• 3 Reasons Why Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown
  i need to learn this, because I also need to learn the screenwriting variant Fountain.
  (tags:web wordprocessing software )

We made a new mug.

I’ve spoken about Laurie Penny here so many times before that I’m not sure she needs an introduction.  British firebrand journalist working in newspapers, books and television.  Currently, I believe, a regular reporter for The Independent after a long session at The New Stateman.  I wrote the foreword for her most recent book, PENNY RED: Notes From The New Age Of Dissent.  She’s in America right now, covering the dissent movement and election politics (and writing a book, and acting as a contributing editor to The New Inquiry, and several other things).  When I asked her to write you about whatever was in her head today, she said this:

A little over a year ago, before Occupy Wall Street began but well after the first wave of student riots had made political resistance more than a storybook fantasy in Britain, I found myself at a gathering of activists and anarchists. The occasion was the opening of a free university in an empty pub in central London, and journalists were strictly forbidden in the space. I had been let in on the condition that I hand in all my recording equipment before I was allowed to drink, which is a cruel thing to do to anyone who writes for a living.

Nonetheless, just after midnight, a man with dreadlocks who I had never met before in my life started jabbing a less than entirely sober finger in my face, calling me scum, asking how I dared to speak on behalf of others, and attempting to assault me gently with a rusty bicycle. I was moved by the idiosyncracy of this attack, but far more perturbed by the fact that five or six comrades, people I had stood beside as police horses charged into lines of protesters in Parliament square, people I would have trusted if not with my life, then at least with my dignity – they turned away, and they pretended not to see.

I was bewildered, and heartbroken. More than any other print journalist working in the mainstream media in Britain at that point, I understood what these people were trying to do. I was the same age, I had read the same books, I went to the same meetings, I declined to name names when to do so might have endangered activists, I stepped outside my job description to report faithfully on protests and incidents of police violence that the rest of the press ignored. None of this, by the way required any special cookies for effort -  but I thought it might at least be enough to prevent me getting thrown out of a party by drunk hippies.

I thought wrong. The abrupt realisation that solidarity is not extended to members of the mainstream press was less upsetting than the realisation there are entirely good reasons for this. Some members of the collective who tossed me out of the pub had already had their names and personal histories dragged messily through the tabloids, and when I was informed that AJAB – all journalists are bastards – I was hardly in a position to plead for nuance.

I thought I got into journalism to tell truths and right wrongs and occasionally get into parties I wouldn’t normally be cool enough to go to. Right now though, with a few exceptions, professional journalism is rarely seen as an exercise in holding power to account. Justly or unjustly, the media, especially but not exclusively the mainstream, corporate-controlled press, has come to be seen as the enemy of the voiceless rather than their champion. Justly or unjustly, few people believe what they read in the papers or watch on the news anymore, because belief has long ceased to be quite as important as complicity when it comes to the Daily Mail, the Daily Post or News International. On the streets of Athens and Madrid as well as during the London riots of August 2011, journalists have been threatened and attacked by desperate young people making havoc in the streets. Why? Not because these young people don’t want to be seen, but because they don’t want to be seen through the half-closed eyes of privilege.

Journalists are losing any case we ever had for special pleading. For the younger generation of digital natives, there is no particular reason to be deferential towards anyone who happens to be at a protest with a phone that can get the internet and an audience of thousands: it’ll be you and a hundred others, and unless the police have given you special privileges to write precisely what they want and nothing else, your press pass is less and less likely to keep you safe from arrest.  As more and more ordinary men, women and children without degrees in journalism acquire the skills and technology to broadcast text and video, the media has become another cultural territory which is gradually being re-occupied. Those on the ground do not have to wait for the BBC and MSNBC to turn up with cameras: they make the news and the reporters follow. They have grown up in a world of branding and they know how to create a craze and set the agenda. They occupy the media. And the media is starting to worry.

Let’s not be naive, though: the professional press still has power, and lots of it. If it didn’t, activists wouldn’t be frantically writing press releases in one occupation and beating up Newsnight cameramen in another. The success or failure of any political action outside the ballot box depends on the participation of the press, and that’s a source of resentment as well as suspicion. Most journalists are employed to produce stories that will sell. If we write for tabloids, we are encouraged to feign a species of objectivity that often includes giving equal weight to the voices of the one percent of the population who believe that all billionaires were sent by Adam Smith to save the free world from socialism and should be rewarded with fruit baskets, tax exemptions and the comeliest of our firstborn children. The best I can do is what I always do: write what I see and believe to be true, and be prepared to take the consequences on either side.

