| Moon Wiring Club: INFORMATION SERVICES |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|02:09 pm] |
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I love Moon Wiring Club. And not just because I got their new record this weekend, which I am going to play tonight because I’ve been sick and/or unconscious with some weird bug since Friday morning. Oh no. (What if it cured me?) No, I love them because they do things like this, too:
In 1982, Gelographic RadioTelevision co-broadcast a test transmission for the tentative BBC5 channel.
Although the station idents were deemed a massive success, sadly the only known survivors of this viewing were unable to be traced, due to radiation issues. This archive footage has been recently unearthed, and provides a tempting glimpse into what those who watched through the smoked glass were able to see.
The musical accompaniment, acclaimed in some quarters, features on the new Moon Wiring Club album ’Striped Paint for the Last Post’, due ’sometime’ November. Certainly before the feast of Syllabub in any case.
Remember: confusing electronic music is a great British tradition.
(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.) |
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| Links for 2009-11-15 |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|02:00 pm] |
- Help Phoenix Marie
"We are raising funds to get urgently needed medical treatment for our beloved friend, Phoenix Marie. She has been battling a life-threatening progressive heart valve disease since 2006, when she had her first heart failure and near death experience. With no insurance to cover her, Phoenix sold almost all of her valuable belongings and clothing and did eBay sales for half a year in order to see a specialist and receive the tests and costly x-rays needed to diagnose her condition. Her heart disease was a congenital defect (from birth) that was apparently misdiagnosed in childhood as harmless and left unchecked…"
(tags:people )
(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.) |
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| Apple Files Patent On Evil |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|11:23 am] |
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Apple has filed for patent on a technology they call an "enforcement routine," that’ll display ads on pretty much any device with a screen and demand that you view them — or else you don’t get your device back:
Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
(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.) |
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| Yes I’m slacking |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|11:07 am] |
But I’m trying. It’s the weird hours I keep that’s hurting here.
Anyway, today Super Mario Bros Wii comes out and I am waiting for 12 PM so I can ride my bike down to the store and buy my copy. I’m too cool for you; don’t fight it.
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| Links for 2009-11-14 |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|04:00 pm] |
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(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.) |
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| Comments on Go |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|10:08 pm] |
Here are my preliminary thoughts on the Go programming language.
The most interesting feature for me personally is the built-in threading. Aside from its superb support for multi-core, it's just plain a good set of ways of doing networking. The lack of a decent built-in networking library (and generally coordination library) in Python has been a thorn in my side just about forever. In particular the promotion of queues to being one of the few built-in primitives with their own special syntax encourages good threading practice and is clearly warranted. Even such a simple command as 'wait until either the UI thread or the networking thread comes up with something' is a source of ongoing pain in most languages, but is built into Go as a core concept using select.
Go seems to finally get the static typing problem solved. Its := operator is a reasonable middle point between C++'s ludicrous verbosity and ML's excessive magic. Types being structural is also a huge win. There's no end of stupid architectural haggling over what module a base type sits in and who owns it, and the answer 'nowhere' completely gets rid of that problem. It seems to me that there are deep subtle problems with such declarations - for example, how does it statically check that the parameters accepted by methods of a type you're receiving are compatible with what you want to pass them? But maybe I just haven't thought about it enough. It's too bad that Go doesn't currently have generics. I for one won't start any new project in it until it reaches that level of maturity.
Go's lack of exception handling is a real problem, and another thing I'm blocking on to do real development in it. My own preferred method for adding it would be that if you call a function which has multiple return values and you don't handle one of them, it defaults to shorting to the same return of the caller, although some people might complain about that being too much like Java's 'throws'. That said, I've gotten so used to debugging by stack trace that I'd be loathe to not have stack building built into the language in some form, and in fact I've gotten really attached to a tricked out logging tool I wrote which can decorate any object and automatically logs a full stack trace of every assignment which is made to the object and allows you to print them all out at once. But perhaps such trickery is really the domain of highly dynamic languages, and not appropriate for something as low level and performance oriented as Go.
The primitives in Go are quite good. All languages should have special maps and lists built in. I think it actually doesn't go far enough with giving them special status, and should have Python-style special syntax for maps. The curly brackets could be freed up by simply eliminating their current usage and making formatting have syntax. It's more than a little bit absurd that the language designers themselves have a setup where a utility standardizes the formatting of their own code every time they commit, but they still maintain the nominal free-form nature of the language. Really guys, I know you were traumatized by Fortran's original awful enforced formatting, but that was a long time ago and it's time to let go.
