Through the Megatonne Marble

Great Success

2011-12-29T15:28:00.003Z

Christmas went well, I thought. Went quickly, of course, but went well. The previous post was done in a state of panic--the war gong had sounded and the time for physical shopping was upon me, and from my extensive virtual shopping effort certain things had not yet arrived that were meant to have arrived...the potential for Total Christmas Failure was still very real. I don't want to explore the heinous chain of events that would have unfolded from that. That Other Self is out there now, right in the thick of it, and good luck to him.

Everything arrived in good time in the end, and I was able to pick up some cool stuff in town. Stocking fillers, supplimental gifts, gewgaws and baubles. We had the decorations up on the 23rd, which is a new record (we're usually busy right up until about 1am on what is technically Christmas morning, and then we get the decorations up and collapse exhausted on the sofa to watch Christmas Vacation). Christmas Eve was spent wrapping presents and boiling up a tasty ham (still have some left in the fridge, five days later, to be fried up for a sandwich in about ten minutes.) Christmas Day went by in a blur as usual...Boxing Day went much the same way.

It wasn't until the 27th, which I now call Neil's Day Of Peace, that I got to play around with any of my new stuff. My main present this year was a rockin' new weight bench, which will allow me to more perfectly BLAST various MUSCLE GROUPS and so on. Took about two hours to build it--the initial glance at the instructions broke my mind, and I had to be talked down from the upstairs bedroom where I was sat against the door sobbing quietly, whispering "no, no, no...". After building it and populating it with the seven stone of assorted barbell weights I had gathering dust in the junk room I gave everything a solid go. Bench presses first, then the various species of curl and crunch that it facilitated. Two days later I'm still in pain--turns out that the last eight months of workouts with the cross trainer and free weights made me a tad overconfident. Should have gone on the cross trainer first for a while to warm everything up, yes, like everything and everybody says. Well, lesson learned, and at least the newly-affected muscle groups have been very clearly identified through the medium of dull proprioceptic agony.

The Fear

2011-12-20T18:02:00.000Z

Heading into town soon, into the maw.

It is the best of traditions, this Christmas death-grapple. The month must be December, the date must be greater than the 19th and less than the 25th. None of the same desperate energy on the 25th--the fight is already lost. You launch yourself into town and you do battle for objects of desire. It fires the blood, returns us all to our warlike roots, reminds us that it is truly every man for himself out there and everything else is just grease on the Great Reamer.

Meanwhile you are forced to think, think, think...grasp at inspiration from anywhere...I've searched my dreams and consulted the I Ching for ideas. Apparently the superior person examines the nature of things and keeps each in its proper place--so I should look for an organising tool of some sort, a shelving unit? I'd say it was suggesting a new jewelry box might be in order, but she has about seventeen of those. A filofax! Too anxious the young fox gets his tail wet, just as he completes his crossing. This is probably a more literal portent; half the town seems to be under water at the moment. There will be a certain amount of aquatic action; I must take care not to drop my stuff right before extraction.

The Late December Christmas Shop is a thinking man's battle, not some bloody pit-fight; victory goes to the smartest and the strongest, as is only right. Sun Tsu famously did all his shopping on the 23rd. Of his Nine Situations, this was number 4; contentious ground. Desireable ground, where victory conferred great advantages to the winner. Make no mistake, the Christmas Shop is the modern equivalent of tearing off your chunk of the kill and returning to your den with fresh Caribu flank dripping from your jaws. There is no option of returning empty-jawed, here; you'd be slain by your own kin and eaten yourself. You can see that same awful knowledge in the eyes of your fellow man at this time of year as they scurry to and fro.

In truth the desperation is not the same as in previous years. The presents for the wider family are all bought. I have a few things to aquire, and I'm still looking for inspiration...but at least this time I have a solid insurance policy against total failure tonight. That will confer an advantage; they will see the relaxation on my face and wonder, how? How is he not panicking?

What does he know?

791

2011-12-19T18:36:00.001Z

This blog has 791 posts (including this one...why not?) It was started 2,338 days ago, giving an average of one post every three days. That sounds pretty healthy until you take into account that about 750 of those posts were made in the bountiful years between 2005 and 2009. Twitter put its wide-bore needle in me in 2007 and began to drain the pus from around my brain; by the end of 2009 it had drained off gallons and gallons of it, reducing the intracranial pressure below .48 psi, that critical point. Instead of letting things come to a head and sitting down for a monster blog session (with a mile of footnotes in the comments), it goes on Twitter.

Still the blog lives and breathes, though it is a sluggish, despondent thing, fat around the middle. It is faced with the dilemma of the immortal. Knowing it'll never die (and it will never truly die--this place will still be around in 2021, or as long as I need it), it's in no great rush to get anything done. It might as well sip piña coladas by the pool, watch girls pass, read a couple of crinkled and yellowed crime thrillers from the hotel library, and wait for the handful of more permanent things I throw its way. Meanwhile it can see beyond the pool, beyond the whitewashed walls of the resort; there's poor heavy-laden Twitter, whipped along the promenade day and night.

There will of course be a traditional Christmas Post and New Year Lament.

Jangling Hangover Theatre

2011-12-10T17:28:00.004Z

It's Saturday morning...or 'afternoon', probably, to good Christians and working men. Evening even. Here on the edge of the Arctic Circle it's better to declare morning when you wake up, switch on your million-watt solar prosthesis and ignore whatever's going on outside. Grim nonsense by the looks of it.

You didn't know Derry was in the Arctic? Neither did I, but all the evidence points to it...the mercury hit -2 a few nights ago, as the front page of a certain newspaper declared below a headline like Arctic Horror Hits Northwest and pictures of frosty hedgerows. Frost in December! Christ almighty. Nature at its most perverse! I think, probably, they wrote their sky-is-falling-down announcement up front and ran with it even alongside that disappointingly mundane temperature.

I've been up for about three hours now, watching the snooker and trying to keep my poor rotten brain from foaming out of my ears. It's been a while since Bacchus and his mad court were invited round. His terrible Maenads are working on me now, clawing and wailing, playing their jangling atonal music and making sure I pay for last night. A bowl of Cheerios and pints of Robinson's Lemon Barley Water have brought me round a fraction; I think I'll live to rock another day. Sausages tonight I think. A shamble to the shop is in order.

"Come Dine With Me" is on TV now. It's on about sixteen hours a day at the weekend, designed no doubt to make the masses abandon their living rooms and stimulate the economy. Five or six assorted weirdoes and perverts gather to nosy about each other's houses and eat cat-hair cheesecakes. There's always a wretched translucent vegan and some bawling manchild with a faytaw chweese awwergy to spice things up. There's going to be a Derry one, which will be amazing...I know because I got an invite from them to my old address, and recoiled in horror at the idea of being on some secret Channel 4 register of Weird Perverts, but discovered that they had carpet-bombed the town with invites, knowing full well that weird perverts are self-selecting. I can only imagine: Nazi memorabilia enthusiast Jan from The Fountain mixing a soufflé in a genuine German army helmet from the North African Campaign, big unibrowed Mickey from the Little Diamond going through her underwear drawers upstairs. Some fey gent called Dominic in full tweed waxing miserable about the loss he made on his four-hundred thousand pound flat overlooking an abandoned building site and the service entrance of the KFC. Nigerian immigrant Paulie Superman will be leafing through Jan's photo album from her last visit to Stalingrad and nibbling nervously on a custard cream. It will be brilliant.

I'm off to the shop.

Remake/Remodel: Six-Gun Gorilla

2011-10-28T11:35:00.002+01:00

A Plurality Of Batmen

2011-10-23T02:23:00.003+01:00

Been A While: Remake/Remodel Little Nemo

2011-10-15T22:18:00.000+01:00

Work Continues Here At The Megatonne Marble Labs

2011-07-11T00:30:00.003+01:00

Judge Kent Vs PredatorCop

2011-06-13T00:58:00.003+01:00

It's one of those weekends, so--why not.

PredatorCop Vs Batinator

2011-06-12T13:13:00.004+01:00

Just a bit of fun, in the spirit of all of those great crossovers of years past. The only thing missing is Judge Dredd fighting a Kryptonian xenomorph in the background.

Some Pages That I Quite Liked

2011-06-05T01:23:00.003+01:00

Here's a selection of unlettered pages from the last year or so, starting with my first published comic art in the Story Of Andrew Haddock Part II, then a page from Small Packages, then a page from the ongoing Adolf Hitler's I Dream Of Ants. Episode #3 of I Dream Of Ants--which contains some of the nicest stuff I've done so far, I think--will be hitting the shelves of your savvy local comics merchant in Murky Depths #17.

Dry

2011-05-25T19:01:00.001+01:00

Like every hotel room I've ever stayed in, our room in the ominously named 'Maldron' (sounding like a portmanteau of 'mal', as in bad, and 'cauldron', as in a big soot-black pot for cooking up satanic brews) is a chamber engineered expressly for the desiccation of human bodies. Where I occasionally might get up in the middle of the night to pee--to enjoy the small human luxury of venting a pint or so of excess water--here I rise creakily at three am and every hour or so afterward to seek some form of hydration, some liquid succour for my various dry and cracked membranes. Luckily we are well-stocked with bottles and bottles of water and various juices, but I imagine the cleaning staff must occasionally find less-experienced travellers kneeling on the floors of their bathrooms, heads twisted beneath the taps of their sinks, mummified lips drawn back from wide-open mouths in silent nightmare screams while streams of lukewarm aerated water gush from the taps to bounce ineffectually from their shrivelled tongues, foam down their leathery chins and bubble away into the thirsty plugholes.

Aerated water! On top of everything else the hotels have actually found a way to make water dry. The water is in fact a delivery system for millions of little pockets of dryness. The hotel people must have had a great laugh when their scientists figured that one out.

---- From mobile ----

Harvey Dent of Earth

2011-03-27T04:13:00.006+01:00

Wondered (because I wonder things like this) if Harvey Dent could wield more than one power ring in a sort of metastable arrangement. Shortly after--it's hard to know, really, but it was probably my next conscious thought--I wondered what that might look like. Then I stepped out of the shower, dried myself off, drew the dull-as-dishwater pinup above and saved it in my drawings folder, never to be seen. Then tonight I had a couple of ciders and coloured it. That is the entire story behind the image above.

Spinning To Infinity

2011-03-26T18:38:00.004Z

In the days of yore, oh, way back in 2010, Steve Horton asked me to do a page for his Spinning To Infinity webcomic. I said, sure.

It's up now so go check it out.

What Am I Up To?

2011-03-20T15:37:00.005Z

Lots of things.

Part two (of...five? I think it's five) of my and Lavie Tidhar's "Adolf Hitler's 'I Dream Of Ants'" is appearing in Murky Depths #16, which I understand is available for pre-order now for those of you that way inclined. Six more pages of Hitler and Ant-based hijinks.

A page I did for Steve Horton's Spinning To Infinity should be appearing there soon. The project is well worth checking out.

Today I'm working on another couple of pages of Remnants, of which we should hopefully have enough pages be able to share soon.

Earlier in the week I took part in the Fantastic 4 Remake/Remodel over on Whitechapel. I didn't have much time to sink into it this week so I decided to do something fairly quick and nasty. The description was as follows:

Energy entity discovers new friend in low Earth orbit. Energy entity greets friend in the universal language of Total Decomposition. Energy entity discovers, to its horror, that its new friend is not in any way equipped to handle Total Decomposition, being composed of many confusing and conflicting parts, some of which seem to have (screaming) minds of their own. Energy entity has a think, decides to put it back to together as best it can, then buggers right off before anybody discovers what it's done.

Left to right, we have: Astronaut made of bits of an experimental shield generator. Astronaut made of ablative heat shielding. Astronaut made of booster rockets. Finally, at the bottom, an astronaut made of pure intellect wrapped in scrotum skin.

The thread was picked up by Comics Alliance, i09 and Super Punch among others. Always fun/reality-shaking to see your own work appear on sites that you read daily. It means that suddenly your art is seen by ten thousand people instead of ten. Then I get a new trickle of hits here--and how disappointing that must be to new visitors!

Yesterday I was in no mood for proper work (read: very hung over) so decided to take some of the remake/remodel characters and do 'proper' comic renderings. I asked myself--how would I want these to look if I had to do an alterate FF comic for real?

EDIT: Just so happened that there was a new Remake/Remodel suggestion this evening, Misty, so I thought I would give it a go.

This Is What Happens When You Redefine Next

2011-01-23T20:29:00.002Z

BBC Three like to use next to mean afterwards. After the next thing. They get me every single time. They announce what's on next (something like "My Tourette's Teen Pregnancy") before they announce what's on 'now' (Family Guy, perhaps). But it's too late. I've already switched over. I'm outta there.

Here, we examine this phenomonon and extrapolate it to its grim logical end.

Do The Evolution

2011-01-22T00:48:00.004Z

You've seen these, right? With the planet balanced on a climatory knife-edge, these seem like an excellent backup species. It's early days for them yet, obviously. I expect that our dwindling descendants would meet them somewhere halfway; half a million years down the line, say, there to give them a few pointers (maybe even a gene or two, because we could spread this human stuff about if we really wanted) before we head for our great warrens to wait out the ever-winter.

Of course there would be no guarantee that the great blue-faced sodomapes wandering the freshly-thawed Earth would recognise us when we reappeared on the scene.

Better Salesmithery Through High-Return Trust Investments

2011-01-20T00:18:00.006Z

I've been talking about starting a strip for the blog for a while now, entirely for my own amusement. If you glean some sort of enjoyment out of it, so much the better. It will be about a range of things, and will probably be about as regular as Halley's Comet. No, hold on--the comet is famously regular, just takes a long time to come round, so that's not a good analogy at all.

This is a trick I've been doing around the house for a while now, much to the chargrin of my poor long-suffering Significant Other. It takes a while for people to get over the urge to either i) tell you to wise up or ii) slap your hand with extraordinary quickness and force in the down below part of the ritual, as they come into it expecting a withdrawl and the traditional mocking calls of "too slow."

You will notice that this is a departure from my usual way of drawing. I've been working on cartoonin' it up a bit lately, as an experiment, because I think feeds back into the more 'mainstream' stuff in positive ways. I think I'll use this space to explore that, hopefully without it defining my 'style'.

Let's see if I ever do a second one before we start worrying about that though. Busy times!

2011

2011-01-18T01:56:00.003Z

I missed making my seasonal blog post (or any blog post whatsoever) in December, which is something of a departure from the established norm. In another age I would have had a good old complain about how much bother it all was, how difficult it was to get to the shops, how paltry the selection of gifts were when I did get to the shops, how my urge to Run Away peaked on the 23rd and so on. This year I released all of that pent-up seasonal tension in short bursts on Twitter, which as you know has consumed my blogging urge utterly, leaving little in the way of scraps. (Seasonal, I said seasonal. Look again. If you read that as sexual tension that's your problem.)

Still, those stale-edged and mold-spotted scraps of blogging urge can pile up, and if I have any of my ration of thin energy gruel left over at the end of the day I can combine the two make a sort of nominally nutritious blog pudding.

Open wide for the blog pudding.

They came for my fedora and my laminated press pass, you know. They covered them in paraffin and burned them on the lawn. I was a lapsed blogger, they said, and a terrible journalist anyway. It had been actual years--whole orbits--since my last post that was not about my artwork and similar goings-on, or heartfelt laments and gilded promises of revamps, redesigns, rebirths. I asked them on whose authority it was, exactly, that they entered my house at night and took those things, but they laughed and called me an idiot and drove away at speed.

That said...

I'm getting better at this old art lark. I've been drawing in a regular and fairly serious way for a couple of years now; my speed has improved vastly, and the work I'm doing looks more and more like I imagine my work should look. This is all very encouraging.

Issue #15 of Murky Depths is out soon, which has within its pages the first part of a five-part comic that will reveal itself through the year, written by Lavie Tidhar, translated into discrete areas of (hopefully pleasing) black and white by me. If you are in any way inclined towards comics with Hitler in them--moustacheless Hitler, the most difficult of all Hitlers to draw--or you like militant ant civilisations, it will be worth checking out.

I have other irons in the fire at the moment. In fact the fire is more or less full of irons at various levels of warmth and probability, because people seem to like my art, or at least there's some sort of international artist drought going on, which is excellent either way.

As well as the work I'm doing for others, I still want to do something of very short episodic nature for the blog. A story dropped a few panels at a time. Just for a change I think it might be a humorous fantasy, which--if it all works out--will hopefully be humorous and fantastic. It might be a resurrection of the horrifically misborn Chest Quest, The Quest For Chests, or it might be something else entirely. An alternative idea was to just start drawing Twitter conversations. Whatever happens, this will happen this year.

I have not given up on my writing, though it might look that way. I've just stopped sharing my lumpy half-baked nonsense with the world before it's ready.

At the moment I'm working on a strange fantasy with a fairly original hook. Nothing's ever original, obviously, but obsessing over that does nobody any good. The act of writing it is not making me especially miserable. The secret, I think, is to write amusing fiction for the handful of other people out there who share my exact set of interests, and write with the aim of amusing them for a train journey or two. A short excerpt:

"That's when he pulled the pin and started knocking with the grenade and everybody ran away."

Told you it was short.

---- From mobile ----

Lynchian Spiderman Remake/Remodel

2010-11-23T13:32:00.002Z

For the Whitechapel Remake/Remodel thread, of course. The brief this week was to imagine Spiderman through a Lynchian lens.

(This is Maw and Paw Parker in the days before the FBI raid. The thing in Paw Parker's hand is a Birthing Wand, a discarded bit of Grandpa Parker, used to help any "young'uns borned without the fangs.")

The Extraordinary Bat-Man of Gotham

2010-11-14T02:09:00.002Z

And Robin, the Brass Wonder.

For the Whitechapel Remake/Remodel thread. Should be a good'un too.

No, Wait!

2010-10-31T20:50:00.001Z

October wasn't all quiet. Check out Murky Depths #14 for "Small Packages", written by Raz Greenberg, drawn by yours truly. I think that was October, wasn't it? Maybe that was September. Hard to know. It should be out soon if it isn't already--will post the link when I get to a computer. It's good.

I have a week off now--a week off! Might be heading to Belfast or Dublin later in the week for some R&R. Expect a proper update or two. Lots of art to be getting on with, which (pleasingly) has become a more or less constant thing now.

Hey, it's Halloween. Sitting in Fiona's mother's house eating sweets and flinging the wrappers at passing kids, shouting detailed obscenities after them about who and what their mothers are doing in hell. "But my mummy's alive," cries one.

"Only on the outside," I say.

I think next year I might actually do something for the occasion, come up with a proper costume, but, you know. The hammer and sickle posing pouch and Cossack hat do the job in a pinch.

---- From mobile ----

October

2010-10-31T19:25:00.001Z

October was pretty quiet.

---- From mobile ----

Remake/Remodel: The Thirteenth Doctor

2010-09-01T00:46:00.002+01:00

Amazingly and terrifyingly it's September now. That should give you all pause. September 2010.

This is the thirteenth and final Doctor for what is already shaping up to be a hell of a thread. Our Doctor is seen here wandering the ruins of Gallifrey with his non-human companion, miniaturised Tardis (only the outside, of course) and Fractal Cloak.

Test?

2010-08-24T21:53:00.001+01:00

If this somehow works, it's a short recording of my very messed-up innards. Not well at all!

Remake/Remodel: Love Crime Detective

2010-08-16T00:23:00.003+01:00

A very quick one today, just to get it in before the thread was closed. I share the bad and the good, folks, the bad and the good.

Five Years Later

2010-07-26T18:40:00.001+01:00

Just realised last night that the first post here was July 25th 2005, which makes the blog five years and one day old today. That makes it about 800 in blog-years!

The colour scheme hasn't changed since that morning. Nor has the random, increasingly stupid-sounding name with the awkward spelling. I'd planned on changing both when I came back from work that same evening. Five years on, maybe it's time to rework it a bit. New colours and a new name. Would that be wrong?

I've had an idea for a quick weekly thing for here. A regular snack-sized amount of art and writing with utterly nothing to do with any other running projects. A sort of light palette-cleanser that would build up over the next year into something gloriously insubstantial. If nothing else it will give the blog a much-needed pulse.

So, let's see. Busy busy. Irons in the fire somehow breeding. Exciting things on the horizon. Working on a sweet beard at the same time as everything else. That's multitasking.

---- Tapped out in the aether ----

Dan Dare Remake/Remodel

2010-07-06T02:57:00.006+01:00

(Click through to bigger version.)

Another Remake/Remodel for the forum.

Murky Depths #13 Cover

2010-06-16T19:12:00.001+01:00

By yours truly! Thought I might as well make this my blog post for June! Just finished this in the wee hours of Monday morning.

http://bit.ly/d94Asw

(I'll do that link properly later. Standing outside Fiona's office writing this at the mo. Did I mention that Iove living in the future? Love it.)

The full thing is a wraparound, based on a sort of glorious glittering fever-dream comic by Robert Rankin appearing in that issue, not treated literally but ruminated-over and fed through my own lens.

There are ominous eskimos waiting in the dark.

---- Tapped out in the aether ----

Ideas

2010-05-16T21:36:00.001+01:00

For some reason I've been full of really sound ideas for improving the world over the last couple of days. The spirit of invention has been moving through me. I am seeing the world with new eyes, no longer buying into the status quo. No: I shun your status quo.

If you don't mind, I just need to record these inventions before I forget.

1) The Sideways Toaster

Sometimes you want to make toast with a delicious toasted topping, but you don't want to go to the hassle of turning on your grill, burning the toast, starting again, etc.

Old vertical-slot toasters are useless at toppings; the cheese or whatever just drips down into the mechanism and catches fire, leading to property damage and personal injury. So how about this: toast horizontally! Imagine a four-slot toaster turned on its side. It's equally as good at making normal toast, but it is at least infinity percent better at making toast with toppings, melting the butter in, etc. Brilliant. Once we find a way to deal with the crumbs-on-the-heating-element problem we're set. (I'm thinking the elements could be made to vibrate constantly, shaking off debris.)

