I should be making with the free entertainment by now, I know, but I’m mostly just reading and wishing those three Red Bull I sank were actually working.

It’s the time of year, it turns out, for people to notice that the sf magazines are tanking, once more. This time it’s the turn of PBS.org’s MediaShift to point out that they’re fucked. The piece interviews a couple of mildly confused-sounding editors: partly, they sound confused because the interviewer is determined to make a connection between their sliding sales and the internet, but they also manage to sound a bit confused about the internet itself.

Vaguely connnected in the clickstream that followed: sf editor Jetse De Vries is packaging an anthology of "optimistic science fiction," having quit the editorial team of INTERZONE magazine due to being "unhappy with the direction and tone the fiction in Interzone will be taking." Which left the remaining team quite baffled, as "no such change was identified or discussed at any time within the team." Apparently the quitting and the anthology are not causally related. INTERZONE’s main problem, on a superficial level, would seem to be less that an editor’s left to make a "SF With Lovely Cuddles" book, than that it appears to be the early 1970s in their art department.

The hell with it. I’m not getting sucked into that discussion again. Go and listen to "Happy Birthday You" by Jay Jay Pistolet.

I don’t know where this has sprung from, but for the last week I’ve been fielding emails and MySpace messages asking me if it’s true that I’ve been asked to work on the American tv series HEROES as a writer. Even stranger to me is that when I dismiss it with "I don’t even watch the show" or similar, that’s somehow taken (three times now) as cryptic assent.

So listen. No, I haven’t been approached to write an episode of HEROES. In no way shape or form has there been any kind of contact from the HEROES production. I doubt anyone working there has even heard of me.

And, in case this turns into something, the reason I don’t watch the show is that, upon viewing the opening of the pilot episode, I realised it was going to be very close to a comics series called NEWUNIVERSAL that I was halfway into writing the opening six issues of. I don’t watch it because I don’t want to be creatively contaminated by it while working on a project with similar content and themes. That’s all.

Now that I’ve said all this here, you see, I can just send people the link to this post without having to type it all over afuckingain. Selah.

For the indie comics creators in the audience, I found this:

Independent comic and graphic novel news site, Indy Comic News wants your blog!

If you are a published or soon-to-be published indy comic book creator, self-publisher, or publisher, Indy Comic News would like to list your blog in our upcoming Indy Bloggers listing which will be part of Indy Comic News.

To have your blog listed, simply send an email to admin@indycomicnews.net with the following in the body of the email:
Your name
What you do (example would be artist, writer, publisher, etc.)
What published or soon-to-be published books you have worked on or are working on
The name of your blog and its URL

Thanks to everyone in advance who participates!

Wesley Craig Green

I would. But I have needs beyond that of ordinary men.

Invented at the famed Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hyperion small modular
power reactors make all the benefits of safe, clean nuclear power available for
remote locations…

But worth a crack. Good job, Sibling Rivalry TV, for giving the net something to look at today:

Zune Paint from Sibling Rivalry on Vimeo.

The following missive was received at Whitechapel earlier today:

After a few months of leaving my alter-ego URE THRALL to his own devices while in the midst of preparing his gargantuan I.AM.INDUST. Experimental octophonic music festival (now an ANNUAL EVENT - see www.iamindust.com for info, video and free mp3 downloads of new music), at last DOKTOR SLEEPLESS of EArth 23 returned to helm the ERR-waves a few weeks back, DJing the concluding segment of KPFA 94.1 FMs NO OTHER RADIO’s HALLOWEEN show on 10/29. And TONIGHT I, the bad Doktor have a brain-blast of a program in store for everyone. To celebrate back to back shows here in San Francisco this week by both The LEGENDARY PINK DOTS and SKINNY PUPPY’s NIVEK OHGR we’ll be playing lots of brand new material including some rare outtakes from OGHR’s new "DEVIL IN MY DETAILS" CD as well as selections from the extremely limited new Edward Ka-Spel release "DREAM LOGIC Part 2" , not to mention excerpts from several new releases by that one-man futuirismo machine PHIL WESTERN (best known as a part of DOWNLOAD as well as his past projects like MERE MORTALS and OFF and GONE).

It looks like I really F##ked things up by abandoning this plane for awhile. I mean just LOOK at the mess this planet is in NOW!
WELL I’ promise to try and do better in future
but ONLY IF YOU WILL, TOO!
And if you just don’t FEEL LIKE getting out of bed and saving this earth today, well…
I suppose I will have to live…or rather, DIE with that…
Sin Searingly,
D.S. EArth 23

Wil now writing a regular column for the LA Weekly’s blogzone.

