I follow a lot of photographers on Instagram, but Corinne Shiavone’s work is something I’m always glad to see there.  She’s on Instagram as perpetualmobile.

Jan Chipchase is in Dire Dawa, in Ethiopia, and got these shots of houses being cladded with hammered-down food-aid tins.

 

Jan notes:

I do love a bit of speculative architecture:

 

Click through for more and bigger.

There is something faintly disturbing about this device.

A new short film by Timo Arnall, tying into a piece by his BERG comrade Mr Jones of Wales:

[ http://player.vimeo.com/video/36239715?title=0

It’s like watching a child learn.  Imagine it as, perhaps, the infant days of a young machine intelligence.  This is what it could look like.  This is how it might see.

(I’m not big on Singularitarianism and the future of strong artificial intelligence.  But this does make you think, and wonder.)

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Indonesian man arrested for kicking woman he thought was a ghost

Reuters: “A Kashmiri protester throws a “kangri” or Kashmiri traditional firepot towards Indian police during a protest in Srinagar January 21, 2012.â€

Wikipedia: “Small earthen pots filled with combustibles were used as early thermal weapons during the classical and medieval periods. Containers made at first from clay, later from cast iron, known as ‘carcasses’, were launched by a siege engine, filled with pitch, Greek fire or other incendiary mixtures. These fire pots could cause great damage to besieged cities with largely wooden construction… By the mid-17th century, fire pots had largely been replaced by shells filled with explosives, which may be seen as the direct descendants of military fire pots.”

And also: “A kanger; also known as kangri or kangar or kangir) is an Indian pot filled with hot embers used by Kashmiris beneath their traditional clothing to keep the chill at bay, which is also regarded as a work of art.[3] It is normally kept inside the phiren (Overcoat type garment), the Kashmiri cloak, or inside a blanket. If a person is wearing a jacket, it may be used as a hand-warmer. It is about 6 inches (150 mm) in diameter and reaches a temperature of about 150 °F (66 °C)… Regular use of the kanger can cause skin cancer.”

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Timeless from KS12 on Vimeo.

 

Polis:

Velocity applied to every traveller.  Every pedestrian given escape-pod momentum and jettisoned clear of shantytown. In someone’s conception.  I look at this and see a launchpad for all the feared criminals of Comuna 13 to speed up into all the nice places where the quality live.  Saves having to nick a car. 

You remember South Ossetia?  Declared independence from Georgia in 1990 in the chaotic hangover from the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Got the shit blasted out of it a couple of times since then.  After the last time, in 2008, all kinds of people promised to put money and resources into South Ossetia, even though (I think) Georgia still doesn’t recognise it as a state.

So let’s see how that’s worked out.

The railway line out of Tskhinvali looks good, right?

The housing’s in fine condition.

And a rotting tank turret that no bugger’s bothered to move in three or four years makes an excellent piece of public art.

More at the link. 

I already knew this – he told me, a few years back – but it still baffles and fascinates me.  From a long and interesting interview with The Paris Review:

Partly, it fascinates because it’s alien to how I’ve worked for the last fifteen or twenty years.  In comics, we’re working in serial form and very rarely have the luxury of finishing the entire manuscript before it begins publication.  So one has to have a structure before the writing begins, because we can’t go back and tweak something in chapter 1 due to having had some story-changing bright idea in chapter 10, because chapter 1 probably saw print seven months ago and you’re still wanting the thing to hang together as a coherent whole in a collection.  Which is a terrible thing, really, but endemic to the commercial form.  Even FREAKANGELS, which I began with no real long-term plan at all, had a structure roughed out for the first 144 pages or so.  But even the bunch of notes and lists I had for FREAKANGELS at the start turns out to be more than Bill has when he sits down to write a novel.  When he began SPOOK COUNTRY, he had nothing more than a single interesting image in his head. 

It’s a horrifying, intimidating way to work, and I want to try it one day.

Deb Chachra just pointed me at her photos from the Diefenbunker:

It’s now a museum, with a website you can visit.  I love the retrotech stylings, as you can imagine, but the signage also fascinates me.  From this perspective, it’s the set dressing for a post-atomic comedy of manners.  Lots of people quietly and politely drinking their reconstituted Mil-Ko under an admonishing banner, trying to suppress the fallout-era social faux pas of just screaming and screaming.