2) Retractable Confetti or 'Serious String'

Just back from a wedding at the impressive cathedral in Armagh. Ten years ago we could have thrown confetti at the new husband and wife, but these days you're not allowed to, as the paper makes an awful mess and somebody has to clean it up, and the impoverished giant cathedral and religio-industrial complex behind it can no longer afford a broom and ten minutes of a junior nun's time.

If you use rice, birds can eat it and explode soon after, or cats can eat the birds and explode soon after, or hoboes can eat the cats and explode soon after, or cultists can eat the hoboes and explode soon after, so on up the food chain.

So my idea is that each piece of confetti is attached to a monofilament wire. After throwing it at the happy couple you hit a button in the dispenser and the whole lot winds away in a snap! That's right: it's reuseable and environmentally friendly. Over-friendly, even. It gropes the environment's bare knee under the table and whispers propositions.

The only drawback is the potential for the monofilament wire to become tangled with limbs and necks etc, leading to potential tragedy, your wedding photos on Rotten.com (does that still exist?), etc.

I've been thinking about a possible magnetic solution where the confetti is actually hundreds of brightly-coloured iron bearings dispensed and recovered by a powerful electromagnet, but again there are safetly niggles as technically the magnetic acceleration and dispersal assembly is a confetti rail-gun. A rail-shotgun, even.

3) Semi-Automatic Place Setter

At the wedding there was food, and fancy food at that, the sort that comes with multiple versions of knives and forks side-by-side, two spoons, so on. They were almost but not quite perfectly aligned on the table and I noticed that the more Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorderly among us were carefully adjusting and readjusting their cutlery. Madness, I thought. All that work and it's still not quite perfect. This needs standardisation, I thought. Repeatable results. Mechanisation.

So I came up with the Semi-Automatic Place Setter, a sort of machine gun for a specific template of knives and forks. It looks a bit like a tray with a box on top. You set up the template on the business-end of the thing. Drums of knives, forks, spoons etc are loaded into the top. When you need a new place setting, you press it against the table--whirr-WHUMP--and there it is. Seven more whumps and you've just set a table of eight perfectly in sixteen seconds.

We'll also sell a tabletop strengthening film, drums of cutlery in attractive styles, etc. We can remind potential customers that paying a human being to do the job of a horrific machine is vaguely Marxist maybe and certainly Unamerican. Go back to the Ukrainian work combine, manual place-setters! Yeah!

4) Valet Shopping

We were in town today buying parts for the semi-automatic monofilament toaster prototype when I had another revelation. I saw hundreds of over-encumbered men walking behind their wives and girlfriends and looking glum. All those bags and boxes shuffling along. It struck me that there is an inverse proportional relationship between Shopping Done So Far (S) and Will To Continue Shopping (W). I propose that this is because of two key factors:

1) Reduction Of Available Means,
2) Steadily Increasing Encumberance.

I had originally factored in a third variable, 'Actual Need For Products', but it proved to be a poor predictor of W: nobody really needs any of the shit they sell these days.

There was nothing I could do about factor 1, but 2 was a no-brainer. You create a team of shopping valets who roam the shopping centre ('mall') looking for overencumbered shoppers. They give the shopper a ticket for reclaiming their shopping later, and take their bags to a special holding area by the exit to the car park. The shopper is suddenly free to continue shopping until they have maximised their consumption potential (ran out of money). There is no cost to the shopper; the costs of the service are recouped via increased rent on stores, which should be more than covered by their increase in turnover.

Profit! Jobs! A more pleasant shopping experience! Why not take an unencumbered shopping break in our restaurant, and eat with cutlery dispensed at 600 place settings per minute! Would you like sone delicious toast? We have a range of toppings!

Here's some confetti to celebrate aaannnddd RETRACT

---- Tapped out in the aether ----

Manco

2010-04-25T17:15:00.001+01:00

Note To Self

2010-04-20T20:19:00.001+01:00

Far too easy to accidentally send emails from the iPhone. Avoid adding addresses until the email is done!

If you happen to follow the blog via the feed you might see weird mutant drafts, please ignore.

---- Tapped out in the aether ----

Danger, Danger

2010-04-18T21:19:00.001+01:00

Serious possibility of increased bloggery now that I only have to reach into my pocket. Usual high, high quality filters will probably be lowered a fraction. Limericks are once again a possibility. Should make a change from the usual rants and pictures of strange clouds. Actually, no. There will just be a bit more of everything.

It's become a sort of archaic thing, I think--the one-man personal blog. Lots of group blogs thriving out there. Lots of tightly focused topical blogs. Not entirely sure what this place is. A shady lay-by on a narrow B-road, a place to pull over and engage in awful things, mostly unnoticed, while the world continues about its business. Same niché occupied by Geocities ten years ago, just without the Comic Sans and rainbow dividers.

I quite like that, actually. Long may it last. Five years in July!

---- Tapped out in the aether ----

Death Plume

2010-04-16T13:29:00.001+01:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/95144911@N00/4525137621

---- Tapped out in the aether ----

Encoded

2010-04-16T00:51:00.002+01:00

Recently fell in love--or at least in interest--with QR codes, those black and white matrices you see all over the place these days. (Was going to call them dataglyphs, but it turns out that's already the name of a specific type of 2D matrix code by Xerox.)

Here's one:

You can encode nice things in these. URLs are one obvious application. These should be attached to every printed ad. Who wants to type a URL? But stick a QR code in the corner of your bus stop ad and I might be curious and bored enough to point the camera at it and see where it goes. Or, ladies, put your QR encoded email address or Twitter name on your t-shirt, go out to the swingingest nerd bar you can find and see if anybody bites. I say ladies there because what girl in their right mind us going to persue a guy with a QR code printed on his jacket? No girl, that's who. But a girl wearing a QR code--who could resist?

What do you mean, 'dehumanising'?

Stick them in art. There must be ways to hide them in art, make them subtle. (Also, they have ridiculous amounts of built-in redundacy and error tolerance.) The lights of a city tower, for instance. Instantly recognisable for anyone who knows what they're looking for. Direct them to something interesting and exclusive.

Beam one on a cloud. Spray one on a dog. Arrange your peas in nightmare messages of domestic vitrol or sweet nothings. Tattoo one on your backside with your name and DOB. (But then you couldn't become a secret agent! What a quandry!) Burn one into forty acres of wheat chaff as a message to the satellites. Get people so paranoid and obsessed that they scan their surroundings constantly, looking for hidden messages. Check Neolithic cave dwellings for messages from lost time travellers. Write a message from a lost time traveller, stamp it on the back of a Roman coin, sneak it into your favourite museum. Etch QR encoded messages to the future in gold and have them buried with you. Have them carve a subtle link to your blog below your name on your headstone.

---- Tapped out in the aether ----

This Is A Test, Only A Test

2010-04-15T22:46:00.001+01:00

Bloggin' from my new phone. It is a beautiful thing, this phone. I've wanted this phone--not this particular phone, but something like it--for years. A mobile portal to the actual Internet. That's it, that's the game changer.

The game changer!

Whereabouts Am I And What Am I Doing There

2010-04-03T02:32:00.004+01:00

I have a couple of impending projects--the cover of Murky Depths issue 13 (the cover, a serious honour!) and an online comic of short regular episodes in a collaboration with Robin LeBlanc (more on that later, as it starts to materialise--when it appears, it'll appear here as well. We're going to build up a few episodes first.) It fits perfectly with my aim to produce 100 pages of comics in 2010--so far I'm not doing so well on that, but that'll change. The intention there is to improve vastly and tell a few stories along the way. 100 pages isn't much in the grand scale of things, but it should be enough to push my boundaries and reveal new ones.

To that end I've been working on expanding my skills a bit. It's only when you start working on a thing in a serious way that you realise you have an awful lot of work to do. If you take a gander at my Flickr account you'll see bits and pieces of what I've been up to for the last week or so.

I think I'll take a week now and then, setting everything else aside, and just go crazy with sketches from life. It works. It just works.

Remake/Remodel: Young Romance #1

2010-03-24T13:20:00.002Z

It's been a while since I last did a Remake/Remodel over on Whitechapel. Actually have a couple of aborted ones sitting around somewhere--had to abandon them eventually. Anyhow--for the last while they've been doing remakes of covers based on the barest amount of information--this is a cover for "Young Romance #1" (click for big version):

I will liven up the blog soon. Promise!

Deft Rhymes

2010-03-04T21:03:00.001Z

As you know, we're going to a stag do in Newcastle later this month.

Gentlemen, we need to come up with some slick rhymes in case we’re challenged to lyrical combat on the streets. I’ve heard that these ‘servings’ are at an all-time high, so I've prepared some ammunition. Lyrics in italics mean we all have to shout at the same time, like the Beastie Boys. Richard, if you could bring the drum machine, that would be great. The rest: I want you working on your signature moves.

Here we go:

Mister Slippy McCaffs
Breaks his problems in half
Then he takes those halves and breaks those halves in half
Then he takes those halves and breaks those halves in half
That’s recursion motherfucker: ON YOUR ASS

M.C. Dick Brown
Don’t make him frown
He’ll take you down to Chinatown
If he’s in your way find another way round
Or he’ll be on you like a dressing gown

Here’s Bath-man Steve
And you better believe
There’s more than just Rolex up them sleeves
First sonuvabitch to say my boy looks old
Will get a golden shower in their porcelain hole

1. Slippy McCaffs is his street/PlayStation name, and he likes recursion. He is also the groom to be.
2. Full name: Richard Brown. He will be on you like a dressing gown.
3. Nobody calls him Steve as he's Stephen with a PH, but he does own part of a bathroom superstore.

My Kind Of Science

2010-02-02T19:51:00.006Z

Enjoyed this article. Ignore the slightly silly title of "I, Virus: Why You're Only Half Human", which misses or at least obscures the point, being that 'human' is a product of all those little edits, and subtracting our viral parts would leave--at best--a sort of hairy amphibian tumour creature flapping about in its suspension tank, bleeding from its cloaca, its one good eye pleading for death. It might be delicious but it wouldn't be human.

The gist: our genome is full of sequences that came from viruses, many of them vital to making us what we are. Markers that usually cap viral gene sequences are littered throughout our DNA. They get into the sex cells, see, and if the cells survive the viral edits (and the host creature survives the virus...) then they end up meeting other cells and growing in leathery eggshells or soft wombs, and if the new creatures are viable they go on to spread the new instructions, for better or worse. Then natural selection applies its pressure and the cycle repeats.

The virus, then, becomes an evolutionary catalyst, a rapid transit system for genes, adding/removing/editing/co-opting whole sequences. The traditional picture of mutation coming about due to transcription errors is only part of the story.

Bacteria are gene factories--R&D facilities, able to prototype new sequences quickly. Viruses (and other mechanisms) pass gene sequences across species lines, from bacteria to bacteria, compounding edit on edit, the more successful sequences spreading over time without being tied to a single species, individual species acting simply as self-replicating backups for these inter-special wanderers. It is a churning sea of innovation. The viruses also carry the most successful of these gene sequences (i.e. the statistically more popular ones, and the ones most able to piggyback on a virus) to other species, more complex things like the first silt-worms, with the successful sequences now imparting terrible afflictions and astonishing new adaptations like changing a few cells into rudimentary neurons and so on.

Viruses mean misery most of the time, obviously. Have no doubt: our ancestors, in all their forms, had a miserable time of it. The greater part of the human species is still having a miserable time of it, and thus still in a state of genetic flux.

Antiviral and antibiotic drugs will probably serve to stem the flow of new genes into the human germ line. We tend to treat diseases now rather than live with them. We live antiseptic lives. That trend will continue to spread. The implication there is that, barring (the fairly inevitable) manual edits or global catastrophe, the human genome in 10,000 years time could look more or less like it does today.

For the next century or so, I would guess that you'll see more unique adaptations coming out of Africa and the poorer parts of Asia than from Europe. The article mentions the emergence of HIV resistance as an example of this--the HIV cure might well come about naturally if medical tech doesn't get there first (at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives).

Anyhow.

We can patch the genome. Update it ourselves in the same way to smooth over deficiencies, alter life expectancy, improve performance, that sort of thing. This is already going on--viruses have been used for gene therapy for years. I imagine a future where you wake up in the morning to discover that your gene-patcher has downloaded a patch for some obscure degenerative brain disease, generated the virus and released it into your bloodstream. Assuming everything goes as planned, you're cured and your future children are cured, and their children's children, and so on (also, potentially, anyone you cough on is cured, though I would keep it an opt-in service as far as possible). A few weeks later a new version of the human genome has been released, a major update that puts you down for a week with flu-like symptoms--but now you won't age anymore.

P.S. We are made of shit-flinging apes AND THEIR STDs!

That's The End Of That

2010-01-20T18:52:00.001Z

That's the end of the posting old drafts. Those weren't great, but the rest were just cringingly awful.

Another Old Draft: "He Could Never Be a Junkie Like Her"

2010-01-20T18:43:00.000Z

I might have used bits of this elsewhere: can't remember. Don't remember any of this.

---

Just to be clear: he could never be a junkie like her.

He was an experimentalist. A man of science. If he were to peer into the abyss, he'd take careful notes. She was all about the buzz. She'd set fire to her notepad just to watch it burn.

In the end, she just wanted to see how much she could get away with, and she'd become a willing slave to The Concept, an addict like any other. The further she pushed it, she said, two hours, three, the more The Concept would reveal. It was alive like anything else, she said. She'd given it life. It was alive and it needed to be loved and she would be the one to love it, the only one, The Concept's special girl. It needed love and it needed proof of that love. A sacrifice, even.

That's when he'd pulled the plug. The funding was all but gone anyway; they could have dragged it out for another month, two at a push, but without new subjects -- new baselines -- but they wouldn't have found anything new. There would be no paper for the journal, no award in November. Her mind would be irretrievably gone, that's all, beyond anybody's reach.

"Dara," he said, "how about that reset now, eh? Like we talked about." Taking the equipment to her flat had been a mistake.

"I don't think so," she said, musically.

"It's for the best. You're not who you were anymore. The machine's changed you."

"And I've changed it. You have no idea, do you? I improve The Concept and it improves me. Feedback, feedback, feedback, that's what you said at the start: you were right, so right. But you know, it's in me now, and I'm in it. We've both fed fucking back like you wanted, we're both all shiny and new, and now, you want to hit 'undo'? No-way-ho-sé. No-way-ho-sé." The heart monitor and the EEG jittered silently by her bedside. Her hands were balled into fists, and then -- jagged peaks smoothing off -- they relaxed.

"You'll kill it," she said, imploring. She touched his hand. "You'll kill us both."

"It's not alive. It's just mirroring your thoughts. Is a mirror alive?" There was a mirror on her dresser; he found himself staring into it.

"You know, I connected last night, all night. It told me a story." "No: you told yourself a story."

She was worse every day. Clinical trials? No, it was not ready. Make it ready, Morgan. The machine was a tool for introspection. Meditation. There's all sorts of interest in your 'Genius Box'. It fed the user's own thoughts back to them, purified, enhanced, the noise scrubbed out of the signal. We're all just dying to try it out. The threat of addiction had always been there, in the background. Big backers. The Trustees are delighted. Make it happen, Morgan!

Dara had seemed perfect; so bright and so willing. But she was too close to the project; her thoughts had turned invariably to the machine, to her magic mirror, her Genius Box, thoughts which the circuits had picked up on, purified, and dripped back into her subconcious as expresso-shots of obsession.

Now the machine had tasted sentience. Now it was The Concept.

"It was about a man on a train," she said, "stuck in a rut. I liked it. He made the train stop and he got out. He walked for miles and miles. Threw his briefcase in a ditch. His mobile rang; he kicked it as hard as he could, and he remembered childhood, kicking a ball against a wall until the sun went down, wanting to be a footballer, never a Junior Administrator of Customer Accounts."

"That's fine, Dara, that's fine."

"In the end he'd walked as far as his legs would take him. So he threw them under a train."

"His legs? What happened then?"

"Oh then," she laughed, "he died."

He reached for the plug that fed the machine; her hand sprang from the bed and caught his. Her grip was white-knuckled, manic, crushing.

"He died," she said, in a voice that was not entirely her own.

Another Old Draft: "The Ballad Of Arnold's Catheter"

2010-01-20T18:39:00.000Z

Some of these things from '06 were kept as drafts for good reason.

---

The catheter wouldn't come out. It wouldn't come out. It wouldn't come out. Arnold tugged beneath his gown; he grimaced and screamed and, white-knuckled, he tugged again, and weird inside-things popped and tore, yet it wouldn't come out.

The needles were out. He now had two holes on either side of his head the size of pencil leads; they'd seeped salty fluid from the moment he pulled the needles out. But they were out and that was better than when they were in: the images, oh, the images of terrible things, nuclear destruction and blank-eyed skankwhores with purple boils, bearded cavemen beaten back by platoons of red-arsed baboons, the first God's nuns and priests begging for the next God's mercy.

He had to pee. Arnold had to pee. But he couldn't pee, of course, because of the plastic tube. He tried again, hiding in the shadow of a tree; he pointed the tube away from himself and pushed with all his might. An aching agony rose in his kidneys; he knew enough to know that this was urine-pressure, badwater pushing back from his poor distended bladder, trying to escape back into his blood. Still he pushed and nothing came. Give up, Arnold, he thought. Give up for now, give up and just run, so that the Mantis don't git ye.

The Mantis was a field of seething wrongness that patrolled the hospital's grounds. It despised the human condition and it was after him, in particular.

"Freak!" Arnold's braincom whispered viciously. "We can see you. Get back in your hole!" For a moment the braincom pushed an image into his mind: Murtile Hatter, the television personality, black plastic hair, one side of his face botoxed into limp solemnity,

Arnold had already decided that he wouldn't. He would brave the Mantis. He would brave anything. His crime had not been so bad: a simple hustle of a blind man, an exercise in the survival of the fittest. He'd sold him a feelbook--

Another Old Draft: "Christmas Is Upon Us..."

2010-01-20T18:34:00.000Z

This is how I must have secretly felt about Christmas '06.

---

Christmas is upon us like some sort of mad rutting beast, just a few long and terrible days away from its glorious, trembling climax of tinsel and discarded wrapping paper and chins dribbling with a hundred-thousand-Cadbury's-Roses-worth of brown slobber.

Another Old Draft: "Dr. Gin"

2010-01-20T18:33:00.000Z

'07 was a year of unfinished drafts and weird vignettes, it seems.

---

The man who Mack Jones had earlier called Dr. Gin came to our window, his head the shape and colour of a cashew nut, saying "you'll not get out of here alive," and other unsettling things. Mack looked at me, and I had a feeling like I should have said something to keep his hopes afloat, but did not, could not.

Mack went to the far corner of the cell and felt the line where the walls met. "Perhaps we'll escape." The doctor was still watching. "His device is in me though, keeping me from seeing the way out--I don't fancy our chances." He kept this up for a while, stroking the walls, repeating himself. "It's filtering out the exit--could already be out for all we know--"

I stayed on the bed. "What makes you think there's a way out?"

"Why else would he put the filter in me?" Clean logic. Satisfied with us, Dr. Gin turned and left. I felt like following Mack's thinking to its conclusions. "How do you know there's a filter? Is there a cut? Or was it injected right into a vien?"

"No, no, you'll go mad if you start asking that. Smudges out the entry site--you could examine yourself all day, all over--and we were under anesthetic first, remember, out cold, so there would be no memory of it."

Entries and exits all filtered out, then. More a measure to instill a sense of self-doubt than anything else. A maddening sense of your own madness. This was almost certainly a closed cell, three dank concrete walls and a fourth which was a window of some thick plastic. There might have been be a door somewhere, probably embedded in the window, but it was locked. "What do you make of him?"

"The man is a perfect marriage of malice and science," said Mack. "He's head of R&D for hell. That's why we must get out, or die trying."

"Ah now--we don't know why he wants us."

"He was clear enough on what he'd do when he was done with us."

"True."

Another Old Draft: "Tunguska"

2010-01-20T18:31:00.000Z

There's a recurring theme here--ideas blasted down quickly and abandoned forever. "I'll come back to that," I would say. Years pass and here we are.

---

Emergency escape--I hit all the buttons at once, voided the ballast and cargo, and--

The panicked machine beat its invisible wings and hurled me upward through time. Pulse one and the inertial pull of the time before still clung to me and everything else in the small cabin. Pins and needles everywhere. I became immediately deaf and blind. It's a strange sensation, to be stretched out until the temporal breaking point is found--the machine must fight to break the surface tension, you see, and the binding strength of time changes from place to place, increasing exponentially with the number of sentient observers and--

You have time to think about a great many things during that first pulse. Residual time runs for a while. They say you're actually in a pocket universe at that point, a temporary Sub, an offshoot with it's own arrow of time that inherits some momentum from the great and glorious Main. You have about fifteen, twenty minutes of residual thinking-time during the first pulse. Depending on the number of sentient observers, of course, and--

This time there had been a few thousand. Made for a rough takeoff. Stay well away from Earth, they say, as a rule of thumb. Far too many potential observers. The greatest concentration of thinking life in the known universe. Earth cuts an impossibly bright streak through time, a thick and swelling line terminating somewhere off in the great sooner or later, at what the Earthbound call the End of the World, where suddenly the surface tension relaxes and the time-travellers are free to dig for trinkets in all those post-human bones and the tired and dead and ruined soil.

I'd been foolish and let myself pass too close to a living version of Earth. With my cargo as heavy as it was, the machine had faltered. My Sub had reconnected to Main and the machine had tumbled for a while until it--

(Here I am distracted by a noise, or my dinner, or something.)

Another Old Draft: "Faulty Space"

2010-01-20T18:24:00.001Z

I have no memory of any of this!

---

"Hold on," said the pilot of the Tumblestar, his voice dim against the static and the undulating whistle of interstellar space. "Bit of turbulence."

The soft skin of the narrow slipcraft rippled in the faulty, churned-up space left in the wake of the collossal warship, the Response To Malice. His exhaust trail was a long ribbon of cool blue silk caught in a strong gale. The Response To Malice left no such trail; it ploughed its way through space on invisible substrate whisks, illegal as they were ancient. The Tumblestar was tiny, silvery, sleek, a small bright stickleback kicking in the wake of some twisted giant from the blackest ocean depths, a raggedly circular blot of missing starscape some eight miles across.

