warren_ellis

• claytoncubitt:

  A style of art (particularly in cinema or music) characterized by lush dream-state visuals, feminine obliqueness, and an emphasis on warm atmospherics over explicit narrative.

  Cinematic examples: ?Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?, ?The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?

  Music examples: Cocteau Twins, Lush, My Bloody Valentine

• Nanoscale droplets, potentially useful for delivering meds into cancer cells: In this electron micrograph image, the white areas are water droplets; they are contained within darker oil droplets. The droplets are in water. (Credit: Jarrod Hanson/UCLA Bioengineering)

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2052.html

petermball

I was back to the point where speech and swallowing solid food was possibile, but it appears the lurgy has been watching bad horror movies and has this back-from-the-dead thing down pat. Fortunately the fever side of things is still on the getting better side of things, so I could actually do productive things (story submissions, reading of books) from the comfort of my bed.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/imHL8PHRi4I/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-09-08/

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archives.html?m=September&y=2008&d=8

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20080908

robin_d_laws

35 Shots of Rum [France, Claire Denis, *****]Taciturn commuter train driver nudges his devoted daughter from their cozy state of mutual domesticity. Gorgeously moody character piece in which the casual gestures of everyday life are charged with submerged emotion.

Blood Trail [UK, Richard Parry, Documentary, ***½] Over fifteen years as a freelance war photographer, Robert King transforms from naive bumbler to dissolute ace and then to world-weary family man. Shoot-from-the-hip doc parallels its personal arc with changes in journalistic access from Sarajevo to Baghdad.

The above film's first act, featuring its subject's early phase as a gormless dreamer, visibly tested the patience of some audience members, leading to a few walk-outs. The film cuts from war zone sequences to King's recent reflections at his home in Tennessee. This bit includes a hunting scene in which he shoots a deer and follows its titular blood trail through the woods. All you see at this point are red droplets on leaves. This motivated a woman to stand up, audibly mutter, "He's an asshole! What an asshole!", and storm out. I can't help wondering, if it hadn't had hunting in it, she would have had a similar reaction to the starkly graphic human carnage extensively shown later in the film.

All Around Us [Japan, Ryosuke Hashiguchi, ****] The death of a child early in a couple's marriage for a period of many years. Epic timeline meets intimate scale in this moving, delicately drawn family drama.

Real Time [Canada, Randall Cole, ***] Gangster (Randy Quaid) offers heavily indebted young gambler (Jay Baruchel) the chance to do whatever he wants before he kills him, which will happen in seventy-eight minutes. Modest two-hander is all about the interplay between the two leads.

In Real Time the role of Toronto is played by Hamilton, Ontario. Toronto, one has to assume, was busy playing New York or Chicago in a bigger budget movie.

Vacation [Japan, Hajime Kadoi, ****] To qualify for vacation time to honeymoon with his new wife and her young boy, a withdrawn prison guard volunteers to assist at an execution. Quiet drama poses a striking contrast to Hollywood capital punishment movies, both in its eschewal of big acting and issue-oriented speeches, and in the furtive quality of the official procedures it depicts.

Sightings: Jay Baruchel, Clark Johnson, George A. Romero

warren_ellis

The 4am is a selection composed entirely of music sent to me by artists. If you want your music (and, hell, I’ll even take field recordings and spoken-word) to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com. The 4am is mixed down to 128kbps, is of no set length and is released on no set schedule. If you like the 4am, please tell people. The 4am would like to lay down in a darkened room with some whisky now please.

The podcast feed for The 4am is: http://warrenellis.com/?feed=podcast

16: The Outhouse Of Love

Restavrant - “Step Down” (3:41)

Brine & Bastards - “The Leaving Of Liverpool” (3:14)

Wingzar! - “Robot Army” (2:53)

lichtzwang - “the noise” (4:37)

Lanterns On The Lake - “My Shield” (4:33)

Ten Tigers - Superlucky (1:49)

RESTAVRANT, fine purveyors of electrocountrypunk, have an album out at the end of the month on Narnack Records, and apparently have a video available here.

Brine And Bastards are, I swear it says so right here, “a pirate themed punk rock band from New Jersey.” This song is off their album SET SAIL FOR SODOMY. Yes.

