• Parallel Campaigns | Notes on Metamodernism
  "At the same time, Ulrich and Agathe begin their private attempt to live in the utopia of the ‘other state’ which they have designed. The development of the ‘other state’ is based on Ulrich’s study of the writings of mystics and on the idea which he refers to earlier as the ‘sense of possibility’ which implies that everything which exists could just as well be different, and so presents an opposite to the ‘sense of reality’."
  (tags:pol alt )
• CDC app lets you solve disease outbreaks at home
  "The nation's public health agency has released a free app for the iPad called "Solve the Outbreak." It allows users to run through fictional outbreaks and make decisions: Do you quarantine the village? Talk to people who are sick?"
  (tags:ios med )

I’m friends with a futurist named Jamais Cascio, and he had occasion early in 2010 to meet a very eminent scientist and author. As these people do, they got to talking about The Future, and a scenario was described wherein Type III civilisations would have the technology to “boil spacetime,” creating or accessing a new universe for itself or even returning to the beginning of the universe in order to have all of time over again to live in.

Me and all our friends were running around yelling BOILING SPACETIME for several months.

Grant Morrison once described for me – and this is back around 1989 – his experience of discovering, while in the grip of severe entheogenic refreshment, that a comic is an entire spacetime continuum, capable of replay, non-linear access and chronological isolation.

Comics boil spacetime.

This is metatextual gibberish intended to prime your brain for what is next.

Time in comics is completely elastic.

Dialogue can slow down the experiencing of a page. (Frank Miller once said, possibly in EISNER/MILLER, that when he wants to slow the reader down he just starts the characters talking.) But your control of time begins with panelling and space.

Japanese comics read very fast because they have very few panels a page and those panels generally contain little visual information. Occidental comics are often too dense for the Japanese to enjoy. (I was told the same thing by my handlers when I was writing outlines for Japanese animated series.) There’s a thing I love in manga, though: every now and then, you’ll find a panel knocked out to bleed at (say) top, left and right. Leaving the framework of gutter and margins. And it creates a complete stillness, a frozen moment that you live in for a little longer.

There’s a scene in Bryan Talbot’s LUTHER ARKWRIGHT where the protagonist slows down the time perception of a group of men in order to kill them more efficiently. He breaks each page down into a couple of dozen panels, showing movement in staccato increments. The sequence is entirely silent, but because there are so many panels, with actual information in each, you experience the sequence almost as slowly as do the targetted men in the story.

I’ve seen comics that have run two different timestreams on the same page. Recursive comics. Pages containing flashbacks to three different timeframes as well as moving forward in the present while making complete sense. Chris Ware did a famous short comic in RAW that featured several different historical periods in the same room in the same page while maintaining a linear story flow. Kevin Huizenga will turn a suburban stroll into a multi-linear history tour and then tie all the lines back together without losing you for a moment.

The point being: you’re not locked to one minute per page, like a screenplay. You can make time run so fast that the reader thinks that your comic has been injected into their eyeball, or so slow and heavy that the reader feels like you’ve boiled a doorstop novel into some condensed informational substrate.

• What if Google Could Think Like You Do? – ReadWrite
  "The New York Times reported Monday that the Obama Administration is close to announcing the Brain Activity Map, which scientists quoted by the paper say could be on the scale of the The Human Genome Project, a $3.8 billion project to map the human genome that, the Times reported, returned $800 billion in jobs and other benefits."
  (tags:sci med neuro )
• The nuclear reactor in your basement
  "How would you like to replace your water heater with a nuclear reactor? That's what Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, hopes to help bring about. It would tap the enormous power of the atom to provide hot water for your bath, warm air for your furnace system, and more than enough electricity to run your house and, of course, your electric car."
  (tags:sci tech energy )
• Curves in spacetime violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
  "If an object traveling through spacetime can loop back in time in a certain way, then its trajectory can allow a pair of its components to be measured with perfect accuracy, violating Heisenberg's uncertainty principle"
  (tags:sci timetravel )
• BBC News – Tenerife beheading: Murder suspect ‘haunted by voices’
  "Answering questions in Bulgarian via an interpreter, Mr Deyanov said voices had told him he was "an angel of Jesus Christ who is going to create a new Jerusalem"."
  (tags:crime )

If you didn’t get MACHINE VISION 038, the latest step of my newsletter, yesterday – check your spam filters.  Gmail, Comcast and Verizon users especially should take a look.