Yellowdawn watched this play out from a safe distance. "Just keep your feelers out, Paul. Don't run into any right-angles, will you?" She stood back from the viewplane of their drifting habitat, blinked to throw up a best-guess map of the space surrounding the Response to Malice. It did not look good. Those knots and eddies in the substrate would last until the universe expanded enough to straighten them out--the better part of forever, in other words. And the galaxy was already full of them, tangled lanes of faulty space, scars left first by the pioneers of ancient interstellar commerce, then by the grim armada ships two interstellar wars.

The Response To Malice was long dead, voided and sterilised by an enemy pointbomb some eight hundred and fifty years before. Still its engines drove it on, operating at a fraction of maximum power, still managing to cut a streak through the space between the Perseus and Orion arms that would have brought it within shouting distance of Earth in just another couple of thousand years. Yellowdawn read the history of the ship in its densite shell; the regular pits made by conventional projectile weapons, filled and re-filled with alloys that told of a hundred years of grinding military progress; the long, soft-edged dent that ran along an entire hemisphere of the ship, where it had buckled--but had not broken--under the impact of something very massive moving at great speed; the pockmarking of small craters and radial gouges left by all those centuries of micrometeorite impacts; then the hole, the clean circle cut out of the engineward hemisphere of the ship by a pointbomb, the new technology rendering the old war machine suddenly and violently obselete.

"Coming up on it now," said Paul. "You should see this. I'm right in the eye of the storm, it would seem--or is that just a relative effect? I'm surrounded by after-images of the Tumblestar, folding off in every direction. It seems that the tunnel to hell is lined by a thousand images of myself. Jerry Christ!" He cut off suddenly.

"Paul?"

"No curve on that one. No curve at all. Flat space, honey, just cut the dorsal feeler in two."

"It's getting worse," said Yellowdawn. "Just like the trail. Get in there, now, or abort."

Another Old Draft: "Peak Experiences"

2010-01-20T18:15:00.000Z

This one is from December '07. No idea why I didn't post it in the end. Bit sappy I suppose.

---

Went to see my dad and his new band, After The Storm, tonight. They've been practising together for over a year now, but this was just their fourth gig, and I'm glad I was there to hear it.

They were fantastic. He was fantastic. The crowd, made up mainly of dinnerladies and Tescos employees on their Christmas nights out, were fantastic. Through it all, his guitar sang sweet and soft and loud and hard, beautiful things happened, goosebumps were raised, air guitar was played by old men in corners. Big smile on his face when he got to those last few songs and realised that everybody was there with him, and you could see the mad energy in him, the weird combination of joy and total control that he wields up on stage. Tonight I realised just how blazingly talented my dad is, and how lucky I am/inspiring it is to have a father who's just utterly balls-out amazing at something.

Another Old Draft: "Keert-Like Planets"

2010-01-20T18:08:00.002Z

A buried thing from late '07.

---

The first and most annoying rule of interstellar colonisation is this: there are no Keert-like planets that do not already host Keert-like life. No way round this. There are no empty Keerts waiting out there to be colonised; there are populated Keerts and inhospitable rocks and nothing in between.

When we first noticed this, some people took it to be proof of the existence of Feratt-Gurk. As if the deity had searched the galaxy for perfect rocks with oceans and ice-caps and breatheable atmospheres and dropped a little seed of Keert-like life on each one without exception.

This is all bollocks, son. Bollocks. The Gurkians have it all backwards. The truth is, Keert-like life creates Keert-like planets. Without life, Keert itself would be just another harsh rock with a poisonous ocean and a hot sulphuric atmosphere. Life eats poison.

Another Old Draft: "Rhymes"

2010-01-20T18:08:00.001Z

From September '08.

---

The Wandering Handyman
Unfettered by society
He goes on nightly jaunts
With no sense of propriety
He wanders where he wants
Beware the wandering handyman!
Beware his wandering hands!
He's quite the fearsome glandy man
With overactive glands
And sick demands

Another Old Draft: "Bed Full Of Sawdust, Head Full Of Larvae, Merry Christmas"

2010-01-20T18:06:00.000Z

This must have been Christmas '08. I was very, very sick and nobody would believe me. I trail off at the end, most likely into a stupor.

---

News: I just coughed up something that looked like a three-day-old Kraken embryo. My lungs had gathered and expelled a four-ounce bolus of pure condensed flu virus, a butterscotch jelly of bad instructions. It whispered to me by some psychic means: my body was an apocalyptic shithole and it was leaving. With luck, this incident marks the start of my miraculous recovery.

This thing has been hanging over me for a few days now. That sense that something awful is hiding out in the low-rent corners of your body. Roachy organs and membranes where viruses can go and pay by the hour to incubate, you know. The event came to a peak last night. Sweat and madness. Circular dreams. Vital discoveries lost in an ocean of clown soup. I woke at 6am clawing at a cocoon of phlegm, brain pulsing with every movement, my left ear all gummed up. Then I took a wide spectrum of expensive placebos and returned to bed.

Suddenly it was 10:47am and Fiona was standing there talking about the shelves I had to make. Then she went away and I slept some more. I finally sloughed away the bedsheets at what I thought was 1:03pm--actually it was 11:03am and my eyes were all gummed together, Fiona had been gone for all of fifteen minutes. Lacking higher brain function I followed my last instructions in grim robotic fashion--turn the four 46"x18" sheets of laminated plywood into a nice set of shelves for the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom.

The 46-inch shelves had to fit into a 45-and-a-half-inch gap. It took me a while to grasp this. I would have to rule out and cut exactly half an inch from each shelf. There was much weak and confused cursing. It was a cruel thing. There is no facet of human experience quite like high flu carpentry. The febrile journey through 24 feet of laminated chipboard with a rusty saw--

(That's it.)

Another Dusty Old Draft: "Kinetic"

2010-01-20T18:02:00.000Z

Another old draft. So many of these.

---

"You are of course aware that this action amounts to a de-facto declaration of war."

The Blighter-Ambassador answered with a whine like radio static. Its crablike mouthparts clacked furiously, expelling black block capitals on transparent tape. When it was done, a tiny chitinous guillotine fell and the tape fluttered to the floor. A service ant flashed down the Blighter-Ambassador's right foreleg, took the tape in its jaws and carried it to the feet of the President of People.

The Blighter had said, "THE INWORLD GROANS WITH YOUNG AND HUNGRY LIFE. WE REQUIRE MATTER. NO MALICE INTENDED. IT IS WRONG TO WITHHOLD."

"Sir. The Blighter-Ambassador does not have a mouth. It does have a specially-adapted version of a vestigial digestive system."

"It is talking shit. It is talking out of its arse."

"I AM ASSURED IT IS CUSTOMARY NOT TO DISPOSE OF THE BEARER OF THE MESSAGE OF THE UNSATISFACTORY NEWS."

Wide-Sprayer Of The Never-Hope

2010-01-20T17:57:00.000Z

I've just discovered that the blog is apparently 740 posts in size as of today, but about a third of those seem to be drafts. Some of them are short things, ideas writ down before I would forget them (but then of course I forgot to look back over the drafts to be reminded of them). Others are mad things like this that I have no memory of.

---

Christ, Harry. I'm in trouble again.

I've been arrested by the Folders. As far as the translator can figure, I've been accused of being a Wide-Sprayer Of The Never-Hope--an agent of despair, or something close to that. It's a crime here, something akin to the worst kind of goat-raping devil worship back home.

They have me in an isolation cell. True isolation; there are no cameras or microphones here. The idea, I think, is to keep my dangerous ideas from leaking out; someone would have to watch the camera feed, or monitor the bug. A stream of metal-tasting water runs down one of the walls and out through a little grille in the floor; the algae, or fungus, or whatever it is growing around the grille has apparently been adjusted to meet all of my nutritive requirements. It tastes like some sort of cold, cheese-flavoured porridge.

I can tell you now that my hosts have vastly underestimated the human need to mix things up with the occasional hamburger or two. I fear I'm going to go mad with hunger long before they execute me.

Did I mention they were going to execute me?

They've stripped me of more or less everything--there was some debate in that funny Parliament of theirs about whether it would be excessively cruel to go all the way and surgically remove my translator. Thankfully Judge Odex interceded on my behalf, explaining to them that removing my translator would assuredly kill me before they had a chance to debate the proper time and means of snuffing me out, so co-dependent are we foolish humans and our machines.

Thank god for mad old Judge Odex. Bless his murderous heart. I'm going to have to sacrifice the translator to send this message, of course--it'll have to turn its space bottle inside out. When you find me I will most likely be some sort of dribbling cretin--I'm not looking forward to that part. I wonder if I'll be afraid of the dark?

Location: I'm on the Folder sourceworld (well...their one and only world, believe it or not), somewhere in the middle of that big southern continent that looks like a wonky banana stuck in scoop of ice-cream. Bring help. None of that watery diplomacy stuff, they won't be interested in anything we might offer them; just use big guns and grave threats, please. A show of power couldn't hurt--would it be bad form to engrave something rude into their moon? Don't expect much resistance, they're a basic lot, largely disinterested in progress for progress's sake. If they have nukes I haven't seen evidence of any. Even if they do, that big float of yours can take a nuke or two, right? Remember the thing with the Spacegulls? If you need to kill a few Folders to show that you mean business, I implore you to go ahead. Take care in how you threaten them; you need to show the right people that you are willing to hurt them, and them personally. Punishment by proxy won't work. Also, they believe all death threats to be intrinsically empty. You have to promise to keep them alive and in pain for a long time. By my reckoning, that's the only thing that might possibly work.

Perhaps I should explain.

I had a conversation with one of my hosts over a cup of that intoxicating red tea of theirs. Relaxed atmosphere, smoke, strange whalesong music, you know. I asked why, after having the head start of achieving widespread industrialisation over fifteen thousand years before us, they weren't the ones visiting us in floats, while we were still, what, shuffling around in furs and stabbing at mammoths? Blok--who, my translator explained, held the title of Second Ambassador To The Rest-o-verse--shrugged her tentacles and asked, "why would we bother?"

That seemed to be their attitude about a lot of things. Foolishly, I probed further. "I don't understand, Ambassador. Your civilisation is small and technologically stunted." The Folders like you to be viciously blunt and frank, by the way; anything else is seen as an attempt at deception. "Your mastery of clockwork is impressive." (I was there to acquire a few of their clockwork computers for further study at the Ministry--you know they're capable of executing hundreds of thousands of instructions per second? Quite amazing for coal-power, steam and brass! Perhaps you could grab a few after rescuing me? Only disintegrate their capital cities as a last resort. That way the mission wouldn't be a total loss.) "But it is only impressive in comparison to the base squalor that the majority of your species wallow in. Outside of your two cities of clay bricks and iron, your people live in buildings made of sticks and shit!"

"It is sufficient," said the Ambassador. "Why is More-Than-Sufficient so important to you Rest-o-verse creatures? You are always so busy. But what can you possibly achieve?"

I was confused by her question; I'm afraid I defaulted to the old Ministry credo. "Exploration! Expansion! Excitement! Fulfillment of divine potential! Aren't these things important?"

"What are you exploring? Why do you expand? Why do these things excite you? There is no potential, only the promise of The Sure And Certain End."

"The Sure And Certain End?"

"Of course," said the Ambassador. "You see, when I die, the rest of the universe is going to disappear with me. It will be over. I will have no more need for it."

"When...you die?"

"Yes."

"Why you?"

"Because I'm the only one here. Everyone says that, of course, but that's only part of the illusion. I know for sure I'm the only one here. When I die, the universe will be folded away. So what do your Exploration! Expansion! Excitement! Fulfillment of Divine Potential! mean then? They're a waste of time. You are exploring a stage. You are expanding into a glittering falsehood."

"If you believe that, Ambassador--"

"--everyone believes that, Visitor. It is Truth. I am Proof."

"If you believe that, then why do you choose to work? Why not just subsist on a farm like so many others?"

"Boredom."

"So that's it."

"That's it. The majority are happy to live off the land until they die and--according to them--the universe folds itself away. Traditionally the last words of any Folder is a heartfelt apology to all those they leave behind, in the off-chance that the people we see and interact with in this universe are actually, in some small way, alive, like they are. Of course that's all part of the greater lie, a construction to test my faith in myself--the only apology that will matter is my own, as clearly all those Folders were not the Sole Inhabiter, as the universe survived their passing! As the Sole Inhabiter, I wanted something different for myself, so I came to the city joined the Ambassadorial League. Nobody argued with me. There was no training, no special exam. Nobody cared, you see--so caught up were they in the notion that they each were the Sole Inhabiter! Surely you've found us to be an agreeable people? It's not because we want to impress Visitors. You walk freely among us and do as you like, because you, like everyone else, are part of the falsehood. Everyone is equal in that sense. I see no dividing line between you, the spaceman with your funny limbs and mechanical brainparts, and the brothers and sisters I shared a yolk sac with. All of you are big fibs."

That gives you a taste of how wrong-headed these creatures are. So I said this: "When did your people first realise that they were all the Sole Inhabiter of the universe?"

"This belief has been wrongly expressed since the beginning of time."

"Of course; they were all wrong, weren't they? You're a generational species like ourselves; you reproduce and die. Your individual lifespan is what, three hundred years? So everybody's dead. Countless generations of your people have believed that the universe would end when they died, but it never did. And all of them are dead. How do you account for that?"

"Another great lie," said the Ambassador, "is that the universe existed before I was born. History is just another fabrication."

I took a drink of my tea. "What age are you, Ambassador?"

"Fifty-eight."

"I'm sixty-eight."

"I've heard this before," said the Ambassador. "You think you're the Sole Inhabiter just because you can remember life before I was born? Do you know how silly your argument is? If indeed you are conscious in a way comparable to myself, those memories are fabrications."

"I'm not saying I'm the Sole Inhabiter of the universe," I said. "I'm saying I'm a co-inhabiter."

The Ambassador listened carefully. "What do you mean?"

"Co-inhabitor. I'm alive. I'm real. But I have no reason to believe that anyone else's claims are less valid than mine."

Blok was quiet for a while. "You aliens have some strange ideas. No Sole Inhabitor?"

Another Excellent Idea

2010-01-20T12:57:00.003Z

You hear about kids getting stolen all the time. Snatched away in the course of an innocent and temporary lapse of attention on the part of their adoring parents or guardians. How can I remedy this, I wondered? How can I improve the average level of safety for all children in the UK and beyond?

Time for another counter-intuitive solution. Time to start thinking outside the box.

I propose that we employ a legion of child abduction specialists. Possibly even reformed child abductors. We start with the parks and resorts; each area will have a kind of jail for children. No, not a jail--a safety centre. We'll have these safety centres all over the place. The abductors will be financially incentivised to gather as many children as they can and take them to the safety centres. There, they can play games and socialise with other kids until their parents come to collect them. (When the pilot scheme proves itself, we can roll it out to towns and cities throughout the country.)

The abductors will be allowed to do whatever it takes--short of physical violence--to capture the children and carry them to the safety centres. They should use every trick in the book. The slightest lapse of attention and whoosh--the child is gone. They can work in teams to distract the parents. They can pose as teachers and community leaders. Whatever it takes.

This is good for parents, you see. When your child goes missing, all you have to do is call your local safety centre and ask if your child has been found. Chances are your child has been captured by a licensed professional instead of some filthy predator. You can rest easy and collect the child at your leisure--all part of the service. Of course, if the same parent loses a child more than five times in any rolling one year period, they will receive a visit from a child safety education specialist. If they lose a child more than ten times in any one year period, their children are taken into care, and hopefully adopted out to more caring homes.

Also, we'll be taking predators off the streets, giving them gainful employment and proper oversight. Essentially we can turn 'em good.

All in all, the chances of your child being abducted during any given attention lapse will increase (due to the squads of ~~childcatchers~~ child abduction specialists) but the chance of your child being abducted by a dangerous predator will decrease (the child will be safely locked away until you can gather your wits again).

I'm going to be an MP, I think.

Ghosts Of Christmasses Past

2009-12-24T21:45:00.002Z

This is only the fifth Christmas here on the blog. Seems like it's been kicking around for longer than that. The level of Christmas cheer has steadily decreased December after December, reflecting increasing levels of Christmas busy-ness. It looks like 2009 will be no different. For now, I give you a list of links to key Christmas posts from 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

Oh yeah, there's a fair chance there won't be a post called 'Tenerife -- Part Two' as it's far too cold to remember the fine detail of it now. I was mortally ill (but somehow did not vomit!) on a two-hour glass-bottomed boat tour, but was fine after returning to land and having some pistachio ice-cream. The sun shone, and we swam in the pool. Tenerife!

Tenerife, Part One

2009-12-12T19:45:00.001Z

I'm out on our generously-sized private balcony. It's difficult to focus over the gentle roar of the Atlantic below and the creaking, popping metal sounds of my own muscles relaxing. This stunning view of Los Cristianos—the harbor, the rocky beach, the dusty hills in the distance—is a constant distraction. The fresh twenty-something-degree breeze dancing on my skin and the bellyful of room service breakfast have been conspiring to lull me over to sleep since I came out here.

That took about an hour to write. The tendency here is to do nothing and go about it in an unhurried way. There's a massive shelf of rock on an island a few miles away that could crash into the Atlantic at any time sending four-hundred-metre high waves in every direction, but I'd imagine those waves would simply lift the little boats below and plop them back down again unharmed, then pass over the island refreshing everything, then continue on to ravage the west coast of Africa, depopulate southern Europe and drown the east coast of the U.S. in a disaster that would be remembered for a hundred generations.

A weather report then:

This is day four of seven—halfway through our stay. The sky was an unbroken blue for the first two days. The sun was intense. Yesterday and today are a bit cloudier—it's pleasantly warm, and there's still plenty of blue up there, but there are also these white ribbons and furrows of cloud high in the sky that have softened all the shadows. It feels more like a good summer's day back home might feel, which is excellent, because back home it almost certainly feels like another shitty day in the middle of winter. It's good to get away from all that rain and dark. The atmosphere in Derry contains so much water (if you average it out) that we are essentially a lost city under a freshwater sea with a really low specific gravity. Derry twinned with Atlantis. We're just waiting for the raindrops to join up and finally drown us all. 99% of all the shootings that ever took place in Northern Ireland took place indoors—when guns are fired outdoors the bullets are slowed by the rain and fall uselessly to the ground after a few yards. That's an actual fact. The last proper outdoor battle fought in Northern Ireland was fought with swords and umbrellas. It's a matter of weeks before the dolphins realize they can breathe our air and move freely about in it, and then we're fucked.

Fiona has just pointed out that my trousers unzip into shorts just below the knees. Bonus shorts!

Tenerife looks a bit like how I imagine the moon colonies of the 22nd century will look, except without the vast self-healing domes overhead and without the methane towers spouting fire and without the big scanline-heavy projection of the Asian woman selling you Coca-Cola or Happy Tong brand moon-opium. It seems that nothing grows here of its own accord except some sort of waxy shrub or bushy cactus that covers the hills—all the palm trees and other plants exist only because they are irrigated by these little black pipes that run everywhere. It is an artificial paradise—the plants could just as well be cardboard cutouts. Don't get me wrong, the scene below me (a chaos of old hotels and dusty palm trees and imported sand) is beautiful. I'm sure most of the world looks like this, what with most of Earth being a bare and barely-inhabitable wasteland. But for a pale Northerner who spends summers trying to quash (or at least looking disapprovingly at) the abundance of unwanted biomass growing in his garden (and driveway, and patio, and drains) it's strange to see anything being watered. There is no grass here. No, sorry—I saw a patch yesterday. It had a man guarding it.

Not sure what we're doing today. Getting on the Internet and sending a few emails to our family (as well as posting this) was about our only aim. Oh—we need to buy a cheap camera somewhere as I forgot to bring ours in the wild screaming panic oh jesus we'll never make it what do you mean the bag is too heavy of getting here on Tuesday night. Then it's more chilling out I suppose. Tomorrow we're heading out on a glass-bottomed boat to take a look at some dolphins, perhaps even devise strategies for fighting dolphins without the use of projectile weapons. We have a trip up the volcano planned for Monday or Tuesday. Those are the main boxes we wanted to tick, really.

---

Okay, I'll talk to you all soon--Internet access is free but only available in the lobby of the hotel, which is a bit of a downer. Still alive though. Having a fine old time.

Some Art!

2009-12-03T20:33:00.002Z

Hey folks! Here's some art to break up the traditional Megatonne Marble wall '0' text:

Whitechapel Remake/Remodel: Mysta Of The Moon

Proper explanation over on the forum. The little robot on her shoulder is part NoNo (Ulysses 31, remember?) and part Metal Gear Mk II. This didn't take very long--a few hours last night, just to do something different.

On the other hand, this...

The Transported Man (follow link for generously embiggened version)

...took a minor epoch to do, back in June. It originally appeared in Murky Depths #9 accompanying a story by Anthony Malone. (I also have work in #10 and I'm currently working on a seven-page story for #11--a thoroughly excellent little magazine that is well worth checking out. They have the vision to publish my stuff on a quarterly basis, right?) Looking back now, there are all sorts of things I would do differently--but it's still one of my favourites.

(If I had a link for the author I would share it, but he seems to be googleproof. If you are he--drop me a comment.)

2009 has been a good year for art; I've gone from idle sketching to...well, I'm still working on it, but something better than idle sketching anyway. The first year of the next decade will herald new and exciting things.

Vengeance

2009-11-27T22:28:00.007Z

They chose a high cave for shelter, a shallow axeblow wedge in the ribs of a sandstone giant. They stowed their gear, laid out their tarp, and settled on their bags. There would be no tent that night, no fire--not while on the hunt.

The boy watched as his father counted and re-counted his pipeguns. Eighteen short lengths of dull copper pipe, each sealed at one end with neat folds and welds, packed with black powder and tissue and a single fat cylindrical bearing scavenged from the belly joint of an old earth-mover, wrapped in strips of cloth and tape. If they caught the men asleep and did the job cleanly, they would only need four.

"Dad."

"Son."

"Who was Jesus?"

