my lj friends

If you’ve been as busy as I have over the last couple of days, you too will not have seen the video for Brokencyde’s "Freaxxx." Ariana just made me watch it. I will think of a suitable punishment for that later.

As she says, it really kicks off into lunacy around the 1.50 mark. But I would like you to watch the whole thing. Because it really is one of those "fall of Western culture" moments. It’s a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture.

It is, however, going to be one of those great Litmus tests. If you meet someone who likes this? Even if they profess to like it in an "ironic," knowing, media-aware kind of way? Then they’re a turd with a haircut.

(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.)

The trees are naked and I love it. That's right I'm an arbo-perv. But really it's good to be back in winter. I'm also pleased that Napolitano will supposedly join Obama's cabinet. Except that her successor will probably suck. All politics aside, Arizona has a passion for governors that suck. There was the quasi-racist, and then there was the bank fraud guy. Any bets on what's next?

(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.)

(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.)

• 09:12 thinks that a modern computer should take less than 15 minutes to boot. Fucking Windows. #
• 10:07 @twodolla where in NE? #
• 10:54 @twodolla we're @ 13th and Adams #

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* George W Bush intends to leave office with class by eroding protection for endangered species and, in keeping with the themes of his presidency, basically handing the keys to the country to the oil companies.

* A third of China’s mainland is having the topsoil torn off it by wind and water erosion, to the tune of an incredible 4.5 billion tons of dirt per annum. Basically, Chinese population keeps growing, and the Chinese ability to grow crops keeps dropping. You know what a country with no topsoil looks like? Iceland. China’s around 3.6 million square miles, isn’t it? So inagine a 1.2 million-square-mile Iceland sawn off a country that’s got to feed one point four billion people a day. And when you’re situated where China is, you’re not going to be looking to the neighbours for help.

* I mentioned the new Ebola thing earlier. Which confounds any hope of a vaccine for some while.

* It’s a source of some amusement that the piratical state of Puntland is actually the most stable area in Somalia.

(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.)

• Dude, somehow I got Peter Frampton stuck in my head. Please make it stop.
• I finally got the Themes tab on Gmail about five minutes ago. Took them long enough.
• What is it with eastbound Sconies¹ on I-94 in the morning actually driving the speed limit like a bunch of old ladies?
• Why why why do IT departments insist on taking what should be a 2-minute request coupled to 2 minutes of actual work and make me fill out a web form that takes 45 fucking minutes?

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1. Sconies are techncially referred to as "Wisconsinites."

It’s 4pm and I’m barely showing signs of sentient life. I spent the first couple of hours of the day pretty much resembling a pseudopod with an overgrown beard stuck on the front. If pseudopods have a front. Anyway. The point is, I can’t be bothered to sort, today, so I’m just going to empty out Feed Demon and see what’s happening…

Yeah. Okay. Five minutes later, I think I’ve stopped laughing at The Love Song To Zo, which I can’t quite bring myself to quote. I know the guy’s first language isn’t English, but I suspect that the sheer mentalism behind lines like "makes the hormones to neigh psalms" would survive a broader vocabulary.

Siege found this yesterday evening: "I was horrified. It’s a baby cockfight - just like somebody put two animals up to fight each other."

Incidentally, this was the first face I saw today, in email:

Took me a minute to remember that Mer had said something last night about getting tickets to a GWAR show…

Jamais Cascio was ranting on Twitter the other day about weakass "futurists" using Second Life for presentations and examples. That’d be the Second Life that becomes harder and harder to access and insists on fucking the paying customers it somehow manages to retain. Well, Bruce Sterling notes that Google has shut down its own virtual-world service, Lively, after barely five months in operation. At some point I want to find the time to get my own final thoughts about Second Life down.

What would you like for Christmas? A new species of Ebola turning up in Uganda? No. Well, please yourselves. How about a new species of dolphin instead? Excellent. Throw the tuna out of that net and bring it to me for lunch.

(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.)

• Vast stores of water ice surround Martian equator - space - 20 November 2008 - New Scientist
  "Ice glaciers hundreds of metres deep are lurking just underneath the Martian surface around the planet's mid-latitudes." This is potentially huge, not least for the chemical archaeology that must be trapped in there.
  (tags:sci space )
• It’s confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations - physics-math - 20 November 2008 - New Scientist
  "Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum." I love this.
  (tags:sci weird )
• Live Piracy Map
  "This map shows all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008."
  (tags:crime pol )

(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.)

It’s Friday, and we’re back: and things blow up.

See this? It’s the print collection of the first 24 episodes. Don’t let any shop tell you they can’t get hold of copies. Avatar printed a shitload. Got yours yet?

(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.)

Now that John Anderton can see his world through new eyes, he returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, to prove his innocence. He nabs Agatha, the precog whom he thinks can save him. (It's complicated.)

