Happy belated Birfday to (23rd) barbaraannepeop xanderwulfie (24th) chubbydude24 shippofoxfire
and
Happy Birfday to thegreenarcher

---

D:
My dad had something to say to me this morning..
"After tonight, you'll never see your 20's again." D: oh noes!

My gift to myself I guess will have to be the commission I purchased.. boy was that naughty.. *blushes*
Might get another one.. I really liked that one.. :D I wish I could put it up on my desktop background.. lol :) maybe one day Windows will do something that will let me put a flash movie as my desktop background lol :D woo!

oh, my post yesterday
I got a sketch book.. and it's theme will be self-hating furries :D i think it's a great idea! I'm gonna start drawing pics of some ideas I've had in it, and maybe get artists to do it too..
A few of them I'm thinking of:
Self-hating Furry doesn't like your yiffy vocabulary!
Self-hating Fox doesn't agree with your submissive behavior!
Self-hating Bear doesn't agree with your shaggy ways! (got this from a friend of mine)
Self-hating Jaguar doesn't agree with your raccoon obsession!
Self-hating Wolf doesn't agree with your dominating tones!
Self-hating Dragon doesn't agree with your legendary status!
Self-hating Raccoon doesn't agree with your trashy style!

hehee I'm gonna have fun wif these!

I thought it was about time to pass the word that I have not fallen off the edge of the world and I shall have photos to post soon. That being said, I wanted to offer some site updates and the transient nature of some of the sites we hold dear. Prior to departing for northern Alabama, I’d planned to write an update on some locations I’ve explored either solo or with companions. Rather than consider it a post-script on my activities in southern California, I look at it was a review.

Originally, I’d planned to make this a in multiple updates on old sites, but in review, I’ll merely hide the stories and photos behind a cut. Subjects covered: the Quartz Hill Golf Shop, the “Special House” in Bakersfield, the various Felicia sites, the Hawes Communications Bunker, and various Route 66 sites including The Greystone Café. All posts (references) are to my personal journal, mainly because I’m too lazy to pull of the same post I made to the community.

( Changes come in shades of gray and black.. [8 images and two slide shows]  )

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6220

I do an irregular podcast here, called The 4am. It’s composed entirely of music sent to me by bands and musicians. If I like it, I play it, basically. You can find the first 13 episodes in the sidebar player — they’ve been played some 55000 times.

Haven’t done one since March. Now I have a decent set of speakers for this laptop, it’s easier to resume. So I’m starting from scratch, for a second season of The 4am.

It won’t happen, of course, without new music. If you think you’d like to be on the podcast, please email me your music (mp3, 128k or better) at warrenellis @ gmail.com. That email address is only used for the podcast. Including a link to your site is always useful — saves me having to hunt around for it myself.

Tell your friends if you like. But I can only play mp3s sent by the artists themselves. if you send me mp3s from bands you really like, I just have to delete them. Okay? Thanks.

I do an irregular podcast here, called The 4am. It’s composed entirely of music sent to me by bands and musicians. If I like it, I play it, basically. You can find the first 13 episodes in the sidebar player — they’ve been played some 55000 times.

Haven’t done one since March. Now I have a decent set of speakers for this laptop, it’s easier to resume. So I’m starting from scratch, for a second season of The 4am.

It won’t happen, of course, without new music. If you think you’d like to be on the podcast, please email me your music (mp3, 128k or better) at warrenellis @ gmail.com. That email address is only used for the podcast. Including a link to your site is always useful — saves me having to hunt around for it myself.

Tell your friends if you like. But I can only play mp3s sent by the artists themselves. if you send me mp3s from bands you really like, I just have to delete them. Okay? Thanks.

(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.)

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6219

That’s it. No more. It’s over. I’m only sorry I couldn’t fit more of you in — the response this year was overwhelming, more than double that of last year. Apologies to the several hundred (!) of you I couldn’t show. It was actually really nice to see so many of you. There’s a little bit of public performance to doing a blog, and that sort of thing always works better when you can actually see the audience. And I know that some of you, at least, enjoyed seeing each other.

Thank you.

Maybe next week we’ll see how many of you want to shoot video. Heh.

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http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6218

Nearly there.

(30)

It's happened so many times... Some nice peppy college grad asks me if they should go to graduate school. It depends on the situation, but my opinion usually boils down to "No, it sucks!" They invariably go anyway. Then, after a few years, they say it sucks! Do you know what I say? "HAHAHA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

This doesn't necessarily suggest that most people have a negative experience with grad school. What it does suggest is that if you are on the fence enough to ask for advice about going, then you probably shouldn't go.