His father unwound a few feet of fuse from his pack and cut two-inch lengths. They fell in a little pile between his legs. "Who told you about Jesus, then?"

"Lady in the bus."

"Lady in the bus was a crazy lady, son. She'd lost a lot of folks and that made her crazy."

"You schtupped her. I heard you."

"You'll understand some day. You schtupp when you can. You schtupp as long as you half like them and they're willing--I half liked her, and she was willing."

"Could I schtupp her some day? When I'm haired and grown? I'd like to try."

"No. Never. Not even when you're haired and grown and I'm dead in the ground. Promise me that. What did she say about Jesus?"

"She said, Jesus says that killin' is wrong, even when we do it for someone else. Jesus says when people hurt us, we have to give them both our cheeks instead of killin' them. Vengeance is a sin and we're awful sinners."

His father dropped his fuse and spat on the ground. "Pay her no mind. We shouldn't have stopped there. We won't stop there again." He shook his head, lips thin, brow folded low.

"You don't want to schtupp her again?"

"I could strangle her. I'm tryin' to bring you up strong. You need to be able to do what has to be done without worryin' about crazy ladies and the opinions of their invisible friends."

"I know. Sorry, Dad."

"Let me tell you about vengeance, Red. Vengeance ain't a sin. It's an evolutionary response to the unfortunate existence of bastards who need puttin' down." The Sheriff raised a fist covered in thick white scars, fixed his eyes on his calloused knuckles. "Once upon a time we were all either Bastards or Saints with nothin' in between. The Bastards naturally did whatever they pleased with the Saints who naturally accepted this as simply being the way of the world. The Bastards spent their days raping and killing and eating the Saints, who turned their cheeks like Jesus and thanked them for the attention. We made no progress. There was no peace. Just wild laughing Bastards dancing around in blood. That was the world, and it would have been the world forever, until one day a Saint was born with just a little bit of cold murdering Bastard in him. He was the first Sheriff."

"He was the first man who could tell good from evil, right from wrong, and he could do that because he had the capacity for both. He used hard words and hard deeds to keep evil in check. The Saints were able to flourish. The first Sheriff had many children with them, and all his children knew right from wrong. All his children knew what had to be done. The Bastards never went away entirely, but they found they could not take life without their lives being taken in turn, so their numbers thinned. They knew fear for the first time. This was vengeance at work. Vengeance brought that balance. The Saints and Sheriffs and frightened Bastards went on to make the world--all the things we see."

The Sheriff went back to cutting his fuses. "The world eventually went to shit, of course."

"So now it's all Bastards and Saints again."

The Sheriff grinned. "That's except for you and me, son, because we know right from wrong, and we know vengeance ain't a sin." He took the nearest pipegun and screwed a fuse into the base, then held it out. "Take it. That's a good one."

Your Harrowing Future

2009-11-22T17:05:00.005Z

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/ibm-makes-supercomputer-significantly-smarter-than-cat.ars

Mull over that for a moment. Mull. Now, this machine isn't meant to replace your cat or anything like that, it's a research device to provide insights into the behaviour of mamallian brains. But this is a machine with 4.5% of the cognitive capacity of a human brain. It runs slower than real-time, and even if it had 100% of the cognitive capcacity of a human brain it still wouldn't be a human brain (not without also simulating the strange bath of mood-altering chemicals our brains slosh about in) but, my god, it's a functioning virtualised brain.

Let's skip over the associated philosophical minefield for a moment and think about what this technology means in practical terms. It means that we're a few short technical hops away from virtualised human and post-human minds. An explosion of familiar and unfamiliar new forms of thought.

What does this do to the economy (and any kind of power structure built on that) chaps?

Let's say you strap down a few dying writers and artists, for example. You use your MindMapper 3000 (technical hurdle) to extract their brain-states and run them on your machines, running them at 100X real time (still concievable), and in each case disabling the part of the mind that knows fatigue. Give them all the resources they need in a simple simulated environment. In a week you have more new writing and art than the ('outside') market can possibly absorb in a year. That's the end of any creative industry in the traditional sense--these virtualised minds can continue to add as much beauty and depth to the universe as they like, and other virtualised minds can enjoy absorbing their output in a sort of glorious Earth-shaking Cambrian explosion of ideas, but the idea of those creations having any kind of monetary value becomes absurd.

The same thing can and will happen for other forms of mental labour. Software development? Gone. Law? Gone. Finance? That's gone. Medicine? What if your doctor could spend three months mulling over your charts and scans in the space of 24 hours, give you a diagnosis, then perform any surgery you need (or virtualize you) the next morning?

What's left? Micro-economies of food growth and distribution, I suppose. Someone needs to stoke the fires of the power stations. But certainly, the idea of engaging in any kind of creative process at real-time becomes meaningless to anyone but yourself. You'll want to be virtualised, to live a lifetime in a year, to expand, to join in that vast dialogue.

It's an exciting and dangerous new age. Will the outmoded old system give way easily? Will we apply sensible restrictions to what can go on in these mind banks? If you have virtualised thinking minds, even non-human ones, you have the potential for misery on a hitherto unimaginable scale, both inside the sims and outside.

---

Forget everything I've said about mapping existing human minds into these machines. Forget that--it'll happen, I think, but for some it's going to be an imaginative stretch too far. Let's say we use this technology to produce new kinds of minds, specialised ones, vast minds without names or any sort of recognisable consicousness but vast creative, productive capacity. You have a new sort of machine, a black box if you like, where you pour in energy and get anything you need out of the other end. The old economy is still dead, utterly flooded and washed away. Plain old fleshy real-time work becomes a navel-gazing niché market.

We are perhaps fifteen years away from 'human made!' stickers on consumer products.

Who will be doing the consuming, and with what?

---

EDIT: Here's a fun thought experiment.

Let's say it's mid-November 2031 and this technology has been improved upon and miniaturised. Something like a super high-res MRI or a friendly swarm of nanomachines can map any section of your brain and transfer both the structure and a snapshot of activity to a mind machine both smaller than the equivalent section of brain and requiring less power to operate at real-time.

Person A transfers his whole brain in one go to the mind machine. He confirms that it has worked, buys a body for the mind machine, then goes and throws himself off a bridge. A few hours later, the mind-machine version of Person A emerges in a sleek robotic body, finds his old body, buries it in the woods, then gets on with his life.

Is Person A alive or dead? Is he the same Person A? Is it the same conscious entity? Certainly if you asked him, he would say that he was.

Person B is told that he has a degenerative brain condition with no known cure. The doctor suggests a new treatment: replace the worst-affected parts of his brain with mind-machines simulating just those parts. They'll be right there in his head powered by a plutonium battery in his chest. The severed synapses will be connected to microscopic ports that map to the equivalent virtual synapses. The only difference he'll notice is that alcohol will affect him a little less than before, but there's an app for that.

Over the years, more and more of Person B's brain is replaced, until finally it's just a few ragged strips of gristle and a dozen or so NHS mind-machines operating in concert. From his point of view, nothing has changed (apart from the angry scar running up the middle of his head, but we'll ignore that for now). Then the doctor calls to tell him that the last strip of gristle has to go. Come in on Wednesday, he says. We'll swap it out.

On Thursday morning Person B gets up and brushes his teeth. He shaves. He kisses his wife on the way out the door. He drives to work listening to vintage rock.

The function of his brain has been transferred to a network of mind-machines in his skull. Is Person B alive, or dead? Is he the same Person B? Certainly if you asked him, he would say that he was.

EDIT: Turns out all of this might well be bunk. Oh well.

Further Adventures in FTL: The Ganymedan Lottery Winner

2009-10-16T23:29:00.012+01:00

Some folks have expressed further misunderstandings based on my previous post. As my lectures go, that one was particularly impenetrable, and I am sorry. I muddied it up with all that origin talk. I will demonstrate the danger of FTL travel again, this time with smaller distances, and a more compelling character.

---

Joe Palmer is an IT professional from Ganymede City Five. That's right: Ganymede City Five. In the last three hundred years or so they've made some serious progress on Ganymede. He doesn't make much money; the machines have had IT tied up since 2015. The machines use him when it comes to swapping out memory, wiping old hard drives, and so on. They call him an IT monkey behind his back. He lives in a 160 square foot apartibox, part of a ziggurat complex of six million 160 square foot apartiboxes on the outskirts of his city, with his wife Mandy and three semiclones. His youngest semiclone is profoundly deaf because they have no kind of nationalised health service on Ganymede and Joe and Mandy can't afford ear drops.

Joe has been sent to Earth on the FTL shuttle to grab a few yottabyte sticks of memory for GANY-23, a water purifier with an IQ of 11!. (Notice the punctuation there. GANY-23 has an IQ of 11 factorial.) The trip to Earth is no big deal. They have those Branefudger engines now. The journey takes just three minutes, with a boarding/unboarding time of one minute on either side. The shuttle runs every five minutes. It's generally standing-room only, but a quick hop on a Branefudger shuttle beats the hell out of a three-week trip on one of the old fusion ferries.

Jupiter is at its closest to Earth. Light from Earth takes about 35 minutes to reach Jupiter.

Joe arrives on Earth, walks to the nearest hardware repository, hands over his requisition form and picks up the pair five-hundred ton memory sticks in their antigravorite wheelie-case. He drags them back in the direction of the shuttle. It's just turned noon and the fat and cruel Earth sun is high in the sky; Joe starts sweating up a storm. He feels about in his pocket and finds some sol-creds. He decides to take a detour via the mall near the shuttle depot and pick up something to drink.

Near the entrance to Baikonur Hyper-mall Six, Joe happens to pass a System Lottery stand. A mustachioed holoman invites him over with a cry of "roll up, roll up! Try your luck!" Joe shuffles over. "Everyone wins the System Lottery," boasts the holoman. "The winner is decided by quantum decoherence! Everyone's a winner!"

"Everyone's a winner?"

"That's right, son," says the holoman. "Your number is guaranteed to come up in at least one branch of the multiverse. You only need one ticket--just three solcreds! Trillions play the System Lottery. You give me three solcreds today, I'll give you back eleven trillion--guaranteed! That's enough to buy yourself a Saturnian pleasure moon! Are you ready for that? Three solcreds. No tombola, no numbers, I just need your System ID. Quick now, the next draw starts in ten minutes."

Joe hands over three solcreds without another thought. He waits by the lottery stand; the holoman announces the start of the draw. A drumroll sounds. The holoman flickers for a second, then points at Joe.

"Ladies and gentlemen, our winner: Joe Palmer of Ganymede 5! Your account has been credited, Mr. Palmer. Please allow--"

"HOLY FUCKOLA!" wails Joe. "You mean--oh god--HOLY FUCKOLA!" He drops the antigravorite case and gives it a stout kick. The case opens, the contents scatter over the floor of the mall, smashing the tiles and sinking through the concrete beneath like hot lead through butter. "I'm rich! Rich! Ha! HA!" He sprints for the shuttle. "Wait 'til I tell Mandy! Ear drops for little Maurice!"

"...Please allow time for the results to propogate throughout the system," says the holoman, but Joe is already well out of earshot, pushing past the queue to the shuttle and into the cabin. "I'm absurdly rich!" The pilot congratulates him and agrees to take off immediately for a million solcred fee to be paid upon arrival.

They lift off and Branefudge their way to Ganymede in record time. The shuttle lands, the door cracks open, and Joe spills out laughing, guzzling a bottle of the shuttle's emergency champagne. From Joe's point of view, he has been a multi-trillionaire for ten minutes. He calls home to tell Mandy to bring the kids and meet him outside the apartibox. He has a big surprise for her. Then he bangs on the roof of the nearest taxi. "I'm Joe Palmer!" he says.

The taxi driver steps out. "Would you mind not banging on my roof like that?"

"I'll buy you a new one. A new one! I'm Joe Palmer--I won the System Lottery!"

"Last week, you mean? I thought that Venusian sewer guy won last week."

"No--this week. There now. I won it there now."

"No you didn't," says the taxi driver. "I'm still in with a chance. The draw won't happen for another...oh...twenty-five minutes."

Joe sags slightly. "But I won," he says.

"I see what's happened," says the taxi driver. "Oh dear me. Oh dear me. You are in a pickle, my friend. Didn't you wait for the draw to propogate? They always tell you to wait for the draw to propogate. The event propogates at the speed of light. You overtook it!"

"They didn't tell me!"

"Well--hop in." The door flickers out of the way and Joe climbs in. They set off for Joe's ziggurat. The driver turns up the radio. They listen to the droning preamble before the draw. Eleven trillion solcreds to be won. Then the draw kicks off...drumroll...the winner is...

The taxi is a hundred metres up skirting over the jagged obsidian hills outside Ganymede 5. It banks and dips when Joe lunges for the controls for the passenger door, wailing insensibly. The driver engages the passenger taser until he calms down.

"But I won! It was all mine! Mine!"

"Maybe you did win," says the driver. "But you outran that. That civil servant from Mars won instead. Now sit still, we're almost there." They land on Joe's level. "Look, I'll tell you what--there's no charge. Next time you find a favourable corner of multiverse...for god's sake, stick with it until it can propogate through the system."

Mandy and the kids meet him as he leaves the taxi. "What's happened, Joe? Some pilot just called the house. He says we owe him a million solcreds. How can that be, Joe?"

"Listen, Mandy, I..."

Joe's pocketphone flashes. The machine on the other end uses his machine-level authority to engage the phone's speaker remotely. "Joe, it's GANY-394. GANY-23 tells me that you haven't shown up with his memory yet--are you delayed somehow?"

"Fuckola."

---

The dangers of superluminal travel, my friends. Events in the rearview mirror may be less certain than they appear. Outcomes can be outrun, event fronts encountered more than once. You can be re-re-re-versioned by the same act of decoherence.

One Of The Many Hazards Of Faster-Than-Light Travel

2009-10-15T19:16:00.005+01:00

I have a thought experiment for you demonstrating some possible implications of FTL travel (if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds true, of course). I'll forget everything about bending time and so on and focus on a feature of FTL travel I haven't heard mentioned before: it allows communication of information between versions of the universe. This more or less breaks everything, and is possibly a fine argument against the possibility of FTL travel.

---

Join me, travelers, in my shining globe with tripod feet and glowing ventral vents. Let the silver escalator do the climbing--that's it--now, find a seat by one of our many portholes, and strap yourself in.

We are going just under four billion light years away, about a third of the way to the edge of our observable universe. (Due to our FTL drive we'll be in the middle of a whole other observable universe when we arrive there, of course, but let's not be picky.) (It is all blossoming spacetime plumes and ultraviolet-shifted stars and other special effects for a while. You are suitably impressed.)

Okay--I'll reverse the engines, you unzip your inertia bubbles; we've arrived. Gather over here by the holoviewer, will you? I've deployed the star-sized gravity binoculars and turned the viewer on Earth, March 19th 3,939,997,991 BC, about ten minutes before that steaming rock pool there on the edge of that oily river develops the first replicator from two chains of organic molecules. See that small comet? It's going to hit land about three hundred miles from our precious pool. If you were standing by the pool, the plume of white-hot ejecta would be just about visible. The sliver of heat will warm the pool to just over 45 degrees centigrade.

Here comes the comet. So bright! I'll draw down the focus--see those amino strands? We know what happens now, don't we? Yeah--see now--the temperature in the pool has risen by three...four...six degrees. Watch those two strands. Watch them--here they come--closer--ejecting phosphate groups, now tipped by bare, hungry ions, moving along hidden lines of force. The viscocity of the medium is optimal, the heat is perfect...

Wait--was that a bubble? They missed each other? Oops. Looks like life isn't going to evolve on Earth after all. Back in your seats, folks. No need to panic. All will be explained in good time. First: let's pop by Earth again, shall we? I'll just engage this...

Earth, 2009. No time-compressed radio signals on the way in. No satellites in orbit. Barren rock and empty oceans beneath an atmosphere of ammonia, nitrogen and CO2. Unfamiliar continents. No ice caps. I said don't panic, folks, we're going to head back out and try again. The in-flight meal is chicken or beef. I recommend the beef.

We're a little further out this time--the light/reality shell of the replicator event has expanded by a few light-hours. I'll deploy the binoculars again. See? There's the pool. There's the comet, just seconds out. I'll just zoom in...there, look! The chains have joined. They're tangling--they've made a circle--and the circle is gathering a new strand at the join, forming another circle...things are looking good for life on Earth. Let's head back, shall we?

Earth, 2009. You'll notice that the continents are familiar, but look at that wide brown stain around the equator. Ah, look at that: this Earth is inhabited by a planetary hive-mind of sentient jellyfish creatures and living machines. You can hop out here if you like--looks like the land around North America is more or less free of those big protien harvesters.

What?

What do you mean, your Earth?

You're growing tiresome, you know. Stop crying over there. You're already home. You've already stepped off the ship and returned to your homes and families. Versions of you have, anyhow. Fully satisfied versions. Surely you understood the price? This is a faster-than-light ship. That also means it can outrun the expanding reality-shells of the multiverse.

What do you mean, what?

Every tiny quantum decoherence event generates a version of the universe where each possible outcome is true. A shell of reality--in this case, the region wherein it is possible to ever encounter anything affected by that decoherence event--expands outward from that point at the speed of light.

I took you out to a point beyond the expanding shell of Earth's first replicator event. Well, I had to--in order for you to witness it. Well I thought it was pretty special. We were versioning and reversioning with the collapse of every tiny quantum possibility as usual when the expanding reality shell from the replicator event passed by and versioned us into witnesses of each possible outcome. You understood that, right? And on our return trip to Earth we passed through a great many more reality shells. A superdense thicket of them, in fact. That's always the way with FTL travel. By the time we'd arrived in Earth orbit, we had been split into versions for all possible histories branching out from the original replicator event. So, I mean, you are home. It's just a great many more versions of you are not home. You just happen to be one of those versions.

I told you to stop crying. Come on, now. At least the jellyfish world still has life on it. How many versions of you have just arrived in orbit of a barren world where the replicator event happened, but the replicators went on to disintegrate after a few minutes? Or ran out of food in the first few days after failing to develop some early, vital mutation? Or the entire spectrum of worlds where life survived, flourished, developed cell walls and the like, but never went multicellular? Look on the bright side! You're a favourable and statistically unlikely version of yourself! They have the internet down there!

---

Perhaps the time-bending properties of FTL travel would conveniently return you to a point in the past which does not result in the communication of information (i.e. versions of you and the ship) between branches of the multiverse--just between you and the trunk of your past. I'm sure this could be worked out, using...math. If so, reality would be very neat indeed, and the laws of physics would have it all sewn up, and fair play to them.

---

Further to all of this is another thought: while we're four billion light years away from Earth, does life exist on Earth or not? There's no possible way to tell.

You know that the potential for life exists--a freshly post-Hadean world in the habitable zone of its Sun--but it's only after waiting around for the realities broadcast by quantum decoherence events that a version of you will ever witness life. From the point of view of any single version of you, out there at the four billion light year marker looking back with your telescope, you would see a single history of life on Earth play out from start to end. You are far more likely to be a version of yourself that witnesses life on Earth end prematurely, or never start at all.

I would guess that the spontaneous appearance of a self-replicating molecule falls into that region of things that are both astronomically unlikely but possible, things that only an endlessly reversioning multiverse could ever make a reality. We'll see soon enough; research continues into the starting conditions for life on Earth. It might happen all the time when you throw the right ingredients into a bowl; this might be bunk. But I have a feeling that it's very unlikely. There are more likely Earths where the Late Heavy Bombardment wore a continent-sized, perfectly symetrical smiley face into the crust and smoothed out everything else.

(We're sitting around witnessing ourselves, obviously, but that's just the anthropic principle again--we're here to witness ourselves because of the tiny but non-zero possibility of our existence. And we're not even the bare minimum necessary for self awareness. That makes us even more unlikely.)

So you're out in intergalactic space watching reality wash over you. We've established that you're one of the unlikely versions of yourself that sees life on Earth appear at all. An infinitessimally tiny number of versions of you would eventually witness the rise of multicellular life. A fraction of those versions would witness the appearance of the earliest vertebrates. Most of those versions would see nothing but writhing flatworms and variations on that theme. A tiny portion of you would see the first fish. After that--tinier and tinier numbers of you (still vast numbers of course, but tiny in the grand scheme of things) would see the fish do utterly improbable things like grow the precursors of limbs, start flapping about in shallow river beds, and so on. Every possibility is explored. Every possibility. And the unlikeliest possibility of all: a few trillion trillion trillion (and so on) versions of you would witness all the tiny variations of your ship being built, and eventually the fulfillment of your particular history.

When we turn our telescopes on far-off galaxies (off in the billion -ly range) and see star factories dragged through intergalactic clouds containing all the ingredients for life, we wonder: has life developed out there? The short answer is, it has. Every possibility has played out there over the last few billion years. Those galaxies teem with life. But if you waited around, watching every habitable planet in the cosmos, you might never actually witness a single extraterrestrial cell dividing. It doesn't mean that there is no life out there. Far more versions of them would look back at us and see a barren rock, too; it doesn't mean that there is no life on Earth.

The multiverse is inhabited by a great number of forms of intelligent life--every possible form.
You can expect countless variations on that theme here on Earth alone. The sad thing is, those civilizations are statistically likely to look out there and decide that they are alone. If they waited until the end of time, the majority of them would still be alone.

On the plus side, there are vanishingly rare versions of the multiverse (when all those reality shells finally overlap) where the intelligent civilization on every habitable planet sees evidence of intelligent civilization on every other habitable planet. Every single one. I imagine those universes are a good laugh.

---

One Of My Better Lectures

2009-10-15T18:50:00.003+01:00

I've recently taken to ranting on and on about science on Twitter. I record one of my better lectures here for posterity. It concerns the LHC, the Higgs boson, and then eventually the 2004 presidential election. The NY Times article in question is here. You should go and read that first, return confused and a little afraid, and allow me to explain.

Tweets begin:

Some folks are expressing misunderstandings of the recent New York Times essay about the LHC, the Higgs boson, and fate.

I'll explain now. Let's say you have a coffee machine. And you have a handful of SPACE TIME OBLITERATION BEANS.

