May 15th, 2012 | researchmaterial
Conan! What Is Best In Life is a long-standing warrenellis dot com tradition. You should not view Conan! posts if you or your workplace are squeamish, as some of them are… probably not what is best in life. You can see lots of Conan! posts here.
May 15th, 2012 | comics talk
Farel Dalrymple is producing some wonderful work in this first chapter of what you might describe as a "stream of unconsciousness" comic, IT WILL ALL HURT at Study Group. It seems to be an exercise in capturing the shifting settings and embodiments of dream reality, and it works (for me) almost eerily well. Even though he has a shelf of awards by now, Dalrymple still seems to me to be under-read and low-profile in the medium. He’s one of those creators that people should be talking about every day. I know he’s working on a book for First Second right now, and he recently changed gears to produce a fine illustration job for an issue of PROPHET.
IT WILL ALL HURT will be adding new sections every Friday, I believe.
May 15th, 2012 | comics talk
From his Flickr. His new graphic novel is SHARKNIFE DOUBLE Z. There’s a preview of it here. I dimly recall writing a quote for its back cover.
May 15th, 2012 | closedown, music
Some proper witched-out space music for the overnight. I fully expect this to trigger dreams of ghost women on gently collapsing space stations, morphine moondust meditation and the soft but insistent refusal to open doors. Sleep well, when you sleep.
G’night.
May 15th, 2012 | brainjuice
May 14th, 2012 | music, researchmaterial
Via Found Objects, it would seem our comrades at The Soulless Party are up to something haunty and dischronal. The decontextualised footage in the last half of the piece does work with the music to genuinely odd effect.
May 14th, 2012 | microlog
 |
You didn’t see the cover for my next novel, GUN MACHINE, yet? Really?
Click here for massively embiggened version. |
May 14th, 2012 | researchmaterial
So I’d been wondering what happened to the mooted revival of NEW WORLDS magazine, entitled in this iteration MICHAEL MOORCOCK’S NEW WORLDS. (Previously commented on here, a little over a year ago.) It’s been due… a few times. And I knew they’d shed at least one staff member due to “artistic differences.” So I went to their Facebook page, which appears to be the only public source of information, and found the below, posted on April 17th:
So here we are, post Easter con and still no New Worlds. Why is this? I hear those of you who still care cry, well the simple answer (and the one that happens to be the truth) is, that we were having some difficulties with the codec for the videos we wish/need to include with the site. This we have now been assured is behind us and we should soon be happy! I do have to give out a BIG thanks to those who have been creating, what is, a quite a complex site completely for free. As a salve to our heavy consciences we do plan on releasing issue 2 within a month or so of issue 1 (provided we generate enough sales from 1 to pay our authors) So we should be on course to publish 4 in the year! Please bear with us this was a much bigger programing job than we imagined. Best
Roger
I left a message, asking if they really are hosting their own video content.
Publishing a magazine is hard, whether on paper or online. But it would seem to me that if you’re handcoding your own video players rather than stuffing your content into Vimeo and letting them do the work, you’re over-coding and making life harder than it really needs to be.
Given that the dedicated website remains static and mostly empty… well, I’m the last guy in the creative industry who should be commenting on things that are “late,” but this would seem to have joined the corpsepile of attempts to continue NEW WORLDS.
Maybe they should have just mounted the whole thing on a Tumblr and had done with it.
May 14th, 2012 | researchmaterial
In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years.
Someone using the fills-you-with-confidence name of “BTE Dan” is in fact hellbent on making an interplanetary service vehicle. All he needs is 0.27% of American GDP and a few spare nuclear reactors.
buildtheenterprise.org seems to be having some downtime today, but PhysOrg talked to him at the first link about his plans for a machine that could reach Mars in ninety days. It’s quite interesting, really, insofar as he’s probably right about most of the technological knowledge and expertise already being in place. (Most: I suspect that some of the things he wants onboard just couldn’t happen within twenty years of today, and sticking a megawatt laser on the front is just boy’s-toys.)
The two real kickers that he thinks he’s solved however, are these – a full Earth gravity onboard and constant acceleration.
Obvious area of fascination: taking a fictional object and attempting to make it real as a historic feat of mega-engineering. Something that started out as a plastic model on a stick in a tv studio becoming the most expensive single object of all time. And the kind of perverse, idee-fixe-bound imagination that takes a fictional spaceship that could travel the galaxy and make it a real spaceship that can do local tours of the solar system.
Still. BTE Dan isn’t frothing at the mouth, and it’s kind of a charming idea, in its way. Worth a look.
May 14th, 2012 | stuff2012
| The new record by Hildur Gudnadottir is remarkable. It was recorded as a single live performance, with no post-production tampering – all the sound treatment happened in-performance.
Imagine a space between Zoe Keating’s driftier experiments and Julianna Barwick’s surreal single-voice choruses. It’s an incredibly beautiful, weightless piece of music that develops less like a composition and more like a weather system. I’ve listened to it a few times a day for a few days, and am still finding new cloud formations in it. |
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Among many other places, it can be purchased from the label. |
May 14th, 2012 | comics talk
Rafael Grampa’s been producing some fine covers lately, but, for my money, none finer than this piece for Brian Wood & Kristian Donaldson’s new comics project at Dark Horse, THE MASSIVE. Colours by Dave Stewart.
Grampa’s Flickrstream is here.
May 14th, 2012 | brainjuice
May 13th, 2012 | daybook
Molly Crabapple sent me this out of the blue this evening.
Regular broadcasting resumes on Monday.
May 13th, 2012 | brainjuice
May 12th, 2012 | closedown
I leave you for the weekend with this: a short film written and directed by Javier Grillo-Marxuach (LOST, THE MIDDLEMAN) and featuring Amber Benson and Adam Busch (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER). G’night.
May 11th, 2012 | Work
Something seems to have gone awry with the mailout of today’s newsletter. If you didn’t get it yet, and don’t want to wait, it’s over here.
May 11th, 2012 | music
I got sent this the other night. If you like spooky ambient atmospherics and strange soundscapes, you’re going to want to give this a listen:
This, the second album by Abominations of Yondo, has among its influences the penultimate chapter of ‘The Time Machine’ by H.G. Wells. However, the listener is of course free to associate other scenarios, memories or febrile imaginings with the assembled sounds.
I’ve been fascinated by this for a day or so, now. You can almost imagine it as the best possible soundtrack to the best possible adaptation of THE TIME MACHINE, but it does definitely go its own way, and it’s frequently just lovely.
And you can click through the player for a free download, or to Archive for an even easier free download.
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