The strangeass Balearic Electroclash of Wingzar! was sent via its human representative Margaret Killjoy, who says: “Wingzar, who sings with the help of voice-synthesis, is on a crusade to eradicate humanity for the sake of robots and nature. The attached song is titled “Robot Army” and is the lead track of its CC-licensed EP “What We Lack In Subtlety We Compensate For In Number Crunching”.”

The wonderful lichtzwang bless me with their own favourite of their most recent recordings. I’ve been an admirer of Kaye and David for a year or so, so getting a piece from them is a particular pleasure for me.

As is getting something new from Lanterns On The Lake, who were on the very first 4am broadcast (as well as the fifth, I think).

Ten Tigers’ “Superlucky” came with this note: “My band recorded 3 songs and everyone loves the wrong one. I’ve sent you the one the band likes best. I hope you enjoy it also.”

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/thefword/~3/386145587/change_for_equa

http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2008/09/change_for_equa

We've written about Change for Equality a few times here on The F Word - it's an activist group of the Iranian women's movement which is campaigning for an end to laws that discriminate against women. They are responsible for the One Million Signatures campaign.

Change for Equality has an excellent section called 'face to face', full of posts such as Hoda Aminian's about housework and Parisa Panahi talking about gathering signatures in a shopping mall in Zanjan.

Now they've posted up a massive collection of photos from the second year of the campaign. Many of the photos and descriptions could fit any group in the UK - meetings convened, agendas set, feminist cakes baked (see photo). But mixed in are matter-of-fact entries about arrests, imprisonments and more. The photo gallery is a great celebration of the work the women and men of the campaign have been doing - and the risks they have been taking.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/thefword/~3/386123674/new_review_jane

http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2008/09/new_review_jane

Janes In Love is an oddly bloodless story of friendship, boys and 'art attacks', says Sarah C L

Jane Beckles lives in a fictional small town in the US called Kent Waters, as told in Janes in Love, a graphic novel written by Cecil Castellucci and drawn by Jim Rugg. She attends Buzz Aldrin High, and collects together a group of friends calling themselves The P.L.A.I.N Janes - standing for People Loving Art in Neighbourhoods - and the Janes use public space to create artworks with the aim of improving the world by making it beautiful.

As Jane Beckles (or 'Main Jane') puts it: "Making art is my love letter to the world." These art works have been labelled vandalism by the local authorities, but the Janes themselves call them 'art attacks'.

The P.L.A.I.N. Janes are a 'misfit' gang of four girls (and one gay male), and, like the Spice Girls, the readers will be able to choose which Jane they identify with most. As well as Main Jane, there is the scientific Jayne, with two dads and a crush on a fellow science-geek who she isn't brave enough to even talk to. The sporty Polly Jane isn't intimidated by anything, especially not boys, and 'Theatre Jane' pines 'romantically' after professional actor Rhys (if I was being uncharitable I could call it stalking). James has no identity beyond token gay male, and no love interests either - he even says the line: "Oh for one cute gay boy here at Buzz Aldrin!"

Click here to read on and comment

warren_ellis

For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or tell me about new music or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I’ll check once or twice a day: degaussing [-at-] googlemail com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out. Always interested in new music, new art, new connections, new madness etc.

If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical, the best solution right now would probably be to send to my literary agency in New York City.

Warren Ellis
c/o Lydia Wills
Paradigm
360 Park Avenue South
16th floor
New York
New York 10010

I don’t have a solution for people living closer to me as yet.

Otherwise, it’s probably easiest to find me via my message board Whitechapel. I leave Twitter on most of the day. MySpace got really slow, so I usually only check it once a day, but I can be contacted through it. I’ve given up on Facebook. The next iteration of this site will strip out the social network links: I just don’t get anything out of them any more, and they become just another online chore for me.

leisuregames

Ohh, four new release posts in a row? Bad Leisure Games!