If you ever, ever use the SPACE TIME OBLITERATION BEANS in your coffee machine, it will entirely obliterate the past and future of the universe.

Not a popular blend, you would imagine. But no! You could set up a factory churning out the obliteration beans.

They would forever remain at the backs of people's cupboards. You would never, ever observe a universe where they were ever used, because as soon as they are used, that branch of the multiverse becomes unobservable. If you ever set into motion a causal chain that led to the obliteration beans being used, your particular universe would be erased.

The essay provides the example of a deck of a hundred million cards, all hearts, and one spade. If hearts are drawn, you turn on the coffee machine.

As long as you vow to turn on the coffee machine when a hearts is drawn, hearts will never be drawn. It'll always be a spade.

The anthropic principle at work.

Imagine: there could be Higgs bosons popping in and out of the universe all the time. But we would never observe any.

Makes you wonder what other conditions there are out there! How fragile is space/time anyway? How often are we undone every day?

An example: there is a keyhole at the end of the universe the exact size and shape of a certain human being.

If this human being does not step into the keyhole on a particular date and time, a Higgs boson will be created, and the universe undone.

We would always observe a universe where that human being existed, found his way to the keyhole, and stood in it. Always. Without a doubt.

We'd also look back at evolution and see strange, unlikely things. Multicellular life. Fish with legs. Eventually, the human body plan.

Because universes where those things did not evolve to create the human body plan are stricken from the record.

Interestingly: whatever shape you make that keyhole, something will appear the next day to fit into it. The Cockosaurus of Venus? Hark! Here he lumbers in his little suit, helmet gleaming.

Imagine all possible histories converging on the same vital moment then branching off again.

Further thoughts (back from my walk): we should all have portable Higgs Emitters in our pockets. Wire them to our heartbeat/brain activity.

Have a button on the Higgs Emitter that you can press whenever anything goes wrong. Miss the bus? Emit a Higgs boson.

Lose the election? Emit a Higgs boson...

You would see an awful lot of unlikely election results. A lot of 51/49 splits in the favour of unlikely candidates with powerful friends.

I mean...let's say your powerful friends ran the Tevatron collider in the states. And you were a really, really unpopular President.

You could also wire the LHC to biometrics from every human being on Earth. Fire off a higgs boson every time someone dies.

(As the years wore on you'd end up with a world filling up with people who are almost, very nearly, almost exactly dead)

A Higgs emitter is immediately the answer to all dispute and the most powerful item in any modern supervillain's arsenal. Forget the A-bomb!

...I want one. No wonder the scientists in the NY times article are undermined. "Otherwise respectable" etc. The gentle diffusion of Dangerous knowledge!

(Thus the lecture ends. Everyone leaves feeling a little better informed. And I sit and plan exactly how I can wire the event of losing the lottery to the firing-up of the LHC...)

The Beast

2009-09-15T19:09:00.004+01:00

I only had Korma, which is normally reserved for old ladies and children under five, but technically it was Indian food and my stomach is a Draconian organ. It follows the letter of the law, disregarding the spirit, punishing severely and without restraint. Heartburn and throatscorch. I spent the night swallowing back hot acid and chomping on rennies between short bouts of sleep plagued by sweaty nightmares.

The nightmares. The nightmares.

Fiona and I are upstairs in our house. Not our actual real-life house--this is a fiction pieced together from all the houses of my youth. We hear a thump downstairs like a cupboard door closing. Go down and see, she says. Fine, I say, and I creep down the stairs. There's a couple of big steel cooking pots on the table in the hall; I grab the lids to use as weapons. Into the kitchen. I check each cupboard, I check the fridge, nothing. I peer outside--I can see overgrown grass and mutant hedgerow for a few feet and then it's just the endless formless black of the inside of my own head. Out of the kitchen (with the electric dread feeling of being watched from somewhere out in the dark dancing up and down my spinal cord) and into the living room. The living room is contempary, our actual real-life living room. I approach the mahogany cabinet in the corner. Fiona is behind me now. I lean in and open the doors.

There, coiled and waiting, is the biggest slate-grey shit-eating black-hearted sewer rat my imagination could conjure up. Hair all patchy and matted. Eyes black, beady, hating. Its teeth are cracked yellow shards pointing at odd angles from its black gums. The mouth is open.

The rat is screaming. It is metal grinding on concrete overlaid with the sound of galaxies colliding.

The rat leaps for my face. I slam the pot lids shut and I just in time to catch its hindquarters--the entire front end of this abomination is free to thrash about. The screaming continues, the claws flail, the mouth snaps at my arms.

The window, I shout. Open the window! Fiona runs over and flings the window open. I throw the rat out, pot lids and all. Clatter and hiss. I slam the window shut and lock it down before the mad beast can scramble back in.

Then I wake up all sweaty with my heart pounding against my ribs and a throat full of acid.

The Flamingo

2009-09-02T23:17:00.005+01:00

For this wonderful thread.

At first I thought "The Flamingo? What can I possibly do with that?" but then I heard a whispering, a tweeting sound coming up through the dialtone at the back of my brain, and it said, "wicker thong, wicker thong, wicker thong."

A New Look

2009-08-31T22:44:00.002+01:00

I thought it was time to change things about a bit. I hadn't changed the blog in any way since 2005 (except to add sidebar sections on top of sidebar sections). The old badly-photoshopped banner was starting to look a bit stale.

So: the new look for 2009 is stark.

Kiloday Calculator

2009-08-25T20:53:00.025+01:00

I'm 10,000 today, so I thought I'd share the joy of kilodays.

Give me your birthday below:

//

Currently: days old.
Day 10,000:
Day 20,000:
Day 30,000:
Day 40,000:

So there you go!

Thermonuclear Administration Angel, Again

2009-08-21T21:26:00.006+01:00

Okay!
(Linky.)

Thermonuclear Administration Angel

2009-08-21T01:18:00.004+01:00

...Or something like that. Anything about a woman piloting giant death-dealing machinery needs a triple-barreled name.

(Took it down to fix something, back up tomorrow. It looked stupid at a glance, the shape of the upper body part read all wrong.)

Recent Bits And Pieces

2009-08-17T13:15:00.004+01:00

Hey all! You may have seen some of my recent art up on Flickr, but I thought I'd transfer it here. At the moment all I have is that tiny link on the sidebar which is probably not enough for something that has become fairly significant.

Alright! Follow links to Flickr for embiggened versions and accompanying text.

There Are Still Precious Few Women On Ganymede

Girl In Foxhole With Machine Pistol

Europan Deep Scout

Relay Scout

Captain Future (Whitechapel Remake/Remodel)

This image was linked to by Comic Book Resources' "Comics Should Be Good" column as an example of the work on Whitechapel's Remake/Remodel thread. If I'd known that was going to happen I would have worked a bit harder on it, probably! Anyway: very chuffed with that. I actually read the column fairly regularly, was reading it last night but failed to notice my own name...

Four Stroke Kid (illustration appearing in Murky Depths #8)

This appeared in issue 8 of Murky Depths in April, accompanying the short story "Nosing With The Four Stroke Kid" by K.C. Ball, and is my first published picture, anywhere, ever, apart from that picture of Ecco The Dolphin I sent into Sega Power when I was ten. You will have been aware of me angsting about it on Twitter for some weeks. Since then an illustration of mine has appeared in issue 9--again you will have been aware of me banging on about that--and I'll be able to show that one off in a few months. I'll have another new illustration appearing in issue 10, which will be darker, moodier, done in the gradually more loose and practical (hopefully still effective) style of the images above, and should be fun to do.

Okay, that's all for now! Will update further later.

Quantum Divorce And An End To This Darned Population Crisis

2009-08-09T14:03:00.003+01:00

Alright, world. I woke this morning with the solution bouncing around my head.

What solution, you ask?

The win-win solution to any form of conflict, I reply, swirling a brandy and tipping back the bronze bust of great-grandfather Jacob Hieronymus Struthers. The old bookcase rotates, revealing the lab.

It began with a design for a Quantum Divorce Booth. This is where two people could go to settle marital disputes once and for all, without getting tied up with lawyers and alimony and all that who-gets-the-kids nonsense that surrounds conventional (or 'Newtonian') divorce. Husband and wife say their final goodbyes before climbing into separate pods. Each 'escape pod' contains a pound of cyanide suspended above a bath of hydrochloric acid. The cyanide is held aloft by a trapdoor mechanism triggered by a photon detector.

Between the pods is a photon emitter. It will emit a single photon, and the photon will be detected by either the husband's booth or the wife's booth. It is emitted in such a way that it must be detected by one pod or the other.

Stout locks seal the doors and the countdown to freedom begins. The counter reaches zero and the photon is sent. Blip.

~THE UNIVERSE SPLITS NEATLY IN TWO~

The pods wait until the thrashing and banging stops before unlocking the doors. The wife steps out and watches the orderlies drag her ash-grey husband from his pod, quite dead. The photon hit his side, then. She is free, finally free. She gets to live in a universe where that lousy bastard can never exist. She gets all the assets; the house, the money, the kids. Great!

~BUT ALSO~

The pods wait until the muffled screaming stops before unlocking the doors. The husband steps out and watches the orderlies drag his ash-grey wife from her pod, quite dead. The photon hit her side, then! He's free, finally free! He gets to live in a universe where that sullen cow can never exist! And he gets all the assets; the house, the money...the kids. Great!

This is the beauty of Quantum Divorce. When you really, definitely, absolutely do not want to share a universe with someone anymore: Quantum Divorce. To each party, the universe continues as usual, minus the other one. I mean, it's so humane, and the other party is guaranteed to survive--so is consent really necessary? It's just a way of escaping someone, forever, with no backsies. Split the universe in two. Send them down the other way.

Quantum Divorce Booths can be used to settle other disputes, not necessarily between husband and wife. Competition for that promotion at work? Split the universe in two--both of you can have the job! In fact, if you need to share any resource perfectly with another party--from a glass of water to a continent--you can use the Quantum Divorce Booth to split the universe and have it all to yourself.

Now, a caveat. Although the participants in the Quantum Divorce will never see themselves die, an awful lot of people in the universe where they do die will--relatives and so on--so this will cause some misery. But the misery will always be confined to the other universe. And if the kids ask where their daddy is, you can just say: he's with you, in his universe. There there, eat your peas.

Quantum Divorce will come in very useful during the Soylentgreenesque population crisis of the early 21st century. Just as it works for individuals (or small groups crammed into the escape pods) it can work for nations. Take the United States and Canada; two parched and starving nations clamouring for control of the same continent. If both nations were in agreement, they could be Quantum Divorced too, and they could leverage all those lovely 20th-century nuclear weapons to achieve the separation. Just wire the launchers to the triggering mechanism of a Quantum Divorce Booth. If the photon lands on detector one, the United States becomes New Canada, slightly charred, population zero. If it lands on detector two, Canada becomes part of the United States, again slightly charred, again population zero. From the point of view of a citizen of either nation, the sun still rises (though through ash-laden clouds) the next day, and the buses pull up at the doors of their overstocked apartment blocks to take the stairwell families to their new empty cities.

Ta-da! That's all future population crises solved, unless the multiverse somehow runs out of space for new Earths. I suggest we start this process early, with face-offs on each major landmass--India vs. China, Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe and Russia, and so on. Halve the population of each area, halve the carbon footprint of the human race, and with any luck we can all enjoy Earths without global warming catastrophes. Earths without war.

That's right. I've cured war. I've cured global warming. Quantum Divorce is the final solution to the Other People problem.

Again yes: there will be an awful lot of tidying up to do for the inheritors of each new Earth-branch. But this should be an excellent source of employment and economic stimulus. We should stockpile all our lye and shovels on neutral ground somewhere before performing the split.

What Have I Been Up To This Weekend Then

2009-07-26T21:30:00.003+01:00

Writing music!

Once upon a time I was fairly obsessed with midi sequencing and electronic music. Sank whole summers into music that never saw the light of day. Recently I've been able to get my old soundcard working properly again, so this weekend I dug out the software, tracked down my old synth and percussion libraries, and started playing around.

In the past I was obsessed with making the music sound real, but I am older and wiser now, so the central focus is on wringing sparse electronic soundscapes from the various wave-generators on the sound card. The first three such things are now up on Last.fm, which I chose as it was the first thing that came to mind when I thought about hosting mp3s.

The growing 'album' of experiments and shambling failures is called Supercooled Venusian Aircar.

Look Ye Upon It

2009-07-13T20:36:00.004+01:00

Witness the power of the shave-and-a-haircut of youth. I'm suddenly seventeen again. Well, not internally, but externally, for a day or two.

(Tired of looking at myself, moved image behind link.)

Looks like I've fallen into a Lazarus pit of some sort.

(I had to take a bio pic today for Murky Depths, new illustration appearing in issue #9. Took a handful of pictures, but Fiona saw them and vetoed them all. So, right I said, a haircut it is. Located my old shaver and took it in hand, undid a full year of experimental hair in fifteen minutes. I was growing tired of it anyway.)

The Blue, My God The Blue

2009-06-24T18:18:00.002+01:00

Walking home today I was reminded of that story by Issac Azimov where, on a world in the middle of a star cluster where at least one of the six suns is always shining, a perfect eclipse event every two-thousand years causes everyone to go mad when they see the depth of the night sky for the first time. Right now the sky is having a similar effect on the people of Derry, as it is blue.

It is blue it is blue it is blue. There is not a cloud in it. Not a one. I stood on a hill and looked around; I saw no hint of cloud on any part of the horizon, even over Donegal, where clouds are born.

The heat is amazing. In the middle of the soul-gouging blue is an impossibly bright and hot thing. I'd seen it on TV, and read about it in astronomical literature, but that was no preparation for the sheer majesty of it. I am told it is the sun. I felt like falling to my knees and worshiping it. A collie dog trotted by; the urge was to sacrifice it in full view of the Bright One, and so win His favour.

But I could not catch the dog.

This is what I suppose they call "big sky", though I think that only applies to unfinished landscapes with featureless horizons, like they have out in America. This place is too hilly to have truly big sky. So we need a new way to describe a cloudless day in Northern Ireland. I suggest unlikely sky. It's the polar opposite to the sky we endure most of the time, which is a brightish blanket of unbroken grey. At times it looks like the sky has simply not yet loaded, but you wait around and it still doesn't appear, so it dawns on you that it's meant to look like that.

If ever there is anything interesting going on in the sky--an eclipse, or the peak of a meteor shower--you are guaranteed the sky will go blank like this, and the blankness will last for exactly as long as you are interested in whatever is behind it. It can wait. Sometimes it waits for weeks. A solar burp could scorch the biosphere off the rest of the planet but Derry would survive, safe under miles of cloud.

Okay. I'm going to get some ice-cream and stare at the unlikely sky.

My My That Is Sharp

2009-06-03T20:55:00.004+01:00

Astonishing pain. Just astonishing pain. I am drumming my fingers and pacing about. And this is me after consuming all the pills I can reasonably consume.

Went to the dentist today to have a molar removed--upper jaw, left-hand side, right at the back. An awkward tooth. An awkward, awkward tooth. A head all cavernous and rotten, buried to the neck in bone and gum. After drugging me with some careful and painless needlework my dentist took to applying every single instrument of extraction known to the tooth-drawer's art, some even that were not in the immediate vicinity but which had to be fetched. After exploring every possible angle with her various tools, my dentist resigned from the task, exhausted in body and spirit. I think the poor dental nurse may have been holding back tears, so traumatised was she by what she had seen.

No charge.

The tooth remains. Shifted but not uprooted. I am referred to a specialist, a surgeon of the mouth, who I will see for a consultation in some six week's time, assuming I make it that far.

EDIT: Just a gentle ache now. The gum has cooled down and I hardly feel the tooth at all. Only hurts when I knock the tooth. Knocking the tooth occurs with some regularity during eating and talking, but I can deal with that.

Paramilitary Love Match

2009-05-28T18:47:00.004+01:00

Saw an advert for something harrowing on TV the other day--Uniform Dating. This is a matchmaking service specifically for people who like people who wear uniforms to work, and people who wear uniforms who like the adulation of nurse fetishists and girls with daddy issues. This is greatly amusing to me. Do they accept applications from priests, I wonder? Or McDonalds employees? I am tempted to create these profiles and see what happens. I want to know how many people are interested in Starfleet ensign Mathus Green and his love of "Sherlock Holmes holomovies, amusing transporter accidents, avoiding death during away missions."

I thought I might corner another niche market by stealing their premise and taking it a step further: I will create a Paramilitary matchmaking service. Is your uniform an old German army jacket, a full facial scarf, beret, aviator sunglasses? Are you all about separating from somewhere, uniting with somewhere, or are you a freedom-fighter, an insurgent, a mover-and-shaker in student politics, or an ex- variant of any of these? Or are you interested in meeting someone who has shown a firm commitment to a cause? Paramilitary Love Match dot com is the place for you. You'll be able to select your ideal love match by ideology, narrow it down to your favourite splinter group, find your match (all faces redacted, of course) and all whilst listening to a bad pan-pipe midi of The Crying Game.

The Dentist

2009-05-22T18:36:00.003+01:00

Went to a dentist today! And not just some softly-spoken guy in a back room at a tyre and exhaust centre, I'm talking about an actual dentist, working in a surgery in an actual street in an actual town!

Yes, just like with the glasses, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet (but gently, so as not to break my teeth) and go get my mouth sorted. There is a credit card put aside for this process. By the time this is over I will have the best mouth in town. The best mouth in town! I think I will get a t-shirt printed up now.

The good news is that my teeth are in excellent condition for someone who hasn't been to a dentist yet in the 21st century (I just haven't had time). Just a few small fillings, an old filling to be replaced with something more modern, and a tooth at the back that has to come out before it explodes and takes out everything in a five-foot radius. Also my dark front tooth (aforementioned hickmouth) can apparently be fixed quickly and cheaply.

Upon reflection I realise that I am a strange and disfunctional man and this is not something people usually get excited about.

Post 700

2009-05-20T20:55:00.003+01:00

How about that then--700 posts! Perhaps about 500 of those are actually online. The other 200 are doomed to fester in obscurity until my third son Rupert runs out of intellectual property to ruthlessly exploit and convinces his fey twin sister to give up her half of the ornate brass key to their dead father's digital vault.

"But whass in dere, Rupert? Whass in the special machine?" Her eyes follow something imaginary snaking its way up the wall and across the ceiling. "Cold machine...dark and clean."

"Our birthright, dear Miranda." The vault opens, microfine petals shifting and sliding, then peeling away with a cool belch of nitrogen gas. The nut within is a dark metal ball with a single USB slot in front. "The Various Half-Baked And Unfinished Trials of Sheriff Red. The first few thousand words of a mystery story about clockwork extradimensional beings. Also a story called the Long And Winding Choad. We will begin there, darling. We will add...elves. And vampires. No--vampire elves!"

You're a sick puppy, Rupert, but I always liked your moxie, and you work a lot harder than I ever did. If you can sift the semi-precious metals out of all of that muck you are welcome to it. Just leave your sister alone. I want you to go far away from her, Rupert.

Far away.

(And stop luring backpackers to their deaths. Stop luring things in general, Rupert. No, I don't care that they're only Australians. Australians are people too.)

Anyway yes, post 700, about a month shy of four years on. Things have slowed down lately, obviously. I think this is because I have stronger filters these days. Back in '05 and '06 I would blabber about anything. Or maybe it's linked to solar activity. Impossible to know. Is it time for a redesign? Get rid of the necrotic yellow? The title is unwieldy and means nothing but I can't change it now. The title image took about fifteen minutes to do.

What else?

I'd actually come here tonight to express an idea about infinite monkey/typewriter pairs and one monkey typing out the digits of the Gödel number that encodes the entire universe as it is now in this instant and thus bringing this instant into being, and another quite unrelated monkey a few trillion trillion cubicles away typing out the number that represents the entire universe as it was fifty years before. Once you apply infinity to any sort of random generative process you're going to get all possible variations of and iterations of existence sooner or later, and within those variations some reflective intelligence might manifest that observes what it believes to be cause and effect, when in fact nothing (nothing but the anthropic principle) actually connects one moment of its existence to another.

If the universe-state could be encoded in a single number, of course, then a single monkey would express every iteration and variation of the universe (in no particular order) simply by counting up to infinity over infinite time.

Count to ten: at ten you are just as likely to turn into a vase of flowers or a flash of nuclear fire as you are to continue as a human being. Of course that's never happened to you or anyone you know. But if the universe can be encoded in a number then you have to expect that there are other values out there that express these (relatively mundane) possibilities. There are probably far, far more of these terrifying alternative existence-values than there are values that express something sensible like cause and effect.

Yes, as I said: filters.

My parents are back from Crete--they had a grand time. The child and the hound are gone. The dust is settling again, and now that dust is mainly small white hairs, and probably will be forevermore.

Trial By Small Dog

2009-05-10T21:25:00.005+01:00

I'm looking after my sister and the family dog while my parents sun themselves in Crete. My sister takes virtually no looking-after; she's thirteen and now more or less an autonomous agent. The dog, on the other hand, is not yet two.

It's been a week now. One week. For a couple of weeks before that I was busy, yeah, busy as a blue-arsed fly, built a shed and rearranged the house and painted the upstairs room (previously the Temple Of Clarity, then the Hall of Christmas Past, now The Spare Bedroom) in one weekend, but this is different; this is Trial By Small Dog. Please understand if I have been disengaged from the process lately, abandoning Twitter, not answering emails, and so on. These eddies of quiet between wild currents of dog and dogshit-related events are fairly unusual.

Maybe next week my affection for the dog--which is there, don't get me wrong--will overwhelm my desire to disappear him. Actually I am considering a visit to eBay to buy a few stuffed and mounted Jack Russells to sit around the house. I imagine those proud companions of the long-dead watching him with their glassy eyes as he decides where in my house he's going to piss next. I imagine him finding a carved mahogany dog-mount and a five-pound bag of cotton wool in the prime urination spot under the kitchen table, and then deciding: no, I'll wait until Neil and Fiona come back from work and I'll pee outside.

The brass name-plaque on the dog-mount starts out blank. Then the dog pees in the hall. I let the dog finish, then I invite him to watch as I bring out my hammer and chisel and with them engrave an ornate "O". Four letters left, Ollie. Four letters left.

