Warren Ellis's Blog, page 2

From myself and Rich Stevens, a new t-shirt for those of you with internet toxicity.  We hope you like it.  Purchase page is over here, at the Doctor Whisky store.

I appear to have killed another laptop.  I seem to beat them to death — and I’m using Lenovos, which are supposed to be road-warrior machines — every year or so.  This one lasted eighteen months before throwing a BSOD and refusing to start Windows, insisting that a patch was preventing the system from… well, doing anything, really.

I’m flying out to LA in a week, and I have three critical jobs to complete before I go.  Waiting until the Lenovo gets fixed – or, more likely, waiting for a new machine to arrive and then mounting the dead laptop’s hard drive as an XD so I can get some files off it — is not an option.

I’m writing this on the Chromebook Pixel I was given, which is a beautiful and highly productivity-oriented machine with a few key omissions by design.  Like, I can’t run Audacity on it.  So, there’ll be no more SPEKTRMODULE podcasts until I get to the X1 Carbon I keep at Undisclosed Rural Location, and I don’t arrive there until February.

I can write like the wind on this thing, though.  A few scripts are going to arrive somewhat odd-looking, because I’m writing in Google Drive without the formatting and macros I have access to in OpenOffice (which is still where I write my scripts, saving in RTF, which Drive also has a few issues with).  But, between Drive, Gmail, Dropbox and Jungle Disk, the only files I don’t have access to right now are decidedly non-critical.  (And I should be able to edit that one critical half-written RTF file on the iPad using Textilus.)

Also, of course, I’m not writing this post in Windows Live Writer like usual, so god knows how it’s going to look.  Not that I write here much any more.  But I wanted to mark the passing of [DEEPBLACK], the Lenovo Ideapad I beat to death in eighteen months.  You served me well, giant creaky plastic black thing.  If only you could have waited until I could more easily afford to replace your stupid dead ass.

If you don’t know what you’re looking at: SPEKTRMODULE is a podcast of haunted, ambient and sleepy music I compile for my own amusement.

A minor one to begin the new year, the new run, and to remind myself how I do this.

Direct mp3 link.  Or press Play on the player.  iTunes link.

@warrenellis / [email protected] / t-shirt? mug?

Please tell other people about this podcast for sleepy people if you like it.  We are #SPEKTRMODULE. 

1. logotone

2.  “IT DOESNT MATTER”� -  Dionysus    (album:  UNEXPECTED PATH)

3.  “FIELDS OF DUST”� -  Echo Planar      (EP:  LOW FREQUENCIES)

4.  “Heaven’s Fire” -  Narita Mamoru     (album:  Music for Butoh Dance Improvisation)

5. "Asteroid Taproom”� – Neil Campbell    (album: Boomerang is Love)

6.  “Annealing Oceans of Venetian Potions pt i” -   Alabaster Falcons  (album: Alabaster Falcons)

7.  “2-Cavatina”� – Larry Lake     (album: CAPAC Musical Portrait QC-1287)

8.  “a rose for the white witch” -    Stag Hare     (album:  Spirit Canoes)

9.  logotone

All previous SPEKTRMODULE podcasts live under this category header or at spkmdl.libsyn.com.

From myself and Rich Stevens, at the Diesel Sweeties store.

Details and tickets (starting at $20) at the event page, which is this link here.  Here’s the description:

In the intimate surroundings of The Farmhouse Barn, writer Warren Ellis sits down for a State Of The Weird, picking over the radioactive bones of 2013 and gathering the stories for a Briefing on the science-fiction condition of 2014. That night, he will be in the middle of writing a novella about futurists and a non-fiction book about the future of cities — except that they’re both also about strange history and Weird Shit — and he’s here to talk about deep time, storytelling and the weather of tomorrow.

It’s intended to be a small, conversational thing.  First Outside World thing of the year, a good time and place to take stock and look ahead.

I’ve spent my entire life within ten miles of this river. I navigate through a full quarter of the country by the direction of this river. I will spend half of 2014 thousands of miles from it, for work and for life. It’s a river that forgives us for that, because for millennia it’s done nothing but spit shabby Englishmen out into the world. River salt in our blood.

Happy Solstice, Merry Xmas and Happy New Year. Stay well and stay alive, and I’ll see you on the other side.

– W

At some point over the weekend, I will be sending out the first post from a new email newsletter system, replacing the old MACHINE VISION newsletter that was sponsored by my previous book publisher.  The onboarding page for ORBITAL OPERATIONS can be found, not unreasonably, at http://orbitaloperations.com/.  Yes, it’s very minimalist.  No need for anything fancier.  (The signup form will also eventually appear in the sidebar here.)

It is likely to pollute your inbox on at least a weekly basis, maybe a little more, depending on what’s going on.  It is likely to contain work updates, random incoherent thoughts and other mental rubbish guaranteed to improve your life and inoculate your brain against alien spores or god I don’t even know what I’m typing right now.  It’s a thing that’s happening.  Subscribe if you think you’d like that.  http://orbitaloperations.com/

To attend, RSVP to [email protected].

We are now revising and making new t-shirts with Diesel Sweeties.  This is one of the new Doctor Whisky t-shirts.  There are two, and they can be viewed in the Diesel Sweeties store at the moment.  The design for the other, a black t with glowing white ink, should appear below.

I believe it is important to display the trappings of one’s hard-earned medical expertise.  Write fine prescriptions.  Operate on people in bars.

(If you scroll down the store page, you’ll also find the glowing SCIENCE GANGSTER shirt.)