Well, to break up this blogging monotony I bring you another capsule review of after hours gaming, this time for the little gem of a game (no pun intended... well, okay, maybe a little intended): Incan Gold

Angus played this with some of our part-time people a while back and game out of the experience just glowing about this game, and to my shame I just couldn't understand why. Now, having played it myself, I fully intend to inflict this game on as many people as possible as soon as I pick up a copy for myself, because for all its simplicity and randomness, it is really, really fun.

The pretence is simple. Each player is a tomb raider (sorry Lara!) who is venturing into this Incan temple, and collecting up the jewels that their party finds along the way. You do this by drawing a card from the deck, which hopefully will show a number of gems to be split evenly with all players who have said they are venturing further in. That number may only be a couple, or to up to seventeen or so. Any gems left over, or all of them if there are too many players to split them between, get placed on the card. The players then simultaneously reveal whether they are backing out of the temple, or continuing on. Any players backing out get to keep all the gems they have collected on that jaunt so far, and also collect those placed on the cards, splitting them between all leaving players if more than one player exits.

However, once you've left you can't gain for any further spoils. And the catch of staying is that if you draw a 'danger' card then everyone still in the temple may end up losing everything they've collected on that venture, if they have already met the same danger before on that jaunt. Given that there are only so many of the various dangers in the deck you have to judge your chances carefully, depending on how many different dangers have already been played. There are also treasure cards that get put into the deck, one for each jaunt, that only a single player can collect if they leave, but if just one of you does then you get a decent point bonus for it.

There are five such ventures before the game ends, and the player with the most gems is the winner (though you do have gems in denominations of five and ten, so you don't have to keep track of dozens of the little things!)

In essence it is a gambling game, based both on your own judgement of the risks for drawing the next card, and of whether you expect the other players to stay or leave after any given card. Simple, but fiendishly tense if you have a decent stake in that venture, or if you have a treasure on the table and need to balance the risk of trying to collect it, depending on whether the other players are thinking the same or staying for further rewards in gems.

The game itself is great fun, and Angus' showmanship in running the card draws for us was an extra bonus, because there really can be a tension for each card that is turned over. Also, I have had a look over Boardgame Geek for what any detractors of the game have said, and was interested to see that the balance of the scoring system was criticised at one point, which could simply have been fixed by playing with fewer people. Because the game plays for three to eight, more gems will end up on the cards the more players there are, thus lessening the amount that gets claimed automatically by sharing them between the players are you go. If you really don't like it when people claim so much each time then just find a few more players, and if you find the cards holding too much, then you can play with fewer. To me though that makes the game very flexible, (a benefit shared with Guillotine, though for different reasons) and it means that different numbers of players will provide a different experience each time, which I like in a game. With just myself, Angus and Sean our second game was a little dominated by the fact that I managed to bank a large haul, and could still collect a decent allotment in later ventures because gems could easy be split between three, giving them a hard time catching back up, but at the same time drawing that last card before I won could have reversed my fortunes if Sean, the sole player still inside, had draw a card in the upper half of the gem values. I was silently cursing myself for playing safe that turn because of it, right until he was ambushed by more spiders!

The game is also very quick, so you can play several games in a go as we did, or use it as a filler between larger games, and I think very few non-gamers would be put off because it is simple to learn. I certainly expect to see it brought out fairly often from now on, either at home or at Gameforce.

David

http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/?p=1645

It’s been over a month since San Diego and I still haven’t revealed the pognophobia-provoking extent of my mad beard science across those five days. Let’s sort that out and have a quick general catch up, eh?

(Photos are from the lovely Chrissy Williams and fairly lovely Frazer Irving unless otherwise stated.)

Anyway - this is how I looked on Wednesday night at the con. I’m pictured in front of a bearded pig, who was a worrying spit for me. Looking like a pig was a little better than the usual comparison, which was basically a variety of serial killers and rapists.

Anyway - from that, to Thursday’s look which was…

Trimmed efficient writer look. I look like the sort of guy who you’d trust entirely to look over a C-list superhero franchise or similar. Or a Geography teacher. Which are fairly similar looks. Trustworthy, yah?

This changed on Friday…

Where a big ol’ biker tasche plus white suit is a great looking for sex with men look which I actually kinda liked.

Here’s a better look at the sides, thanks to Gonzopunk…

. There’s also a lot of pictures of me flicking the Vs at Jamie, which you have to assume was a coded message to tell him to fuck right off.