It's not so bad, it's not so bad. The dog is a lot of fun when he's in the right mood; all mad energy. He sat himself at my feet earlier and stared at me with this slightly deranged look on his face. I said "do you need to pee?" and he shot to the back door, a white flash. By the time I made it to the kitchen he'd come back to find out where I was. He gets all excited. Attaching the lead to his collar requires great dexterity. It's not that he doesn't like his lead; he loves his lead. He is greatly enthusiastic about it. Sometimes he loses sight of the goal and lets out a little dribble of pee.

Sawed through my left forefinger a bit on Monday while making the "Ollie-gater", a movable chickenwire fence that jams across the hall to stop the dog from getting upstairs. It is a fine piece of bespoke carpentrymanship. Now the dog has no access to carpet while we're out and he can't scoot out between your legs when you open the front door. He hates it. I am greatly proud of it.

Eyeballs And Whatnot

2009-04-26T19:06:00.003+01:00

So I went to the Optician on Friday to get my eyes checked out. Lately things have been less than great; there's the void-coloured tentacular smudge in my left eye which comes and goes, and lately I've noticed I've been straining to see things more than usual. It seemed like a good idea to get things checked out as almost everything I do involves processing light in one way or another.

The news: my retinas look fine, so that's a relief. The multicoloured smudge is just the desperate clawing of an extradimensional entity of some sort, or a software glitch, depending on your world view. Right now I can't see it so I consider it a temporary quirk. But I have astigmatism, which is when the eyes can focus more clearly along one axis than another, giving everything a slight vertical motion-blur effect unless I strain to focus. Picked up my glasses today; the difference in clarity was immediate. The edges of things are razor sharp. The one drawback is that the vertical axis of the world has been corrected, meaning that I feel about a foot shorter and everything feels slightly disembodied and unreal. I'm sure that sensation will fade.

On the plus side I now look terribly serious and grown-up.

No, I'm not Neil but if there's trouble I'm sure I can contact him for you

It's Happening Again

2009-04-08T18:36:00.005+01:00

So I'm about 20 years old, half asleep at 4:24pm on a bright July afternoon. A weak blue light struggles past the thick tartan-pattern curtains of the little room at the back of our garage and fails entirely to make it past my eyelids to penetrate the warm green-and-purple dark of my brain. A cool breeze and the curtains billow, the light swells and retreats. This is where I am. This is my eternal now. A moment of perfect peace and clarity. There's nowhere I need to be.

I take a deep breath and some dim background process thinks: I wonder what things will be like when I'm in my late twenties? Then

*FOOTAGE MISSING*

I'm turning 27 in a couple of days. That's late twenties. What that is, my friends, is just plain mad. I'm stuck in this increasingly dystopic vision of the future and I can't wake up.

Many of you are older than this, of course. Significantly. You will say: lucky bastard is only 27. I know this. And I know I probably complain that time is going too quickly every year. When people say that of course, that time is going too quickly, what we're really expressing is a sense that we're not making optimal use of our time, or more precisely that time is a sort of rough rocky mountainside that we're tumbling senselessly down, all bare arses and broken limbs, reaching wildly for twigs and roots that yank loose or rip our palms without ever slowing us down. There is no stopping to smell the flowers and there, that sharp rock just inverted your face for you anyway, all you'll smell from here on in is muck and blood.

27 will be a good year though. I'll have a story in print this year. Also I am now a proper published artist, or will be in a few day's time when the good folk at Murky Depths run off issue #8 (I've done a double-page illustration for them) and I will be published again, and have many fine things to show you all (that's where I've been lately, by the way, slaving over a hot wacom graphics tablet). So things are progressing well. I feel a change upon me. The art has taught me patience: I sunk every spare hour (and--according to Fiona--a great number of hours that weren't actually spare) for nearly three weeks into that one image. The result was pleasing, if maybe a bit static, and I learned an awful lot in the process.

In that sense things aren't so bad. Just rough edges to polish off now: I need to get a driver's license at some point (should really take up lessons again...), I need to improve my general health a couple of notches (or else I'm middle aged now), there are vital things to do around the house, and the house I'm talking about here isn't actually mine, I'm 27 with very little accumulated wealth to show for it, and so on. The usual mess of Earthly bullshit that follows you from one week to the next, things I know I should deal with, but I really don't care that much about. Hard to convince myself to invest in a pension when every fibre of my being knows I'll never get to retire, and that there's a good chance that pension money will end up getting reappropriated to buy sonic truncheons for the fascist SocioTechJunta that takes over in 2015.

Didn't mean to get all angsty on you there. 27, fair enough. Plenty of stuff to do.

EDIT: Should have mentioned, my parents are on to a good thing with the birthday presents; last year they bought me a barbeque, this year they bought me a giant clay chimenea. The possibilities are now endless: as soon as the weather picks up I will be in the back yard setting multiple fires. Large blazing fires that singe the hair and dry out the eyes. Chimenea!

It Worked!

2009-03-03T21:11:00.003Z

The star chart confirms it; I've skipped past February in its entirety and it's now the 3rd of March, 2009. The device is in ruins, of course, the precious time core at the heart of the machine crushed beyond recognition by the nightmare pressure of shifting 8,987,551,790 gigajoules of manflesh through time. I have no spares. I'll have to wait until my great-great-granddaughter's tech people perfect the technology so that I can steal it and send it back to myself. I'll try my best to make the thing target March '09 but according to the scribbled note I found with it, "rearward branch traversal is notoriously unreliable, oh and don't let that quack bastard take your leg above the knee nomatter what he says" so it might end up anywhere, even materialising in my shoe cupboard sometime last month and causing this whole damn mess.

I've been busy with this and that. Normal order will be restored soon. New art to show off.

The Devastating Tale Of Quan Li (Scraped From Twitter)

2009-01-27T02:21:00.003Z

I have a story for you--bear with me for a moment. It is a devastating tale that ran on the front page of Friday's 'Derry Journal'.

A grim Chinese backwater. And there, a village. It is a godawful place made of concrete and bamboo. Quan Li--our hero--lives there.

Lived there, I should say, because the village was razed to the ground by an earthquake a few years ago. That is where the story begins.

With the destruction of his village, Quan Li found himself homeless, unemployed, and walking around knee-deep in dusty, blank-eyed dead.

Reedy thin, his simple peasant's clothes in tatters, Quan Li stumbles past the marker at the edge of town and just keeps walking.

He meets a monkey, a pig, and an effeminate monk. They smack bandits and drink rice alcohol from gourds, until one day he zigs and they zag.

Alone again, Quan Li finds himself at the edge of the world. Gulls and grinding industry. Great shapes shift in the cloying smog.

He finds a community of people living in windowless metal boxes of various colours stacked on the slowly-heaving deck of a docked ship.

The Crate People tell him where they are bound. A land of wealth, of decadent abundance, of loose, loose women. The West.

"I would follow you," sighs Quan Li, "but I have no money to pay for my passage." "Hush now!" booms a well-dressed man. "That's no trouble!"

"Why, my associates here will front you the money, and you can pay us back as soon as you find work!" The Associates giggle and chew beans.

Nine months and three ships later, Quan Li arrives in Derry, Northern Ireland. Men pull back the doors and he comes blinking into the rain.

"This...is the West?"

He is immediately truncheoned over the head by one of The Associates, bundled into the back of a Volvo, and driven to a council house.

He lives in the hot shiny attic with the plants. He can never ever leave the hot shiny attic. He tends to the plants. He dries the leaves.

Men sometimes leave food for him. Sometimes they don't. His skin turns to leather under the UV lights. He chews the leaves for relief.

There's shouting below; Li hardly notices. The hatch splinters open. Men in black uniforms take pictures of him and carry him to a van.

Now he's in the dock. His translator explains to him that he is a criminal, but not to worry. Two years behind bars will cure him of that.

Thus ends the story of Quan Li. Until he contracts a flesh-eating virus and they add a few years to his sentence for incorrigible bleeding.

( There may have been some exaggeration involved there. Source: http://tinyurl.com/cq8gxq )

Maintenance - One

2009-01-15T01:05:00.003Z

Click on through to the larger version. Or the full res version over on TwitPic. This is Maintenance, a story of love and scavenging at the dark end of the 21st Century.

Well, Here We Go

2009-01-04T23:15:00.003Z

Eleven thirty pm, last day of the holidays.

Laws of time and consciousness insist that there is no way to insert an extra week or so between now and tomorrow morning but, my god: if I could shoehorn it in somehow, I would. Perhaps a closed timelike curve created by the sort of awesome stellar energies that can only be released by blood sacrifice.

They say a thimbleful of blood can coat an average-sized room in a layer three inches deep. But when you're trying to satisfy the appetite of a minor time/space deity by pouring bucket after steaming bucket into a whirling hole in the fabric of things, there's just never enough. I feel faint now.

Gah.

Up until a few days ago I was awfully ill. I've described this in enough detail already. Now I'm better just in time to go back to work. This, my friends, is typical.

On the other hand it has been a great few days, spent almost entirely with my new graphics tablet and a fridge full of things I couldn't eat over Christmas.

Well, let's see what the new year brings. I have a feeling that it will be a memorable one.

2009's Opening Shot

2009-01-01T23:14:00.006Z

2009 started ominously enough.

I opened my eyes at about 4pm today after an uneventful 7-hour sleep. I was immediately hit by what I can only imagine was a government decoherence ray of some sort: my eyes scanned uncontrollably left to right to left to right, the room spun in a violent figure-8 movement. The bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling looked like one of those time-lapse images of the solar analemma. Gravity was all over the place: I had to grip the bed to stop myself from flying off and hitting the wall like a cannonball. This lasted for about twenty seconds, enough time for me to shout "blauuuughh!", then it stopped, and the ray moved on to dement the next poor bastard, without any sort of explanation.

I haven't been drinking. Not even last night: I had one or two whiskeys, of course, but nothing to warrant that kind of fearful episode...unless my body has started storing the alcohol in some sort of spongy new organ and releasing it in sudden bursts directly into my brainstem. Have I really manifested an organ for comedy effect?

I felt fine afterwards, but I was left with a haunting sense that it could happen again at any time. I could be bringing a small aircraft full of emerging musical geniuses and Kennedy family members in for a landing. Or, worse: I could be urinating in public. Then wham: the ray would hit me right between the eyes, I'd start gibbering about the spinning mandala imagery, and there would be propellers and guitars, bits of Kennedys, arcs of piss everywhere.

Regardless, I will have to move on with my life, so I'm going to forget this ever happened. Like when you discover a weird and disastrous software glitch while working in some lesser-traveled region of your product--the server log output turns into a scrolling ASCII image of a guy in a stovepipe hat committing some sort of sex act on a donkey, and it happens once, and only once--you just have to pretend it didn't happen, sell the thing, move on to the next job. Otherwise the fear would be a constant and crippling force.


> importantservercomponent.exe -d -PU -1024 -r4

383e8 d fif49$$% 
%%$ee
$%%
                    +----0--+   0
                    0\       \
                 0   |       |
                     /       /
               0 +--------------+
              ___   | >o  o< |
              | |   |  <     |D     --- Happy New 
               U=======___   |--          Year!
                    |        |   \
                    +--------+    \
_______              _|.     . __ |
       \          3==_|     3==__ |
        \             |_ __ ___ __|
   \    |              // oUo //
    \   |              ||     ||
____/|  |              ||     ||
     |  |          ___|  | __|_ |
     |__|          |_____| |___||

0x45ef0400 - should never happen

> oh, jesus

> del \importantservercomponent.exe
y

> del \QA\logs\importantservercomponent.log 
y

> shutdown

It's Time We Talked About This

2008-12-18T20:57:00.003Z

I'm sure by now you've heard of this baby born with a grab-bag of extraneous anatomical features embedded in his brain. There are links ricocheting all over the place. Weirdhunters and spookaroos are drooling over this one like so many thousands of eternally hungry teratomata drooling at the thought of sweet freedom.

It makes you wonder, doesn't it? About brains. What if enough extra brain survives to support a whole other consciousness?

With normal multiple personality disorder, you have two minds--one good, one evil--wrestling for control of the same body. That is the medical definition as far as I know. These two minds are usually intellectual equals; separate processes with access to all the same hardware, if you will. The evil mind might be fraction more devious. It will prefer the cloak of night. It will know exactly how to talk to women, and exactly when to stop talking. Medical literature records a number of cases where the good or 'daytime' mind only became aware of its mirror self after developing an inextricable case of triple herpes.

But in this case, you have two separate brains, connected perhaps by a few knotted braids of nerve tissue. Communication between the brains would be minimal, like brothers separated by fifty miles of rural telephone line, estranged for years after all the hateful business over the younger brother selling his half of the farm to Big Corn.

One brain is normal. The other is like the moldy Halloween walnut you find at the back of the cupboard in May. This is not the classic good, evil split; this is a functional, severely retarded split. You could be driving to work some mild morning in spring, completely unaware of this extra brain just above and behind your right eye, then a stray spark in your brainstem passes control over to it, and when control is restored you find yourself in a crowded supermarket with your penis out, your car upturned in the trolley bay outside, wheels still turning. You smell petrol and urine. A feral scream dies in your throat.

Jesus. It could happen any time.

Now Cracks A Noble Fridge

2008-12-07T18:00:00.003Z

Goodnight, sweet porkmeat, and flights of angels carry thee to thy bin.

More Of Those Dreams

2008-11-30T18:12:00.002Z

1. I was the leader of a small, unsuccessful cult. My followers were mad and dedicated enough but the whole group could squeeze into the back seat of a single American-made car. We shared intravenous drugs on the dusty concrete floor of an unfinished and abandoned house. We dipped ivory-tipped hatpins into the warm yellow fluid and stuck them into our arms. The room was lit by the glow of an old wood-paneled TV set. On the TV, Barack Obama talked about hope and the future. Just his head and shoulders and voice. A pastel blue background. The image flickered and he was wearing bulky matte-black body armor and a black SWAT helmet. It flickered again and the armor was gone.

I pulled myself to my feet for a quick check of the flock. They were distributed about the dusty moonlit rooms of the house. One of the girls had fallen asleep in the kitchen on a strip of floral-patterned carpet with her hatpin still sticking out of her arm, and I removed it for her, gently turning it in my fingers as I pulled it free.

It was hard to climb the plywood stairs; the air was a sort of transparent syrup that consumed all momentum. No handrail to steady myself with. After a few steps I was on my hands and knees. My legs failed before I reached the top. I remember breathing concrete dust, and I remember it sticking to the roof of my mouth. I remember thinking, dimly: "I'll wake up sore tomorrow."

2. I was out in the kitchen doing dishes, looking out over the back yard. A small grey-furred cat jumped on to the windowsill. Grey fur with black spots. I waved, and it waved back. I nodded my head, and it nodded back. I rocked from side to side, and it did the same. I took a step back from the sink and it fell from the windowsill, landing in a bucket of water. I peered out and saw it, under the water, not moving, eyes open and staring. I ran out to the yard and pulled it from the water, then squeezed its belly until it breathed again. I took it into the house and informed Fiona that we now had a "grey-furred mimic" as a pet.

Fallout

2008-11-04T18:06:00.002Z

"You look like you've been sick for six weeks." That was The Girl, earlier today. She is precise with her criticism, my Fiona. I don't look like I've been sick for five weeks, or seven weeks, but six. Exactly six.

She says this because I am deathly pale with a jagged five-day beard. I am dressed like a bum. Imagine, if you will, an egg just a fraction larger than the average human head. The egg has a highly magnetic white shell. You roll the egg in a tray of copper filings. Now you use your hand to smear a rough approximation of a face and mouth into the copper bristles. Draw some eyes with a red marker. You find some reclaimed copper spaghetti from a derilict office building or an abandoned telephone exchange and arrange this in a sort of misshapen nest above the face. Now you take your magnetic egg to your nearest Oxfam, and you ask to be allowed on to the roof. You call down to them. You tell them to throw some old jeans out into the alleyway. Perhaps a shirt and a pair of scuffed shoes. Then you hold the egg out above the clothes and you let go.

That's me today.

And it is all Fallout 3's fault. I have owned the game for about four days now, and by my estimation I am somewhere between 30 and 50 hours in. It's hard to tell. That's why I've gone quiet on the Twitter. That's why I haven't been hassling people on their blogs. When I'm not asleep or at work I am in the Wasteland. Absorbed entirely.

The Dreams, They Be Whack

2008-10-12T15:16:00.003+01:00

Nothing quite like a quiet Sunday morning for sleeping in and going on bizarre mind-trips.

We were in a jungle. Twisted trees and vines, mud and rain. Winding our way up a mountain on the trail of two men. Myself and three others. A tall woman in combat gear, an Iranian man in full Great White Hunter drag, and grim-looking older man in khaki trousers and a simple short-sleeved white shirt.

I led the way. Looking back I saw miles of rolling jungle and narrow paths converging on ours, leading down and away. We followed the men to a pair of small huts. Blistered concrete and corrugated iron. We covered the exits. They came running out. One was a tall man in a filthy suit that might once have been white. The other was a fat bald man. The bald man made the mistake of looking back towards the others while running in my direction.

I'd chosen a long thin vine on my way up the mountain. I caught the bald man by looping the vine around his neck and pulling tight. He fell to his knees. I tightened the noose until he went purple. The others had captured the other man and they brought him over.

"Don't kill him yet," said the woman. I relaxed my grip and the man fell to the ground in a heap. We dragged him into one of the huts and sat him on the floor, propped up against the ruined plasterwork with his hands tied behind his back. We put his friend beside him in the same way. Then the old man took over and set to questioning them.

I took a walk, found my way into the other hut, and looked out of one of the windows. I immediately shouted for everybody to run as fast as they could. Beyond the window was a steel pole stuck in the ground. It bristled with cameras and official-looking signs. The cameras were all trained on the huts. Wherever we were, we were very much not supposed to be there. Our intention had been to nip in and nip out without drawing attention to ourselves. That had been safe enough in the jungle but now we were exposed.

Now we had Mongols after us.

(Don't ask me why the Mongols were involved, but they were. I called them Mongols anyway. They looked like Mongols.)

We ran from the huts. The old man decided that he couldn't follow us; he set off into the jungle in the opposite direction. We left our prisoners for the Mongols. Myself, the woman and the Iranian hunter set off down the side of the mountain, along a fairly straight trail that led down to a far-off beach and a group of buildings where we knew we would be safe.

I remember a sort of sustained fall down the mountainside, scenery rushing by. Behind me, the thundering of hooves and the echoing of horns. The murderous Mongols would soon be upon us.

We made it, just about. Over a fence and into the largest of the big wooden buildings by the beach. I let the woman and the Iranian file in first. The Mongols skidded to a halt by the fence and leveled their bows at me. When I closed the door to the building I heard the thud of arrows.

The building was a consulate of some sort. And the man in charge owed me a favor. Strange thing is, I remember dreaming of that place before--of the same man in the same building. I went into the consul's office and the man was sitting behind a simple desk. Short black hair oiled into a hard side parting. Round glasses and a bow tie. A sweat-stained shirt under a canvas suit. I requested sanctuary. I think I might have used the words "diplomatic immunity". He smiled and pushed the papers on his desk to one side, brought out a small leather-bound book and opened it somewhere in the middle. "Of course. Of course. You helped me in a big way, you know. You can stay here for a while." He scribbled in the book with his pen.

He pointed to a rickety set of bunk beds in his office. Three bunks high. The upper bunk had no mattress and the wooden supports were mostly missing. The Iranian appeared, exhausted and red-faced, and I told him the top bunk was his. The consul laughed.

CUT TO:

The men we'd captured earlier are free now, wandering through the jungle. I'm watching them from the point of view of their heavy-laden horse. Some sort of big cat appears; the horse rears up and flails its front legs. The cat runs off.

Now I'm the old man. I'm following the men and their horse. I have a rifle slung over my shoulder.

The men have found what they were looking for. An overgrown ruin of some sort. A fifty-foot wall of marble. And on the marble is etched discs, a massive circle of these discs, some larger than others. The discs are featureless or they have the shapes of alien continents and oceans carved into them. Beside the discs are smaller circles running along radial lines from the centre. At the centre is a medium-sized disc with the outline of the Pacific rim, Australia, and Antarctica. Beside the central disc is another circle meant to represent the moon. The overall effect is one of impossible grandeur. I feel it somewhere in my throat. Then I know, somehow, that this is a representation of all the human worlds at the turn of the 96th Century. A map of mankind's expansion as of the year 9600. At the same time it is also impossibly ancient.

From the distance I watch as the men feel their way along a narrow ledge at the foot of the wall.
I raise my rifle and pick them off without a fuss.

Then I wake up.

ALONE ALL ALONE

2008-09-30T21:13:00.003+01:00

So I'm all alone now after a week of chaos. You may have heard me moaning about this all-consuming chaos lately, but now it is over, my heart has made it to Chicago, and I am all alone in the cold, cold house. Just rattling around.

Rattling around, moving things from place to place, making sure all the little penguins face south, huddling naked by the radiator, collecting my various excreta in gallon jars, that sort of thing. I find myself getting paranoid: now, I know there are things out to get me, but paranoia tells me those things are coming tonight.

Cryptozoology Corner: The Psychedelic Mink Of The Congo Basin

2008-09-14T16:44:00.047+01:00

The psychedelic mink (mustela dementis) is currently listed by the IUCN as "extinct, or at least keeping itself right out of the way of anybody who has ever gone looking for it." We cryptozoophiles prefer to believe the latter: the poor creature has simply had enough of being rubbed and sniffed and licked and squeezed and smoked and steamed for the entertainment of humans. Small and notoriously wily, a small population of m. dementis would have no trouble hiding in the dense and sparsely-habited jungles of the Congo basin. The high-chasing European elite who once took pleasure trips along the Congo in search of the ecstatic ermine have now been absent for almost fifty years.

