Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

Google+, of course, is not, strictly speaking, a social network. Most people can’t see what other people are doing there. Google, of course, sees it all. But everyone knows that going in.

It feels like the social web is going to get somewhat less interesting for a while. Less connected, less engaged.

Twitter’s going to be used for tv ratings in the States now. The clever thing about that it that it serves the same purpose as Facebook Likes: it documents media preferences. These are the things that keep a free service free, of course. But, god, there have to be less banal and creepy ways to do it.

I wonder if anyone’s been thinking twice about giving up their personal websites.

[Instagram: I said on that service earlier that I'll wait and see. Some hours later, they released an update to their TOS that I haven't had a good look at yet. But all my Instagram photos were backed up when Facebook bought them, and that backup auto-updates every time I post.]

Sir, let me start by saying you are awesome. Thank you very much for giving Transmetropolitan to the masses. My question to you is this: How best do you deal with writer’s/artistic block and what tips would you give anyone going through such annoyances?

mcchubbin

I don’t believe there is such a thing.  There is only being unable or unwilling to write the thing that’s in front of you, and, consciously or unconsciously, looking for ways to not write it.  Some people on the internet argue with me about this sometimes, or denounce me from the cheap seats.  All the fucks I give: see if you can detect them.

The trick — and it’s imperfect and can take a while, but — is simply to write something else.  Don’t let your hands go cold.  Don’t let yourself stop thinking.  Shift to something different.  I think it was Robert Silverberg who used to do his (type)written correspondence on bad days, and then “trick” himself into writing by slipping manuscript paper into the machine once his fingers were flying.

It’s about letting your backbrain chew on the problems while your frontbrain is amused by the new and shiny things.  Find an essay to write.  Do some flash fiction, or a short story, or a novelette about dancing gravediggers written in the style of Cormac McCarthy.  An audiobook about dirigible vampires who shit sexy babies down chimneys.  Whatever.  I’ve read of several writers from eras past who would type out passages from their favourite writers, to get a feeling of what it’s like to make sentences like that.

Write something else.  Anything else.  Either you’ll solve the problem in the background, or get the taste back for what you’re stuck on — or, guess what, maybe that whole thing was dead and you were just shoving electrodes up it to make it twitch in an awful semblance of life the whole time.  I mean, that happens.  It doesn’t mean you were blocked, it means that you were zapping a big stinky corpse with all your electricity and wondering why it wasn’t sitting up and calling you Mummy.  It was dead.  Bury it and never speak of what you did to it again.

You’re a writer — or an artist — or you’re not.  It sounds harsh, but, seriously, not everyone’s wired for this stupid life.  If you think you are, then you have to write around the block.  Anything that takes your fancy.  Just get words happening.  The rest will follow.  Best of luck.

Full size version?

Here’s where you find Sara Gries.  And here’s where I retire the Station Ident for a while.  Good morning, sinners.

SPEKTRMODULE 16 The Rain Hive  31 minutes and 56 seconds

If you don’t know what you’re looking at: SPEKTRMODULE is a podcast of haunted, ambient and sleepy music I compile for my own amusement.

Direct mp3 link.  Or press Play on the player.  iTunes link.

@warrenellis / warrenellis@gmail.com / t-shirt? mug?

Hello new listeners.  Feel free to tell other people about this podcast for sleepy people if you like it.

#SPEKTRMODULE

1. logotone

2. Showers- Echoes Of Nature  (album: Thunderstorm)

3. Piece For Solo Flute- Dead Can Dance  (album: Toward The Within)

4. The Comforter – Lisa Gerrard & Pieter Bourke  (album: Duality)

4. Swenson – Nite Lite   (album: Marlene)

6. Peacon  – The Workhouse  (album: The End of the Pier)

7. Water Maiden Dance, excerpt (Hopi Indian Winter Festival Dance) -  Hopi Indians  (album: Global Celebration: Earth Spirit (Cycles Of Nature))

8. Smell Of Moisture After The Rain- Sostrah Tinnitus  (album: Caravanserraglio)

(excerpt from “Thunderstom” – Echoes Of Nature in the middle)

9. Rain and Shine at the Lotus Pond – Julianna Barwick & Ikue Mori   (album: FRKWYS Vol. 6)

10. Sleep When We’re Dead – Ghosts Of Breslau   (album: Peste)

11. logotone

PREVIOUSLY: 1 – Fire Axes In Space | 2 – The Lane | 3 – Comfort And Joy | 4 – Long Count| 5 – Underfoot | 6 – The Chamber | 7 – Spark Gap | 8 – Death Is No Obstacle | 9 – Misty Eyed | 10 – Dirt Launchpad | 11 – Dreams Of The Woodland Cult | 12 – Dispatch Render Ghosts | 13 – Hull Oxide | 14 – Galactocentric | 15 – Celestial Navigation