The relationship between activism, journalism and truth-telling has always been complicated. If you do it honestly, you can expect to be attacked by almost everybody, since fearless political writing cannot co-exist with orthodoxy of any sort. George Orwell, caller of bullshit on left and right par excellence, made few friends in his day, and a passage from his essay The Prevention of Literature (1946) is worth quoting at length:

Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his (sic) integrity finds himself (sic) thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

Reading this seventy years later, it seems a wonder that fearless journalism has survived, that reports and commentary are not produced, as Orwell imagined in ’1984′ entirely by machine. Perhaps, though, it is not such a wonder. Human beings have a refreshing tendency to pursue truth and excellence in the face of staggering hurdles – and for every professional hack who resigns him or herself to a living as a greased gear in the corporate press factory, there is another for whom the challenge of carving out a space for honest, rigorous reportage and inspiring, imaginative wordcraft is a reason to get up and put the coffee on of a morning.

Not that it isn’t a bloody pain sometimes. Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism.

That relationship never been more fraught than it is now, because the line between activism and media production has become smudged to the point of irrelevance. Anyone with a camera-phone that does the internet can report from a protest; anyone with a blog can write commentary about mortgage foreclosure and financial feudalism. But there’s a line in the sand, and you cross it when you start making most of your living writing about politics. Because once you  have decided that you will always tell the truth you see in front of you, no matter what your bosses say, you have to decide what’s more important: your career or your conscience.

It is extremely hard to get into journalism. Even before the recession and the jerky transition to online publishing made new staff reporter jobs harder to get than an NYPD press pass, J-schools were consistently churning out several times as many talented, energetic, hopelessly indebted young people than there were salaried positions at even the smallest papers. So many people want to make a living writing that we are encouraged to accept tiny salaries and terrible working conditions, and breaking into the industry often involves years of underpaid or unpaid interning – closing off the most prestigious jobs to all but a wealthy few. We are expected to be grateful for any opportunities we are thrown, and encouraged to see ourselves as future members of a social elite rather than workers with a living to make and a job to do. In the United States, where healthcare coverage is contingent on salaried employment, it’s even harder to make a living as a freelance writer, and so more young people are under pressure to self-censor, to produce copy and footage that their bosses think will play to the prejudices of their readership.

You’ll have gathered by now that I hold no truck with the notion of ‘objective’ reporting – the idea that there is any such thing in a world where Fox News and the Daily Mail are considered serious press outlets seems to me too ridiculous to seriously countenance. To my mind the best one can ever do as a writer is be honest about your background and partialities and try to understand how they affect your outlook, to do violence to your own cliches, to practice compassion over caricature.

That’s what I’ve tried to do, whilst learning on the job, where practical skills – how to take quotes properly, how to wriggle around libel laws – count for no more or less than emotional skills, like scoring out a line between propaganda and cowardice that you can walk along in good conscience and then, whatever the insults and death threats and character assassinations thrown at you from either side, continuing to put one goddamned foot in front of the other. The best journalists I know have found a way to walk their own line. But for some of us that postion comes with a cost. My friend Natasha Lennard lost her job as a stringer at the New York times simply for being honest about her political affiliations, and responded bravely by declaring that she had no interest in producing that sort of objective journalism anyway.

So the question is: if all reporting is partial, if the mainstream press is hopelessly undermined by advertising, self-censorship and police complicity, if anyone with a camera phone can create a media sensation, then what is a journalist for? Why is it that in London, in New York, in California, in Egypt and across the world, it is young journalists who have come to be identified, in the absence of named leaders, as figureheads in these new movements? Why not orators, organisers, artists, musicians, singer-songwriters? Why journalists?

Because people are sick of being lied to. Because young people want to be told the truth – that’s why they became part of movements that are, more than anything, about finally speaking truth to power. Because in a world of 24-hour news cycles and instagram, good writing, and good, clear, original thinking, still matter, are still worth something. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, because I’ve got a good fifty years of rent checks still to make.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know whether what I’m trying to do, and what some of the most audacious, inspiring young people I’ve had the privilege to meet over the past two years are trying to do is worth all that much in the long run. There’s always a chance, isn’t there, that my affection for my friends and colleagues makes the best efforts of our young lives loom larger in the heart than their ultimate significance deserves. Privately, though, I doubt it. I believe in fearless journalism, and I believe that it will continue, and I have seen it change the world in the most daring and intimate ways. I am still inspired by the brave reporters and polemicists who laid the path we run on, I still look to my peers to give me courage, and I still wake up in the night dreaming of the perfect paragraph – the one yet to be written. Some day, I will get old, but I don’t think honest writing ever will.

