My day was actually similar to:

G’night.

(I have no credits for the shot. Please add them in comments if you know.)

• Keynote: Bruce Sterling (us) on Atemporality | transmediale
  "If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The second conference session is being introduced with Bruce Sterling's Keynote on Atemporality."
  (tags:video )

Bit different, this week. I’m off on the road first thing Monday morning, beginning an intensive ten days of travel and meetings. So, a few changes, just for this offering:

1) We (Ariana and I, in our joint comedy guise as the International Electrophonic Unit) are offering this shirt for two weeks, rather than the usual one. Because, see above.

2) This shirt is returning by popular request, but in a different form. It was in fact Shirt #001, in a simple black-on-white.

3) And the request was that we offer it for Valentine’s shopping. Not that I have much truck with Valentine’s, or, as I prefer to think of it, Horny Werewolf Day. But lots and lots of people asked.

You may therefore now go to our store, and inspect LOVE (RED):

As you can see, it’s offered this time as red-on-white and red-on-black. Because we love you.

http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

We also offer a couple of perennial items. Such as:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

• The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer – Movies – New York Times
  "Mr. Mailer is almost always testing a hypothesis that the most hyperbolic presentation of the self will also be the most authentic. " "…Mr. Mailer describes what he is doing… as pursuing 'an attack on the nature of reality'…"
  (tags:culture social )

(From this set on English Russia.)

This is warren ellis dot com. I write here every day. You can also inspect me on Twitter. Tomorrow I commence ten days of travel. I want to stay in bed more than you can possibly imagine.

• New Spider-Man Device Could Let Humans Walk on Walls – Yahoo! News
  "A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man or create adhesive devices that could be turned on and off with the flick of a switch."
  (tags:sci bodymod )

* "Attention scarcity"

* Rimel Neffati:

* "Vlubä":

* why porting graphic novels to the Kindle makes sense: a million people (or whatever) have Kindles, will want to use their Kindles because they paid a lot of money for them, and therefore need stuff to put on their Kindles. Platform-locked audience: eventually people will start reading outside their immediate interests just to keep using the thing they paid through the nose for

* Suzanne Gerber (longtime readers will remember "Miss Wurzel Tod") trying to set up an art/design space in London

So here I am, asking you, fellow (preferably East) London creative/artist/designer/utopian to join forces with me and share a space for creative endeavours with me.

* note to self: remember to try hooking this up to Posterous.

* why is post-by-mail on (non-hosted?) Wordpress such a fuckaround? Why isn’t blogging getting easier? (Answer: it is, if you’re using Tumblr.) Why is it still such an ugly, fiddly process? In essence, it’s no more elegant than the early days of moblogging.

"Field Holler" is the opening piece off the above album, a collection of recordings of the Appalachian tradition ranging from 1944 to 2002. You can listen to more, and buy it, at this link here. There are several gems therein, but "Field Holler" is the one that haunts me. It has some spectral relationship with music I’ve heard from the Solomon Islands, with Bayaka music, with Clive Powell’s rendition of "Reed Sodger." There’s something ancient about it, something that speaks to blood.

(link degrades in seven days, review purposes only, shout if you need it removed)

If you go here, you will find a thread full of new webcomics to read.

Travel prep: charging things up and shutting things down. My message board will be rigged to low-power configuration over the weekend. Have dismissed the idea of buying MiFi devices while in Canada and America and just tying several to my body to maintain mobile broadband wireless connectivity while travelling. Filling the mp3 player — people keep asking, so it’s a Sony NWZX-1060 32GB, audio quality staggeringly better than any Apple device and more usable than the equivalent Cowon device. And, yes, I’ve compared them. Travel, these days, is all about charging devices up. And then those lovely fifteen minutes in the departure lounge when I shop for a book for the flight. Ebooks are all very well for some situations, but for a plane, I want a nice non-volatile storage medium ("It’s very rare. You should ’ave one") that doesn’t require electricity.

My friend Templesmith was once asked to do samples for a DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? adaptation project (not the one from Boom! that I wrote an introduction to). Looky:

With a bit of luck, I’ll be seeing Templesmith in a couple of weeks for Scheming.

