baffledjailbirdisin asked: Hi Warren, I was wondering if you know of or are talking about some alternative adaptation projects for Transmetropolitan? I understand that seeing it on the big screen is at present too big a budget to even consider, but do you have any thoughts on how you might like to see it adapted otherwise? If so, how good are the chances of this happening?

We don’t take TRANSMET out, but very occasionally persons in the film and tv industries request conversations with us about it.  And I mean very occasionally, because it’s an obscure work.  We haven’t, since the days of Patrick Stewart optioning it, met with anyone we’d consider the best fit for the material.  TRANSMET is not a thing we sell options on for the hell of it.  There are other works of mine that I’m happy to see other people adapt, just to see what happens.  TRANSMET is not one of them.  It’ll go to the people who will keep it intact, or it won’t go out at all, and either result is entirely acceptable to Darick and I.  I don’t feel that any book has to be “legitimised” by film or tv for it to have been a successful work.  And, at this point, the book is between ten and fifteen years old, depending on how you measure it, and enquiries as to the rights are growing ever fewer.  So, you know, don’t hold your breath or anything.

• Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "The notebooks contain quotations that struck Lichtenberg, titles of books to read, autobiographical sketches, and short or long reflections. It is those reflections that help Lichtenberg earn his posthumous fame. Today he is regarded as one of the best aphorists in the Western intellectual history. Some scholars have attempted to distil a system of thought out of Lichtenberg's scattered musings. However, Lichtenberg was not a professional philosopher, and had no need to present, or to have, any consistent philosophy."
  (tags:writing notes )
• The Daily Routines of Famous Writers | Brain Pickings
  "I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenberg’s Waste Books.)"
  (tags:writing notes )

I had the great privilege of meeting, speaking to and working with Rachel Armstrong this summer, at a think-tank in Eindhoven.  I bought this book, a Kindle Single (also on iBooks), right after.  It’s taken me months to finish it, not least because I had to sit down and think for a month after each chapter.  If nothing else, this here is probably the manual for the next five years of science fiction “biopunk” novels, (Ah, if only they would stick with “ribofunk,” too!) with protocells becoming the new nanomachines.

Rachel said to me, “biology is the new engineering,” and the book is an expression of that thought.  Put crudely, the idea is that manual-assembly construction of buildings and physical infrastructures out of inert materials that either grow more inert or corrode away entirely over time… is stupid and dangerous.  Rachel illustrates (with occasional, thrilling speculative extrapolations) how buildings could be grown, and how existing architecture could be transformed, and how this new age of living architecture could achieve astonishing things.  There is, in fact, the strong sense than even Rachel herself feels like she’s barely scratching the surface of the possibilities.

LIVING ARCHITECTURE is a wonderful read that puts fire in the imagination.  I recommend it greatly.

You can find Rachel @livingarchitect .

This is just gorgeous.  A nice gentle start to the day from /please/.  Good morning.

I’m not sure why I keep blogging about this – which is why I’m timeshifting this post to the middle of the bloody night, actually – but it keeps bugging me. 

It is, on some level, about inbound: tuning the world so that the good stuff comes to you without having to spend all day looking for it and grabbing it manually.  It’s why you have news sources, and clever and curious people, in your Twitter feed.

I must say, I’m thinking about unlinking podcasts from iTunes on the desktop entirely.  If Instacast (frequently recommended to me) syncs between iPhone and iPad instances, then I might make the break.

I’m trying Monocle Affairs because their podcasts seem to be under ten minutes in length. I like that idea.  I’d probably have had a lot more subscriptions for a lot longer if there were a lot of good podcasts under ten minutes.  Which probably just speaks to shattered attention span on my part, but fuck it.  Dan Carlin tends to get saved for long periods of travel.  (I would also say “long sunny afternoons in the back garden,” but we didn’t have any of those this year.)

I’m snapshotting this now because 1) it’s quicker than listing it 2) I’m going to find an hour this week to both prune and add to my podcasts list.  I need more news analysis, more new music, and possibly a decent tech cast or two.

#informationdiet

• Sound bullets in water
  "In 2010, researchers at Caltech led by Chiara Daraio, a professor of aeronautics and applied physics, developed a nonlinear acoustic lens that can focus high-amplitude pressure pulses into compact "sound bullets." In that initial work, the scientists demonstrated how sound bullets form in solids. Now, they have done themselves one better, creating a device that can form and control those bullets in water." SOUND BULLETS. Ah, world, you are too good to me, some days.
  (tags:sci med )
• Scientists pioneer method to predict environmental collapse
  "The researchers have applied a mathematical model to a real world situation, the environmental collapse of a lake in China, to help prove a theory which suggests an ecosystem 'flickers', or fluctuates dramatically between healthy and unhealthy states, shortly before its eventual collapse." ECOSYSTEM FLICKERING. Oh, I like that. I will wait to see if Deb Chachra decides it counts as a daily idiom.
  (tags:eco )

Possibly a little too sylvan for some of you, but we’re fond of a bit of the leafy and ethereal here at Ellis Glades, from time to time, and we think this is very bright and pretty.

So, back in August, I proclaimed that I had cracked New Book, a thing that had been fighting me every step of the way, announced that I’d nailed down the first thousand words, and that forward progress was inevitable. I had crushed the book, driven it before me and heard the lamentation of its women.

I am, of course, a fucking moron.

Three months of writing, rewriting, giving up and walking away, coming back and burning out the rot with fire, walking away and hitting things followed. This book is fighting me. It wants to be written, but it does not want to make it easy.