WotLK screenshots will be continuously posted here, in case anyone is curious. :3

with Comicon going on... anyone know what the parking situation is like Downtown? I have a show at HOB to go to and wasn't sure if I should even bother. anyone have any idea?

I was invited to give a talk at a local college about what I do and what I did to get there

....

I never graduated college

Sarcastic remarks such as "Well I certainly didn't go to school for it" pop into my mind when I have to be serious.....

WHY SO SERIOUS.

Perhaps I'm getting older, or perhaps reading on a chapter every day or so keeps the rage from building up. Whatever the case, though I've been quite tempted at several points, I haven't YET thrown Stranger in a strange land against the wall yet although it has quite grated on me at several points.

I think the only part I've found interesting thus far was Jubal Hershaw's views on religion. Man, I'm slow to catch on. His view is word-for-word almost absolutely identical to mine. The whole spiel about all religions being equally likely or unlikely and that it'd be a pretty lousy sort of God who'd prefer one over the other and the universe being so big that God probably doesn't care if you do X, Y, or Z. Even the bit about how he'd rather spend eternity in Hell than kiss up to an abusive God. It's almost verbatim from my head. Uncanny.

Curious. I thought this was a popular book and yet I've never really seen that POV expressed anywhere outside of me or this book. Surely other people have thought of this. I'm surprised it isn't widely accepted as the only sensible answer to anyone who's ever thought at length on the subject of religion. The question isn't whether or not God/Gods/magic exist but the value/credibility of religion.

The really positive thing about reading this is that, I came to it independently. Sure, lots of people have contributed to me fitting it all together and offered little pieces, but the result I reached was something I found for myself. Not something dictated by my parents, church, country, or social network.

No two groups (to my knowledge) have ever independently developed the same religion. Particularly not in abstract terms. Stories about the moon and the sun as gods may be somewhat common in many of them but you'd find a lot of devils in the details and their requirements and customs would have some radical differences. Even groups like jews, muslims, and christians all share the same root religion but have sharp divisions between them, and subdivisions of those religions are nearly as bitterly divided.

Oddly enough though, I also share the view of Mike, the Man from Mars. I am God. You are God, the trees and the wind are God. Not in the sense that I can raise a mountain with the wave of a finger, but more that we're all a part of everything. Even inanimate objects exist and that's something incredibly awesome and magical when you consider the vast emptiness of space. We're something unfathomably complex and amazing. sub-atomic particles structured just so to form atoms. Atoms linked together in just the right way to form different compounds, those compounds interacting and exchanging with other compounds. Those chemical exchanges and compounds sometimes forming what we call life in the form of cells and their myriad sub components. In us, those cells form organs which all work together to make an animal and somehow just the right firing of chemistry, electrons, and environment has produced us. Creatures that can move beyond their base needs and create. We're making the next level of complexity right now. We have been since the dawn of man. Fashioning crude tools and refining them more and more. Eventually creating machines which will one day become to us, what we are to cells, and in those machines, entire new universes are and will be born. We ARE the wheels within wheels within wheels. We are God.

Want to know the secret of the universe? Why everything exists and where it all came from? Want to know the mind of God? It's simple... BECAUSE. That's it. It exists because it does. What else would the universe do if it didn't exist? All the rules and everything else, gravity and all that are necessary to making this because function. There could be and most likely are an infinite other number of universes (either parallel or serial) with completely different sets of rules. There's at least 7 billion on this planet alone. All your dreams, ideas, and emotions, creating their own infinite expanses with their own sets of rules. Every story that is written, every song, every painting is a world of its own.

Think about it. What's the end goal of science? Isn't it always at the very end to build better universes? Some people think they can do that through war, others through inspiration and exploration but we're all still going. All dreaming of a better world. Some of us may only dream of a comfy chair and a decent nap while others have grander dreams but we're all basically searching for the same thing, be we astrophysicists, computer programmers, evangelists, artists, writers, parents, alcoholics, heroine addicts, dogs, cats, insects, even plants. Everything is God. Everything is an isolate universe infinite unto itself. As thinking creatures, we can chose to be either, both, neither, or some complex and varied combination of all of them.

Recently, someone called me a bodhisattvas. (After looking it up) I think I could nearly accept that label though I think I would say that from my current vantage: On the road to enlightenment, the only destination is the journey and the only truth is none. (In other words, I'm no smarter than anyone else and no closer to 'the truth')

That’s it. No more. It’s over. I’m only sorry I couldn’t fit more of you in — the response this year was overwhelming, more than double that of last year. Apologies to the several hundred (!) of you I couldn’t show. It was actually really nice to see so many of you. There’s a little bit of public performance to doing a blog, and that sort of thing always works better when you can actually see the audience. And I know that some of you, at least, enjoyed seeing each other.

Thank you.