( Read more... )

John Anderton has found himself implicated by the same perfect system he helped create. In spite of the fact that he's staked his life and reputation on the infallibility of Precrime, he does not give himself up quietly. The rules of Precrime insist that he is most certainly "guilty" of the crime he's accused of, but the rules of human behavior insist that he respond to the accusation the same way everyone does -- by resisting. Anderton believes everyone who is accused by the precogs is guilty, but everyone who is accused by the precogs believes they are innocent. So Anderton, star pupil and "good son" of the Precrime unit, must now do the only thing he can -- run from the law. What he has forgotten in his ruminations on destiny and fate is one of the oldest rules of all, which is that power corrupts and any system of control will ultimately be manipulated by its creators to serve the needs of the powerful.

( Read more... )

I've learned to really love being at home. In fact, I think I'm becoming like the cat. She has no interest in anything past the front door, or anyone she hasn't lived with for years (pretty much anyone but Brian). And more and more, I totally get that. I'm like, yeah, I'm fed up with all that outside shit too.

But I'm not going to turn into a cat-collecting hermit, I swear.

(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.)

* You know, if you’re going to take a sex drug called Power 1 Walnut, you’re pretty much bound to get what you deserve.

* Lithuania operates what appears to be a Museum Of The Classic Soviet Death Camp. "Every visitor has to wear Soviet Russian prisoners cloths and when enters is being humiliated by the staff dressed as Soviet army soldiers. They yell on and almost beat all the visitors, force them to do things, wear gas masks, run distances and many many more things to do."

I kind of want to work there. Y’know, just a summer job.

* Talking of classics: attempting to get high by huffing air freshener is back. On the bright side, it’s not jenkem.

* Organised poaching is back in the British countryside in a big way. I suppose it’s a good sign that they’re doing it for hard currency, as opposed to doing it to stave off starvation.

* "Contradicting nearly two decades of government denials, a congressionally mandated scientific panel has concluded that Gulf War syndrome is real and still afflicts nearly a quarter of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the 1991 conflict."

* Pastor Ted Haggard, famous for losing his shit with Richard Dawkins before sucking cocks while crying and doing meth and then lying about the whole thing and then doing it all again, now claims his "problems" stem from being sexually abused at the age of seven. The idea appears to be that if Pastor Ted — quite happily, by all accounts — can convince everyone that copping the bad touch from some mystery kiddie-fiddler made him gay, a tweaker and a pathological liar, then he can go back to preaching the bullshit and running his church and filling the heads of the credulous with poison. For added hilarity: Pastor Ted’s day job is as an insurance salesman.

* The Kingdom Of Yahweh sect, based in Melbourne, has declared itself above Australian law. Which doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to me. Naturally enough, there are concerns about guns, compounds, nutters, etc etc.

(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.)

Mer’s sitting in with Ragwater Revue Friday night at the Stork Club in the east bay, playing violin and theremin. Go and pay tribute if you’re in the area. And trust me, if you get the chance to hear Mer play, you should take 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.)

• 15:12 has an iPhone with a flat battery and a charger sitting at home on his desk. Argh. #
• 07:11 thinks that Blu-Ray would be more popular if the movies weren't so damned expensive. #

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Amanda Palmer’s new one — video directed by my acquaintance Alex de Campi:

(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.)

I just moved my New Scientist newsfeed out of Bloglines and into Feed Demon so that I can actually bloody read them, and today’s capture is just outstandingly strange, ugly and wonderful. I should just del.icio.us the lot, really, but this is too good to not lump together as a snapshot of What We Learned Today (Or Overnight, Anyway):

I have to say, the NS crew really do have the art of the lede down pat. "Human aerial bombardments might have pushed Neanderthals to extinction, suggests new research." How can you not love that? Studying the bone shapes of Neanderthals and homo saps indicates that humans spent a lot of time doing overhand throws with heavy objects, something apparently beyond Neanderthal capability or conception. The inference is the subject of some doubt, but someone’s got a Neanderthal rib bone with spear damage.

This, too, sometimes gives me pause to think: that homo sapiens has only been without a sibling human species for some 25,000 years, whereas we shared the other with other human species for a period of not less than 160,000 years and possibly some 300,000 years. More time passed with more than one human species than without. And, even stranger to me — we forgot all about our sibling species until discovering and comprehending their bones in the mid-1800s.

And it’s been a hair over 150 years from then to the first test of an interplanetary internet.

A rough draft of the woolly mammoth genome has been extracted. I would love to see a woolly mammoth, and I hope the gene delivery system gets cracked sooner rather than later. The tarsier, it turns out, is still alive. But tarsiers look a bit like someone turned a baby inside out and then rubbed it in the fluff that collects down the back of the sofa, so nobody really cares.

The headline of the day, mind you, is probably still Woman Receives Windpipe Built From Her Stem Cells.

The old idea of using the temperature differential between layers of the ocean to generate power is being revived again, this time by Lockheed Martin of all people: but they’re being outpaced by, believe it or not, the US Army, who’ll have a major military base powered by ocean-thermal by the end of 2011. It seems that they also get the desalinisation of 1.25 million gallons of seawater per day out of the deal, which is also interesting. I imagine all those parts of eastern England that are due to be flooded out in the next ten years can at least be converted into ocean-thermal fields to provide cheap power for those of us on high ground. Fuck you, Great Yarmouth, I have machines to run.

(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.)