Anyway - this lead to Saturday…

Where I like to thin it’s a faux-trucker look, but I’m kind of still digging into the sex-with-men archetype. Worryingly, I liked this one even more than yesterdays and can imagine me growing it back. There’s not enough handlebar tasches in comics, I think. Also, note the look in the eyes, which states clearly that I may have been at the con too long.

Here’s it in action, courtesy of the lovely Jenn, who I highly enjoyed bullying Kevin with:

(And, yes, inevitably, there was a period between this and the next stage where I looked like Hitler.)

I return. Chrissy described it feeling as she was having an affair.

So endeth the year of the beard. I suspect some facial hair will return at some point, but only when I’m trying to pretend to be a grown up and trying to argue people should pay me more, as it adds between five and twenty years to my face depending on its extremities.

Finally, on the pictures of yours truly front: Charlie Chu’s photographic hobby continues to turn Nova with him doing a set of photos of a load of his friends. I think the Hope Larson and Bryan O’Malley portraits are particularly splendid. Even Jamie scrubs up okay.

This is, I suspect what people think I think I look like. So - er - yes.

Anyway. San Diego. In short: was incredibly lovely.

What else has happened? Well, I’ve been in London in three months and things are starting to settle in a little. I worked myself to death in the first month, and earned quite a lot of money - fear is the best motivator. I earned very little in the second month, due to San Diego. And last month was… well, I dunno. Seemed okay. The work I’m picking up as a journalist has changed subtly - being in London, thus available to do things on short notice, I’ve picked up a lot of that. I’m doing less for PCG, but I’ve somehow become the go-to man for US magazines trying to do big features on short deadlines. I’ve done a second long feature for OXM on Rare and am about to go off and do one for PCG:US tomorrow. And I’m picking up a fair chunk of work from the UK Official XBox mag, which is a complete change of pace, and agreeable.

Over in comics, things are quite fun too. 1959 came out to a generally highly favourable bunch of reviews, with is satisfying. My Avatar thing progresses apace - I handed in the first draft for the series Bible, which seems to have gone down well. A few tweaks and I’ll be onto writing that, planning to get the first six-issue arc done for Christmas. A new project has come to light too - I’m doing a story for the next STARCRAFT: FRONTLINES for Tokyopop. Which will be interesting, because it’s the first time I’ve written for the digest-manga format. Randomly - I believe that description of my story included in the above link is from the back of the first trade. I’ll say that it’s a paraphrasing of the initial story idea I pitched, and there’s been a lot of changes since then. While starring Kel Morians, it’s not set on Antiga Prime, for example.

The second issue of my Warhammer series has been solicited. It looks like this…

And the solicits reads:

With the beleaguered Empire army assailed by the verminous horde of the Clan Skyre, Greatsword Frohlich strikes out to secure the object that the Skaven desire from the Mansion of Necromancer Rudolph Brecht. While the security of the Old World trembles precariously, the dead rise and bodies fall!

ONLY WAR, etc. I’m just doing the final tweaks of the third issue right now, and hopefully will wrap up the series towards the end of next week.

Obviously Phonogram continues apace. If you actually desperately want to get ahead on series 2 - or, in fact, just want to have a nose at the work - Jamie’s got a page at the comics art exhibit that starts at Harrods from this week. Us at Harrods seems funny enough, but look at the list of other original art being exhibited…

Watchmen,” “The Killing Joke,” “Gentleman Jim,” “Tamara Drewe,” “Breakfast After Noon,” “Petra Etcetera,” “Charleys War,” “Commando,” “From Hell,” “Captain Britain,” “All Star Superman,” “Jack Staff,” “V For Vendetta,” “Jackie,” “Face Ache,” “Nellyphant,” “The Filth,” “Books Of Magic,” “Phonogram” “Tank Girl,” “Slaine” and much more, as well as the first “Judge Dredd” page from 2000AD #2 and early “Dennis The Menace” and “Oor Wullie.”

One of these things is not like the other. And that Phonogram is mixed in with my two primary influences - Watchmen and Oor Willie - is about as good as it gets.