Therefore, after throwing away everything but the first 800 words and starting again, I give you the return of the DEATH BAR:

In which there is a riot, and an interrogation of sorts, and I show you how to do something really fucking horrible with a pencil.

The NEW HUMANIST, of all magazines, sent me this book to review for them. I have to finish it this week, somehow. I haven’t read any of Seth Grahame-Smith’s other works, and know them only by reputation. So far, I can say that, to this point, it’s a Ripping Yarn of considerable charm, and that Grahame-Smith does know his way around a sentence. It’s also, a hundred pages in, a lot more traditionally Christian than I was expecting, and stands in some contrast to Colm Toibin’s THE TESTAMENT OF MARY, also released in the last month, and which I’m going to write a little bit about later today.

Incidentally, NEW HUMANIST has for you some free downloadable Christmas Cards by the famous British political cartoonist and illustrator Martin Rowson.  Go and take a look.

(It’s the British Humanist Association that I’m connected with, not the Rationalist Association that runs NEW HUMANIST.  But we’re all in broad agreement that Satan is real.)

Also in today’s (re-)reading, from the Futurist Manifesto (as found in 100 ARTISTS’ MANIFESTOS, ed. Alex Danchev):

Back on the air.  Also, the website redesign should be complete within the next week or two.

(Stuart Updegrave)

And that’s it from me this week.  Back Monday.  Things are a hair less crazier here, so the site should be more active from Monday morning, and there are some things planned for the near future of the place.

As ever, if you’ve got something you think I should be featuring here, warrenellis at gmail dot com gets me in the end.  I’ve been way out of touch with things over the last few months, and have a lot to catch up on.

Anji Cheung made RITUAL, one of my favourite records of last year.  She and collaborator Beard Closet are playing me out with a piece from their new record together, STONEMAKER.  Subterranean and supernatural, devotional and doomed.  Which is how we like it, here at Ellis Caves.  Click through to get the whole thing for free.  Have a good weekend.

• von himmel – florid pagoda side a by donkey disk on SoundCloud – Create, record and share your sounds for free
  von himmel – florid pagoda side a
  (tags:music ifttt soundcloud )

An animated film by Max Crow.  I find this kind of visualisation fascinating.  For extra points, the music is by HANDWITHLEGS, who I featured in SPEKTRMODULE 02.

XETROV from Max Crow on Vimeo.

I am a great admirer of Jon Mueller’s record THE WHOLE, so when I saw this link posted by Miasmah on Twitter, I was all over it.  An album that comes with a manifesto, in fact.  DEATH BLUES lives up to its name, and this will set you up good for some cursed, oppressive and cobalt-coloured dreams about running away from things you can’t escape.  Good times.  Click through to buy the download for five Yanqui dollars.

• Geometries of Utopian Desire | Notes on Metamodernism
  "The triangular figure that hangs in the night sky in each of these images, a digital cutout of the aurora borealis, is echoed in the equilateral segments of the domed architecture beneath. As a kind of occult ritualistic symbol, the triangle motif here seems to signify the return to a faith in the more primitive geometries of a bygone Euclidean age; one in which truth and beauty appeared one and the same, linear and attainable, yet mystical in their absoluteness."
  (tags:art architecture pol )
• wearespartacus.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-Peoples-Review-of-the-Work-Capability-Assessment.pdf
  "The People's Review is presented in order to show the reality
  of going through the Work Capability Assessment
  for those who are living with sickness and disability every day."
  (tags:pol social )
• Rhizome | Drone’s Eye View: A Look at How Artists are Revealing the Killing Fields
  “the drone also, for me, stands in part for the network itself: an invisible, inherently connected technology allowing sight and action at a distance. Us and the digital, acting together, a medium and an exchange. But the non-human components of the network are not moral actors, and the same technology that permits civilian technological wonder, the wide-eyed futurism of the New Aesthetic and the unevenly-distributed joy of living now, also produces obscurantist “security” culture, ubiquitous surveillance, and robotic killing machines."
  (tags:drones war gz )
• Meaning: Plausible Utopias | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

  (tags:talks eco )

• First Teleportation From One Macroscopic Object to Another | MIT Technology Review
  "…practical quantum routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around the corner."
  (tags:sci comms )

On Friday, recording commences on the GUN MACHINE audiobook.  (I believe this to be the initial Amazon.com page for it.)  We locked the voice actor to read the book a couple of days ago.  I had a short list, and his name was on top of it.  My agent is a marvel.

Reg E. Cathey agreed to read GUN MACHINE.

Motherfucking QUERNS from OZ.  And, of course, since you are all educated people who have seen THE WIRE, the magnificent Norman Wilson:

So what we have here is a crime book read by one of the best actors from America’s best crime television series.  More details as I get them, but, basically, I couldn’t be happier.  I mean, good god.  Reg fucking Cathey.  That’s a hell of a man to have associated with your book.

A new record for unsettled post-midnight listening by the excellent Talvihorros.  Click through for physical and digital pre-ordering after you’ve streamed it for free here.  G’night.

• russell davies: the internet of middle-class things
  "The point is that – once the bridging/programming/installing problem is solved, hopefully by something like the BERG cloud  - people are going to want this kind of stuff. It's the decorative, furniturey, not exactly useful, certainly not to do with work stuff that people buy in the nicer sort of garden centres."
  (tags:comp iot )

Louie Joyce – @louiejoyce