“Creating an electrified torture rack for my penis!â€

Or, to paraphrase William Gibson, the penis finds its own uses for things.  That’s a consumer-grade TENS machine, the sort of thing you can pick up on Amazon for forty quid.

Oh.  Yeah.  You might not want to click through on it.  Should have mentioned that earlier. 

Did you ever read CROOKED LITTLE VEIN?

(previously on Conan! What Is Best In Life?)

I can’t get enough of this stuff, personally.  Presumably some deep-seated fetish from having grown up during the Cold War and hearing the nuclear attack warning siren being tested every six months.

Designed by Bryan Oknayansky.  More designs in a similar vein at suckerpunchdaily.

Why log this? The old comics muscle twitches: the one that’s constantly trying to detect interesting new fashion thinking that can be interpolated into memorable character designs.

Tomorrow, there’s to be an announcement concerning the Higgs Boson.  The viXra log has an amusing little take on the implications should the “God Particle†turn up in an awkward range:

There is, for me, some black humour in LHC physicists spotting the Higgs signature, reading the energy value, and then slowly whispering: “…nobody move.â€

I also find myself wondering what that’d look like.  Lightspeed covers, what, six billion miles a year?  Which is, very roughly, the distance from Pluto to Earth and back again.  Even if The Higgs Doom was triggered off relatively locally, we’d have plenty of time to see it coming.  This wouldn’t be a neat movie-style 2D shockwave.  Space is a volume.  This would be a stellar tsunami rushing towards us from all edges of the visible universe.

Hey.  It’s a Monday.  Sometimes I think about these things on a Monday.

what in the name of god just happened to my eyes and my brain my poor poor brain

someone just @warrenellis ‘d this to me on the twitters and i clicked the link and now i can taste time itself

A Swedish artist that someone pointed me at a few weeks ago.  He has a tumblr, and his work is sold here: you can see more of his stuff at both places.

Strange and gorgeous paintings:

 

A glorious routine by novelist James Ellroy.  And I think he was reining himself in, too. 

Interesting interstitial things happen when a writer devises a character to be, for interviews and the like.  Especially if someone’s been doing it a long time, and has gone through the cycle and, I suspect in Ellroy’s case, gotten back to the point where he hopes someone somewhere is getting the joke.  Listen to how Ellroy speaks, now: more than ever, he’s speaking for tv, and speaking to be transcribed.  A lot of media training under the bridge, there.  And the little wink to the audience, if not his interviewer, is there too. Slowed down, like a big bit of bait being trawled across still water.

A still from "How To / Internet" by Jaakko Pallasvuo, as captured by James Bridle of RIG, who also tells me RIG have a FRSTEE for me.

Post-novel, I find myself still mostly in recovery: one of those disturbing “not as young as you used to be†moments.  Compounding this concern was the recent worry, introduced into the household by the arrival of two bottles of Shackleton whisky, that I was having blackouts and going internet-shopping for alcohol and not remembering a thing about it.  Thankfully, today, the fine people at Whyte & Mackay contacted me to ask if I’d received the bottles and the note.  There was no note.  I’ve been enduring days of people telling me I drink until I don’t remember ordering more drink.

This is a meticulous recreation of the whisky Shackleton took on his ill-fated trip to the South Pole: there’s a website (has an age-check gate) that explains it all.  The original whisky was a Glen Mhor, now a silent still.  I opened a Glen Mhor of some forty years’ age the other month, and it was frankly astonishing.  Very much looking forward to this younger, yet historic bottling.

(Whyte & Mackay just told me in email that there’s a scavenger hunt in the UK for smartphone users.)

The important takeaway from all this is: I am not having blackouts.  Or, at least, if I am, I can’t operate my credit card during them.

Now look at these: a photographer from Seoul using the name “komeda†on Instagram releases a new shot every day or so:

Something sadder, here’s Brian Wood talking about how Dark Horse Comics were essentially menaced into upping the prices on their digital comics.

And here’s Bruce Sterling at his most Bill-Hicksesque.  Back later.