That said, the primitives are given too much special status in other ways - they're the only things which have type parameterization, making it impossible to even implement their interfaces yourself, and worse, they're the only things which are call by reference. The call by reference thing worries me a lot. I really, really don't want Go to become the reference/pointer mix hell which C++ has become, but it's already headed in that direction. It really shouldn't matter that much - things which are passed are either an address or a copy, and the reference/pointer distinction really just has to do with what's the default (okay, so typically references don't let you overwrite either, but that's not a fundamental property). I for one strongly prefer the default be an address, and clearly when push comes to shove Go's designers do too, but more important than which way it is is that it should be consistent. Already transitioning to something consistent might require rewriting huge amounts of code, and it's getting worse, so fixing this problem might have to happen soon or never, and I'm afraid that it might already be never.
Go's speed of compilation is very nice, although I'm afraid I view that not so much as a strength of Go but as an awfulness of C++. Why C++ continues to take forever to compile even on machines many orders of magnitude faster than the first ones I ever used it on has long been a mystery to me. I hope the answer is simply that it's a language which wasn't designed with ease of parsing in mind, and has a whole layer of preprocessing on top of it which is horribly abused.
It's interesting that Go is going the garbage-collected route. If such a low-level language as Go can get away with that (and, truth be known, their preferred garbage collector isn't really integrated yet, so it's a little early to call it) then we may never see another non-garbage-collected language ever again.
I despise the use of initial capital letters to specify that something is public. Maybe if I used it for a while I'd learn to not hate it, but for now I hate it. Does chinese even have uppercase?
It's entirely possible that after using Go for a while something else would really start to gnaw at me about it, but it generally has a good smell, so hopefully not.
If you've read this far, you should follow me on Twitter. |
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| Immortals |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|10:18 pm] |
Really, the lists were a way for people to stem off boredom. By trying accomplish all of the list, or in racing friends to finish certain chapters, people had goals. And the goals kept them going. No amount of formal dinners and skydiving parties would replace the thrill of living. But in this age of longevity, no one remembered how to live.
As the fairytales fortold, eternal life, or a life long enough to seem eternal, left very few pleasures. The pleasures that were left were stolen from shorter lives. The joy of watching growth and learning, the excitement of a dance, even the passions of young love, all of those were stolen from the Centurians. And they, in turn, stole them from their great, great grandchildren.
There had been a time when the average life span was only 80 years. Then that number got pushed back by science and medicine. Then the Immortalus treatment had been invented and the number was pushed back to nearly 500 years. A hundred generations went by that way. Then boredom set in. And with the boredom the debates about the morality of the Immortalus treatment. And now, it was outlawed. But the generations of Immortals lived on. And would live to see the lives of their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and down the line for twelve generations. And they were called Progenetors or Immortals. And they were bored.
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|01:04 pm] |
Hot fucking damn! I'm an internationally sold artist. It's little stuff of course, but no matter. In August I sold that mermaid in Finland. Today I found out that this week the fish I forged at the Blacksmith Marathon sold for 100 €, or a hair under $150. It sold the day I came back home. (That's right, I'm home now! Of course it's a little surreal. I was only away for six months, but that's half-a-year, which sounds quite a bit longer.)
For Guy Fawkes day and bonfire night celebrations, I got to help set up professional grade fireworks shows. One of the big ones we set up something like $20,000 worth of fireworks. Another one was hand fired -- which means that where the directions on the fireworks say, "light fuse and retire 25 feet," we actually light the fuse and retire about 25 inches. I'm definitely looking into fireworks opportunities in this area.
The countries I visited in my 194 days abroad: Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, England, Latvia, Sweden, Finland, Italy, France. Obviously I didn't hit them all, and there's more to see and more festivals to attend. They're full of wonderful people who I want to see again. I must have met fifty or sixty new people who I plan on keeping in touch with.
I want to write, I want to forge, I want to be creative. I don't want to get stagnated -- that's my biggest fear. Maybe I'll go downtown and register myself a business account so I can feel like there's forward motion. If I had a workshop/studio space, that would rock. Maybe I'll clean my room.
Someone might say, "Take some time off," but my mind would claw out of my skull if I didn't feel like I was accomplishing something. |
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| Things that sound dirty but aren`t |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|10:56 am] |
Sticker on a vending machine at my client`s site:
"KEEP HANDS OUT OF VENDOR."
