thoughtsunclean

Home internet is down, possibly for some hours. Posting this via Blackberry. Talk amongst yourselves.

(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.)

Ten pictures of places that were either directly part of movies or that reminded me of scenes from movies. To make it an even ten, I've included one TV show.



You can click on the pictures for larger versions if you like to.

Kain is the best except when he is in the middle of Jump and I group heal and then he returns down to 100HP and then the boss decides to counter

ಠ_ಠ

( cut for spoilers. this story is killing me (so are the bosses) )

• 09:30 I want to read: Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel - bit.ly/6pmhN0 #
• 14:53 Just wrote a review of Dragon Age: Origins (360), which I've played for 66 hours. I gave it 5/5 stars. bit.ly/6I00RO #
• 15:07 New Alice in Wonderland picture out today! ow.ly/Trjd #
• 16:37 RT @geekgirldiva: Sign that women mags aren't ready to accept women are knowledgable about tech: bit.ly/83JTEc #VFTweetHearts #
• 16:41 Our dog Jazz and @amarajo & @Shisumo 's dog Cannon playing in the snow. We've gotten two new inches since noon today. ow.ly/i/hSx #
• 18:50 has too much Dragon Age: Origins and too little time. raptr.com/Cherith #

Thanks to the magic fortune telling machine in the Twilight Zone.

Mah STUFF

"Vessel," by the phenomenal Grouper, from a recent split EP (with Roy Montgomery). Grouper’s DRAGGING A DEAD DEER UP A HILL was one of my favourite records of 2008, and this EP has basically made my night.

(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 discovered Scott Tuma’s work a few years ago, with a record called THE RIVER. He’s usually filed under "Americana," but I find this reductive.

This is a piece from a collaboration with Mike Weis called TARADIDDLE, just because it’s what I’ve got to hand right now, but I find it preserves what’s important about Scott Tuma. His work is powerfully strange and estranging: it smacks of mutated ground, poisoned water, rust and death. The first track off 2008’s NOT FOR NOBODY is actually kind of harrowing, in the way that recent Elegi and Svarte Greine records have been — the sound of someone in extremis in an unforgiving environment. But I seem to have misplaced that. And TARADIDDLE is a fine record. So, from it, I play you "On Cox."

(mp3 provided for review purposes only, dies in seven days, contact me at warrenellis [at] gmail.com if you need it removed)

(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.)

So, because I obviously can never be too busy, I've signed up for the au_bigbang as both an author and artist. Decided to try and actually write something more in the AU Wonderland I created for my spook_me challenge. Wonderland and Vampires, fun stuff. I've succeeded at NaNo before, so 15,000 words in a few months shouldn't be horrible to do.

---
New Years Eve was nice and quiet at home with friends. We watched the end of Romeo and Juliet (love Baz Luhrmann), played some New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii and rang in the New Year with sparkling apple juice and champagne.

New Years Day, Jodie and I spent pretty much all day on the couch watching the Degrassi marathon on Teen Nick while making jewelry for her to take home. If I recall correctly, we spent a fair portion of last New Years Day watching the same show, but a later season, and with more people in the house. Later Matt and I joined up with duendegrrl for dinner at Fritz' - the place that delivers your food by minature train (I love it, Matt doesn't) and then kakita_shisumo met up with the three of us so we could settle in and watch Sherlock Holmes. I loved it, and would like to see it again soon.

Saturday we watched the final episode of Doctor Who with David Tennant as Ten. Overall, the last two episodes weren't that great with the exception of the small moments with Ten and Wilf. And while the ending seemed to drag on, when he visited Joan's granddaughter at the book signing, I pretty much lost it. So sad that he's gone.

Sunday I think I spent most of the day playing Dragon Age. I may or may not have spent several hours on a playthrough just so I could get the the infamous foursome sequence in The Pearl. Sadly disappointing that there's no achievement for that. I also started a City Elf character so I could see that origin - so sad and angsty.

Monday I stayed home because this weather we're having is a pain in the ass. We've still got several inches of snow on the ground, they're not plowing our street, and it's mostly ice by now. Not to mention the single digit temperature. And then, Matt got some weird stomach virus, so it was good I was home to take him into the doctor. Seriously, I know something is wrong when he's been sick twice this winter and I haven't - I haven't even gotten anything from him. It means I'm doing the right thing by sleeping in a different room and drowning myself in vitamins to make up for my crap immune system, but still.

• First Earth-like planet spotted outside solar system likely a volcanic wasteland
  "The rocky planet CoRoT-7 b is, however, a forbidding place. If its orbit is not almost perfectly circular, then the planet might be undergoing continuous, fierce volcanic eruptions…"
  (tags:space )
• Neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light
  "Neuroscientists at MIT have developed a powerful new class of tools to reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light. When targeted to specific neurons, these tools could potentially lead to new treatments for the abnormal brain activity associated with disorders such as chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury, and Parkinson's disease."
  (tags:sci med neuro )
• Oloshino > Top Shelf 2.0
  short online comic by Whitechapel regulars
  (tags:webcomics )

(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.)

Darenzia's Daily Tweets

( Tweets under cut )

Visit Darenzia at Darenzia.net and MyFetishLife.net! Tweets automatically shipped by LoudTwitter.

Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, which is where you can read a shitload of Marvel comics for between five and ten Yanqui dollars a month, is sorting their inventory by creator.

Which means there’s a Warren Ellis page on Marvel Digital.

A lot of it is, of course, appalling shit that I was hoping might disappear forever. But, on the other hand, you can spend ten bucks on joining for one month and read all of NEXTWAVE and all of my THUNDERBOLTS run (which was quite funny in places, and apparently my having the Green Goblin give monologues while naked was somewhat influential on the development of the Marvel universe or something)…

(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.)

