics in photosynthesis (Wired UK)
  "Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet of quantum effects fuelling photosynthesis."
  (tags:sci )
• Mathematica Visualization and Graphics Gallery of Jeff Bryant
  "This animation shows a Calabi-Yau surface which is a projection of these higher dimensions into the more familiar dimensions we are aware of."
  (tags:sci )
• A Brief Introduction to the Ekpyrotic Universe
  "The Ekpyrotic Model of the Universe proposes that our current universe arose from a collision of two three-dimensional worlds (branes) in a space with an extra (fourth) spatial dimension."
  (tags:sci )
• Minkowski space – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "hypersurface of the present" – always loved that term
  (tags:sci )
• Atomtronics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "The use of ultra-cold atoms leads to circuit elements that allow for the coherent flow of information and may be useful in connecting classical electronic devices and quantum computers." ATOMTRONICS!
  (tags:comp tech sci )

I can’t get enough of this stuff, personally.  Presumably some deep-seated fetish from having grown up during the Cold War and hearing the nuclear attack warning siren being tested every six months.

From the WhatNot group sketchblog, a wonderful piece by Bill Sienkiewicz, one of my first favourite comics artists.  In fact, I’ve loved his work for so long that I can spell his name without having to check it.  Loads of other great stuff at WhatNot, from people like Mark Chiarello and Becky Cloonan and Mike Oeming and Duncan Fegredo and and and…

I am very fond of Finland’s fine Fonal Records. They release fascinating work in beautiful packaging. And now they have put up a shitload of their output as a streaming jukebox. According to their tweet, some seven hours and twenty two minutes of music. So that’s me sorted for the day.

Working in the back garden for as long as my fingers will operate, on a hard cold afternoon.

• Shock as retreat of Arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gas – Climate Change – Environment – The Independent
  "Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region."
  (tags:eco dooooom )
• Wicker & Steel | Perc Trax
  "Fusing a list of influences including classic Birmingham and Berlin techno, the early UK hardcore, jungle and drum & bass of A Guy Called Gerald, Ed Rush and Suburban Base and vintage British horror films such The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General and the output of the legendary Hammer studios, Perc’s musical DNA is almost as unique as his production sound."
  (tags:music bandcamp )

PROPHET was a comics series by Rob Liefeld in the 1990s, from Image Comics.  I’ve never read it.  It ended at issue 20.

Recently, Rob Liefeld licensed a bunch of his old properties, including PROPHET, back to Image, where Eric Stephenson began matching them to creative teams with carte blanche to reimagine them.

I was, shall we say, skeptical.  And possibly slightly scathing.  Then Eric emailed me and told me exactly who he’d convinced to reinvent these properties.  Which did actually shut me up a bit. 

(these images are screenshot off a PDF advance reading copy, so don’t mistake them for print quality)

Brandon Graham is the writer/artist of acclaimed comics like KING CITY and MULTIPLE WARHEADS.  Simon Roy is the writer/artist of the justly applauded JAN’S ATOMIC HEART.  Both of these are off-kilter, very modern urban science fictions.  In PROPHET, Brandon writes for Simon, and what is produced is something as close to classic French science-fiction comics as I’ve seen in a long time, with a hard edge of contemporary strangeness ground into it.

And it’s very, very good comics.

They recommence the series with issue 21, as if it had simply paused for years.  I’ve never, as I said, read a copy of PROPHET before, and had no idea what the character or the central idea was.  I wasn’t lost.  It sweeps you right in, as if it were the start of a brand new series.  Very densely populated with ideas, very readable, very accessible.  Very clever.  And very beautiful.

John Prophet is a cryogenically-stored agent, periodically disgorged from the bowels of the Earth to be dispatched on a mission.  This time, he’s been underground for a very long time.  Possibly too long.

So begins a journey of deep weirdness – and I’m trying not to spoil it, so I’m not showing you the bit that made me laugh and sort of twitch and retch all at the same time, or even the most wonderful pieces of invention.  I’m hoping this little taste will be enough for you to at least look for it on the week of January 18, 2012, which is when it’s released to comics stores.

What PROPHET by Brandon and Simon is, for me, is the best new science fiction comic since CASANOVA.  It’s more linear than that book, and not as highly compressed, but it is rich, highly inventive, lustrous and a completely entertaining reading experience.  I really hope it finds an audience, because I want more of this book, and I recommend it to you without reservation.

Comics stores can still order more copies of PROPHET #21, using the Diamond order code NOV110358 – if you want to make sure your local store gets a copy for you, quote them that code, as it’ll make it easier for them to do it.  Or, hell, just tell them you want one, if need be.

I hope that when you find it, you enjoy it as much as I did.  Thanks to Eric Stephenson for sending the ARC over.