Maybe next week we’ll see how many of you want to shoot video. Heh.

(31)

(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.)

Well, it looks like I'm going to have the truck from 3PM tomorrow (Saturday) to 3PM Sunday. Help loading and unloading are both greatly appreciated, and anyone willing to lug a few items in their cars (mostly fragile or awkward stuff) would be greatly appreciated too! We should be able to tackle things well enough ourselves, but help will still be more than welcome. And hopefully I'll have photos of the new place (and an address) soon!

Nearly there.

(30)

(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.)

As you may or may not know the Hockey Night In Canada themesong was sold to CTV to use for the Olympics. While a terrible tragedy to the cultural heritage of this nation it has afforded Science Ninja Big Ten the opportunity to compete to replace the the well recognized themesong.

Our humble offering is the song Cliche from our last album Gaijin Smash.

Please feel free to vote us the hell up.

Unable to sleep the other day (what, me insomnia?), I poked around looking at this and that, and ended up watching a lot of muppet stuff... and found it rather interesting to watch the progressions go on through the years.

There are a lot of video links in here, so I'm putting it behind a cut... purely for bulk-purposes. In the meantime, here's a word from a sponsor:



Ya know, I've never tasted Wilkin's coffee... I wonder if it's still around.

Popped in Goonies. And i ALWAYS say it but it remains true: THEY DO NOT make movies like this anymore! If Spy Kids had this much swearing and juvenile humiliation by the main characters it would have been much more tolerable. This is back when kids in movies actually acted like kids!

Book #28 of the year was Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis (1938). This was the first work of Lewis I read after Narnia, during the 5th grade. It was, and is, a highly satisfying piece of speculative fiction. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes lecturing, I feel it has dated quite well, provided one is willing to believe that Mars (or Malacandra) is inhabitable.

Lewis was a master of providing his characters with realistic emotional responses to extraordinary events – or at least describing how I think I would feel in those sorts of situations. The only scene which (for me) rings a bit false is during the climax, when Professor Weston debates with the “Oyarsa” of Malacandra. Weston is a little too much of a caricature, though looking at his philosophies in the light of world events when the book was published, it is more obvious why Lewis would choose to attack them.

I was rather struck by the realization that his protagonist, Elwin Ransom, is approximately the same age as I am now. I’ve read this book now and again from the age of nine or ten, and always imagined him as middle-aged.

I have also been listening to audiobooks from Librivox.org, an excellent source for free public domain texts. This is going a lot slower than you might think, as I listen to them on my morning train ride. I tend to fall asleep after 20 or 30 minutes, or drift in and out of consciousness, and have to go back and listen to the same chapters over and over again. This is actually rather pleasant, especially with some of the readers who have almost become old friends.

I’ve been concentrating on classic children’s book, for the most part, as my attention is rarely sufficient for the various scholarly works or heftier tomes. I tried listening to Wuthering Heights, but found the more dire elements of the plot were insinuating themselves into my commuter-daydreams, and I’d arrive at work feeling out of sorts.

In the last two months I’ve listened to:
The Princess and the Goblin, by George Macdonald (1872)
The Princess and Curdie, by George Macdonald (1873)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (1865)
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll (1871)

I’m amazed that The Princess and… books are not better known. I had not heard of them at all, aside from a passing reference to “The King in Curdie…” in a C.S. Lewis book. Both of them were well worth reading. The Princess and Curdie, especially, is full of narrow escapes and death and strange magicks and monsters.

The hero of the book is Curdie, a teenaged miner who walks the Earth with a horribly deformed dog-thing who serves as his companion and bodyguard. He's armed with a mattock that he carries everywhere, and he has a strange connection to an odd sorceress/angel/ill-defined spiritual power. There’s a giant battle scene at the end, wherein a lone king, a housemaid, an elderly guardsman, a 10-year-old princess and Curdie face a giant army of revolutionaries.

It ends with the victorious king re-establishing himself as a (benevolent) tyrant:

'Behold your trust! Ye slaves, behold your leaders! I would have freed you, but ye would not be free. Now shall ye be ruled with a rod of iron, that ye may learn what freedom is, and love it and seek it. These wretches I will send where they shall mislead you no longer.'

It is interesting to read that starkly anti-democratic sentiment so clearly expressed - and remember that Tolkein was a big fan of George MacDonald's fantasies.

****

I’m having a grumpy old fan moment after reading a bunch of “Which Steampunk Character Are You?” memes.

Darn kids, with your goggles and trenchcoats and vague “Victoriana” pastiches that seem to cover everything from 1880 to 1930! How many of them were reading The First Men in the Moon when they were ten years old, eh? Eh? Or even Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air? Or faithfully watching The Man Who Would be King over and over as a child? Eh? Hmm? Wot? I ask you!

