You know I love the internet
The way that folks get so upset
And since I've rarely much to do
I'll spend whole days just to construe
The most inflammatory screed
To trickle through your browser's feed
And launch you from unthinking rage
In foolish flame war to engage
But though I see you have replied
To some quick and cruel aside
That I posted in your forum
Not concerned much with decorum
I'm afraid I must confess
I have not yet its words assessed
I'm sure it's wise and sharp indeed
But it's too long; I didn't read

Perhaps you tried a light approach
Expressed mere hint of your reproach
If so, I'm sad I have to tell thee
You have failed to repel me
Or did you trip that trap at all
of SHOUTING LETTERS CAPITAL
You know it makes you look the moron
The message board will surely pour on
Gasoline for such a blaze
The whole community gone crazed
Revealing how thin their facade's been
Until some dimwit pulls a Godwin
Then you'll have to lock the thread
And all because of what you said
Those mighty words you thought had whipped 'em
But it was long, and so I skipped 'em

I'm guessing it fulfills a need
This message board you think you lead
Whose moderation I exceed
And every function I impede
(Spurred by boredom, not by greed
So nothing personal, agreed?)
Each time I post it plants more seeds
Your tended garden choked by weeds
A bit more time and I'll succeed
To bring the whole thing down with speed
And so it's time for you to plead
Effectively, you will concede
In fact, you'll beg me to recede
Your final post will almost bleed
Constructed short enough, I'd heed...
But no: Too long; I didn't read

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For consideration: "Too long, didn't read / You think you're paid by the word? / Haiku does the trick"

I made that deadline, I’ll have you to know. Nearly drove myself bananas doing it, and ultimately rewrote 14,000 words of a 35,000-word project, in addition to the other changes. Now, of course, the weight is lifted and I’ve been going nuts catching up on all the little things that I let slide while my days were otherwise occupied.

Since Friday I’ve done laundry, cleaned house, seen a movie, gone grocery shopping, written some important correspondence, arranged several more appearances, two more radio/podcast interviews, answered a whole lot of email that had been sitting around in ye old in-box, and gone to lunch with a couple of friends (followed by some much-needed retail therapy). In short, I’m still playing catch-up, a bit.

I’m still writing on Hellbent too, though I doubled back and reorganized/removed some words, leaving me with a net total of only a few hundred — not enough to document, in my opinion. I’ll wait until I have at least a thousand to report. Less that that feels like the waste of a good graphic.

Tonight I’ll sit around with it and noodle. But not right now. Right now, my secret weakness is coming on TV (America’s Funniest Videos yes I know shaddup shaddup shaddup) and I’m going to grab a glass of wine and indulge … with a notepad beside me, in case I figure out exactly how to pitch my next Clockwork Century project. Hey, sometimes I find puppy videos and clips of pinata-whackers gone awry to be inspiring.

Most 'funny' websites go through phases when they're incredibly funny, phases when they're not really that funny at all. And most of the time, of course, they're... ok. Not the funniest site in the world, nor particularly unfunny. Just... ok.

But criggo has been solidly in the first category above the past few days, with images such as:

A paradox


Unfortunate choice of words


Management opportunities!


Nice Camera


I don?t think that?s what they meant.


What?s on TV tonight?

• Scientists turn stem cells into pork
  "Call it pork in a petri dish – a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon."
  (tags:food sci future transmet? )
• Recession Special: NASA cuts space shuttle price
  "…As for the space shuttle main engines, those are now free. NASA advertised them for $400,000 to $800,000 each in December 2024, but no one expressed interest. So now the engines are available, along with other shuttle artifacts, for the cost of transportation and handling. Assembly will be required, however."
  (tags:space )
• Text service resumes 6 months after Xinjiang riots
  "Text messaging services restarted with some restrictions Sunday for cell phone users in far western China, more than six months after deadly ethnic rioting prompted the government to shut them down."
  (tags:pol comms war )
• Diamond Oceans Possible on Uranus, Neptune : Discovery News
  "Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics."
  (tags:space utterly+insane goddamn )

Henry, son of writer/scholar Jess Nevins, is not impressed by your pagan ways:

(Ariana comments: "I knew offering toddler t-shirts was a good idea.")