(David Dell’oso)

• Senate Puts Brakes on Defense Clandestine Service
  "The Senate moved last week to restrain the rapid growth of the Defense Clandestine Service, the Pentagon’s human intelligence operation."
  (tags:war spook intel pol )
• Digital Dualism And The Glitch Feminism Manifesto » Cyborgology
  "Glitch Feminism therefore is feminism for a digital age, a heralding of virtual agency, a blooming of particularity and selfhood. “Glitch” refuses being categorized as subtext, it rejects being labeled as subversive, it does not speak for the marginal or the subaltern, as “sub-” as a prefix needs to be marked as a mode of acquiescence to our own exclusion from the canon, the academy, the Platonic ideal. The first step to subverting a system is accepting that that system will remain in place; that said, the glitch says fuck your systems!"
  (tags:social theory )
• Michael Chabon and Junot Díaz: Living on the page
  "There’s few people who would argue that one does not have to cut a deal with reality to spend so much time on these projects,” Díaz says. “Whether you’re a young artist, or you’re an artist late in their career, you have made a f–king deal with reality. You’re not going to be in the world as much as a normal person, I don’t think."
  (tags:writing writers )

I’ve got one for you, actually, though it’s a bit pedantic, I suppose. You said you wrote GUN MACHINE (which is fucking fantastic) on your iPad. With what, howfore, and why? I find jumping between an open Pages doc and Safari a royal pain, for instance, and given the amount of research you did, I’m wondering how you negotiated it. Also: keyboard? program? And any other details you care to share. Me, I’m lost without my laptop.

ruckawriter

Greg Rucka, everybody.  When you pass out from stark boredom three lines into this one, blame him.

Okay, so, yes, I did write a chunk of GUN MACHINE on the iPad.  I did it in a couple of different ways, depending on my mood.  To write material on your iPad, you need:

*  A keyboard case.  I have the Logitech Zagg Keyboard Case for iPad, which is a nice keyboard inside a padded aircraft-grade aluminium shell, that connects via Bluetooth.  It is very good.

*  Dropbox.  Dropbox Dropbox Dropbox.  Seriously.

*  I have two basic word programs on the iPad that both pretty much do the same thing.  PlainText and iA Writer.  I still can’t decide which one I like best.  Probably PlainText.  They both have their annoyances.  But what they do is create (inside your Dropbox) a plain old .txt file.  If I was writing something that I needed to check the research on later, or something that I felt was going to need a polish later, I’d just bang it down in PlainText.  Writing in .txt makes me take another look at it before it goes into the manuscript.

*  For actual finished work, I open Quickoffice HD Pro, which uses and creates Microsoft Word doc files, which is what I submit manuscripts in.  Again, it’s seamless with Dropbox.  I can write on the iPad in the main manuscript with full comfort.

*  When I’m mobile with iPad-only and I am stuck for research but want to get a thing done — well, I can simply keep Quickoffice running in the background and launch the Evernote app, which is where my book research lives, organised by folder.  Or I can launch it on my iPhone, for that matter, because where I go, the phone goes, and when I’n writing it’s usually propped next to the work machine anyway, picking up messages, playing a podcast and/or running a news stream of some kind.  (Twitter, or Reedlines, or similar.)

*  Why do I do this?  I’ve always hated lugging laptops around, and have always looked for efficient mobile solutions.  I had one of those early Asus netbooks.  I had a Treo.  Hell, in the 90s, I had a Handspring Visor.  And I figured that since the iPad was light, instant-on, built for wifi and supposedly fucking magical, I should be able to make it work as a mobile work solution without having to screw around with laptops and crappy batteries and all the rest of it.  In the mornings, I just grab the iPad and case and go out into the back garden and sit at the table and am ready to go.  I go back to the office, wake up the laptop, and thanks to Dropbox everything I’ve done is already there.  It works for me.

I was re-reading a bunch of James Bridle over the last couple of days – his brain works very differently to mine, and much better, which makes his stuff a good lever to prise me off old tracks – and I tripped over this, which I bookmarked last year:

What would a hauntological literature look like? I’m not sure, and that makes me suspicious.

