Tonight, Monday July 7th, Dr. Sketchy returns to the Tatame Lounge for another night of dames, drinks and drawing! It's only $5 (we have to keep our models happy and fed) for you starving artists out there, but you can bring your non-participating drinking buddies with you for free. The session starts at 8pm, and lasts until 10. We recommend you arrive around 7:45 so you have plenty of time to grab a seat and start a bar tab.

This month, our fabulous model will be the lovely and talented Miss Lily.

We'll have door prizes, wacky drawing contests, silly games, and more. Bring your sketchbooks, your friends, and a sense of humor!

PLEASE spread the word for tonight! The more the merrier! :D

1. Post-Petrol, 2. Cu6a, 3. 070608, 4. Day 238: Guilty, 5. Gia’s awesome Tattoo, 6. in precarious balance around her

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

• Goddamn. Thomas M Disch is dead. Committed suicide on July 4. #
• There’s a new book hiding somewhere inside me. I can feel it. I must extract it. With hooks. Or nails. Ropes. A shovel? Not a Hoover. #
• @davidwynne STOP TALKING ABOUT MY PENIS LIKE THAT #
• @freakyfudge And you can keep @templesmith ’s mucus off it, too. You people disgust me. Jesus will come for you in your sleep. With eels. #

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

This is really cool: Pretty Oakland crosswalks. I'd love to see more of these around the bay area.

turns out that it's cheaper to travel to Portland by train than it is to drive. who knew?


and it only takes about 3 hours. i need more 3 day weekends so i can explore that city.




Hot Topic has Charlie the Unicorn t-shirts for sale. the horror!!!1



alas, i did not get to visit a spa this weekend ;__; but i received a very nice massage despite this. :)


it's time for a life change but i haven't settled on what exactly that is, quite yet.


in the meantime, i'm looking forward to seeing NIN at Key Arena on the 26th!


and i don't wanna go back to work tomorrow. wah.

there was a car commercial when i was a kid by Fahrvergnügen where a black car is driving serenely through a leaf-strewn landscape with some very calm music that might have been Enya or in her genre of music that has popped into my head time to time over the years, but i can't find the damn commercial (and thus, the music), anywhere online.

anyone remember it and maybe can find it for me since i failed? i tried youtube and google, to no avail. if you know of a good place that catalogs car commercials, that would be awesome.


no, it's not the stick figure one.

Hmm, Firstly to all whom see my post allow me to say i hope you all enjoyed your Day of rebellion, Retribution and mass slaughter. Mine was shared with my old pals mortiary6 and his fantastical wife wickedwish We drank yapped and stumbled down to a apartment unit that had a view of both shows, it was a nice time aside from what turned out to be a miscommunication between myself and my to-be date for the evening.

Unfortunately missing out on having that lovely person around lead to me being saddened by the end of the evenings antics. On another note, things have been well as of late (insert sarcasm), Kompressor has suffered a major mechanical disruption in the "Heart/soul region"! and teh medical team (i.e. me) is doing the best they can to resuscitate the crusty pile of shit known as my mechanical wife... And further down the rabbithole. I am planning a return trip to Chattavagus within the next couple months, look out town Torres The Terrible will be raisin hell! Yaar...

The years 2001-2007, approximately, on the web were the crazy years. The patchwork years. The years the web was massively and chaotically pumped full of Stuff. 1995-2001 were pretty crazy, of course, but they were checked by connection speed and the limitations of personal publishing. By 2002, broadband was happening over a broader swathe of the world, and blogging had bitten in. Followed by the takeup of bit torrent, YouTube, podcasting, and every other damn thing.

One of the few sane responses to this explosion of production was to assume the role of curator. (Other sane responses include moving to the woods and considering a completion of the work Ted Kaczynski started.) The two most famous examples of same are Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom (est. 1997) — Barger is said to have coined the term "weblog" — and Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing (est. 2000 as a weblog, previously a print magazine est. 1988), co-produced for much of its life by Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. The latter, in particular, has spawned countless imitators, all deeply involved in doing the web-work of 2001-2007 — sorting out all the weird crap that’s out there and re-presenting it in some kind of ordered and aesthetically or politically filtered manner for our consideration.

My own filter, on the site diepunyhumans.com from 2002-2004 before I moved that side of things to warrenellis.com, was simply gathering research material. It had occurred to me that if I gathered my internet-based research on to a searchable database — something as simple as a blog — I’d have access to it anywhere I could get an internet connection. Which, for someone who usually travels with mobile devices, was kind of a big deal. And so I’ve found myself calling up reference through a Web TV five thousand miles from home while writing on a Treo handheld device and foldout keyboard in order to meet a deadline, before now.

In the shift from there to warrenellis.com, I’ve taken great pleasure in reporting the doings of my network of mad and beautiful acquaintances, further personalising the curation process. But it is, regardless, a curation process.

Anyway. That’s been the job of half the web, for the last several years — collating links from the other half of the web. Last year, I started getting a little itchy about this.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stand up now and say, okay, these are the post-curation years? The world does not need another linkblog. What is required, frankly, is what we’re supposed to call “content” these days. When I were a lad, back in the age of steam, we called this “original material.” Put another way: we like it when Cory and Xeni are the copy/paste editors for the internet, but we like it better when Cory writes a book and Xeni makes an episode of BoingBoingTV.

(In fact, if you read any of the abhorrent comments threads on BoingBoing, you could be forgiven for coming away with the notion that its readership would be happy if it shut down tomorrow.)

