The Mechanic Speaks [09 Nov 2009|11:28am] warren_ellis Ariana Osborne, designer of this place, SHIVERING SANDS, etc., talking about POD and the book, because: …apparently, there’s a bunch of folks paying close attention to how Shivering Sands does so they can figure out if POD is “worth their time.” And I have absolutely no fucking clue what that means, so I’ve just got to talk about it… (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) post comment

flickrgeist 9nov09 [09 Nov 2009|11:15am] warren_ellis 1. Entrance to the Hotel Rivington, 2. prejuice, 3. New Hair, 4. New print: Honeydrip, 5. FA choker, 6. On final approach (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) post comment

Zola Jesus: Store Open [09 Nov 2009|10:11am] warren_ellis THE SPOILS by Zola Jesus is one of my favourite albums of this year.  But it’s kind of hard to find on CD.  (The mp3 download is easy to find, I’ve even seen it on Amazon, and got mine at eMusic.)  But now there’s a store open at zolajesus.com, where you can buy it, her other records, and a t-shirt that I’m going to pick up for Lili. (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) post comment

Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization [09 Nov 2009|09:32am] warren_ellis Nick Barrucci from Dynamite Comics asked me to do him the favour of posting this. This seems like an entirely worthy charity, well deserving of your investigation: Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization, Inc. announced today that world renowned painter Alex Ross has donated an original piece of classic Catwoman art to Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization, Inc. (S.W.R.O.). The piece was created exclusively for Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization to raise money to help rescue animals. The piece will be auctioned through Ebay at the following URL: eBayISAPI.dll-ViewItem&item=250524615645 . The piece is signed by Alex Ross and measures 10.75 inches wide by 23 inches tall and has never been seen anywhere… Full press release at the link. (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) 1 comment|post comment

T-shirt Of The Week 003: FUCKABLE ZOMBIE [09 Nov 2009|08:44am] warren_ellis TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are. Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes. So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic. Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #003: FUCKABLE ZOMBIE: We also offer a couple of perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself: (And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy) Thank you for your kind attention. (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) post comment

The Streets Of San Diablo [09 Nov 2009|08:39am] act_i_vate [tallguywrites] News. I'm restarting The Streets Of San Diablo on Activate.com. The strip will return at the end of November and appear every Monday. http://act-i-vate.com/index I've been so busy with my Psychiatric Tales book project that I had to put San Diablo on hiatus. However, now that book is almost finished, I can get back to my freakish Western/superhero/horror mash up tale. Yippee! Psychiatric Tales will be out from Blank Slate in February. You can see chapters here: http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/ Here's a frame from the first new San Diablo page. post comment

[08 Nov 2009|11:56pm] act_i_vate [iconotrast] A week & a half of book touring and an unexpected job caused me to miss last weeks posting. Sorry. Here’s page 53 of “Adventures of The Floating Elephant!” At Activatecomix.com! See it right here: http://activatecomix.com/23-1-53.comic Read “Adventures of the Floating Elephant” from the start: http://activatecomix.com/23-1-1.comic Thanks for reading!

Where do ideas come from? [07 Nov 2009|10:59am] netizenron I’ve never asked nor been asked the question, but having read dozens of comments and accounts of professional authors it appears to be a common one among fans and would be writers. Where do your ideas come from? Everywhere. Seems like a simple answer doesn’t it? It’s a rather simple question to be honest. Writers in particular, humans in general, innately learn from experience. Take mundane moments in life and apply them to future events. There is an old adage “write what you know” that is driven into every creative writing student. Taken literally, this is crap. If we wrote only what we knew there wouldn’t be Harry Potter, there wouldn’t be monsters, there wouldn’t be super-heroes, and there wouldn’t be Stephen King. Well I’m sure there would be Stephen King, but he’d be a literary hack who writes riveting stories about the human condition in small New England towns, without all the gore, horror and intrigue. “Write what you know” isn’t meant to be taken literally. What it means and how it should be taught to mean is to take your experience, your encounters, and apply them to atypical scenarios. Let’s say you live in a small community and close enough to work that you can walk each day. This is routine, it’s mundane. On that walk each day you meet the postman. He gives you a smile and you watch him walk up and down walk ways and driveways. One particular house you notice he always gets out a milkbone for the dog. Knowing the long history of dogs and postmen you assume its a bribe to prevent an attacked. A writer on the other hand suspects conspiracy. An unnatural interaction between the postman and dog can only mean bad things are afoot. This has germinated an idea. The postman was trying to save himself from a dog bite, but in your reality as a writer, the postman lime-lights as a burglar and has cleverly canvased his route for houses with dogs who he has trained to welcome him and not see him as a threat. From there you could write any numerous outcomes in any various genres. See it wasn’t necessary to be the postman or to be a thief to build the idea for a story about body snatching — oh, is that where the story went — only thing necessary was the seed, the fragment of experience that you could build upon. If such a little element as a man giving a dog a bone can generate a story of post-apocalyptic alien domination, then any little bit of your experience if you let it can phantasmagorically blossom into a story that even Stephen King would be envious of. Your story ideas come from everywhere. From anything you encounter:  news, books, dreams, television, co-workers or a chance encounter with an alien postman. Your job, your challenge,  is to take that experience and put it somewhere it doesn’t belong. Where it can cause the most effect and stir a chain of events turning the mundane into something adventurous. Are you ready for adventure? Are you ready to write? Originally posted at Ron Earl 1 comment|post comment