If you didn’t see it, the web version is at this link here.  If you’re not a subscriber, you can still look, too.  And, if you’re interested, you can subscribe at this link here.  You only get emails from me, and, at this point, I’m only going to be posting a newsletter a couple of times a week.

(Older subscribers will laugh at that, because I can go weeks at a time without posting, not least because, unlike my old list, there’s not really an easy mobile option with this system.  But things are a little more sorted now.)

Anyway, if you are a subscriber, I’d appreciate you checking your traps this week.

• Hannah Donovan – Notes from New Adventures
  "IDEAS WANT TO BE UGLY! This one goes in all caps because it was one of the most important lessons I learned that day. So many times I’ve apologised to my peers for the scratchy, ugly looking sketches I did in that rushed moment while I tried capture a fleeting idea. Never again will I do that! Of course it’s ugly, it’s an idea."
  (tags:working )
• The Human Division gets serialized and serious about experimentation | Ars Technica
  "“Today, publishing is where film was in the 60s and 70s," Scalzi said."
  (tags:books )
• BBC News – Lab rats ‘acquire sixth sense’
  "An experimental device allowed the rats to "touch" infrared light – which is normally invisible to them."
  (tags:sci tech bodymod )
• Iran Leader: Having Nukes is ‘Crime Against Humanity’ – US Sanctions Actually Target Fuel Enrichment
  "Long-time readers know that I think Iran wants nuclear latency or ‘the Japan option,’ i.e. they don’t want to make or stockpile nuclear warheads, but do want the deterrence of invaders that comes with the known ability to put one together in short order"
  (tags:pol war )
• Christian woman in Egypt Shoe-whacks Salafi Fundamentalist for Calling her a Harlot (Photo)

  (tags:pol cult culture photo social )

• New Chapters
  " "5 Unexpected Factors That Change How We Forecast The Future," is my first essay for Co.EXIST, a FastCompany spinoff focusing on "world changing ideas and innovation""
  (tags:future )
• Water on the moon: It’s been there all along
  ""Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the moon, the water is inferred to have been in the moon when it formed," Zhang said."
  (tags:space )

So I’d been talking about newspaper strips, and an idea that amused me: to lay a daily single-panel strip down on the website.  I mean, I’d been talking about various options, but that one did kind of make me smile.  And then Jason Howard, a frequent collaborator with Robert Kirkman, emailed and said “I could fancy that.”  So we got to talking, and discovered that certain musics and certain kinds of science fiction were mutual pleasures, guilty and otherwise.  And we came up with SCATTERLANDS.  A largely improvised comic strip that will run here Mondays to Fridays, one panel a day.  We’ll take a short break every four or five weeks, at which point we’ll run a digest of that block of panels somewhere or other (we have no serious plans in this direction beyond the intent, and are basically making shit up as we go along).  But here they will be daily and free.

Just a bit of fun, as they say.

(So much so that I’m tempted to do a second and bookend each weekday with a panel.)

And with some terrific cartooning by Jason, whom I suspect will regularly surprise the people who believe they know his work.

You can find Jason on Twiiter as @thejasonhoward.