And, a few paragraphs further up, related:

While I understand the distinction between nostalgia and hauntology, I am unconvinced by their separation in the application of the latter to music. The two most frequently cited sonic hauntologists are Burial and Ghost Box records, and while I’m a huge fan of both, I also see them as being steeped in nostalgia.

Bridle, as you may know, coined the term New Aesthetic, which can be defined as the observation of the eruption of the digital world into the physical world.  And it occurred to me that there is already an artifact of hauntological literature that does not require or involve nostalgia.  It is, in fact, one of the historical artifacts that was such a touchstone for modern hauntology.

THE CHANGES.  A BBC TV series from 1975.  The first episode of which I recall vividly, because it was (if you were seven years old) so unsettling.  And the subject of this series was simply this:

The eruption of the historical into the present.

Which is, essentially, what Burial was doing, in the moments when he wasn’t (as in “Raver”) specifically summoning up past times through nostalgia or yearning.  The moments where the past can be heard leaking through the walls (in my head, there’s a weird linkage between Burial and Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room”).

I think my problem with hauntology is that it deals with the problem of the future by going back to the past. And that is fine: but it will not save us.

In a hauntological literature, the future isn’t the problem.  It’s that the past never stops coming to get us.  Hence the frequent Ballardian framing of hauntology: we’re so exhausted by our blind headlong run into the future that we now wander around in a confused haze, and Time (SAPPHIRE AND STEEL!) oozes in like oil all around us.  Dragging us downstream.

Georteyphobia.  Fear of history.

Or: do not allow a 70-year-old woman to wander about your house unattended, because she will see the pulsing light on your Little Printer and touch it with her aged, destructive claws, thereby doing something unfathomable to it that causes it to be both very difficult to reassemble and refuse to accept reprint commands.

My Little Printer lived in the kitchen.  Which, somehow, seemed the most apt place for it.  It’s a surprisingly heavy thing, with edges.  The combination of brushed metal and white-goods sheen makes it an odd fit in the living room, which is a place where devices (tv remote controls, for instance) are light and rounded things.  It sits better in kitchens, next to coffeemakers and toasters, across from the oven and the fridge.  It is, in fact, a thing you’d set to chunter away while you were making the coffee, and read what it spat out while you were taking your first few sips of the day.  The information that Little Printer prints out, in fact, could usefully be described as “sips.”  A short weather report, the top headlines from the newspaper, a few factoids.

As a proof of concept, a test article and a summation of Matt Webb’s “social letterbox,” it’s a fascinating device.  I’ve seen people start to hack it already, and am keeping an eye on what Dan Catt’s up to.  Dan’s working from the position that some things are just more useful on paper.

However, I must say: Little Printer was certainly presented as the electric Inter Net telegraphy device that your unplugged family members could use.  But I ask you again to observe the result when an ancient relative and her disintegrating talons were left alone with mine.

• The Flores Hobbit’s face revealed
  "An Australian anthropologist has used forensic facial reconstruction techniques to show, for the first time, how the mysterious Flores 'hobbit' might have once looked. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-flores-hobbit-revealed.html#jCp"
  (tags:history )
• The UK needs a new age of STEAM, and the Ebacc won’t make it happen.
  "An age of STEAM – Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics – (rather than just STEM) is what the UK needs to survive in the foothills of the 21stC."
  (tags:edu )
• Cyborg au Naturale
  "When Amy Purdy talks about her leg extensions on TED, she slowly weaves in the pain and loss of her legs, which somehow justifies to the audience the new longer, beautiful designer legs. We still apply the century old principle of no pain, no gain -even with technology. There is always a sacrifice for the enhancements. Imagine if someone had to saw off their own legs in order to obtain the beautiful, height-extending legs that Purdy has?"
  (tags:bodymod )
• The Image Object Post-Photoshop
  Durantini goes on to suggest that “the inevitable disappointment of mass-produced commodities has created a sort of haptic half-life where the image produces more pleasure than the object itself.”
  (tags:theory )

This is a reprint of the missive I sent to my newsletter audience on Saturday night, which I post here because 1) maybe somebody wanted to see what the newsletter was like 2) it was a slightly non-standard newsletter post anyway 3) I am tired and a bit swamped pre-Xmas and this is easier than writing a whole thing this morning.  You can subscribe to the newsletter over here.

MACHINE VISION 028: Drunken Fist

These arrived on Friday. The first box of GUN MACHINE hardbacks.  I just got back from London, where I gave the first copy off the top to urbanist and information architect Adam Greenfield.  The first time I met Adam was at Cognitive Cities in Berlin, where I gave the talk that is the basis of the non-fiction book I’m writing after I finish the novel I’m currently on.