…over my three and a half decades in L.A., I’ve come to see us as sort of a
cultural microcosm of 21st century America, one of those tabula rasa
destinations that is eagerly sought out by those who aren’t already here, and
they all bring something wonderful with them…

NASA:

Hermann Potocnik (1892-1929), better known as Herman Noordung, created the first detailed technical drawings of a space station. This 1929 image is a depiction of the space station’s habitat wheel. Power was generated by collecting sunlight through the concave mirror in the center. This was one of three components of Noordung’s space station. The other two were the observatory and the machine room, each connected to the habitat by an umbilical.

Noordung wrote "Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums," or "The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor," (1929), an early work on spaceflight.

Funeral for a videoblog she never quite seemed to make:

Embedded. from Melissa Gira on Vimeo.

Kid Shirt is actually probably way beyond being off in the aether by now, and has therefore already crashlanded on The Planet Of The People Who Forgot To Take Their Pills. But it’s fun stuff:

After name-checking The Yeovil Lemurian Society yesterday I got an email from Roy…er, I mean Azaruus asking me if I could mention that they meet on the third thursday of each month at the Unitarian Hall, Goldcroft, Yeovil and anyone is welcome to come along. Their next meeting will be 8:00pm on 20th November. The guest speaker is Lawrence Fernney ("Aurora") from The Glastonbury Lemurian Society who’ll be giving a talk on a network of secret Dero tunnels under The Mendip Hills…and Murok, the treasurer of the Yeovil chapter, will be unveiling his homemade Aethyric Radio which he hopes to use to communicate directly with The Space People. Coffee, tea and homemade cakes will be served afterwards.

Actually, Azaruus has got a cheek asking me to promote their meetings. They don’t have a website as the group believe that the Murdoch-Google Continuum (the Internet to you) is inheritently evil and that Murdoch is actually The Black Aspect of the Anti-Satan, one of the many portents that signify impending Earthdeath. Actually, they might have a point there. But what really galls me is that I’m not an official member of The Yeovil Lemurian Society as Azaruus says (and I quote) that I have "the slanted, narrow eyes and thin, low-gravity bone structure that mark me out as a scion of Mu…" - which sounds like jew-baiting to me, but I don’t think he was being that serious - so they won’t let me join, which is a pisser as they get to wear silver cloaks to the meetings.

And there is no Yeovil Mu Society. Well, not yet.

"Thanks to a new technique, DNA strands can be easily converted into tiny fibre
optic cables that guide light along their length."

Yeah, it’s another scattershot day here at Ellis Compound.

All the Flickrgeist is, is a collection of pictures posted to Flickr by my friends and fellow-travellers over the last day or so.

1. Frankenberry Oracle issues first command, 2. Altercation between Brent Geese, Bull Island, Dublin, 3. Motivational, 4. Sign in BBtv studio, 5. Champagne, Nov 4 2008, 6. Bartlos!

Obey. Or she will stare at you like this:

The Superstruct game awards, for which I was a judge, are apparently being announced via live webcast at this link at 11am PST.

EDIT: Apparently this link is better.

Yes, I know, flurry of small single posts today. Must use brainjuice sparingly. Apologies for rain of grey, waxy conceptual semen splattering the neck of your info-womb etc

Even though I know some people who are afraid of his mesmeric penis. Look at what he does with a camera, though:

New stuff dropped into this thread over the last few days.

"FIRE!"

(No, this site has never been safe for work. Why do you ask?)

In 2009:

Bits and pieces, today, folks, as I’m on the fly a bit.

Ego Assassin, purveyors of fine pervwear, are having a sale on all their snowflake-printed items. As Jodi writes, "It’s a gift for him but really it’s a gift for you."

Lisa Suckdog (I can’t remember what name she’s using these days) is selling a bunch of her archive stuff ahead of a move to a place that’s 666 feet smaller than her current home ("it’s the size of the devil less"). And in the list of her stuff offered for sale, I find this:

Cassettes:
My Courtney Love interview. Kurt comes on at one point to try to get her off the phone with me and back to her intervention, and she yells at him.

For many years now, my friend Colleen Doran and I have been working on an odd little graphic novel called STEALTH TRIBES in our spare time. She just sent me over some more pages today, and I thought I’d share a clip from a panel with you.

This is Mister Ramp. He is a nice man.

There are five thousand people on my internet community Whitechapel, and many have money that they are not using.

Therefore, I invite the novelists among us to show off their books in this thread, in order to siphon the last of their cash away.

Invitation only applies to people who get paid for writing books and have publishers who sell said books for them. The last time I did this, the thread got inundated by people trying to tell me about their unsold and largely unwritten "novel" about the vampire sex pixies who live in Frodo’s bumhole or something.