What’s that? Cold? Snow? Ice? Not where Meredith Yayanos is living. She’s down in New Zealand, and the weather is apparently fine.

This is warren ellis dot com and I want to go back to bed please.

(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.)

There, finished the dang comic. I am tired and still grouchy. Here are some more pictures of my redhead roommate.

( a cat named tree )

Today I dug out all my Western movies, on a whim (well, not entirely a whim, but close enough), and watched Once Upon A Time In The West, A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More while working on stuff. The sheer amount of squinting was intense. And hey, at some point in the past two years, I guess I bought a three-DVD set of random Lee Van Cleef movies and forgot about it, so when I found them again today it was like getting a present. They're going to be cheesy as hell, I bet, but I'll enjoy watching them.

I haven't felt much like commenting on things lately, and I'm being slow with email again (as usual), but rest assured that I still think all you guys are swell.

Fish Tank     HD480p 40MB   HD720p 101MB
US trailer for the second feature film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road) that won the Jury Prize this year in Cannes. It's a coming-of-age, social drama that tells the story of a volatile 15-year-old (Katie Jarvis), who is always in trouble and who has become excluded from school and ostracized by her friends. One hot summer's day her mother (Kierston Wareing) brings home a mysterious stranger called Connor (Michael Fassbender) who promises to change everything and bring love into all their lives.

A Film with Me in It     HD480p 37MB   HD720p 92MB
(Very) dark comedy from Ireland in which a struggling actor (Mark Doherty) is having a bad day. He's just been through the ordeal of yet another fruitless audition for a bit part in a movie. With his long-suffering girlfriend about to walk out and his landlord ready to evict him he's only got his best mate (Dylan Moran) and their joint ambition of writing a career-breaking film to sustain him. Life's not easy, but things are about to get worse, much worse, and then someone dies and things get really bad.

Chloe     9 MB    4min Clip 33MB
Trailer from France for this relationship drama about a successful doctor (Julianne Moore) who suspects her handsome husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her. To silence or answer her suspicions once and for all she hires an irresistible and alluring young woman, Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), to put his fidelity to the test. Directed by Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Adoration, Where the Truth Lies).
This is a remake of a French movie named Nathalie... that starred Fanny Ardant, Gérard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Béart, and judging by the four minute clip, a pretty faithful one (though reviews indicate that there are differences). But Seyfried certainly has a different appeal than Béart. So far I haven't found a good reason why the remake was really necessary.

Our Family Wedding     17 MB
Loud comedy in which chaos ensues when a young, African-American medical resident (Lance Gross) proposes marriage to his Latina girlfriend (America Ferrera), who happens to be pregnant with his child, and both families begin to argue over wedding plans. Their two overbearing fathers (Forest Whitaker, Carlos Mencia) must put aside their differences to plan the wedding in less than two weeks.
We probably all have seen the same movie before with different ethnic stereotypes involved.

The Warlords - Tau ming chong     HD480p 41MB   HD720p 103MB
US trailer for this violent action drama from China that will have a very late theatrical release in April. It is set in 19th century China and tells the heroic tale of three blood brothers (Jet Li, Andy Lau, Takeshi Kaneshiro) and their struggle in the midst of war and political upheaval. It is based on "The Assassination of Ma," a Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) story about the killing of general Ma Xinyi.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I     HD480p 29MB   HD720p 62MB   HD1080p 134MB
Hi-def quicktime versions of the previously posted 50 second teaser (plus intro) ripped from the Half-Blood Prince DVD.

• 01:43 @robinyang Better Off Ted is a great show that too many people are missing. #
• 01:44 Up way too late for my own good, so I'm getting some news ready for @GamingAngels that'll go up in the morning. #
• 12:54 RT @Scarimonious: Last Night on Earth Gingerbread House: tr.im/Jwh0 completely edible zombies and chainsaws! (THIS IS AMAZING!) #
• 17:50 I unlocked 2 Steam achievements on Torchlight! raptr.com/Cherith #

Thanks to the magic fortune telling machine in the Twilight Zone.

DO ANYTHING was mostly written in a Moleskine reporter’s notepad with a propelling pencil. The page reproduced below — cranked up in GIMP to make it visible, if not legible — appears to date from late May 2009. It’s written in block caps because I needed to be able to copy-type from it, and as we know from earlier posts, my handwriting is shitty.

Pretty much every page of DO ANYTHING in this notebook looks like this:

If you’ve read DO ANYTHING, you know a lot of it is pretty densely layered with connections. The column was written in a very specific way to maximise the information. It always, always started out as longhand, early in the day. The longhand was always about the forward thrust of the column — the column meanders a lot, but it doesn’t wander, it’s constantly following a channel. As I go, I’m signposting things I need to check later, or need to remember to tie in.

Later, I sit down and copy-type the thing into Notepad, with a browser open, because I’m fact-checking as I go. The longhand draft is all mental, and that includes working in information from memory. Since I often can’t remember what I did yesterday, it needs to be checked.

I’d write the longhand version in intense two-hour stretches, and usually had way too much for a single column. After 003, in fact, I just kept writing without thinking about column breaks, and found those breaks later after the copy-typing.

Once I’d typed the column up, the real draft started. Because I’d then spend an hour plugging names from the column into Google, looking for more connections, as well as following my signposts, and layering that stuff into the piece. The Notepad draft after an hour or so on Google was the actual first draft, and that’s what’d get pasted into OpenOffice to get edited and cleaned up.

Really, an incredibly complicated and time-devouring process for a column no-one read. But it was fun, and it taught me things.

(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.)