Driving home this evening, I caught the last ten minutes of the BBC Radio 4 programme Americana, during which Kevin Connolly discussed the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and - marvellously - played a selection of questions recorded by a Chicago teacher of his third grade class (8 year olds), the questions they would have liked to ask of Dr King.

While some of the questions were those that any adult might have asked ("Did you think the I Have A Dream speech would have such an effect?", or "What part of the speech do you think got people listening most?"), the questions that actually touched me were the questions that - to me - only a child would ask, in part because only a child wouldn't be overawed.

Questions about such as:
- how old were you when you made your first speech, and what was it about?
- how much did you practice the I Have A Dream speech?
- what did you do straight away after you made the speech?

and, most gloriously of all:

- were you very nervous before making the speech?

Coming & Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed. A Kickstarter-powered book project by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell:

Meaghan and Melissa (or, "we") met because of the internet and writing, and writing about sex (and blogging about writing about sex). Almost since then, we’ve been talking about how we need to do a book like this: a collection of stories (and photographs) from the messy, awkward, hilarious, painful, and ultimately true side of sex.

As part of this project, all of the money we raise together will go towards producing the book and to paying its contributors. The more we bring in, the more we can put out — a prettier book, bigger take-home for our writers and photographers, and fancier packages for all those who pledge.

We want to produce this book because we want to read it; it’s something we’ve been looking for for a long time and haven’t found yet. Compelling writing that doesn’t skip over the interesting parts, writing that is willing to go there, to be brave and to dwell in it, the way few published authors have….

You'll probably be relieved to know that, for today's post, I only got about halfway through a piece about two guys trying to sell exercise bikes that encourage progress through the application of digitally-optimized oral sex, before abandoning it as entirely too disgusting.

It?s not easy to kill an immortal being, but I?m well-trained and well-equipped. Sometimes, they?re hard to find, but they tell me this one will be easy. In the park. Old blue coat. Approach from behind.

Protocol requires that we identify first. ?Sir, I regret to inform you??

He turns. ?Que??

?I?m with??

?Was? Ma??

?Sir, I??

?Chto??

There?s tortured confusion in his eyes. Lost, alone, three thousand years jumbled up in a brain that had failed along the way.

?I?m with Time. We wait for no man.?

His mouth tries to work out more words:

?Save? me??

I fire.

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For consideration: "If I had just a little time, I could speak seven languages. I could walk on water."

• Counter-X > Comics >> Vulcan
  Site containing scans of 60s/early 70s British comics serials: The Steel Claw, Robot Archie, The Trigan Empire etc. Lovely idea.
  (tags:comics )
• The Third & The Seventh on Vimeo
  "A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects
  are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal…"
  (tags:architecture video )

A friend of mine who works in the post-industrial design space told me once of a meeting he was called to with a terrestrial network television broadcaster. He does lots of interesting work with lots of interesting people, in a range of digital and postdigital fields. But he was really kind of antsy about this meeting. He said to me: "Television? Broadcasting? That’s, like aerials and shit. Pylons and towers. Huge fucking chunks of rusting metal." The strong implication was that he felt he was being drafted into a meeting about manual farming machinery. Having an iPhone meant that he really shouldn’t have to know about things like oxen and ploughshares.

All this was in pursuit of a conversation about television, specifically British terrestrial tv and "common culture" (which is ten million people watching DOCTOR WHO and talking about it the next day, put reductively), and why I want to write some. Why, in essence, I want to traffic with the likes of great rusting broadcast towers.

And I said to him, "I want to do some television before it, as we know it now, goes away. If only just to try it and feel what it’s like."

(Which is, I’ll allow, like taking a writing holiday in Portmeiron because Noel Coward wrote there, or working on a Smith-Corona because it has mythic resonance. But, you know, it might be instructive to sit in Dennis Potter’s chair for a while. Just as I once sat at a desk Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote at.)