You can find Laurie in various places, most especially her blog and her twitter, and I want to thank her right here for taking so much time out of her insane writing and publishing schedule to produce the above epic.

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This is a photo of an aurora occurring two and a half billion miles away.

It’s a composite image of atmospheric activity over Uranus.  So, not a direct shot, in the purest sense.  But, in its way, no less real than an Instagram shot, or even this:

This being the original “Pale Blue Dot” photo, the dot in question being Earth as seen from 3.7 billion miles away.  This was taken in 1990, with a camera made in 1977, bolted on to Voyager 1 and having been in cold soak for some 13 years.

It is, to me, suggestive of that science fiction trope of sending space travellers off to other solar systems, and relativity working it so by the time the explorers land, the people they left behind had evolved FTL over generations and beaten them there.

Voyager 1 sails off into the dark, having 22 years ago taken the last good photo of Earth it could, wherein our world was imaged in a single blue pixel.  And now we’re taking photos of the Uranian Northern Lights.

I wonder exactly how difficult it would be to have the Hubble take a photo of Voyager 1.

Today’s Station Ident by Robert Porter, who says:

This is a picture I took at the Chemical Heritage Museum in Philadelphia in October 2011, processed with Google+ Picnik tools. My wife had a couple of prints on display there in a group exhibit based on the periodic table. They wouldn’t let us take pictures of the new art, but the decades-old computer punch tape was fair game, apparently.

• Physicists continue work to abolish time as fourth dimension of space
  Best headline today. Also: 'In any universe described by the theory of relativity, time cannot exist.'
  (tags:sci )
• Religious cult leader, "God in the flesh," pleads guilty to lesser sex crime
  "Dalton told his then 15-year-old daughter he was ‘the Holy Ghost’ and promised her she would be ‘blessed’ before forcing her to have sex with him. Prosecutors said he also condoned an ‘impression’ that Geody Harman, 38, said he had received indicating that he needed to have sex with the girl. Within the sect Harman was referred to as ‘God in the flesh.’"
  (tags:crime cult )
• Swedish town rocked by second child exorcism
  "At one point her parents held her down and tried to stick live wires in her mouth to release the evil spirits through electrical shocks."
  (tags:crime cult )
• on panpsychism and OOO « Object-Oriented Philosophy
  "But what OOO really says is as follows. Humans and animals do not confront reality directly, but only sensual caricatures of it. So far, that’s pretty much just basic Kant, and shouldn’t be too controversial. The controversial step is to say that the same is true of inanimate beings in confrontation with each other. However, keep in mind that this is not the same thing as ascribing “consciousness” to rocks."

  Sent to me by Ian Bogost. Okay. More reading to do. Also, though, a thing Mr Bogost said to me on twitter (while being very kind to a slow mind like mine): "The smell of animism is there, but it's a calculated risk. At the end of the day, anthropocentrism is inescapable."
  (tags:philosophy newaesthetic )

• BBC News – Confusion over Guinea-Bissau PM after ‘coup’
  "Guinea-Bissau, an impoverished former Portuguese colony, has been plagued by a long series of coups since gaining independence in 1974 – and has recently become an important staging post for gangs smuggling drugs from Latin America to Europe."
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• BBC News – Brazil murder suspects ‘confess to cannibalism’
  "He said one of the female suspects had claimed to have used some of the flesh of her alleged victims for making pasties, which she allegedly sold in Garanhuns. Mr Oliveira said the three would be charged with murder, kidnapping, hiding bodies, fraud and offences against public health."
  (tags:crime )
• New Aesthetic // OOO // Future of Things | Near Future Laboratory
  Perfect New Aesthetic summation: "It’s the nostril that must be picked."
  (tags:newaesthetic )
• The Syrian Army’s outlaw Executions (Serle) | Informed Comment
  "‘When I got to Bab Dreib, there were 16 corpses, all women and children. Some of the children had been hit on the head with sharp objects. The brain was outside the skull’"
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Shots from my friends and acquaintances on Instagram, for a change.

There seems to be a scotch egg theme, due to a bunch of London friends descending on Brockley market:  Matt Sheret on the left and Kieron Gillen on the right.