(As a vendor, I appreciate this directive.) |
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| Friday 13th November 2009 |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|12:30 am] |
I would really have to work up to living alone, it's clear. Andrew's been
away this week and although it has hardly been a reprise of the great May 2009
ordering-pizza-so-I-wouldn't-have-to-leave-the-house-for-days disaster (I was
pretty sick, OK?) the last couple of days have been fairly bad.
Mum was here Monday and Tuesday nights and that was companionable and
pleasant. On Wednesday around the time she left it was clear to me that I was
starting to get a cold of some kind, which quickly degraded into me losing a
yoga mat while doing errands in the Macquarie Centre — not something people
find unamusing the next day, have you found a yoga mat in here? , and
also, no they hadn't — then heading to the implied yoga class and getting so
dizzy that my hearing dropped away. (Andrew tells me he's had that sensation
before, I tend to have vision rather than auditory problems when dizzy,
normally.)
The trouble with exercise is that clearly you can lay off it if you know
prior to doing it that you're sick, but you don't always know beforehand, and
if you don't you find out with considerable drama. I didn't want to tell the
teacher about it either, because this class is very very careful about my
pregnancy already in a way that I find a bit annoying to deal with. I know that
it's a very weird time for my abdominal muscles, yes, and lying on my stomach
is really uncomfortable, but please let me be the judge of my own upper arm
strength. The weight gain is only about 10% over my starting weight.
Last night I pushed out a major task that, I am not kidding, has been a
couple of years in the making, although I did spend most of that time intending
to get around to it rather than doing things. I had no idea how stressful the
immediate leadup had been frankly until I spent half of last night having my
old style semi-hallucinations about it. (Possibly I had a mild fever.) The
hallucinations are really a particularly annoying unrestful sort of semi-dream
state, where time passes extremely slowly and dream people argue with each
other incoherently. I used to have a night of that with every new job I got. It
tends to stop if I have my eyes open. Keeping them open is a problem.
By the time this morning came around, I was bloody tired, and utterly
socially incoherent. Was that a joke you made there? Or a meta-joke? Would it
be better if I played along, or if I got cranky? I'm especially bad, when
tired, at geek social jokes, which tend to revolve around identifying something
vaguely ambiguous in someone's phrasing, choosing the obviously wrong
interpretation, and making them stand by it.
So, that was 48 hours of my life I could have lived without. Janus has been
making himself a bit scarce: I wouldn't kick my housing either, if it was in
that kind of mood. He has stuck with small rearrangements.
It's not that I get sick more, I think, when Andrew is away, it's that a
small change in my energy levels makes it such a pain to care for myself. And
pregnancy plus illness is not really small, not in the first or third
trimesters.
I was going to take myself to Sculptures By the Sea tomorrow, but with my
increasingly unpleasant reaction to walking around and actual sickness I don't
think I can, sensibly at any rate. It's two trains and a bus in each direction,
and then a slow and hilly walk. (Everyone else in the world who owns a car is
thinking uh huh, that car-free caper is still ludicrous , but actually,
here's a little known pregnancy symptom for you: extreme motion sickness. I get
sick when I drive now. Mum said to ask the obstetricians about it,
and they suggested that not being pregnant would be a good solution.)
I need to get some sun though. Luckily, stone fruits are coming into season,
so I am motivated to head for the shops. And if I sleep well, perhaps to go
into the city and have Spice I Am with Andrew on his way home. Time for a
goodly bit of fire.
Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/diary/2009/November/13/20091113 |
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| perspective |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|10:27 pm] |
*2 weeks ago today: My first house guest (Juno) was here and I had my first truly grounding conversation since starting med school
*1 week ago: I was in transit between NOLA and Boston for a crazy and wonderful weekend fully of wedding and friends
*today: I am knee deep in classes and trying to shove more information into my brain while not letting anything fall out (thought I probably should be trying harder)
*1 week from today: I will take my genetics final, hopefully meaning that I passed my 2nd course of medical school, and will be cramming anatomy
*2 weeks from today: I will be in Los Angeles (& Palm Springs) playing with my little cousins, and will (G!d willing) have completed and passed gross anatomy
*3 weeks from today: Elizabeth comes to visit! Yay! |
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| Conan! What Is Best In Life? |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|05:43 pm] |
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"DAY-GLO HUMAN UDDERS!"
(I feel I must point out that these are really not what are best in life, and that Molly Crabapple should be arrested and probably waterboarded for making me look at this.)