…is it seriously -2 in Toronto?

"Romance."

(Last Conan! for a while, I promise.)

In which I actually do some dialogue scenes again, honest.

"Glazing."

• Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy
  "There is a growing sense that the properties of the universe are best described not by the laws that govern matter but by the laws that govern information."
  (tags:sci )

Warren Ellis dot com. Good afternoon. And this is the work of my "friend" Chip Zdarsky.

You’re welcome.

• BBC News – Iran launches rocket carrying animals into orbit
  "Iran has launched a rocket into orbit carrying what state-owned Al-Alam televison describes as an "experimental capsule". The Kavoshgar 3 (Explorer) rocket has a cargo of live animals…" Ahmadinejad may be an evil prick, but his black, kinky sense of humour is undeniable. Obama just cut the nuts off NASA, and Iran (it claims) puts a capsule in orbit.
  (tags:space )

Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts.

This is the cover to the first edition of ON THE ROAD I ever owned. Which I thought of, which I always think of, because I’m on the road again next week. First, I have a couple of days in London for sekrit meetingz. Then I’m on a plane to Toronto, to spend a day or two on the set of RED.

Being on the set of a shoot is a bit odd. Everyone’s very nice to you because they’ve been told you’re the author of the source material. No-one’s quite sure why you’re there, or what to say to you. After a few hours, you feel like you’re a bit underfoot, not least because everyone’s working, or at least a working part of the production, and you’re just there to watch. You actually welcome the usually excruciating (for me: I hate being filmed or photographed) experience of recording interview material with the unit publicist, because you at least feel mildly useful for an hour.

Being only there for a day or two, and obviously having to be on the set a lot because this is what they’re flying me out for, I won’t get to see everyone I know in Toronto, and I apologise in advance. I’ll be back.

I’m out of there at the weekend, and am travelling to An Undisclosed Location for a couple of days to break ground on a new writing project without distraction.

I’m then circling round and hitting LA for two days of intensely scheduled meetings on a number of gigs. Again, I’m not going to get to see my LA friends, which I hate, but I expect to be back in the summer with more time on my hands.

Things are really a bit insane right now. More so than usual. If even half of this stuff pans out, I’m going to be in this very weird cross-media space by the end of the year.

Of course, the moment I leave God’s Own Country (that’s the United Kingdom to you, johnny foreigner), my phone will shed about a hundred IQ points and half its metabolism. 7.2MB 3G connection over the air in North America? Forget it, travelling man. No more watching the news on the phone for you. You’ll take the local flavour of gimpy GPRS and like it. And we’ll charge you fifteen quid for every 25MB you eat. warrenelllisdotcom time will therefore be relegated to moments with hotel wifi for ten days. I hate that I lose so much of my outboard brain functions when I go to North America. I practically had a seizure from the thin bandwidth in Vancouver four years back.

Which reminds me, I need to rig my netbook for travel configuration. More later.

I occasionally receive strange email notes from Moon Wiring Club, fine purveyors of confusing English electronic music. This one turned up today:

Hello Warren,

Hope you are well.

Did you know, that in 1983, ASDA, the well-known supermarket chain, commissioned several musicians to provide 70min music mixes to ’enhance instore customer experience’?

Of course you did!

Well, anyway, this project was, sadly abandoned after unusual reactions were witnessed within a test group.

However…

The fabled, perhaps infamous Moon Wiring Club ADSA mix has surfaced here:

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/3623/

As well as vintage-synth style music, It features over 3 voice samples from potentially obscure televisual sources, and there’s even a nice cover too!

But under no circumstances listen to it on headphones within a supermarket.

This is warren ellis dot com. Zo says hello.

materials for inspection can be sent to warrenellis [at] gmail dot com

Working on an episode of FREAKANGELS and a WIRED UK column about human spaceflight that will probably get a bit shouty, this evening. Around midnight I’m going to switch to something else. I have a shitload of travel coming up, and for a chunk of a month the only writing I’m going to be doing is on a netbook on planes, on a netbook in hotel rooms if I’m lucky (and not asleep), and, if I’m very very lucky, in paper notebooks in dive bars.

