Regulars will have noticed two things. One, I haven’t been around much, and two, comments are gone.

Second one first. Comments here have, by and large, been a bit dull for a while. Some nice surprises sometimes, and some smart people, but also too often falling into the “I don’t really want this on my website” bucket. This isn’t going to fall into the slightly barbed mea culpa about switching comments off that the act seems to usually entail — no discussion of the “blogs are conversations” bullshit. Whenever I kill comments, I invariably decide to try again several months or a year or two later, and I’m sure that’ll happen again. But, right now, it’s time for them to go. (That time being usually indicated by my having to go into a comments thread, ask people to read what I actually wrote instead of what they think I wrote, and then explain the whole thing again in simpler language, very slowly and loudly, as if trying to direct a foreign tourist to the train station.)

The other thing: Lili’s cat’s dying, and I’m currently the only one in the house in a position to check on him regularly. Therefore I don’t have a lot of focus right now. I don’t think he’s got more than a couple of days in him, poor little bugger. We saved his life, sixteen years back, but I always thought that the damage done to him might have an effect on his life expectancy, and now he’s slowly winding down. I call him Lili’s cat because they became best friends when she became old enough to eat solid food. He’s always liked his food, and Lili went from “that small loud thing I avoid” to “that small loud thing who — hey, she’s offering me food. I like food. This small loud thing isn’t so bad.” And they’ve been inseparable ever since. So, yeah, the next week isn’t going to be fun, and there may not be a lot happening here, not least because I’m having to get up hourly to see to him, which I’m about to do right now. G’night.

MASSIVELY RAMIFIED

If anybody does say they have all the answers, they’re either full of shit, delusional or Warren Ellis.

– comics writer Jason Aaron

When creators who matter to me start really thinking about the in-app or cliented digital comics form of Comixology or graphic.ly, and start doing, say, 10 or 12 page comics (with whatever notational stuff shoved in the back that they feel like adding) and releasing them for 99 US cents every two weeks or so, I’m going to get interested really fast. And so will you. Particularly when these services perfect series-specific subscriptions that sideload the books automagically into your client locker or push an alert to your device.

That could even loosen up to, say, buying a subscription to a graphic novel, and having the discrete chapters pushing to you as they’re completed, on an entirely irregular schedule that builds up to something of not fewer pages than you signed on for, within an acceptable plus-or-minus of a previously announced timeframe.

(Small print, it say “if the artist gets the Mongolian Terror Trout Flu the whole thing could end up two months late, we’ll keep you posted with alerts and send you twitpics of the artist’s pustules”)

(random thought ends)

A Highlight and Note from Warren Ellis(Twitter:warrenellis)

Above six hundred and fifty, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, Aurora Borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear.

Note:the ghost space of early radio.

Shared on September 16th, 2010 from Kindle

C

byTom McCarthy

See this item on Amazon.com

This is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull regularly 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.

Previously, this was a weekly gag. Summer was a bugger, and made us shift to monthly, and autumn is only looking slightly better. So we’re shifting to fortnightly. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, at the top and the middle of the month, 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 the sentiment I wake up with on most mornings: T-Shirt Of The Fortnight #002: LIFE:

This will go very nicely with our LOVE t-shirt, offered again.

We also now offer, at the same link, a great many perennial "legacy" items, which will be added to on a largely random basis. For instance:

Thank you for your kind attention.

Yeah, everyone’s sick of dubstep now.  That fucking wubwub sound on every bloody record.  ADVENTURES IN DUBSTEP AND BEYOND, an excellent compilation curated by music journalist Joe Muggs, reminds you why you liked dubstep in the first place.  And if you think you don’t like dubstep? This might just convince you.