(I’m sparing you the uncomfortably close-up shot Matt Jones took of Chris Heathcote eating a “scotch egg” that is actually a creme egg wrapped in fried peanut butter)

But frankly this morning is all about Stoya’s epic find on the streets of New York City:

• What’s in a surname? New study explores what the evolution of names reveals about China
  "China stands unique with a 4,000-year history of recorded surnames stretching back to the Xia Dynasty of the 21st to 16th centuries BC."
  (tags:culture )

I’d been reading again about Speculative Realism.  From a sourced Wikipedia entry, I tripped over this:

Expressing strong sympathy for panpsychism, (Graham) Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone"

Finally, subjects for philosophy that can’t argue back.  If you ignore armies.  And the ethical considerations around terming an army an “object.”  Which I won’t ascribe to sophomoric political naivete because I don’t know the man.  Elsewhere in the piece, this approach is described as “metaphysical realism,” as different from “Speculative Realism,” the latter term presumably being considered too on-the-nose as descriptor for the practise of sitting around and wondering what makes stones sad.

Anyway.  I was reminded of something someone else said once, and found a fair approximation of the notion in a piece he wrote:

Perhaps the Sun can think in a way barely imaginable to our more limited power of thinking, its thoughts interfacing with its ever changing patterns of vibratory activity. In this way, it is scientifically imaginable that the Sun could be conscious.

That is, of course, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, most recently the author of a book entitled in this country THE SCIENCE DELUSION.  The “Trialogue” discussions he had with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, in which he speculates about the specific psychic realities of suns, have been floating around the net as mp3s for years.  Dr Sheldrake, much like David Icke, presents as a perfectly nice and deeply committed man who wears terms like “deluded crank” with a degree of self-aware equanimity.  It strikes me that he could make a killing in philosophy today.

I’d been reading about it again because object-oriented ontology (short version: “how dare you wave your human privilege over stones”) and metaphysics had reared their Vitamin-D-deficient heads in relation to various discussions about The New Aesthetic.  And by “discussions” I mean, in most cases, people standing up and blustering a lot, frequently from the position that they wish they’d thought of it first or want you to believe they thought of it first.  Or, as an anonymous wit put it the other day, “that person who stands up in Q&As and goes “I don’t really have a question…””  Lots of philosophising, often using these recent tools. 

And mostly missing the point (especially when calling it “an art movement”): it’s already happened.  Bruce Sterling termed the NA tumblr a “gaudy, network-assembled heap made of digitized jackstraws,” which is a very Bruce Sterling way of handling James Bridle’s flat declarative “(it’s a) series of artifacts,”  But it surrounds the actuality, which is that it’s raw reportage.  It’s an unsorted Wikileaks dump of evidence that The New Aesthetic has been here for years, and it slid into view so insidiously that we didn’t even notice it.  We were all looking at tiny bits of it.  Everyone (in the fringe-y design-y tech-y circles that I exist on the outermost edges of) has gone nuts about it because so few people had had the massed raw evidence presented contextually to them like that.

The New Aesthetic may indeed have an ever changing (or at least oscillating) pattern of vibratory activity, but I don’t think whole thrust of the NA aggregation really supports the notion that it’s conscious.  And ferreting out a specific psychic reality may lead you down the path of machine awareness and cosmic layers of psyche, but I would suggest that that gets you only a few years of fun in a Weimar Cabaret bierkeller while your neighbourhood’s been marked up for drone vision.

I would go maybe this far down that road, if you want another quote to play with.  Here’s Charles Fort: “A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.”

Well, that got out of hand, for a ten-minute thought dump.  Not Fully Baked.

Probably a bit early in the day for this, but I did not want to lose this magnificent piece of ambient metal:

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  (tags:space )

Oni Press editor Charlie Chu took this photo of the forthcoming Antony Johnston/Sam Hart graphic novel THE COLDEST CITY.  I have liberated it, because, well, look:

That’s a book designed to be displayed with other books, in genre sections, not in the “graphic novels” dump where Posy Simmonds sits side by side with, I dunno, Frank Miller and Chester Brown and Bryan Lee O’Malley.  And it is just a really nice-looking object.  Congratulations to the team, and designer Keith Wood.

(A few more shots at this link here.)

• BLDGBLOG: Star Garden
  "An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. "If all goes well," the magazine explains, in a few year's time the pit will "rage with humanity's first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life.""
  (tags:tech sci energy )

In the New York Times:

His next project, he said, would be another independently produced Web series, to be distributed free, created with the writer Warren Ellis and called “Wastelanders,” which Mr. Whedon jokingly described as “Glengarry Timecop.”