The psychedelic mink was sought for the unique oily venom emitted by glands just behind its ears. As it groomed itself, the mink would spread the venom over its fur; as it fermented and dried it would become even more potent. Pygmy shamans were the first to make use of the mink venom as a means of reaching a state they called mbe kukutu*; they did so by shaving the creature, boiling the hair, and performing the ritual of huufu** with the resulting fumes. Early European explorers mistakenly took this "oddlie meeke & warie, varioufly balde ftoate" to be a separate species entirely, so numerous were they on the banks of the Congo. They also noted "an abundance of infenfible aboriginef".

The explorer Benjamin Duffle was first to record a description of the psychedelic mink experience, having taken a pygmy wife and gained the trust of some shamanic folk.

"It started mellow enough. Things took on a pleasant glow; for a while, I thought myself luminescent, and tried to impress this upon my guide. Nodding knowingly, he explained to me in his own simple way that the fullness of the experience had yet to reveal itself, and that it was invariably quite frightening the first time. I believe this foreknowledge may have harshed my buzz somewhat. His wide-eyed chanting of "kukutu, kukutu!" didn't help.

The long middle part of my journey was a vision of the most sublime heaven and deepest hell overlaid one on the other, the ghastly painted face of guide fighting for attention in between. My limbs became heavy; the air around me became as thick as treacle. Time seemed not to flow in one direction, but many at once. I was aware of my thoughts before I thought them; most of those thoughts were concerned with how surprised I was at being aware of my thoughts before I thought them. I was firmly in the grip of the mbe kukutu then. Badly twisted, I spent some time trying to talk a nearby monkey into allowing me to perform an act of coitus upon him. Luckily for us both, he remained in his tree.

Later, the harsh confusion of visions fell off somewhat, and I entered a period of entertaining calm during which the most trivial thought was inflated until it seemed vast and important. My guide became less interested in me as he entered mbe kukutu himself and ran off to pester the same monkey. I sat alone, immersed in thought. I had never before noticed how solid my hands were. Soon I was taken by a rare hunger for a starchy tuber of some sort, sliced thin as parchment and fried in the fat of a goose or a sow, perhaps flavoured with a powder of cheese, salt, and onion. As I write this, the hunger has yet to leave me. That this foodstuff does not exist, here in the jungle or in any other place, is a lament that I will carry now to the grave."

- Benjamin Duffle, The Fearful and Loathsome Congo, 1671

Benjamin Duffle eventually returned from the Congo with his pygmy wife. His report was not as widely read as he had hoped. He died in 1675 of what was recorded as "culinary misadventure with a potato, laudanum involved." His wife remarried, had seven children, and eventually went on to become the first pygmy mayoress of Suffield.

The tale of the psychedelic mink did not end there.

In the early 18th century, English universities had begun to accumulate a new kind of Natural Philosopher. These were privileged boys of the new upper-middle class who had signed up for the degree because they were expected to do something after leaving school and it sounded like a breeze--all sitting around in nature and musing over the nature of things. Wrong, Sir Issac Newton (or someone who had been taught by Newton, or someone who knew someone who had been taught by Newton, or someone reading from a set of notes published by Newton, depending on how much their fathers could pay) would tell them on their first day.

The result of this was a great number of young Natural Philosophers who weren't that great with numbers, who didn't quite get physics, who weren't that hot with alchemy, and who didn't have the stomachs for biology. They would have definitely started reading Newton's Principia Mathematica but would have never quite gotten round to finishing it--losing it in unfortunate boating accidents, or using the paper to make cigarettes out of tobacco and hemp. Many of them turned to studying the great nebulous mysteries of the human mind.

By the 1760's, the mind was where it was at. Sometime during the long hot summer of '69, a young Natural Philosopher by the name of James Milton Turnbull tracked down a moldy first edition of The Fearful and Loathsome Congo in the basement under the library at Oxford. He had heard of the psychedelic mink from a stoner friend and had wondered--

"Why is the creature not rendered useless by its own venom? Perhaps The Creator saw fit to give it some natural defense against dementia--in its blood, in its saliva, in the fluid of its brain. What would happen, I wonder, if this defense was isolated and administered in large doses to some hopeless case from the Ealsbury asylum?"

He shared this thought with a tutor of his, who had dimly remembered that some man Duddle or Diddle had been up the Congo and had brought back a detailed report of the pygmy shamans and their habits. He knew this only because the book had been used to prop open the door to the stacks for as long as he could remember.

James Milton Turnbull found the book, found the reference to the mink, and proposed a grand adventure to capture a few hundred breeding pairs. A shrewd young man, Turnbull observed that the landed gentry were rich and very often inbred. They would pay dearly to avoid spending their evenings locked North Wings of their stately homes, moaning mournfully, smearing shit over themselves, masturbating into antique vases. Turnbull's magical mink-fluid gave them hope. With the mink-fluid, the wealthy could inbreed with impunity. Unmarried Dukes and Lords and Barons and Marquises sent affectionate letters to their favourite sisters and cousins. Married ones eyed their extrafamilial wives with suspicion and sent letters to their lawyers. All of them put aside a little money for young Turnbull and his expedition. As a result, James Milton Turnbull found himself in charge of about 7% of the Gross Domestic Product of Britain and all her colonies in that year, immediately making him the richest man that had ever lived.

Turnbull set out with five ships and some three hundred sailors and Irishmen. He returned twenty-six months later with three ships, just over one hundred sailors, seven living animals and a further thirty in various stages of decomposition. At the time this was seen as a great success. Captain Andrew Thompson wrote:

"Well, we have the animals. In all the expedition was quite uneventful. Losses were as follows:

- The Daily Bread, broken on some rocks off Cape Verde.
- The Maiden's Virtue, lost to some Spaniards when we weren't looking.
- 54 hands were lost to fever
- 17 were lost overboard
- 5 were lost to crocodiles
- 3 were taken by pygmies
- 3 were hollowed out by spiders
- 2 were badly hurt while building gallows
- 1 man ate a mink, spoke badly of my mother, was shot in order to improve morale
- 1 fell and hit his head while waving goodbye to his wife
- 10 Irishmen died of natural causes, 113 were hanged"

Seven animals made it to the great mink farm that had been prepared for Turnbull's return; two male mink, four female mink, and one "coarse haired, solitary, remarkably uncordial little fellow". Some twenty-odd minkherds were gathered at the gates of the farm to welcome Turnbull and the "four hundred score breeding pairs" he had promised. Many were boys who had entered training two years before, pressured by aspirational but still thoroughly working-class parents into choosing minkherding as their trade, assured that by the time they were qualified they would be able to make a very lucrative living indeed. As the head minkherd later recorded,

"...A single carriage pulled up, and the gentleman [Turnbull] stepped out, looking quite sullen and distracted. He walked to the rear of the carriage, eyes fixed on the ground, jaw twitching. He allowed himself a quick sideways glance at the crowd; he ascertained that I was in charge from the weave of my minker's hat and beckoned me to him.

Without a word--and without once looking me in the eye--he bade me to untie the doors at the rear of the carriage. I did so. My old eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark.

On the floor of the carriage were seven small cages, six cages each containing a very small and ill-looking juvenile mink, and a seventh containing a common African biting-weasel.

The sight of their master emerging from the rear of the carriage wiping tears from his eyes with one hand and dispatching a common African biting-weasel with the other was too much for some of my boys. The bubble burst. The tension broke like a thunderclap. A great many unpleasantries were heaped upon the young gentleman. He pressed his forehead against the monogrammed ebony door of his carriage, set his hands in the pockets of his coat, and took the abuse without complaint. When the boys finally fell silent, the young gentleman turned and said,

'I was never that great with numbers.'

Then he took his cages one by one into the first of the vast airy barns we had built to house the minkish legion.

The boys were sent home."

James Milton Turnbull and his head minker quickly set to trying to make the mink make more mink. Making mink make more mink was usually easy enough; however, the psychedelic mink were the slowest-breeding species of the genus mustelae, having absurdly long gestation periods, taking years to grow to sexual maturity, preferring long ritualistic courtships, honest displays of commitment, and cuddling.

This behaviour was unlike anything the head minker had encountered before. The average herd of European mink was essentially a single organism, a tangled ball of slick fur and frantic, frenzied humping that consumed crickets and voles and left vast mounds of droppings wherever it rolled. The minkherd's job was to ensure that the ball of mink was never in one place for too long, or else they would all simply starve to death. Minkherds wandered the country with their mink balls, stopping at market to peel off an animal or two and pocket a little money, then moving on. Apprentice minkherds would walk before and behind the ball, keeping their eyes peeled for other men's herds, trying above all else to prevent a catastrophic collision. Early minkherds quickly discovered that a ball allowed to grow to over eight feet in height would collapse under its own weight, sending confused and injured creatures flying everywhere, humping and biting, biting and humping.

Not at all like the prudish m. dementis.

Not at all like the prudish m. dementis. It seemed like there was no solution in sight. Turnbull sank into a deep despair. In the winter of the following year, he scrawled this in his logbook:

"It is the males, Roger and Pete. We see it, now. The females waggle about in the usual way. It is the males. They have no reproductive urge. They spend their time together, hiding in their corner of the barn, or rummaging about the house, or hopping and jumping through the east meadow--they seem to always be wherever the females aren't. I swear: some days my inclination is simply to snap all their necks and be done with it. A great many powerful men would line up to snap my neck, of course, were that to happen...so for now, I keep away from the creatures when I can. All this from a theory, a notion much oversold. I am in too deep, snagged in the wicked gears of my own machine.

...A machine. Now there's an idea.

A depraved machine. Wicked gears spinning. Belts belting and pulleys pulling and pushies--are there such things as pushies? No, pistons. Pistons thrusting. A great brass affront to God and nature, with mink in it, induced by mechanical means to perform coitus upon other mink whether they like it or not, until they are drained and ruined...

I think I will talk to my man about this. Now, though, my kettle has boiled, and I have a pouch of crusty mink fur at my disposal. Tonight I will expand into my glittering other self and disturb the young ladies of the convent at Farwhistle. My expanded presence will no doubt vex them greatly. It will be great fun. Mbe kukutu forever!"

The next reference to Turnbull's machine is from the journal of Carl Hull, an engineer who was employed by Turnbull's Mink Company from 1775 to 1777. His name is signed on a great many orders for lathes and furnaces, then brass, steel, coal, and herd after herd of common European mink. Hull wrote,

"I learned a great many things on that farm. A great many things I would gladly unlearn. However, it is done now, my debt to Lord Mercer is repaid. Small blind creatures flow from the machine, are reared until they reach maturity, then sorted and fed into male and female hoppers to replace the ruined things that fall from that dreadful lower chute. Turnbull takes these away for his experiments. God help me, the squealing never stops. It is a nightmare contraption.

The first unfortunates arrived just as I left the farm. Hunched, shuffling forms in stained rags and chains, led by a couple of the asylum's boys. They seemed happy enough to be out in the air. The more feeble-minded of them trailed behind the group, indifferent to it all.

I turned to see Turnbull emerge from the breeding barn to meet them in that awful wicker dog mask of his. His appearance was marked by the shrill sound of the four-o'clock feeding whistle. A cloud of steam and smoke billowed behind him, long fingers of the thick aether clinging to his clothes, lit red by the boilers. I try not to think of the mad horror on their faces--all of their faces--when they saw that vision of hell coming for them, then heard the clanking of the machine in the distance, the whistle, the tiny screams."

[...and the rest of this story will be recounted later. A little more to go.]

*mbe meaning "pretaining to the tribal leaders and their women", kuku meaning "shit" and "tu" meaning "about the face". It was Benjamin Duffle who first translated this as "royally shitfaced", and thus the phrase entered the common lexicon.

**huffing. They huffed the fumes.

The Dreams Continue To Baffle

2008-09-12T20:34:00.003+01:00

I had a massive house. Clearly, money was involved. If property is theft, then I was some kind of diamond-toothed bandit king. From the future.

The house was bristling with interconnected gadgets, and everything was a screen, deep-colour e-wallpaper pasted over intelligent plasterboard. Active interfaces followed you from room to room, warping around furniture, slipping past doorways, continually adjusting to your angle of view. You could set it so that the walls relayed whatever was on the other side, giving the impression of a continuous open space. Animated systems of icons swarmed over the faked transparency, following you and your interface into the bathroom, into the kitchen, wherever.

I played with it, reaching out and flinging the interface along the hallway. It warped past the open door, momentarily appearing on the far wall in the room beyond, growing large as it adjusted for perspective, then shrinking again as it slid to a halt on to the wall between living room and dining room. My icons scrambled after it.

I felt the wall, then remembered: the soft heat given off was enough to keep the house comfortably warm at all times. I remember wondering how much energy it took to run. I suppose they've dealt with that in my dream-future. A personal quantum quivveration reactor in the attic, something like that.

Then I realised it was a dream, had a "wow!" moment, and started playing with the interface to see if I could bring up the BBC news or something. Instead it opened up a book; I flipped through the pages, back and forth, and found it to be consistent. It was about a man with perception lag and how he saw the world just that bit out of sync with time. The idea of perception lag now interests me.

Anyway, that's your (fairly obvious, probably) prophecy for today. Keep an eye out for e-wallpaper or location-aware self-adhesive pixel spray or whatever coming your way soon. Some Korean will invent it in about six month's time and you'll see it heralded on BoingBoing as the greatest thing ever. After this it will disappear for about five years and then you'll hear about it from a friend who knows a guy who knows a guy who has had all the inner surfaces of his house coated in pixel-spray. That guy will be me.

Exciting LHC Black Hole Death Drama

2008-09-10T20:39:00.036+01:00

Alright. The Girl woke me at about 8:30 this morning to remind me that the LHC was about to be switched on. She also reminded me about what the TV people were saying, that soon after this great switching-on a microscopic black hole would appear that would not immediately wink out of existence but instead would go on to consume the entire planet. Now, the collider won't stand a chance of spawning black holes until they power it up all the way and do that whole Ghostbusters crossing-the-beams thing; this morning was just an early test. All the same--she went off to work and I lay wondering what the Exciting LHC Black Hole Death Drama about to ensue might actually be like.

First of all we'll have to assume a few things about black holes that are probably untrue.

The prevailing thinking on black holes is that they evaporate by radiating themselves away. This is called Hawk-King radiation, named after the famous Congan King of birds, Kugu.

(Legend says that Kugu was once caught in a hunter's snare whilst out patrolling his kingdom. He could have broken free easily, but the wise and cantankerous old bird chose not to; such an affront deserved special punishment. His keen hearing told him that Yorkshiremen were prowling about nearby. He disguised himself as a common kestrel--knowing the form to be pleasing to Yorkshiremen--and pretended to struggle weakly against the snare. The Yorkshiremen found him, manhandled him into a balsawood cage, and took him back to their camp. There he waited until nightfall, then took a deep breath and grew to his true size, shattering the cage with ease. He grasped the earth in his long black talons and and beat his great wings against the air. The ground strained beneath Kugu; roots popped and snapped, earth cracked and crumbled, trees toppled, then a vast bowl of earth finally broke free. The white man's camp and the land around it rose into the air; riverwater quickly filled the hole, creating Lake Tumba. Kugu flew high into the night sky, then dropped the camp and let it tumble back to Earth. It landed flat-side downwards, crushing the men, creating what is now known as Mt. Umembe. To this day, the goatherds who graze the foothills of Mt. Umembe say they still sometimes hear muffled cries of "Bleedinora! Bleedinora!" in the deep cool quiet of the night. But enough of this. It is called Hawk-King radiation because of a different Kugu legend, not recounted here.)

The rate at which black holes evaporate by the action of this Hawk-King radiation increases as they get smaller. The kind of black holes that the LHC might make--if it were powerful enough to make them--would evaporate faster than they accumulated mass.

Also: a handful of protons doesn't add up to all that much. The entire Earth, if compressed into a black hole, would create an object with a radius of less than a centimetre in diameter. This proton fart would create a black hole significantly smaller than the granular resolution of the universe. The calculations start to break down there, but let's keep going as if everything's alright.

Ours is a magic black hole. It's impossibly small and it doesn't evaporate. Just for fun, it starts out with no velocity relative to the Earth, so it starts falling.

For the most part, being so impossibly small, it falls between things. The probability of absorbing another particle will increase as the density of the matter surrounding it increases. The Earth's delicious gooey centre is dense but that probability is still very small, so we'll have to be generous. Let's say it consumes an average of one proton for every thousand kilometres it travels through the Earth--just yanks it right out of a hapless iron atom, turning it into a little speck of manganese, utterly spoiling its day.

Absorbing all those (relatively stationary) protons will diminish our black hole's speed. As the black hole gains mass, it will lose fractionally less speed with each new proton it consumes. The black hole's diameter will also increase, so it will also tend to consume slightly more. I'm just going to assume that by some remarkable coincidence, those effects will balance each other out. All we need to know is that our black hole will be in freefall, but this will be interrupted every now and then, so it will fall past the centre of the Earth and not quite reach the other side, then it will fall back and not quite reach as far it did last time, and so on. It'll swing back and forth, turning iron atoms into the hated manganese, gradually slowing down.

This slowing-down process will end with the black hole vibrating tinily at the centre of the Earth. Meanwhile, on the surface: utter turmoil erupts. We all die. Our children all die. Their children all die. With each generation, billions more die. This horror continues for quite some time. The lunar poles blink to life; a delicate tracery of lights criss-crosses the Moon's surface and vast holes appear in the sides of ancient crater walls. The matter removed from the holes becomes a vibrant equatorial city, then a fleet of ships. Mars shrouds itself in long trails of white cloud and a band of green spreads along its equator. Sleek new ships appear, rip holes in the Higgs field, then disappear, never to be seen again. Back on Earth, mutations abound: nature perverts itself in a process of gradual transformation that continues until something that might once have been a porpoise stands on four long spindly legs and sucks a mouthful of protein-rich krill-bugs from the heavy evening air that blows through the chitinous whistle-trees of the great Antarctic jungle.

Then things really get going. By chance, our black hole sucks in an iron atom, electron shells and all. Then it sucks in another without stopping for breath. Then, nothing quite so out of the ordinary happens for another while.

Fascist porpoises discover uranium and use it to wipe themselves out. Later the sun explodes a bit, which perturbs our black hole, bringing about a whole new era of vibrating back and forth by centimetres at a time. A frosty and faintly radioactive Earth drifts free of the expanding nebula and plunges towards the galactic core. It misses most of the stars on the way in, picking up speed; then it vibrates back and forth in the gaps between the stars of the core until it is captured by a red dwarf star called <GBARROK'S STAR> (the extra characters denoting that it is to be shouted with the lips pinched between foreclaws and thumbs and stretched back over the outer teeth).

The gentle rays of <GBARROK'S STAR> defrost the atmosphere. A handful of dormant bacteria spring gallantly to life, then fail to successfully reproduce due to hideous and irreparable damage to their DNA. A race of vast and vaguely sluglike beings discover and populate the new planet. Or rather, <DOMINAAATE> it. With little else to do, <DOMINAAATION> has become the favourite pastime of our evil bastard space-pirate descendants.

While they set to enslaving the lifeless oceans and suppressing the mountains in the name of =UUUMANITY=, our ancient black hole finally gathers enough mass to start gathering mass in a serious kind of way. The core collapses inwards and the magma layer follows. A throaty gurgling sound and an eerie, far-off whistle are the first signs of the oceans and atmosphere disappearing down the mouths of volcanoes. The next sign is mass suffocation, bursting lungs, pink foam all over the place. The crust buckles, sending dead Uumans and their buildings flying about. A few ships escape in time; the rest tumble inwards along with everything else.

So that's it. That's what will happen, my friends, if this terrible LHC thing is allowed to go ahead, and black holes work like we're assuming they do here, and I'm right with all my wild guesses about how the universe works. APOCALYPSE.

Oh No, Oh God, Oh No: Hellboy II

2008-08-28T23:55:00.007+01:00

Went out after work for a bite to eat, a couple of Long Island Ice Teas (the Emperor's New Ice Teas, we called them, as the alcohol content was found to be lacking) and a movie. The movie was Hellboy II.

Spoilers. Yes, spoilers. Go away now if you haven't seen it. Especially if you're from Northern Ireland. Especially if you're from the North Antrim coast. Oh, God.

8<------------------------ ------ --- - - - -

The climax of the movie takes them...well, it takes them here. In one scene they point quickly at a point on a map, towards the top part of the left-hand island, I remember thinking "hold on...they just pointed at Portrush. The Golden Army are holed up under Portrush?" It was almost too much to bear. Then Abe Sapien actually said "Northern Ireland, County Antrim! The Giant's Causeway!" Upon hearing this startling and unsettling and wholly out-of-place revelation in the middle of this otherwise unoffensive movie, everyone in the cinema let out a groan of disbelief, then a whine of apprehension, then rapid popping sounds as they all broke out in hives.

"...To Antrim!"

Oh, no. Don't. Don't go to Antrim. Don't go to the Giant's Causeway, please. I was there just eight days ago. I imagined a hideous CG exaggeration of the Causeway's famous geological features--something like Lex Luthor's crystal island in the recent Superman film but with more sheep. The little hill of mildly interesting rock pillars and Samoan tourists would not, could not be enough for them.

They didn't use it. Ha! Fake-out! They went to the Giant's Causeway and they didn't show the mildly interesting rock pillars at all! The iconic rock pillars with their mildly interesting regular shapes! They did have a Giant. And it opened a Causeway of sorts, which was a nice touch. They also had a goblin thing with a full-on Ballycastle accent. Not a generic pan-Irish accent, oh no--an honest-to-goodness Ballycastle accent. This is a goblin thing who clearly had been to the aul' Llamas fair at Ballycastle-o. God, he might have invented it. The whole thing was equal parts horrifying and brilliant.

- - - -- --- --- ----- ------- --------------------->8

It was an alright film, I suppose. As others have commented, the sudden sense-and-reason-out-the-window love that blossomed in all of six on-screen seconds between Abe and the Elf Princess woman was a bit on the ridiculous side. But they were packing a lot in there and it was all done in a lighthearted manner.

A Fine Evening's Twittering

2008-08-28T01:00:00.004+01:00

Today I am feeling queasy and impatient and in need of a haircut. Yes, 'in need of a haircut' counts as a feeling.

Queasy, I think, because I have been poisoned by the heavy metal salts wafting from the plug-in air freshener in the corner of our bedroom.

