This is a grid of covers from i-D magazine.

I took this screenshot off the i-D magazine website.  It’s not a great way to display their covers.  And it’s obviously a little bit reduced here.  They cropped the damn covers into squares themselves, so the logo is truncated in almost all images.  That said, this is their own website, so they’re not trying to tell you what the magazine is or anything.  But have a look at that, and then have a look at this:

Front page of Comixology on the iPad.  The cover images are actually bigger than the ones in the i-D screenshot.  I shot this at random, having thought about it while flicking through the new releases.

Now, how do these covers work, reduced to smaller size and mixed together like this?

On the understanding that none of these images have been optimised for the Comixology shopping UI.  And, therefore, that if anything works here, it’s by dumb luck.

In tiny little box form, many of those i-D covers are more visually legible/parseable than the comics covers.

I can’t even make out some of the logos here.  Thank god for the handy text underneath each one.  Although I’d have to click through to discover what those CHAMPIONS OF TH are actually champions of.

EVIDENCE: nobody optimises their covers for Comixology. 

Why?  God only knows.  My presumption is that big important publishers can’t spare a person to do the cutting or create a workflow that creates a thumbnail image suitable for the Comixology app.  A zoom-in on part of the cover, or even clipping a bold image from the inside, and getting an optimised version of the logo on it…. apparently that’s too much work.  Most publishers simply don’t want digital sales enough.  It’s the usual assumption of “if you build it, they will come."  Which is why digital sales on monthly books are still (I am told) no more than a fifth of print sales.

LESSON: five minutes’ work will get you a thumbnail that works better in the Comixology store than 95% of the covers around you.

You’re welcome.

• I’m Felicia Day, and This Is How I Work

  (tags:working )

• Lowering Life’s Chances on Super-Earths
  ". Rather than being planets much like the Earth but simply more massive — worlds characterized by thick atmospheres, plate tectonics, volcanic activity and magnetic fields — they may differ in fundamental ways. With internal pressures tens of times higher than those found in Earth’s interior, large viscosities and melting temperatures could have adverse consequences on the planet’s habitability."
  (tags:space )
• Fujifilm introduces new authoring software
  "Fujifilm has launched GT-EpubAuthor for Fixed Layout. GT-EpubAuthor is an authoring software that allows the easy output of images such as e-comics and e-books in EPUB3 format, the official international standard for digital publishing. The software has full English support; hence it can be also used by publishers worldwide."
  (tags:comics ebooks )

An EP called EYES.  Good for a burned forebrain.  G’night.

Path is a lovely little app that is used by pretty much nobody I know.  And the thing about it is that you find you don’t want to accept friend requests from people you don’t know well.  (Yes, I slept like the fucking dead that night.) It’s somewhere between a personal journal / lifestream and semi-ambient awareness for good friends.  There is something about it – the fact that when you wake up and tap it the thing tells your friends you’re awake, maybe? – that makes it feel far more intimate than Facebook or Twitter.  I see photos here that don’t appear on Instagram or other services.  I see locational notes that certainly don’t show up anywhere else. And I only have eleven friends on the service, and at least three of them seemed to stop using it the day after they installed it. I’m pretty sure the intimacy is what doomed it, once the early adopters moved on.

The suggested friends list is, in fact, all tech-circle early-adopter types.  Hell, as you can probably tell, I uninstalled it for a few months myself.  I put it back on because I wanted to try and make it work properly, to get a sense of what it really is.  And what it is, in fact, is a very cleverly designed lifestreaming application sitting inside a walled garden that sits inside a walled city.  It quite marvellously creates the air of quiet, dignified privacy, as well as the suggestion of the sort of privileged friendship that makes you comfortable with the reportage of your sleep and wake times.

Which is perhaps an odd thing to centre a thought on, save that I follow a couple of hundred people on Twitter and very few of them open their day’s Twitter use with “awake!”  It’s probably actually only me, after being awake for an hour or so, who posts “good morning, [insert insult here],” and that’s only to fuck with people here in Britain who’ve been up for hours at that point.  Kind of makes me wonder what Twitter would look like if people did use it as a log of the day.  Actually, no, it doesn’t, because I immediately think of that literary agent in NYC who was recently physically assaulted by a disgruntled writer who had tracked and trailed her in realtime by her Twitter and Foursquare use.

This is the niche Path was developed to fill: realtime lifestreaming for your trusted personal friends.  I don’t know that, in 2012, the majority of people are actually ready to hear that about a social service.  21 and under, maybe.  Possibly even 50+.  Perhaps you run something similar as a Circle on G+.  It seems to me that Path, an intelligently gentle app for an always-on and always-fast internet, may prove to have the niche that no-one really wanted to set up a table in.  Shame.

…is basically the best title ever.