But here’s a thing about the rust of broadcasting. Something Russell Davies, who works in what he calls the post-digital space, said a while back:

We have broken your business, now we want your machines.

What Russell and his crew at Really Interesting Group have done is wrangle deals with newspaper printers. Whose business, in an emergent post-industrial age, is certainly a bit broken. Huge fucking machines designed only to print newspapers, in a time when newspaper publishers are printing fewer newspapers. RIG set up Newspaper Club, that allows people to print their own short-run newspapers using these big lonely machines that are not running the volume they used to but still need to pay for themselves.

Sometimes, I look up at these rusting aerials and towers, in a time when TV comes to an increasing number of people through a ground cable or a phone line, and wonder how long it’ll be until that business breaks completely — and, more importantly, how long until someone comes for the machines and makes them a deal.

Just a leetle bit busy. Broadcasting is on low power for the weekend.

You can send me tips, information, interesting stuff you’re doing or dirty pictures at my public dump email address, warrenellis [at] gmail dot com. I check it once every day or two.

Have a new photo by Ellen Rogers:

New Yorkers with a taste for the deeply weird and gorgeous and ridiculous, you owe it to yourself to go see Hausu playing at the IFC Center this week. Actually, y’know what? Correction– you owe it to ME to go, since I live thousands of miles away and won’t be able to.

Comrades, we are talking about something unprecedented: a high-end screening of an actual print of what was long considered one of the most legendary horror bootlegs in existence. As far as I know, this fantastical film has been nigh-impossible for Westerners to view any other way. Until now.

Kudos to comics/film guru Ben Catmull for turning me onto this raging brilliant nutterfest.

Shot in 1977 by experimental Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi (and based on a story written by his 7 year old daughter), Hausu is one of the most spectacularly, riotously demented movies ever committed to celluloid. There’s plenty I could tell you about it (and there are tons of rabid, frothing film geek reviews online if you want to go exploring) but my instinct tells me it might be best to go unprepared, as I did, and just give yourself over to being repeatedly tit-slapped by the technicolor Japanese KRAY ZAY. My virgin viewing experience was similar to seeing The Forbidden Zone or Eraserhead or The Billy Nayer Show for the first time– mindblowing, seminal, beautiful, and fucked up as all hell. Seifuku Koo Koo!

Come to think of it, there are a lot of wonderful things happening in New York imminently:  Throne of Blood (a completley different flavor of Japanese cinematic genius) is showing at Film Forum, BAM is celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King on Tuesday, and tomorrow there’s the Knickerbocker Orchestra’s WFC performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, with Neil Gaiman narrating. Plus, two ultra high-concept Coilhouse Issue 05 photo shoots that have been in the planning stages months are finally happening. We’ll divulge more about those shortly.

Meanwhile, seriously, DO NOT miss seeing Hausu in the theater. GO, GO, GO. If my fervent urging hasn’t yet convinced you jaded bastards that this screening is not to be missed, click below for several more clips and stills.

Read the rest of “House” aka “Hausu” aka “HAAAAAUUGHWOOOOSSS”

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Post tags: Animation, Art, Crackpot Visionary, Diasporrhea, Events, Faboo, Film, Horror, Japan, Madness, Surreal

It’s a little sad, how the advent of CGI rendered much of the animatronics industry obsolete just when cinematic robotics were starting to get so intricate, so lifelike. But the technology retains its place, and under certain circumstances, there’s still a definite advantage to using animatronics instead of CGI or stop motion. Some truly badass robotic FX artists have continued to find plenty of work. Take British wunderkind John Nolan, for instance:

Squeee! Although a relative newcomer, Nolan’s already worked on everything from Hellboy to Where the Wild Things to Doctor Who to Harry Potter. You have to check out his entire show reel. Incredible stuff.

Via DJ Dead Billy, cheers!

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Post tags: Animation, Film, Flora & Fauna, Geekdom, Puppetry, Technology, Uncanny Valley