(It’s also notable, I think, that my favourite “new” groupblogs — Ectomo, Coilhouse, Inferior4+1 — don’t just link and go. But anyway.)

And, frankly, no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BB crew anyway. They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.

The weblog has evolved to the point where, today, it’s possibly the most effective way of transmitting material that any of us could have imagined. Look at Tumblr. It’s the easiest thing in the world for writers to use — and also artists, photographers, videographers, spoken-word artists, musicians and a dozen other things. Imagine a jewellery maker, a laptop musician, a performance artist, a cartoonist and a short-story writer getting together on a single Tumblr to make themselves an internet channel. The tools are all there, baked right into the site for free. Not groupblogging so much as groupcasting.

And with a million people all madly curating the web — in many cases, trying to put your link in their curational record before someone else does — getting linked up isn’t exactly hard any more. These aren’t the days of begging for space on someone’s jumpstation anymore.

The above is, as Simon Reynolds puts it, “not fully baked.” I want to come back to this once I’ve cleared this flu out of my system — which is why I have this bottle of whisky — and cleared out some of the work backlog.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

Anyone have the # to request a small compost bin for under my sink? Thanks.

 

I stayed in town for the 4th — even though I’d originally planned to go to Tacoma. It’s a long story, but it worked out pretty well. I wound up being part of an impromptu shindig with Aric, Alex, and Ellen, which eventually joined a shindig-in-progress with Suezie and her S.O. Keith. Their shindig took place in a cool empty apartment overlooking the city and its fireworks, and much hilarity was had by all.

Yesterday, I ran some errands and hit up the B&N down at Pacific Place, for it is a nice spot to hang around and read books. Besides, I needed to go back to the mall anyway to pick up some stuff I’d neglected to buy the other day, when I was out with Ellen. You see, she and I were killing time before seeing HULK, and we wandered into a very nice, high-end specialty olive oil store that also sells many fine vinaigrettes and other assorted noshables. Hurray and huzzah, they were having a massive 50% off sale.

But I did not buy anything at that time.*

Though the prices were very good and the goods were highly commendable, the lone employee on duty absolutely defied belief. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he was the most sublimely creepy tool I’ve ever seen working a classy retail job.

He followed me and Ellen around the store, trying to start up awkward, suggestive conversations; and then he tried to corner us and stuff tiny spoon samples of various products into our mouths, whether we wanted them or not.

Then he tried to pick a fight with my dear foodie friend over the origins of some of the products. At least, I think that’s what was going down. He was as awkward a conversationalist as he was a seducer.

Ellen: [Says something about where the oil came from]
Salescreep: Well, where do you think you are?
Ellen: What? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.
Salescreep: Is this where you came from?
Ellen: I beg your pardon?
Salescrep: Where did you come from?
Ellen: Erm … here, I guess.
Salescreep: [Announces triumphantly] Well, I came from my father’s penis!

Ellen and Me: Yeah, we’ll just be going now.
Salescreep: Wait, wait, don’t leave!
Ellen and Me: [:: run like hell ::]

Since this exchange, we have wondered extensively how this guy ever landed his position in an otherwise estimable establishment. I mean, honestly — this wasn’t mere awkward dude-talk; this was the kind of guy who rides the short bus and licks the windows while fondling himself and thinking of clowns. I’m sorry, but in the course of selling fine gourmet cooking products, the genitals of a stranger’s parents should never, ever enter the conversation. And anyway, it’s hard to decide which was worse: his grasp of salesmanship, or biology.

So you must imagine my relief to see a very cute, very friendly punk girl working alone at the register when I peeked into the store yesterday afternoon. This different salesperson was helpful without being intrusive, and thanks to her professionalism and general politeness, I did indeed purchase my desired gift-type items for the birthdays of distant folks.

And all’s well that ends well, I guess.

---

* My dad can probably guess who I was shopping for; but it’s my understanding that the person for whom I was shopping doesn’t spend any time on the internet, so I’m not blowing some big secret.

[Crossposted to/from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]

I've enjoyed spending the weekend with my husband and all my friends.

Via Kate Schaefer from this post, at Clarionites:

“Due to the swift and generous response of the SF community, Clarion West has now received nearly enough money to replace the four student laptops stolen July 4 from rooms at the workshop residence. Clarion West staff, volunteers, and students all express their thanks for your very timely help. They especially want to thank BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Jay Lake, and many more for their generosity and for alerting others to the need for money and laptops. Donations began coming in from around the world just hours after the theft.

‘If we collect funds that are much in excess of the cost of replacing the stolen computers, we will return them proportionally to the donors,’ said workshop administrator Leslie Howle. ‘The use of PayPal makes this relatively easy to do.’ She added, ‘We are all overwhelmed, and the students are immensely grateful. They were devastated by this theft, and it’s been amazing to see the community rally to support them.’

Thank you so much!”

[Crossposted to/from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]

DOCUMENTAL is an exhibition by four emerging photographers, including two good friends of mine, Irene Kaoru Malatesta and Sarah Sharp. Exhibition ends with a live gig, apparently. If you’re in NYC on the 11th, please do go and see them. Details in the link, obviously.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

There is no nihilism in pushing the frontiers of comics, no budgets but our imaginations, no reason to stop trying.

PULPHOPE: KARIMBAH

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[via cavalorn]

"You will never find the bodies"

Off to church.

(Well, Kingdom Hall)

$%^*&%* Jehova's Witnesses.