Graphic.ly is a digital comics store. The desktop edition is built on Adobe Air. It also has iPad/iPhone apps. On installing and first launch, it’s a little memory-greedy on my laptop — I imagine that if I did a restart and then launched it, it’d even out just fine. Haven’t given it a good roadtest yet, but the install was so smooth, and the first look at the thing so promising, that I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

EDITED TO ADD: Guess they haven’t got the payment system worked out properly yet. Payment does not lead to comic appearing in collection. This can be annoying. It can take a while for it to occur to you to quit the app entirely and relaunch it, whereupon you find the comic you bought in your collection. Not hugely impressive user experience.

(Click through to pick up the 14-piece album as a USD $10 download or CD from Bandcamp. Also on iTunes. Meredith Yayanos plays violin and theremin on several tracks)

• Bus-Tops: London, screens and the Olympics | booktwo.org
  "we?re putting screens on the top of bus stops across London, and we?re going to let people play with them."
  (tags:design art cities )

I don’t think poor Zo has stopped screaming yet.

Good morning, sinners. This is warren ellis dot com.

Received in email from Chris Staros of Top Shelf, publishers of some of the finer comics out there:

*******************************************************
THE 2010 TOP SHELF MASSIVE $3 SALE
*******************************************************

For the next ten days — thru Friday September 24th — Top Shelf is having a
giant $3 graphic novel web sale. When you visit the site, you’ll find over 100
graphic novels and comics on sale — with over 70 titles marked down to just $3
& $1!

To go directly to the list of items on sale at the Top Shelf website, just click

here:

http://www.topshelfcomix.com/specialdeals

But here are a few sample sale items:

– Slashed Prices: Lost Girls, Alec: The Years Have Pants, and more!
– Slashed Prices: Essex County, Moving Pictures, BB Wolf, and more!
– Slashed Prices: Owly Hardcovers and Plushy, Undeleted Scenes, and more!
– Slashed Prices: Dodgem Logic, The Surrogates Owner’s Manual, and more!
– Slashed Prices: The 120 Days of Simon, Far Arden, The Ticking, and more!

– $3 Titles: Voice of the Fire, The Surrogates (Vols 1 & 2), and more!
– $3 Titles: Sulk (Vols 1, 2, & 3), I Am Going To Be Small, and more!
– $3 Titles: SuperF*ckers #1-#4, Lower Regions, Please Release, and more!
– $3 Titles: Regards from Serbia, Comic Book Artist, Delayed Replays, and more!

– $1 Titles: The Surrogates #1-#5, Black Ghost Apple Factory, Dang!, and more!
– $1 Titles:The Man Who Loved Breasts, Comic Diorama, 24×2, and more!
– $1 Titles:Jack’s Luck Runs Out, Tales of the Great Unspoken, and more!

Please note that Top Shelf accepts PayPal (as well as Visa, MasterCard, Amex,
and Discover — all secure), and that this sale is good for retailers as well
(and comic book shops will get their wholesale discount on top of these sale
prices).

http://www.topshelfcomix.com/specialdeals

Your friend thru comics,

Chris Staros
Top Shelf Productions

“Rather,” Procedure Club. As heard by me 5 minutes ago on the Casbah podcast. Reminds me of something, and it’s driving me mad.

Procedure Club “Rather” from Lizzie Boredom on Vimeo.

• Wall Street’s super traders come under fire
  "Regulators are poised to curb so-called high frequency trading that uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze equity markets and trigger trades at lightning speed."
  (tags:money crime tech GMbook )

KIRLIAN PANIC

• Walking in Midtown, without using avenues : The New Yorker
  "The goal: to walk from the Empire State Building, on West Thirty-third Street, to Rockefeller Center, on West Forty-eighth, without ever setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenue?to knife through tall buildings in a single bound, or at least in stepwise forays…"
  (tags:cities GMbook )

Perhaps apposite to today’s earlier mutterings, Ben Terrett:

I don’t think blogging is as good as it used to be. It’s lost a little magic.

I know this is down to rise (and ease of use) of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and all them but I miss blogging. Proper old fashioned blogging, like this and this and this.