Dogs Are Destroying The Planet And Killing Us All [06 Nov 2009|04:04pm] warren_ellis I told you. I told you all. The Dog is the Enemy of the Human. But you wouldn’t believe me. Now look. …dogs have a greater eco-footprint than gas-guzzling SUVs. See? SEE? (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) 10 comments|post comment

Links for 2009-11-05 [06 Nov 2009|02:00pm] warren_ellis Oldest American artefact unearthed : Nature News "The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago" (tags:history ) Brazil crime wars: Spiderman’s story of drugs and Jesus in Rio’s slums | World news | The Guardian ""If you add them all up I control 15 communities," boasted Spiderman as his shiny 4×4 hurtled through the narrow backstreets of western Rio de Janeiro. Behind the wheel was Juarez Mendes da Silva, 28, one of the Brazilian capital's most wanted drug lords, better known by the nickname Spiderman. The words "Jesus" and "Christ" were tattooed on to his forearms in black. In the boot his pet dog, Bloodsucker, shared space with an M-16 assault rifle." (tags:crime drugs pol ) Detroit: Urban Laboratory and the New American Frontier | Newgeography.com Not a lot new for Detroit watchers, but I love the phrase therein: "urban prairie" (tags:cities ) New podcast: Shift Run Stop ? Roo Reynolds Roo says: "I?ve been working with Leila Johnston on a new thing. It?s a fortnightly podcast called Shift Run Stop and as she explains it?s ?an ambient soundscape sort of production, an undulation of chatter and noise, ideas, games and food?." (tags:podcasts ) re-inhabited circle-k?s - mammoth // building nothing out of something "photographer Paho Mann documents the diverse array of stores that re-inhabit the empty shells abandoned by the national corporation Circle-K; the current lives of Circle-K's include "a dry cleaners, a couple of florist shops, a tattoo parlor, a tuxedo rental place, several mini-marts and dollar stores, and Bridgett?s Last Laugh Karaoke and Fish Fry." " (tags:architecture culture ) The Psychedelic Review Archives 1963-1971 "MAPS has posted PDF scans of The Psychedelic Review Archives 1963-1971." (tags:magazine history drugs ) (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) post comment

After these messages … [06 Nov 2009|03:32pm] netizenron If you’ve been following me during my crush through the NaNoWriMo experience, you might have noticed I didn’t update yesterday. I know that makes me a bad NaNoWriMo writer. Horrible for stalling out at 10k+ words. Yesterday was a hectic day. Usually I have time in the work day to wind down, take a brake, let my brain cool down and relax. I’m a programmer and web developer, most days entail working out coding issues or update previous code. Yesterday I hit a loop in logic and just kept at it until I was mentally drained. On top of that, I haven’t had the best of sleep lately. After work, all I wanted to do was crash. And that’s what I did after dinner and vegging with some TiVo’d Venture Brothers. Today I’m rested. I could knock out a couple thousand words or so, but — yes, always a but — today I had lunch with a college buddy and tonight I’m going to celebrate my grandfather’s 94th birthday. With alcohol to compensate for all the yelling he’s going to do because we’re celebrating how old he’s gotten. I’m of two camps here when it comes to birthdays. You can hold them in reverence, especially upon hitting certain milestones, which after a certain age is any that you manage to live through. Or you can just go with the flow and ignore them because somewhere in the middle it doesn’t really matter if you’ve lived 24 or 42 years. Getting belligerently upset really shouldn’t fall into play. I’m a celebrate and hold them in reverence kind of guy. If I live to 94, I’m going to dance with my artificial body parts like it’s 1999. I hope he doesn’t tear us all new assholes, but he probably will. The man is remarkably healthy for his age. He worked as a lawyer until 85 and didn’t stop playing tennis until he was about 89. I can’t even run up the stairs without getting winded. Tomorrow I should be back to the grind. Goal is to have 20k by Monday. Two fifths of the way. Then I’ll decide whether to step back to 2k a day or keep on rolling the fast track. Thanks for the support, and if you want, you can wish my old codger of  grandfather a happy birthday. Silently. You don’t want him to find out. Originally posted at Ron Earl post comment