* * * * *

Apropos of nothing at all, I feel compelled to share this post from user brycemidas, because I feel sorry for him. Are you in the Austin TX area?

I am living in Austin, TX for the next month and have been busking pretty frequently for the last couple of weeks. If you live here and are a musician/cool person who likes beer and you see me playing come talk to me, I know almost no-one. I am generally playing mandolin and sometimes guitar, some of the time I am with a skinny guy who plays harmonica. I know you are here because I saw a guy with a Doktor Sleepless t-shirt the other day. Don’t be afraid, although I may look like a frazzled, grumpy, hairy guy playing Hank Williams, but I am really a friendly, frazzled, hungover, hairy guy playing Hank Williams songs.

* I do not understand this dress Lenora Claire wore when she opened for the Dresden Dolls a while back, and therefore I fear it.

* Dave Walsh on a UNESCO-protected biosphere reserve in Dublin:

* Henry Leo, keeping them bitches off his corners:

* ZO’S ALIEN NATURE REVEALED

Sara Gries with the FREAKANGELS Woven Throw, a weird idea my publisher had:

FREAKANGELS is on a skip week today, but please click through to see the Avatar office make fun of poor Paul Duffield (instead of, well, me making fun of poor Paul Duffield.).

* Foetus cookies.

* Starting a new "production diary" of sorts for my forthcoming comics serial IGNITION CITY.

* The self-portraits thread never fails to amuse me.

* People tell us about interesting events in the UK happening between now and New Year. Same for the USA. Add yours.

And:

If you are involved in making any kind of comic that is sold or can be ordered from a comics shop, please please tell us who you are here, provide a link to your web presence, and if possible run an image or two from your comic. (No more than that, please, or else threads have trouble with loading and navigation. One or two images will do the trick anyway.)

Why? Xmas is coming. I want people to give you their money. That’s a good thing, right?

(Also, steampunkery is still happening, and musicians, singers and bands are still turning up to tell people about their stuff. Which I like.)

* The COILHOUSE coven interviewed.

* Taken by Matt Fraction: Brian Bendis hunts Spider-Man cosplayers through the streets of Manhattan.

* Congrats to Jean Snow on joining PingMag as an editor.

* Matt Jones on 4G supervillain architecture. As ever, switch brains to "on" for this.

* Jamais Cascio giving two talks in the Bay Area this weekend.

* Patton Oswalt is finally writing a book.

* Handmade FREAKANGELS stuff?

* Lots of people talking about music.

* A cruel joke to play on the outgoing President of the USA.

* Real-Life Mayan Road To Hell Uncovered

He tells people he’s Mel Brooks’ son. And has done prison time for same in twelve different states. Except for Maine. Which imprisoned him for fucking dogs.

Awesomely pissed-off Irish band Fight Like Apes appear to have re-released their single "Jake Summers" in support of a new album that I haven’t been able to find yet. In the hope that you find the album more easily — you can hear a bunch of FIGHT LIKE APES AND THE MYSTERY OF THE GOLDEN MEDALLION here — I’m going to make you listen to "Jake Summers" for a few days. Because you can’t not love a song that says "Hey you, you’re taking up space / And you’re a fucking disappointment to the human race."

(Usual rules apply: mp3 vanishes in seven days, provided for review purposes only, if you need it gone before then email at degaussing at googlemail com and it shall be done)

* Brain motor function begins its decline at age forty. NURSE! etc

* "Who is the woman whose genetic calling card has been found at more than 20
scenes of theft, assault and murder hundreds of miles and more than a dozen years apart?" An apparently uncatchable female heroin addict has left a trail of crimes and bodies — and, possibly, less lucky accomplices from several different countries who refuse to talk about her — across Europe over some fifteen years.

* A deeply peculiar piece of video, I’m guessing clipped from a British tv documentary, purporting to be a record of an Italian priest abusing a disturbed child conducting an "exorcism."

A word to the credulous: Satan was a literary invention to give Jesus a villain. There’s no such thing as Satan. There’s no such thing as God. Jesus, like Barack Obama, was a politician.

* In other news from the world of magic, thousands of people have flocked to see the "return" of the now seventeen-year-old Nepalese boy widely believed to be the reincarnation of Buddha. Because having "supernatural" figures turn up and gather thousands of followers in a politically tense country that is largely without roads or telephones and which bends a knee to China by arresting hundreds of Tibetan exiles for exercising their right to peaceful protest? That’s always a good thing.

* On Monday, a 13-year-old girl became Iraq’s latest suicide bomber.

* Baby farms: where babies are bred for sale. Not making this shit up. Just as monstrous as you think it is.