(And also this.)
(Cowgirls. Honestly.)
(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.) |
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| Additions and improvements for Paid Feature |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|02:11 pm] |
We've made some additions and improvements to Notes!
The Notes feature has been added to two action-taking pages:- You can now add a Note directly on the Add a friend page - handy if you'd like to mark down where you met them or another name you know them by!
- On the Ban and unban users page (under Account -> Privacy) you can now add a Note, including to a group of users all banned at the same time (so that next year you won't need to ask yourself "hey, why did I ban these guys?")
Other changes:- When you're viewing your existing Notes they're grayed out; click in a field to activate it to change the text (this page can be found from the header by using Profile -> Manage Notes)
- Changes to editing:
- When you're going to create a new Note but one already exists, you'll get a warning that you're editing an existing Note
- You can now delete a note from the "Edit note" pop-up in the hover menu
- You can now delete notes for multiple selected users on the Manage notes page
- When you change Notes on "Ban|unban users" page, they can be edited and saved with "Save Changes" button
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| Regretsy |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|02:05 pm] |
 "Really? That's interesting. Because to me, this is a $200 necklace of worms fucking." |
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| LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares! |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|01:53 pm] |
Notes augmented
We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!
Product tweaks and bug kill
- In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
- If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
- The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
- If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
- If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
- Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)
New FCK fixes rich text editor!
- We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
- When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
- RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
- An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
- The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers
LiveJournal Cares
We’re pleased to introduce you to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.
In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.
Papered in postcards
A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.
Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!
Photos of the week
We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.
You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! |
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| Links for 2009-11-12 |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|03:00 pm] |
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(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.) |
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| Success! |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|10:28 am] |
I declare a success on the Spiced Apple Wine. I thought it was going to flop when it kept not clarifying (if the drink isn't clear, it usually still has active yeast which can be due to any number of things). The other two alcohols I put in at the same time were clear and bottled back in March and July. This one just stayed cloudy. Well, it finally started to really clarify about a month ago. I bottled it on Monday night. The fun part about bottling is that there is always a little that didn't quite fit in the bottles right. Usually its the dregs, but you can at least get a sense of how it is going to taste. This wine is actually good. It almost tastes like something you'd expect to get out of a bottle with a cork.
I'm excited.
In the other booze-news, the cider and wine are both about what I would expect of them at this stage. I added more sugar to the cider because it was going to be only very lightly alcoholic. I'm hoping that that re-started fermentation there. The maple syrup experiment has nothing interesting to report back yet. I think it will be another month or two on the front, though it is starting to clarify.
Now, I have 2 empty 1 gallon bottles. I'll have to find something interesting to put in them. I don't have my eye on a couple of recipes. Maybe a tropical ginger wine, a sack mead (its supposed to be done in a month) or possibly a porter or stout. So many options, so little time. |
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| Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|02:00 pm] |
EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.
Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!
Thanks ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!
---
On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work. |
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| Life is good |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|11:24 am] |
Just putting it out there. My life is pretty good. I have a decent job, I great partner, a good living situation and enough goals to keep me busy and experimenting all the time.
I have a good life. |
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| HAPPY()SAD |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|10:04 am] |
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I’m not sure how the universe has withstood Rich Stevens (DIESEL SWEETIES) and Ariana Osborne (SHIVERING SANDS, this site, designing various things of mine at Avatar) teaming up to produce a t-shirt, of all things… but this is the result.
Available to order now, ships in 1 - 2 weeks.
(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.) |
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| Simon Reynolds’ NOTES ON THE NOUGHTIES: Beard Rock |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|09:52 am] |
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Simon Reynolds is one of my favourite writers. It’s funny, really: I agree with what he writes maybe half the time, at best, but he says it so fucking well, and in such a way that I always have to think about the subject again.
He’s now doing notes on the decade at the Guardian, beginning with a piece on "beard rock." I was, I admit, hoping for a clue as to why I find Will Oldham so inexplicably creepy, but, you know, it’s a fun piece anyway:
…beardedness is tantamount to a visual rhetoric, almost a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing their music on their faces…
(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.) |
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| SHIVERING SANDS: One Week On |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|09:34 am] |
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So, one week later. Copies of SHIVERING SANDS are now starting to arrive with people — I found this on Kat Foisy’s blog this morning:
(If you want to send me a photo of you posing with SHIVERING SANDS? Email it to my dump address at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com, along with your website address or twitter ID or whatever, and I’ll run it and your link here)
A week since launch of the book. We’ve sold, I believe, a little over four hundred copies. Given that the production of the book involved 1) me culling from seven years of jabbering and sticking it all into a couple of RTF files 2) Ariana flowing all that into a single file and spending a couple months’ worth of spare moments fiddling with it 3) Ariana uploading the thing, ordering a proof and spending an hour checking it over… we were well into any definition of profit by the end of day one.