(Because, you know what, Steve? iPads look very pretty in that STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION way you and your people have, and I’m sure they’ll be a marvellous coffee-table machine, but they’re the wrong form factor for serious writing. Netbooks do that better. As a dedicated writing/internet machine, my Eee 901 running OpenOffice and Chrome wins.)

My business runs on four things, really. A netbook, a smartphone, a handheld email device and notebooks. Currently, that’s the 901, the iPhone 3GS, a Blackberry Curve and a pile of Moleskines and Field Notes. The phone and the email device have to be two different devices, because having to answer the phone when you’re in the middle of typing an email or note is, frankly, fucking annoying. (I used to work on an all-in-one handheld, a Visor or a Treo with a foldaway keyboard that I could write on as well as do email and take calls. That got annoying. Convergence is a nice idea, but not for me.

(I’d add in a fifth, an mp3 player. I thought a moment ago that was non-essential business kit, and then I tried imagining travelling without one.)

Obviously they all serve different purposes, but they are all in fact bent to the same purpose, the essential purpose of writing: getting the idea down before you forget it. Doesn’t matter if the idea’s crap. Doesn’t matter if it’s not immediately useful. Doesn’t matter if it’s half-formed. Get it down. Jot it in a text file on your computer and toss it in a folder called Loose Ideas. Thumb it out into a note file on your phone. Scribble it into a notebook (in block caps so you can read it later, if you’re me). Record it as a voice memo (I’m working with someone right now who sets his phone to voice-recording in the car and spitballs ideas into it as he drives, hits send to email it out to me when he parks, just so he doesn’t lose the ideas).

If you don’t have some kind of kit for capturing ideas, even if it’s a 50p reporter’s notebook and a pencil from the local shop for local people, you’re doing it wrong.

(I used to burn through those fuckers. I’d sit in the local burger bar because it didn’t close until 3am, writing episodes of LAZARUS CHURCHYARD in longhand and sketching out the panels and pages because I was terrified of asking Matt Brooker to draw something that was impossible. This is a paranoia I’ve had since David Lloyd told me at a convention that Alan Moore had written him a panel where a character was to stand with his back to the reader, smiling. Think about that for a second. Yeah. Matt was a greatly more experienced comics artist than I was a comics writer, and I really didn’t want to embarrass myself.)

(Point of story being: don’t be afraid of being lo-tek. Worked for me, in those dark pre-internet days when the most advanced electronic device I owned was a small portable b/w television that only worked if you punched it every ten minutes.)

A bit of brilliance from one Samuel Arbesman, via Discovery:

Derek’s illustrations are always entertaining, sometimes surreal, sometimes revelatory. Here’s today’s, complete with his caption quoted below:

Remember Ultraman? Remember how he had that thing where he could grow really large to fight monsters, but only for three minutes, and then he shrunk again?

Turns out he was stuck with that deadline even when there weren’t any monsters.

Sometimes surreal, sometimes revelatory… and, yes, sometimes dick jokes. But very well drawn ones.

Designed for Jamais Cascio by Chip Zdarsky.

In which I talk about information and crapping:

Some guy from my ISP phoned me earlier — thereby buggering the afternoon’s work, and therein lies a link — to ask nicely if they could upgrade my broadband and take over my landline telephone provision for a small increase in my monthly fee. He then asked me something that actually stopped me dead for a moment. He asked me how much I download, on average. And I found that I had no idea…

• Daniel Bjarnason
  Neo-classical compositions.
  (tags:music )
• RAT CORPSE on MySpace Music – Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Downloads
  because hideous grinding noise pleases me sometimes
  (tags:none)

Wonderful language in a news story about land use and a new waterfront city in Singapore:

The committee said there is also a need for an underground master plan.

It said the government should catalyse the development of underground space over the next decade.

The committee also emphasized a need to develop subterranean land rights, a valuation framework and to establish a national geology office.

(Thanks, Fritz)