Comic Critique reviews THE ACT-I-VATE PRIMER [06 Nov 2009|02:42pm] act_i_vate [man_size] http://www.comiccritique.com/cgi-bin/greview.pl?id=643 Reviewed by Adam McGovern Excerpts: "The Act-i-vate Primer is Exhibit A in the hopeful internet-era maxim that if you hook them, they will buy. The Act-i-vate collective has done more than anyone to confirm webcomics as an artform, and this collection of priceless print-only stories from their free online series will with any justice go far to establishing it as an industry too." "The range of interests, level of storytelling and sheer wealth of style are staggering. I haven’t been this anxious to curl up with a colorful collection of the medium’s possibilities since The Great Comic Book Heroes in nineteen-seventy-never-mind. The golden age of comics gets its restart here." post comment

The Haunting Of Kristamas Klousch [06 Nov 2009|09:41am] warren_ellis The self-portrait photographer/"caricature artist" Kristamas Klousch finally has a website up for her wonderful, ghostly and irreal work. (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) post comment

Bonus UNDERWIRE: Alternate Ending for October's Strip [06 Nov 2009|10:59am] act_i_vate [jenniferhayden] Hey Friends! Through the miracle of ACT-I-VATE, UNDERWIRE just became interactive. Well, sort of. Based on all your incisive comments, I just edited my last story: http://act-i-vate.com/64-14-13.comic You can read both versions of the story all the way through at: http://act-i-vate.com/64-14-1.comic The other stories are here: http://act-i-vate.com/64-1.comic Thanks again for all your help--and I"ll see you all tonight at the New York debut of The ACT-I-VATE Experience, kicking off what looks like a great weekend at Brooklyn's King Con! And thank the Goddess for New York's love of comics! --Jennifer

24/Seven: Mighty King Con comes to Brooklyn [06 Nov 2009|09:48am] act_i_vate [man_size] http://24sevenbrooklyn.blogspot.com/2009/10/mighty-king-con-comes-to-brooklyn.html post comment

The End is Here arrived [06 Nov 2009|09:41am] act_i_vate [pinguin_auf_ice] [ music | Fireside_Beautyful Island, Ugly Natives ] This first full weekend in November 09 is all about the Brooklyn KingCon http://www.kingconbrooklyn.com/. I will be there at my table (When you come in, just the first table to your right!) to show and sell some stuff. Well, every friend of the penguins will be able to buy a nice print version of "The End is Here". It was a long and stony way for this book - not only for me but also for my wife. Without her, all of this would never happened. Therefore, my thanks go first and foremost to her. But also to everybody who read the online version and supported me with comments and suggestions. And to get you interested in the print version after you all read it online (I'm sure you did - the stats suggest me so!): I redrew some pages and panels, added some stuff here and there, and took some stuff out here and there. Also: I will moderate this panel: FROM EUROPE TO BROOKLYN: SUNDAY 1PM-1:50PM Even though there are lots of cartoonists living in Brooklyn, it doesn't necessarily mean they are all born in the US. Join European artists Thomas Baehr (Germany), Simon Fraser (Scotland), Vasilis Lolos (Greece), and Amir Moye (Switzerland) as they talk about their motives and experiences living and working in a different market on this side of the Atlantic. For a full schedule of the panels for the con click here: http://www.kingconbrooklyn.com/panels See you there! Thomas post comment

CBR reviews THE ACT-I-VATE PRIMER [06 Nov 2009|02:10am] act_i_vate [man_size] http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=user_review&id=1540 post comment

WIRED UK: Column 08 [05 Nov 2009|07:01pm] warren_ellis In which I make a case for Paul Morley as national treasure, champion of music journalism and the oldest digital pioneer in newspapers. And also I make a pitch for a TV job. And a statue: I think we can all agree that I should have been given The South Bank Show after Melvyn Bragg retired from it. If nothing else, it is way past time that the serious arts media gave coverage to those elements of the Japanese film industry that produce such inventive, beautifully designed and thematically muscular works as The Octopus Invades the Vagina, The Fish That Has is Crunched And The Wound is Received [sic] and The Eel and Loach to Attack in Lasciviousness are Insane [sic]. You don’t really want to search those terms from work. Which is why one requires the piercing artistic gaze of a South Bank Show to discover and present such items for the engaged viewer’s consideration. Frankly, I’m the only real choice to replace Bragg when he retires… (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) post comment

Strangers And Gypsies [05 Nov 2009|04:26pm] warren_ellis There’s something powerfully weird about this beautiful photoset by Marta Lamovsek, not least in this image, where the model really does look like an alien landed in eastern Europe. (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) 3 comments|post comment

[05 Nov 2009|04:39pm] stereotypist well onra - the anthem 19 comments|post comment

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