It is taken from a letter Johannes Kepler wrote to Galileo Galilei in 1610, musing on the future of space travel. "Provide ship or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes," Kepler hypothesised, "and there will be some who will not fear even that void."

I love that so much. 

This is a Kickstarter project, to complete the editing and sound design of a film:

…a surreal, semi-fictional, sci-fi ecological documentary.

I imagine the artists as a team of specialists sent on a mission in the future to rebuild the Arctic environment after it has been almost completely destroyed by global warming. With no master plan, maps or blueprints, each artist recreates the Arctic of his or her own (flawed) memories, fears and desires. Through the film’s narration I will also address darker contemporary concerns: global warming, the Arctic resource race, the political tension of a militarised Arctic and the disappearance of the last great wilderness.

A clip from the mechanical of the GUN MACHINE cover.  Which I’m probably not supposed to show you, but still.

Joe Hill is a very nice man.  (I would point you at his website, but it’s down as I write this.)  You can find him on Twitter as @joe_hill.

MISSA CELESTE, by Drop Sum.  Space-cathedral ambient from Kiev.

• Rising Spimes – Charlie’s Diary
  "The idea of a magic paper writing book, wherein you write your first draft using a pen and paper, and it magically appears in a word processor afterwards, is a marvel to behold. Almost as much of a marvel as the speech recognition software I am using to draft this blog entry."
  (tags:writers writing spimeworld comp )
• BBC News – Space ‘harpoon’ tested in search for answer to junk in orbit

  (tags:space )

• BBC News – Liquid air ‘offers energy storage hope’

  (tags:eco energy )

• BBC News – ‘Cling film’ space telescope to image Sun
  PHOTON SIEVE
  (tags:space sci tech )

This is getting desperate.

* ALPHA, Greg Rucka

* LONDON’S OVERTHROW, China Mieville

* THE ISLANDERS, Christopher Priest

* POST-CINEMATIC AFFECT, Steven Shaviro

* Jeff Noon’s CHANNEL SK1N

* TRIBAL PEOPLES FOR TOMORROW’S WORLD by Stephen Corry.

* ANGELMAKER, Nick Harkaway.

* HOW TO TEACH QUANTUM PHYSICS TO YOUR DOG, Chad Orzel

* BACKROOM BOYS, Francis Spufford

* DEAD WATER, Simon Ings

* HIGH LIFE, Matthew Stokoe (I think Frankie Boyle recommended me this)

* RATNER’S STAR, Don Delillo

* MURDER AS A FINE ART, David Morrell

* THE FORBIDDEN BOOK, Guido Mina di Sospiro & Joscelyn Godwin

* THE RELIGION OF THE SAMURAI, Kaiten Nukariya

* TOPLOADER, Ed O’Loughlin

* THE GIFT OF STONES, Jim Crace

* EMBASSYTOWN, China Mieville

#informationdiet

DISCORDIA is an ebook about the state of Greece this past summer, written by Laurie Penny and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.  They went to Greece together to get boots on the ground, Molly sketching and Laurie making notes right there.  It’s published by Random House.  It is really, really good.

If you click through here, the Look Inside should show you Paul Mason’s excellent foreword.

The editor, Dan Franklin, wrote an interesting bit on its genesis and production here:

Molly actually created most of the art first and Laurie wrote after it. I explained to Molly that the majority of readers would be using black and white e-ink devices, so she focused on black line-drawings with the only colour really being the red bloodstains of the violent anti-Golden Dawn protests.

She created a mix of predominantly finished pieces and sketches to communicate the in-the-moment nature of the reportage, sketching as Laurie did notes. We’ve ended up with 36 pieces in the finished ebook, which weighs in at 24,000 words – and if anyone complains about that being priced (under) £2 ($3), they don’t deserve it.

Obviously, I’m biased, as I adore both the little monsters.  But I think it’s turned out to be one of Laurie’s very best pieces, and Molly, who’s been levelling up all year, hit a new high mark in the illustration herein.

And, right now, it is literally $3.10 in the US and under £2 in the UK.

(amazon.co.uk)  (amazon.com) (ebooks)

The interface is a little shonky, but this guy knows what he’s doing.  Mike Walton’s FALSE POSITIVE is an ongoing collection of short stories of the strange and macabre, beautifully paced and gorgeously illustrated.