It is, of course, the long game that pays off. It’s interesting to look at the first week, but it’s not defining.
A persistent criticism of my interest in POD has been that only writers at my level of cultural awareness can make any kind of success out of it. And some of them will now be saying, well, even Warren Ellis can only move 400 copies in the first week of a POD project. But, for one thing, it is about the long game. For everybody. The book doesn’t go away. And, for another, if I’m not aware enough of you to order that POD project — whose fault is that, really? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t born with a book deal in one hand and an exclusive comics contract wrapped around my other flipper. Hell, when I was starting out, there wasn’t even an internet.
SHIVERING SANDS is published through Lulu.
(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.) |
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| Flying to the Dawn |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|11:59 pm] |
The theory was that if she flew fast enough, or is it high enough she thought, that she would be able to see tomorrow. She thought about it longer. Flying faster wouldn't make the day come sooner, but if the sun rose in the north, it stood to reason that if she flew far enough north, she would see the sun before it rose.
Then again, she thought, if I fly high enough, I will be able to see around the curve of the earth.
He buckled the final layer of her flying furs. The jackets were double-lined in down feathers and lamb's wool, just like her boots and pants. Her gloves were layered, one of wool, one of leather with the outer layer holding all of her fingers together like a mitten instead of a glove. Her had was an entire tanned hide with the fur still attached and turned inwards. It still left her ears cold in the higher altitudes. The whole outfit was held on by a wide belt and harness that would snap on to her saddle. Not that she had ever fallen off. But some people weren't as talented.
The great reptilian bird blinked at her as she approached. She held out the treat she always brought. Mammoth flicked out a forked tongue and the treat disappeared from her hand. Shelley smiled. She and Mammoth understood each other. That's why they were the ones going dawn hunting. |
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| Scripts |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|11:02 am] |
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People often ask me what comics scripts look like — or, at least, what my comics scripts look like, as there is no industry standard for comics scriptwriting. I have a few scripts up here on the site, and you’re welcome to download them. I write in OpenOffice and save in RTF. Beginning writers may find it instructive to compare the scripts with the published work.
(Please, don’t ask to be shown other scripts instead. These are the ones I have available. Okay?)
MINISTRY OF SPACE #1.
DESOLATION JONES #1.
DESOLATION JONES #7.
(Yes, JONES will be back one day.)
FELL #1.
(And so will FELL.)
(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.) |
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| You couldn`t wait a week? |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|07:55 am] |
My body has bee trying to get sick for about two months now, and everytime I feel it getting a grip(pe) I ask my cold to give me a little more time. "Please just wait until the tour is over!" and then "Just sit tight until I get back from that week of consulting." This has gone on and on since mid-August, because that is the last time I had spare time on the docket.
This week I`m teaching 5 days in Austin, and yesterday morning I woke up with a giant gland sticking out and making my throat sore. This morning I feel like, well, I have a cold.
Next week I have nothing going on. Next week would have worked better for me.
It`s days like this that I don`t like my job: There`s no such thing as calling out sick.
Perhaps a breakfast taco will help.
[ETA: Breakfast taco helped. This appears to be the kind of cold where one looks/feels like death in the morning, but after a shower and some food, it's all groovy. I like these colds. Didn't even need to take anything, though drjohn may argue that eating a breakfast taco is simply a lighter dose of the prescription "rub some burrito on it."] |
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| TUESDAY MEANS SVU |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|04:54 am] |
Tuesday is law and order svu from 6 am til 1 am the next day on USA. Tuesday is my favorite day of the week.
FUNemployment? 
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| The Lost Army |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|05:03 pm] |
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This, on the other hand, is amazing.
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.
Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.
"We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus," Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News…
(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.) |
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| Meta nonsense |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|06:23 pm] |
The worst part about trying to blog everyday is writing a waste of space entry like this one. The best part is that one is reminded that one’s blog even exists.
I really blame twitter and the instant gratification of saying something short and sweet for my horrendous drop off in blogging over the past 18 months.