I don't trust that little bastard. I find a bedroom that smells of yesterday's socks and morning shitmouth preferable to a dose of tumours.

Obviously there is no proof to back up this particular paranoid tirade. Yet. As with most new things, I give it twelve to fifteen years.

@michaelfurious This mild but ever-present paranoia of mine virtually guarantees I will die in some ironic way. I keep an eye out for irony.

Short internet outage struck fear into me. My god, only TV news? When the net is finally killed, only those that kill it will ever know why.

I rely on instant global word-of-mouth. A good dose of fresh news, once a day. Impartiality not important: I want to know what people think.

Example of Irony Death: you build a bunker to escape H-bombs. Sirens wail; you seal the door and wait for large breathy rumbling sounds.

You cook a can of frankfurters over a gas stove. You leave them bubbling while you listen for clawing at the door. You smell acrid smoke.

You shake your head sadly, mourn the mad world above, and you re-check the filter on your ventilation system. Nothing wrong with it.

The gas stove has set fire to your stack of comics. Shit. Nothing burns quite like a stack of comics. Except carpet. And then your legs.

Stoked by the ventilator, the fire consumes the bunker entirely. Batteries and butane cans erupt with terrible violence.

Thirty feet above, a thrush stops singing, looks around, then decides to get on with what it was doing. A curl of smoke rises unnoticed.

No H-bombs; the diplomats beat the ICBMs to the punch. A new era of uneasy cooperation spreads across the globe. Your ashes cool slowly.

That's a somewhat lengthy example of "Irony Death". Another might be: yoga-induced spine cancer. Yogic cancer death.

@aquafortis It was a fairly obvious Irony Death, I'll admit. The gas stove in the bunker was just asking for trouble.

@aquafortis "Madam, I am afraid it's almost certainly a yoganoma of the spine."

@aquafortis "That 'kundalini energy' was actually a massive buildup of free radicals around the coccyx. Regular hyperventilation does it."

A New Nightmare For You

2008-08-26T18:30:00.002+01:00

Holy pissing the bed every night for the next month or so, Batman.

A Dander With Danger

2008-08-25T00:27:00.004+01:00

You'll have to imagine it's last Thursday night. I was away, see.

---

I don't know if you've seen A Dander With Drennan. Probably not. It's a BBC Northern Ireland thing; a local show, for local people. A Dander With Drennan is perhaps the most accidentally horrifying thing I've seen in years. Outlanders and foreigners of all kinds—even Free-Staters, normally hardened to this kind of madness by years of RTE special-interest shows about old men making lobster pots and carving boat keels and shit—wouldn't understand what they were seeing. I heartily recommend it to all. Upon first sight, I thought it was some sort of clever parody of Northern Irish programming, a work of some local genius, playing it close to the line—but it's not! It's for real.

The opening credits let you know exactly what you're in for; you watch as the scarecrow-like figure of Drennan, clad in hiking gear, prances along a country lane playing a tin whistle, zig-zagging, dipping and rising, grey eyes dead, fixed on the camera—fixed on you. As he approaches, his lips curl into a smile. Scanlines warp and widen, the TV crackles and bulges, then he's on you, and all is a blur. You sink and sink into weightless dark. You wake on one of nine narrow beds in a barn loft somewhere, pinned down by six layers of blankets that look and feel like they might have been looted from the wreck of a U-boat in some uncharted coastal cleft—the embroidered swastikas confirm this—and this man is behind you, just out of sight, a hairy-fingered hand on your bedpost, talking to someone in his lilting Ninth Circle of Hell dialect, talking about something he calls the wishin' dance, and how The Nine are finally in place, and then—from the corner of your eye—you see a little girl with a rough home-haircut and a downy moustache swinging her legs on one of the other beds, and she has a large eyeless ragdoll, and you'd swear it had been made up to look just like you. Welcome to Mid-Ulster.

Mid-Ulster, my friends, is a world that should ne'er be revealed—those motorways and double-carriageways and bypasses between Derry and Belfast are there for a reason. With each new episode of his Dander he brings us a step closer to this wishin' dance of his. What's the end-game, here? Can this simple wayfaring Ulsterman really mean to replace God?

One of the most unsettling things about Drennan is his age. It's hard to tell if he's thirty-one or sixty-one. His beard is grey, but his vigour and thirst for godhood is that of a young man. His face is young when seen in motion, immeasurably ancient when still. His eyes—those eyes might have seen the mighty Finn MacCool single-handedly kill all those orcs on that fateful day in the Boyne valley. He speaks in an ancient tongue, a dialect not spoken here since the days of rot and famine and exodus; he talks to a procession of old and wizened men like they are mere boys. If I had to guess, I would say that Drennan is approaching his five-hundredth birthday, and not one of those five hundred years has been spent outside the six counties. Drennan believed in Northern Ireland long before the English invented it and the Scottish planted the hell out of it.

This man Drennan is a danger to us all.

You should know: it is Thursday night, and I am drunk, sitting at the table in the caravan. I am awful happy, giggling happy. I've watched a total of 1.05 episodes of Dander With Drennan in total. That .05 is because The Girl hates it. I get all excited, see...I point and shout "h'brangs forth the wishun' dance!" and things like that. Things that exist only in my head. She makes me turn over. I imagine I am hard to live with.

Alright, serious face now.

This man Drennan is a hero. He strides across this country, talking to crow baiters and drum makers and the like, sharing stories, occasionally breaking out the Ulster Scot jazz flute and laying a serious number on all of our heads. He says things like "today I'm goin' from the gran' oul' harbour of Ballynashonnaghy to the brave wee mountain town of Aughnacloy," and he knows the best way to dander between those places, along lanes and canals and dry riverbeds and barren cliff faces, discovering towns that still share a single telephone number and DNA fingerprint, adding them to the map so that they may share in our vulgar prosperity and junk mail. In the episode I was allowed to watch, he found a neat little town dedicated to one weird-arsed religion, some puritanical madness that involved traditional bonnets and sackcloth clothes. Right now I'm thinking Mormons but we all know that the last followers of that particular weird-arsed chunk of crazy-eyed Americana were sent back west on a leaky rowboat some years ago, and the only Mormons in Northern Ireland are here as punishment for doubting the word of Jesus MK.II. It began with M, anyway. One of those all-inclusive package religions that offer baptism, education, employment, shelter, free passage to Heaven, you know. Not Methodists.

Mammonists? Methusalists? Motley Cruetarians? Who knows.

For a small, small country with a low, low population we do have an awful lot of crazy shit going on—even if you subtract all the better-known crazy shit that goes on in the big cities. It comes from being hilly, you know. It's all down to the landscape. The country is made almost entirely of nooks and crannies. Some places are in perpetual shadow. Where it flattens out a bit, or where it's easily accessible by sea, civilisation has taken hold, famously troubled though that process has been. Everywhere else is just given over to the worst kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind madness. Drennan danders through it, reporting it as it is, befriending old men on bridges and using his command of archaic Ulsterspeak to extract stories from them.

I have stories of Mid-Ulster, too.

I remember, once, my friends and I strayed into Mid-Ulster on our way home from our house in Dublin. We were lost, see. After finding a few rust-edged, shot-pitted roadsigns that mentioned our home town, we thought we'd found the mythical shortcut to Derry. No. There is no shortcut to Derry. If you look for a shortcut to Derry, you will find only madness and death. Go the long way, friends. If possible, go by air or by sea. Circumnavigate the globe if you have to.

We found ourselves lost in a series of country roads that wound higher and higher into the rarefied air of the Mid-Ulster hills, passing a lake with a single threadbare Union Jack flapping on a tiny island in the middle, then a narrow path with steep sides, and an old farmer with tufts of hair on his cheeks that doffed his cap and shook his head sadly as we passed, and a goddamn honest-to-goodness rusted-out car abandoned by the roadside, axles in the air.

A few more wrong turns, and we passed through a heavily-forested area, emerging suddenly in an oppressively narrow street in a nameless town, walled on either side by terraced buildings, windows cracked and boarded over, paint peeling, plaster gouged. We felt eyes on us and began to panic, locking all the doors. It was a good job we did. The narrow street led into a sort of overgrown town square—nay, town pentagon—bordered by a high iron fence, a thick mat of brambles and nettles and feral roses spilling out from between its bars. The small grassy area in the middle of the town had five sharp corners, five posts with five grimacing gargoyles facing along five narrow streets, all alike. After driving once around the pentagon, we had no idea where we'd come from or where we were going. Morale was low; I defaulted to a state of madness and started whispering things like "rape and ruin and doom, lads, rape and ruin and doom." On our second time around, panic overflowed and an argument broke out. We weren't watching the road; we didn't see the girl until it was almost too late. There she was, stood right in front of us, a teenage girl in a dress cut out of a faded floral curtain, long straight dirty-fair hair, a small wiry body, eyes wide and full of fear, dirty hands held out in front of her. Her feet were bare, scratched and bloodied and spattered with mud; the girl had been running.

Tires screeched. We stopped just in time. She slammed her hands on the bonnet, looked at us one at a time, and screamed. Her voice had the unearthly atonal quality of a deaf-mute. She scrambled for the passenger door, pulling at the handle, pounding on the glass, looking from the handle, to the street, to the handle again. "Let her in!" "No way, fucking drive!" "We can't just leave her!" "My god, what's wrong with her ears?" She tried each door in turn, looking imploringly at each of my friends, grunting, screaming that harrowing nasal scream. "What's wrong? Who are you?" "She's deaf, you idiot...look!"

At last she was at my door, but she must have known her time was almost up. She shook her head with awful, hopeless sorrow. I reached for the lock, but I reached too late. As quickly as she had appeared, she was gone; four pairs of thick-fingered hands grabbed her by the arms and legs and lifted her away. The men were giants in pointed black hoods with long vertical slits over the eyes. Dungarees, white vests and filthy overalls. They pulled her into the dark yawning mouth of the nearest house. She went without putting up a fight, without making a sound.

I wish I could say we stayed and tried to help. No; we sped away, turning up the nearest street and—by sheer luck—we left the way we came. We drove in silence for a full fifteen minutes before we found a roadsign; soon after that, we found the the Glenshane pass, and the grim outpost town of Dungiven. We were glad to find Dungiven, and that is saying something.

The police assured us we were mad and told us to go home and forget about it. No such town, they said. We agreed with them enthusiastically and went on our way. I think we all still occasionally hear the girl's screams, and see those mournful eyes, and sense those black-hooded men lurking in the dark, but we haven't really talked about it since, so I guess we're all doing alright. A couple of us have turned to drink and drugs and base jumping and blogging and such, and poor mad Jim disappeared a few years ago after turning up on my doorstep begging for me to join him on an expedition to find the place we have been assured does not exist. The rest of us now agree that Jim never existed. We say things like: Jim who?

Exactly.

Anyway, after I do my holiday writeup, I'm going to scare up some episodes of Dander With Drennan for you. If you have access to BBC NI, I strongly encourage you to check it out when it's on. Prepare to be harrowed.

Holiday '08

2008-08-16T00:24:00.004+01:00

Folks, it's time for Holiday '08. Ten days off.

I set out for the caravan tomorrow. Tonight is a night of settling into the holiday groove.

The Girl and I ordered a couple of kebab boxes from a nearby pizza place. The flavours and textures of the kebab box--the spicy sauce, chewy chips, warm coleslaw and gently charred strips of meat hewn from the flanks of the common Persian Sandworm or whatever it is they have rotating on that spike--are designed to penetrate the worst kind of drunk, replacing that paralysing sense of aloneness with a pleasant tingling sensation in the mouth and throat, a feeling of fullness--if not wellness--about the stomach, and twelve hours of entertainingly scented farts that begin thirty seconds after the first heinous-yellow shard of potato or flapping strip of Maker-flesh is consumed. Approaching the kebab box with a fresh palette and an unsullied nervous system is a form of self abuse. Those sensations should not be experienced in the raw. But we are adventurers, drifters across a twisted landscape of right and wrong. Winds of chance and inspiration blow us here and there; devils and angels in shining eighteen-wheelers lift us from roadsides, beat us with axe handles, dump our violated bodies where they please.

The house is full of food. We'll be isolated at the caravan; any food we require in addition to what we bring with us will need to be provided by the land, Ray Mears style. As far as I can see, the sole source of protein in those endless dunes is the small black-spotted butterfly that breeds there in large numbers. I'm not above eating mouthfuls of butterflies--if butterfly meat was good enough for our hardy dune-dwelling forefathers, it's good enough for me--but you have to be up awful early to get them while they're still sluggish. So forget that.

What's the difference between a butterfly and a moth? This is one of those questions where "about ten pints!" seems to fit but I can't imagine what sort of sick freak would ever be in a position to say that.

Tomorrow then: I will pack my fresh drawing books, EEE PC and sundry other things (clothes, food) and we will set off. We'll probably dip into the off-license on the way to purchase the necessary liquid refreshments.

I love the caravan.

I'll be gone for a while but I will return with pictures and stories. So goodbye, all. If WWIII breaks out to secure a future free of Russian taxes on all that lovely Caspian sea oil they pipe through Georgia, I guess I'll see you all on the other side. I'll be the one in the iron mask, with the crazed mutant biker gang trailing behind me, whooping and screaming into the night, leaving nothing but blood and bones and a trail of radioactive fumes. Later I may throw down the mask, retire from my life as a murderous land-pirate, and open a small shop selling fresh seafood and dirty drawings done in charcoal-on-nacre.

A Week Of Twitter (20th-31st July 08)

2008-07-31T00:13:00.004+01:00

Here goes. Busy busy busy. Some of these are without context; this is invariably a good thing.

---

Dream: USA was part of the UK. Greater Britannia. I had a yacht I used to travel between timelines. It was safe to do so out in the ocean

I asked someone from Greater Britannia about their history. WWII lasted from 1939 to 1962. Europe was still just one big nuclear crater.

They'd leveled half of New York and they were rebuilding, reimagining London on the 'east side'. Flat ground, grids of fluorescent string

I like the quantum yacht. Nice safe way to shift between Earths. Oceans are the constant. It had a big Tesla coil thing mounted on the bow.

Back in from the garden. Showered for ages and I still stink of our diseased grass. That's two showers today though: one in the bank!

A system of interlocking gears. http://tinyurl.com/5ponq3 Sheer crushing force [for nipples].

Think of it: for a fleeting instant, a few femtoseconds perhaps, as it is fed into the gears, the nipple experiences a playful squeeze

Which quickly turns to horror

And the sun has set on another weekend. Piss.

Being an absolute fucking idiot seems to be a prerequisite to getting your driver's license. Just watched a guy peel round a blind corner...

...narrowly missing my girlfriend as she crossed the street. I could have strangled him.

I mean, populated area, plenty of people milling around, but no: this pin-headed fuckwit in his Vauxhall Cavalier had somewhere to BE

New superpower: the ability to just sort of point at a car and cause the driver's knob to evaporate. I would bear this responsibility gladly

"Sorry, kid, but once I take this finger out of its holster..."

[Noel's tires] Your new tires are made from 100% genuine mule hide and birch sap, tread hand-carved by the finest craftschildren, many over 12 years old

Your new tires are guaranteed to meet the minimum safety requirements in <%GetUserCountry()%>

Contrary to what you may have heard, your new tires do not leak; they ‘breathe’. Some pressure loss may occur due to excessive breathing.

In the event of catastrophic tire exhalation, discontinue driving immediately.

Do not attempt to stop Evil Superman with these tires.

NOTE: Your garage must have an air compressor compatible with 100% genuine mule nipple

Big thorn popped through my shoe on the walk home. Came in at a neat 90 degree angle to the sole of my foot. Instant "holy fuck!" moment

Couldn't remove it with my bare hands, this monstrous shard of woody evil. Had to walk the rest of the way with one shoe on. In the rain.

Ah, there it is: the pain. Seems my foot had to think long and hard about how best to express its displeasure at being speared.

Scientists: I am in the market for some kind of electric writing hat. Now go play jazz.

[The dazzling new science of fuckometry] @buzzorhowl A fully-qualified Fuckometrist of some sort.

And now? Now I am shaven.

OBEY THE FRACTAL OCTOPUS: http://tinyurl.com/5gwrga

Looks like the entire internet got there before me on the fractal octopus thing.

I think I read somewhere that Octopi have brain tissue in their arms. 12x the neuron count is more than 12x the thinking power, right?

The ultimate chocolate bar has a Dime-bar centre with a Caramac coat. Think of it. We have the technology.

OOOOOOOOOOHHHH, YOU'RE MY WIFE NOW

is it wrong for a perfectly healthy man to want a catheter system installed in his armchair? Maybe a funnel system would be more comfortable

If I'm reading something good I'll leave it until my gums start tingling before making a move towards the bathroom. That can't be healthy.

@CamyLuna Books are fine, oh yes. It's the laptop. The old laptop was too big and hot. Now the EEE PC seems too easy to drop into the bowl.

@bwchism Funnel it is then. I'm sure some kind of adhesive sheath could be devised. We need to get the scientists on this right away.

@CamyLuna You ever wonder if the gov't have backdoor access to the camera on your phone, too? This is the crazy-paved road to crazy

@bwchism Soft rubber + velcro, maybe. No glue necessary. Do they do that already? I have...sketches. I'm taking this show on the road

And now to the chamber, with the dry ice mist and the harsh blue lighting, to recharge until I am satisfied morning is well and truly over

Hit my head pretty hard last night on the way to bed. It was dark, see, and I stood on an upturned plug, and this made me bend over in pain.

It was during this blind bending-double-with-pain moment that I hit my head on the doorframe. And not on a flat part. Now I have a new dent.

I was profoundly night-blind because I'd just been in the bathroom removing an eyelash from my left eye.

@WillCouper The dole-queue->chain gang stuff smells of a gov't preparing for Marx's machine dystopia. The future is poverty and make-work

Our working population becomes a commodity with no demand. Criminalisation of the
economically-dispossessed is the gov't's knee-jerk reaction

@WillCouper in ten, fifteen years, AI will cause a crash in the value of mental labour; the educated are fucked as well. Chain gang time

Eventually it all comes down to this: who are we working for? We'll be digging ditches while vast sleight-of-hand systems juggle the wealth

The gov't will be reduced to a labour contractor and peacekeeping agency. It'll be rock breaking & microwave crowd control for us.

Suddenly a sort of post-scarcity Communism v2.0 will look awfully attractive for educated and uneducated alike. It may get messy.

...this is the fear anyway.

In certain software houses, everything they do is defined by processes. Even what they code. Machines could do their jobs today.

And the machines will do their jobs as soon as it is cost-effective. Everybody will out on their ears.

New harmonica arrived today. Itching to get home and try it out.

The sky is thick with white cloud, not a drop of blue. But it is hot. Sauna on Venus hot. The air is quiet: nature doesn't know what to do.

The weather is wrong.

It's raining, but not enough to actually wet anything. It's been like that all day. Dry rain.

"Only Doctor Hans Zarkhov, formerly of NASA, has provided any explanation..."

dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum FLASH!

It's Friday, everyone, and work is over, so you know what that means. That's right; it means it's time to go to the off-license.

And now, Aliens vs Predator: Requiem. I hear there's a predalien.

@djeljosevic Turns out it wasn't all that great. That's six Alien films now and still no facehuggers leaping out of toilet bowls.

@djeljosevic The lighting was awful. Too many "what the hell is this slowly-shifting dark shape
now?" moments. I want daylight alien action.

Saturday. Took a knife to those cardboard boxes in the back room. I can breathe now. Their taunting has stopped. Now, the disposal

Dear Tescos: do you sell any pork products that do not bleed a half pint of watery jism into my pan upon cooking? If so, let me know

Dear Tescos: it was kinda okay in the end. I scraped the pork-spunk away and put the remains in a sandwich with some 'Reggae Reggae sauce'.

Sofa ads are ridiculous these days. The people are green-screened and shrunk by about 20% before being superimposed in front of the sofas.

Also: Nigella Lawson is on TV. Some cooking channel. She is a filthy girl. Constant innuendo and sly looks to camera. I SEE YOU NIGELLA

@buzzorhowl She's one hell of a woman.

Tonight I am drinking wine. We're out of Corona, see. So wine then. Wine from a giant glass goblet.

@joncarpenter That just adds spice to the whole thing. Imagine her shouting "Global warming is a lie!" "Eviscerate the proletariat!"

Muggy day, filthy now, time for a shower. Otherwise I fear the filth will develop a mind of its own and try to take over. "Sssspread meeeee"

@buzzorhowl I had a fairly random "stop-'n'-chat" once that lasted three hours. Three hours right there in the street. Hardly knew the guy.

After fifteen minutes I was looking for an exit strategy. After an hour suggested we move to the pub. But no, we had taken root. It got dark

To be honest though I had nowhere in particular to be, and after a while I wanted to see how far a simple stop-'n'-chat could go.

Went into town to deposit some cash. Ended up getting Chinese food. Singapore Special Fried Rice. I think my stomach has actually burst

It's a new place so they're trying to impress us with their portions. They keep ladling out the food until you say "dear god, please stop"

By the way: dark chocolate Tunnock's Tea Cakes have been spotted in the wild. They taste much like normal Tunnock's Tea Cakes, to be honest

...they may not actually be new. They're new to me, alright?

Tested the sonic weapon earlier today. Aimed it at the ground. It should have hit the Western U.S. a little while ago. Anybody feel it?

Magma Cascade Test #1: success!

Holy shit, have you seen that new Just For Men ad? "Dad...it's time. We think you'd be a really great catch for somebody."

"Sorry, kids. Every time I close my eyes, I see your mother. Every time. Screaming. Screaming, and the bubbles rising up. IT WAS MY FAULT!"

"Dying my hair blacker than night and remarrying won't help. No, I'm afraid it's call girls dressed in your mother's old clothes for me."

Sensodyne ads are great. "A bowl of ice-cream followed by a nice hot mug of tea used to be my favourite treat...until I got SENSITIVE TEETH"

"But now with Sensodyne, I CAN LIVE AGAIN. Bring on the vanilla! And I want that tea PIPING HOT!"

You know what? Everybody has sensitive teeth. Reason is, we have nerves connected to our brains.