Calling it “a drama about people who save the world and how unbelievably unhappy they are,” Mr. Whedon worried — up to a point — that its rougher edges could alienate even his dedicated fans.

“It’s very dark and very grown-up,” he said. “But it’s the next thing that I want to say…”

#Wastelanders

Do you usually know the heart of something when you start writing it, or do you have to have dig around to find it first?

formidableumbrage

What I always say is that the two things I first need to know are what the story’s about, and what the book’s *really* about.  That is to say, the basic plot, often very basic, and what I’m actually there to talk about, the themes and subjects of the book.  Story without theme is just a bunch of typing.  Often, the themes — the stuff I’m actually there to talk about — will assemble themselves before the plotline.

And, also, the end.  I do need to have a clue of how it ends.  I’ve been known to start with the ending and work backwards.  I mean, to the point where I thought of an ending first, gathered the themes that suggested themselves from the ending, and then plotted in reverse time up to the opening scene.

FAQchive is here.

You can send questions to warrenellis@gmail.com or ask me on Tumblr.

A collection of ephemera from the productive Lake Radio, worth it just for the rainy midnight travel of the opening piece. 

But Now I Just Read It A Lot Because Let’s Face It I Say A Lot Of Stupid Things:

I am clearly tired, because I have just said to the new chickens, “All this garden is yours, except the rhubarb. Attempt no landing there.”

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) April 2, 2012

If the Doctor Who cast gets any younger they’ll have to be filmed with a laparoscope

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) March 23, 2012

If contemporary literary fiction doesn’t read a bit like science fiction then it’s probably not all that contemporary, is it

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) March 27, 2012

So I’m guessing Keith Olbermann’s YouTube channel will be funny, until he calls Google the running dogs of the Illuminati or something

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) March 30, 2012

You’d think I’d be better at being unemployed, since, as a professional writer, I already just sit around half-naked all day.

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) March 10, 2012

Also: in a decent world, Davy Jones’ body would be laid in a bed and pushed through the streets to the cemetery by the surviving Monkees.

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) March 9, 2012

Also: in a decent world, Davy Jones’ body would be laid in a bed and pushed through the streets to the cemetery by the surviving Monkees.

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) March 9, 2012

@pattonoswalt It’s been proven with Science that repeated viewings of that show cause a medical condition called “Margaret Thatcher’s Claw.”

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) February 20, 2012

You all know Ariana. She designed warrenellis.com and keeps it running, she designed SHIVERING SANDS, she makes the IEU t-shirt designs, she designed the covers for things like CAPTAIN SWING… she’s basically brilliant and I couldn’t do without her.

And now she’s doing this: restoring some public-domain vintage demonic illustration.

Right to the point: I want to design and print a deck of 69 large (3.5″x5.75″), full-color cards, each featuring an illustration from the Dictionnaire Infernal. I’d also like to create a supplementary PDF for the deck, with all 69 card images and extended information about each. If you’re already familiar with the images I’m talking about, you can scroll down to the “accountability” section to see what this project would entail.

You can click through to read all about it right now (and possibly see the best demon anteater image ever), or Ariana can give you the pitch like this:

The documentation is thorough, and the work is absolutely beautiful. Please do give it a look, and, if you like it, share it around. Thanks.

(Dylan Gilman)

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write books and comics and articles and other things.  I live in south-east England.  My next novel, GUN MACHINE, is due January 2013 from Mulholland Books.  The film RED 2, sequel to RED, based on the graphic novel I wrote, is due autumn 2013.  A film version of my GRAVEL graphic novels is in active development at Legendary Pictures.  I have author pages at Amazon and Amazon UK.  My most recent original comics work was SVK, produced in partnership with the design & invention unit BERG.

Public email address: warrenellis@gmail.com (gets checked daily.)

@warrenellis on Twitter. 

I have an Official Facebook Page. 

Username warrenellis on Instagram (for as long as it lasts!) and This Is My Jam.

I keep a notebook at Tumblr.

I’m writing a new novel and developing things in film and tv, but am keeping an eye out for interesting things to do on the side.

If you want 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 and make noises, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

Sometimes I speak at conferences, or do other kinds of talks and appearances.  I’ve previously been a columnist for WIRED UK and Reuters.

I occasionally podcast.

Photo by Ellen Rogers.