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| The Mechanic Speaks |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|11:28 am] |
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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.) |
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| Zola Jesus: Store Open |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|10:11 am] |
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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.) |
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| Saved Whiskers Rescue Organization |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|09:32 am] |
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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.) |
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| T-shirt Of The Week 003: FUCKABLE ZOMBIE |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|08:44 am] |
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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.) |
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| Dragon Age: Origins |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|08:56 am] |
Dragon Age: Origins is a game I've been excited about for more than a year. I loved Baldur's Gate II, and its expansion, and I lost more time to Neverwinter Nights than I ought to admit. So a new single player fantasy RPG by this company, billed as the "spiritual heir to baldur's gate" (spiritual because this new one is their own IP, and not a D&D game - though the mechanics are very similar) got me all giddy with anticipation!
And it's great. I've been having a really good time playing it. It isn't without it's flaws, but the overall experience is good enough that I've been all too happy to overlook the frustrating bugs. The onion AV Club gave it an A though, which I'm not sure I agree with entirely. I wrote a big comment on that AV Club review. And here it is!
The bugs in this game are frustrating.
The two big ones are:
- Quests that don't register their completion can leave you running around an area in frustration after fighting, say, the hordes of bad guys in the Redcliffe castle mission, wondering what small thing you haven't yet done. Only looking on the internet led me to the conclusion that something had gone wrong on their end. Reloaded a save game, fought the battle again, and CLICK - cut scene. Also, it didn't help that while I was trying to figure out what was going on, the aggravating fight scene music kept playing! It's great and cinematic when actually fighting, but while running around in empty areas trying to figure out what to do, it sure adds to the frustration!
- cut scenes sometimes screw up, and you'll go through a cut scene, make one of the games (actually pretty interesting) moral choices, and then suddenly be watching the cut scene again. I chose a different choice the second time, and was then moved forward in the game as though I'd only chosen the first. Later, other characters alternated between acting as though I'd chosen A or B. It sort of took the wind out of that choice. This happened to me in the Redcliffe section, as well.
That said, The game has some very good things in its favour, too:
- the moral choices themselves feel more satisfying. I really like the game's system of having the choices affect the world itself, rather than some arbitrary slider of how good or evil you are. You make a choice, and your companions approve or disapprove, sure, but also you'll find that your future options in the game world have changed, too. It really adds to a sense of immersion.
- The combat's good. Not too simple, but not ridiculously complex either, and the tactics reward the learning curve that comes with understanding how they're interpreted by the game. After playing with the tactic programming for a while, I found my party members acting just how I needed, which was useful for adapting to harder fights and made the combat feel genuinely tactical rather than like a mashfest.
- Some of the characterization is great - Morrigan and Shale are both fun and interesting, and I like the way they fit into the game world, and the major events of the game, rather than just having discreet stories of their own. Some of the characterization is sort of lame, too though. (The voice acting also runs from very very good to characters who seem to change voice actors mid-dialogue, again, in the Redcliffe quest, which led me to have most of my doubts about the game. Maybe the people in charge of the Redcliffe quest
- The skill trees feel well balanced, and it's fun to play as a warrior or mage or rogue (except for some rogue dex issues that they've acknowledged and which are being fixed in an upcoming patch) and for the most part the specializations really give a different feel to your class when you get to that stage. And a couple of the specializations are tied to the game world in a fun way. In a lot of these games, specializations just add a couple generic skills. Extra damage, and such. In this, they add skills that tie into the story sometimes. "Blood magic" being a big one, and that sort of detail really adds to the feel that you're a part of the game.
- The game gets its title from a system where you can choose your "origin" - each of which is a different way to start the game. The origins are a couple hours, before merging with the main storyline, but which will affect the game further down the line, too. Every character has to go to the dawrven city to seek aid, for instance, but that visit has a very different tone if you are a dwarf noble who was falsely accused of killing her brother the heir to the throne and then exiled.
I would give it a B, or a B- (with it moving to an A after a bug patch or two for sure.) A lot of care and love went into the game, and despite the couple frustrating bugs above, I've put in a couple dozen hours since it's release and haven't lost interest yet!
Penny Arcade had a pretty funny comic about how they do downloadable content. There are characters you come across IN-GAME, who describe the DLC for you, and the dialogue options say "downloadable content" right on them, which takes you out of the game a bit. ( I have, of course, downloaded them )
Have you played it? What do you think? |
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