And it’s not like the saga of Nice Pete hasn’t been brilliant/horrifying thus far. But I think this is a new peak in Onstad’s use of language.

Found on my message board without attribution, offered without comment:

“L_A_N is, both in size and ambition, a door into another world, alien and lovely. You need one.”

— Warren Ellis

It is a pleasantly foggy, drifting sound, appropriate for a warm early-autumn day with misty rain. The whole album is a free download.

Funny thing I’ve noticed lately. I get fewer trackbacks than I did when this site had fewer readers. I presume this speaks to the supposed “death of blogging,” and that linking has moved off into Twitter from blogs and sites. Makes it harder to judge when “attention philanthropy” is working, though. Aside from the occasional note telling me that I’ve killed someone’s website.

Attention philanthropy — I have a feeling that term was coined by Alex Steffen — is a big part of what I do here. It’s one part that to one part research material of various kinds to one part muttering about work, because it pays the bills and keeps the site going. But it’s always hard to tell if the agalmic, anti-obscurity attention economy stuff is working. There’s a music site claiming that Zola Jesus didn’t hit big until I started talking about Nika, which I know isn’t true. But in times past I know I’ve helped comics companies get by.

Which brings me around to online comics retailer Khepri.com, whom Heidi Mac reported on over at comicsbeat.com yesterday. They’ve been hit by the economy like everyone else, and another year of flat numbers will see an end to them. What struck a chord, I think, was Heidi’s identification of them as a retailer specifically supporting those creators working in, in Heidi’s quote, the mode of “Warren Ellis style self determination.”

And, christ, just like that, I feel like I’ve got a weight on my shoulders. Did I really convince so many people that there was a career to be had in commercial creator-owned cross-genre work (and occasionally doing some work-for-hire on your own terms)?

No, of course I didn’t. It was blatantly obvious to anyone with half a brain and one creative bone in their body, and I was saying nothing that hadn’t been said a million times before during the Eighties and early Nineties. I possibly concretised some thinking for some people in my generation and the one immediately below, but no more than that. And God knows nothing I said in 2000 applies to comics in 2010.

On the other hand: hell, I’m so separated from the business these days that I don’t really know how bad things have gotten out there. It was conversations with people like Bryan Lee O’Malley that led me to open the Engine comics community, years ago, and now Mal has the best-selling graphic novels in America (because of the film, sure, but you’re not going to tell me it’s not deserved).

We do comics stuff on my current message board, Whitechapel (set up as online-community support for my webcomic FREAKANGELS), but Whitechapel tends to reflect my interests, and so we tend to talk a lot more about music and books and other stuff and not so much about, say, Brandon Graham’s KING CITY (though we do that too).

And, in the meantime, I see people drifting back to the convention circuit or, more and more, see people talking about wanting to get out of the convention circuit but not knowing where their sales and exposure will come from if they do. Even though sales and exposure are getting harder and harder to find at comics conventions as they morph into pop culture shows. And, really, is sitting at a table trying to hawk your wares like you’re at a rural craft fare with your handmade wicker bedpans really the model to aspire to?

The truth is that working the attention economy is hard in 2010 because there is so much noise and so many things vying for your attention. I actually feel a glimmer of pride because I’ve gotten my Google Reader down to under 600 unread items for the first time in six months. I think of it as the Manfred Macx problems, from Charlie Stross’ ACCELERANDO – Macx had to absorb a megabyte of text and a few gigs of AV a day just to stay current. This is why the web is still rammed with curatorial sites, from BoingBoing on down. The difference between them and this site is simply that this is my research store, accessible from anywhere with an internet connection (which, for me, is anywhere aside from rural Kent, apparently, where I think I have to sacrifice a hare to get bendwidth).

And now I’m out of Red Bull, here at the pub, and have to buy more and then go home and start work. Consider this not fully baked: a pile of things for later consideration.