• ‘MindMeld’ app anticipates people’s needs
  "A voice calls application called MindMeld to be available this month promises to know what iPad users want before they do. The application, named for the way the character Spock melded minds with other beings in hit classic science fiction television series "Star Trek," analyzes conversations in real-time to anticipate speakers' desires."
  (tags:apps comp comms contextual voice )
• A Sound Awareness: Kindred Of The Kibbo Kift
  "The Kibbo Kift were an early 'open air' social movement founded by John Hargrave in 1920. Hargrave’s aim was to encourage “outdoor education, the learning of handicrafts, physical training, the reintroduction of ritual into modern life, the regeneration of urban man and the establishment of a new world civilisation.”"
  (tags:history book music covers )
• ELECTRIC RESENTER | mascara
  "Steve Aylett is a satirical science fiction and slipstream author most recently adopted by the bizarro movement. He is the creator of the futuristic, dystopian world known as Beerlight, the producer of the no-wave film, Lint, has written issues for several comic book series, and was the winner of the Jack Trevor Story Award in 2006." In case you were unaware.
  (tags:music writers )
• Payload by @stuwillis | Short Film
  Very nice science fiction short from an Australian director
  (tags:video )
• ??Now
  via @craigmod – live visualisation of every train running in Japan
  (tags:dataviz )
• A Real-Time Map of Global Cyberattacks – Global – The Atlantic Wire
  "Cyberattacks are happening constantly across the globe, and now you can see what that looks in real-time with this map by the Honeynet Project that shows so many attacks, it looks and feels like it's straight out of an apocalyptic war movie."
  (tags:dataviz comms war crime )

Yes, very good, Grant and Darick.  Very good.

The new one, about blasphemy and politics, is up.

I’ve mentioned Travis Charest’s SPACEGIRL here a couple of times over the years.

2nov10:

I loved the idea of SPACEGIRL. Newspaper humour strips transferred to (and were exploded/deconstructed by) the web, but the old drama strips… not so much. SPACEGIRL was just the daftest thing in the world to do – revive the newspaper science fiction strip serial, and not even do it on a daily basis — and I loved it for that.

If I knew anyone who’d fit it and would do it for free, I’d do one here on the site like a shot. (Or at least as soon as I thought of one.) Give it its own category. It’d still be nigh on impossible to read back effectively. But, you know, what the fuck. You do it for the idea. It’s nice when ideas are pretty and so simple the cat can operate them. But it’s not always necessary.

I did actually talk to a friend, in 2010, about trying just this.  I think I wrote 15 panels to be going on with.  That friend’s life got crazy and difficult soon after, and it never happened.  (I never pushed, either, as they had quite enough going on without adding this to it!)

24apr10:

So I’ve been thinking about the newspaper adventure strip, that superquick blast of art spectacle and an idea. Which, as I said on Whitechapel, didn’t seem to convert to the web so well because it’s a form that finds it harder to capture eyeballs than the humour form.

And then I thought, on the other hand, if something like that was nested, as it was in a newspaper, inside a blog that already had a daily audience…

And then I thought, well, a proper and useful newspaper-width strip is actually a bit wide for a blog, which tend to containerise inside 600, 700 pixels or so. And maybe it’s the concept and intent of the thing that matter, not slavish replication of the physical object, because this is after all the web and we don’t have no laws or wear no stinkin badges and all that. Maybe your "strip" is the size of a card CD sleeve, or a horizontal half of a manga page, or (name your own).

SPACEGIRL, in some ways, is a pure descendant of the likes of FLASH GORDON. A single beat of plot or action in a beautiful science fiction illustration. And on a daily basis that’s really all you need to provide in a single instalment — something lovely, that frames a nice little idea. Makes pleasant electrical things happen in your brain for a moment. So you come back tomorrow to get that button pressed again. And, if the creator(s) is (are) lucky, you stick around long enough to see that this cascade of little sparkles are actually strung together with auctorial intent, and it assembles into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

SPACEGIRL publishes at a width of 860px, which is why it looks a little squashed here.

As I may have mentioned – I know I mentioned it on Twitter – a couple of friends of mine are planning a newspaper-adventure-strip for the web, and I’m sick with jealousy.  Not least because, as noted above, I Had A Plan Damnit, years ago, and I don’t get to play.

Warren can be shouted at about being crazy or cryptic @warrenellis or warrenellis@gmail.com

But, honestly, wouldn’t it be nice if a bunch of people started to bring strange ideas and new thinking to the dramatic form, in a low-impact serialised form like this?  What if, just for the hell of it, the next 18000 webcomics weren’t about funny animals or core nerd wanking?

On second thought, hey, that’s not going to happen.  And webcomics are a very important venue: as George Burns said about vaudeville, it’s the place the kids go to be lousy.  It’s a learning space, and a play space.  It’s important that it remains that way.  But no-one could change that if they wanted to, and but it shouldn’t be just that.

Wouldn’t this be a demented, lovely, quixotic thing?  If a bunch of people said fuck all you people who do nothing but newspaper comedy strips on the web, we’re going to do newspaper dramatic strips and do crazy stuff.

Obviously, that’s what my friends are going to do.  But I wish more of you would join them.  I’d dearly love a bunch of new panels to read every day, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

And we’re off.

(Patrick Delaney)