• NASA study finds that Middle East’s water is disappearing fast | FP Passport
  “…the Tigris and Euphrates basins — which are ripe with border disputes, conflict over Kurdish minorities, and now major conflicts in Syria and Iraq — might be more prone to the insidious effects of water instability than other places around the globe.”
  (tags:eco war pol )
• Neon Gods & Funeral Strippers on Vimeo
  Neon Gods & Funeral Strippers Video shot and directed by Alex Zhang Hungtai. from “The Statement” LP 4 way split Slim Twig, Dirty Beaches, Ela Orleans, U.S. Girls, 2012, Clan Destine Records clandestinerecords.bigcartel.com/ Alex Zhang Hungtai
  (tags:ifttt vimeo video )
• The beginning of BotWorld « Magical Nihilism
  “The world of domesticated, tiny AIs that Matt was talking about two years ago is what BERG is starting to explore, manufacture – and sell in every larger numbers.”
  (tags:berg tech little+printer future )
• The best videos of the Chelyabinsk meteor | FP Passport
  “The extraordinary developments were captured on video, in part through the automobile dash-cams that are nearly ubiquitous in Russia.”
  (tags:video )
• 4,000-year-old shaman’s stones discovered near Boquete, Panama
  “Archaeologists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have discovered a cluster of 12 unusual stones in the back of a small, prehistoric rock-shelter near the town of Boquete. The cache represents the earliest material evidence of shamanistic practice in lower Central America.”
  (tags:history shamanism )

I’ve already talked about the first instalment of John Scalzi’s serialised sf novel THE HUMAN DIVISION here.  I read parts two to five on the train into London today – I’ve been getting them auto-delivered every week, and intended to read a couple of parts on the plane, but got into David Byrne’s HOW MUSIC WORKS instead.  (Still on track for a book a week in 2013, if you squint at it.)  Anyway.

What I wanted to briefly note down is this.  This is a thirteen-part serial.  Each piece takes no less than ten or fifteen minutes to read, I think.  Some, like the first episode, are much bigger.  He’s taking a risk by varying the length of the episodes so dramatically, but I think he’s getting away with it.  Each piece is costing me 99 American cents, or 64p.  An mp3 runs me 99p on iTunes.  A tv episode costs £2.49 on iTunes.  Each episode of THE HUMAN DIVISION automatically downloads to my Kindle. 

In modern-day terms, this is the equivalent of a cable television show season happening – but in a deeply participatory “cool” medium, and with a greater informational density than other cool media like tv or even comics.

It’s the instant nature of the ebook, with its automagic form of broadcast, that’s the killer.  If there was a single serious misstep, it was that the publisher did not negotiate with Amazon (I don’t know if it’s true for other vendors) to create a one-click subscription for all thirteen parts.  Perhaps that was impossible.  I certainly would have liked it, though.

While companies like Netflix attempt to embrace the “novel for television” by making all thirteen parts of HOUSE OF CARDS available simultaneously, it’s interesting to see Scalzi and Tor go the other way by testing not a traditional serialisation but a “television season for novel.”  The walls of the current standard of container are getting bent a little.

You can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Stephen King’s forays into periodical serial had been taken in the spring days of the e-reader, tablet and smartphone.

Yes, doing digital-only or (in this case) digital-first still feels a little exclusionary.  But, honestly?  Is it any more economically exclusionary than publishing in hardback?  And it’s not like there’s not a substantial digital-first audience out there.

I don’t pretend to be informed enough to know if THE HUMAN DIVISION constitutes a signal suite of breakthroughs in publishing.  But it’s the one in front of me, and it’s gotten me thinking.  There’s a beauty to the idea of signing up to receive the digital broadcast of a prose serial.  Buying a season of book and having each piece magically appear every week.  And, conceivably, reaching an audience that won’t or can’t hit bookstores, through the developing momentum of word-of-mouth over thirteen weeks.  And, frankly, getting to talk to people for an entire season, one week at a time.

Not Fully Baked, as a thought.  But it’s nagging at me.  There’s more to unpack, but I wanted to get this down now.

But now I’m back.  I needed time away from everything, post-booklaunch.  Am ever so slightly recharged.  Forwards!

(Photo taken by me, yes.)