Also I am quite full of whisky and wine and beer and I don’t know I think there was something else.

The first time I ate here was with Joss Whedon.  We’d been recommended the place by his hotel’s concierge.  The walls are covered in cow hide.  In those days, the lighting in the lobby was red.  So it was a little bit like entering a haute abattoir, or perhaps some insane architectural conceit wherein a steak restaurant was staged inside a large cow that some bastard had helpfully turned inside out first so you didn’t your feet wet.

Joss was a little nervous.  And may have said "Good god."

When you get the copies of your book, the first, horrible thought you have — or, at least, I do — is, "well, shit, it’s a fixed thing now.  God only knows what mistakes I missed."

Adam took a photo, laughed at it and said, "We’ll fix it in post."

G’night.

– W

(April Schultz)

How To Shut Down Internets:

…we’re dealing with what, in science-fiction novels, might be some strange future iteration of the military-industrial complex, where regime and commerce are bound by blood…

In The Year 2022:

Today, ten years later, I can’t hear the birds. There’s just that constant low-level hiss of dronerotors, which always seems to blanket over the sound of birdsong. You have to go deep into the countryside now to hear birds. Out to one of the coverage holes, like the drowned towns in the West Country. Stand at the western end of the M4 motorway that the locals call Bristol Pier. And, perhaps, the distant and distorted tone of church bells softly striking under ten metres of rainwater…

Turns out I haven’t posted anything by them since March.  Have some gentle synth washes to tide you to bed.

Good job, BERG. (Yes, I’m randomly posting while wandering around the house.)

Which is a pulp-style Weird Crime comic by award-winning creator Francesco Francavilla.

Click through here for full size.  Click over here to learn more.

For a while, I had a capture of my twitter feed running here. It ended up doing something weird to my API calls, stopping me from running my desktop client, so I killed it. Which is probably just as well, as I talk a lot of shit on Twitter. It’s basically mental slurry, the wet lumpy bits from a day spent at the keyboard vented off into a trap so the buildup doesn’t blow some crucial valve in my head. Look at these, from the last month, and pity me:

*  It cannot possibly be December already. I am returning to bed and when I get back up I expect this to be FIXED.

*  Kittens are trying to break into my office. It sounds like the smallest and most rubbish zombie attack ever.

*  Join my Xmas Eve tradition: sit in a barn all night shrieking that an invisible space god put a parasite inside you and it’s coming out

* good morning sinners. the fishpond has iced over and so have my eyes

*  Warren stares at important work. Warren must concentrate and summon intellect. CUT TO: INSIDE WARREN’S BRAIN: http://bit.ly/UJ2w7M

*  just stating my availability for the post of BBC Director General. my first act would be to change that title to Dear Leader

*  If you analysed my folder of email with @mollycrabapple you would find the most frequently used words to be "shut", "up" & "Molly"

*  I like to think that @benhammersley releases his moustache into the streets of London at night to devour weaker moustaches during Movember.

*  [Oct 31 ] A depressing night for my agent to refuse to pitch my new musical horror project THE KING AND I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE

*  My daughter has just accused me of being so old that I "remember when fire first came out."

*  "CRUSH THEM LIKE MONKEY" may be the worst piece of advice I’ve ever given to another writer. Or the best. One of the two.

I swear to god, an actual Concept Album.

the LAY LLAMAS is a tribe that in the year 2092 AD starts a trip from an unknown region of Nigeria on a self-built spacecraft (track A1) to reach a planet that they continued to observe every night from the earth and inexplicably attracted them. Once there, explore the planet (track A2) until they meet a totem called the Big Snake (track 3) who will point the way for the purification and elevation to a higher state of consciousness (track B4).

The pieces are arranged in order for free streaming on Soundcloud.  Here’s the first.

This is not a photo of my testicles.  But god DAMN sitting outside in the garden today to clear my lungs was a challenge.  Apparently this came out of nowhere around 7am and dumped two inches in two hours.  Let me try and catch up with some stuff.

Katie West’s print sale ends today.  And, by god, look at this poster Ellen Rogers and Prizme put together for Meredith and her Parlour Trick Kickstarter.  This magical thing is in the USD $45 reward tier – which is a steal – and the Kickstarter’s only running for another 18 hours or so.  Look at this:

And over at thisisGUNMACHINE, you can find the first chunk of the Spotify playlist I put together, reflecting at least part of what I was listening to while writing the book.  And now I’m being told I have to leave the house to drink wine.  Which will hopefully thaw some of the ice, there in the very disturbing places it currently sits.