I prefer my steampunk unpopular and obscure, sirs! Or, at least, a marginalized subgenre with relatively few aficionados! Like God intended!

(I also liked X-Files before it got lame. And carrying your backpack over one shoulder? I invented that, okay?)

From now on, I'm all about the 1100s! Like, what if the Chinese built a giant firecracker to the Moon in 1169? Think about it, man!

So, what of Bruno von Boots, in this age of Dr. Horribles and Dr. Steels and Rain Slick Precipices of Darkness and rap songs about tea and popular webcomics about the Luminiferous Aether? Where does he fit in?

Same place as always – hunting gashants along the Syrtis Major canal between Aubochon and nowhere….

Something else to do non-Comic Con related!!! FREE!
As part of the South Park Walkabout
http://www.thegrovesandiego.com/events/walkabt/index.html

http://consumerist.com/5029282/for-chrysler-a-full-tank-of-fuel-is-an-additional-feature

Woot! I got something up on Consumerist! <3

Fin de siècle LOLcat discovered:
( read moar )

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6217

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http://www.technoccult.com/archives/2008/07/25/synthetic-pot-as-a-military-weapon-meet-the-man-who-ran-the-secret-program/

http://www.technoccult.com/?p=3516

Ketchum was referring to his work at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, in the 1960s, when America’s national security strategists were high on the prospect of developing a nonlethal incapacitating agent, a so-called humane weapon, that could knock people out without necessarily killing anyone. Top military officers hyped the notion of “war without death,” conjuring visions of aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of “madness gas” that would disorient the bad guys and dissolve their will to resist, while U.S. soldiers moved in and took over.</p>

Ketchum was into weapons of mass elation, not weapons of mass destruction. He oversaw a secret research program that tested an array of mind-bending drugs on American GIs, including an exceptionally potent form of synthetic marijuana. (Most of these drugs had no medical names, just numbers supplied by the Army.) “Paradoxical as it may seem,” Ketchum asserted, “one can use chemical weapons to spare lives, rather than extinguish them.”

Full Story: Alternet

(Thanks Bill!)

ShareThis

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(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.)

http://news.bmezine.com/2008/07/25/so-lucky/

http://news.bmezine.com/?p=7252

“I always feel so lucky to be a living canvas for such amazing artistry and then to have it captured so beautifully! I just wanted to share the names behind the work with people who would appreciate it..

Photos by Briscoe Savoy, leg tattoos by Dave C. Wallin of Tattoo Culture in Brooklyn, NY and the torso work by Needles at East Side Ink in Manhattan.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6216

You just can’t trust these people:

"Warren [Ellis, who wrote the project] was a decision to usher this into pg-13," dos Santos said. "There’s no cursing… there’s no blood. It’s ’Warren Ellis Light,’ his style is all over the project. It’s within reason, and in good taste. Not that his work isn’t always in good taste, but sometimes it isn’t in good taste."

Ellis even sent a message to SDCC fans through dos Santos. "He wanted you to all know that he’s in England, sitting in his living room, naked, collecting all of Hasbro’s money, and he wants to thank all of you for that."

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6215

Prints for sale:

Waiting until next week now... I'm going to be a tad strung-out come Tuesday if this guy goes much slower with this...

You just can’t trust these people:

"Warren [Ellis, who wrote the project] was a decision to usher this into pg-13," dos Santos said. "There’s no cursing… there’s no blood. It’s ’Warren Ellis Light,’ his style is all over the project. It’s within reason, and in good taste. Not that his work isn’t always in good taste, but sometimes it isn’t in good taste."

Ellis even sent a message to SDCC fans through dos Santos. "He wanted you to all know that he’s in England, sitting in his living room, naked, collecting all of Hasbro’s money, and he wants to thank all of you for that."

(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.)

Prints for sale:

(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.)

Layra's safe and sound and back in America again, and my apartment feels quiet and empty! The cat looks around for the extra human worship with the excellent claws, and I have no one to make waffles with. But it was a lot of fun while she was here. She's a blast! But a goober for living so far away, boourns.

( Photographica deluge... )

10 more days till I take off for my holiday, almost freakout time!

I've been forgetting about projects because I haven't been writing them down... bad bear.
If you're not on the following list and you should be, let me know ASAP. The deadlines are mostly tentative, for me to have an idea of what order to do this all in. I want to take care of everything before I go back to school.

Commissions:
JTBeckett commission - Sept 10th
T'arg concept sketches (wait to show till payment recieved)
Crypto's skunk character package - August 28th
Anjel sketch commission - July 31st
Silverone suit - August 10th
Crynny suit - December
keychain commission for Writing Wolf - July 31st
Noble trade - August 1st

Other:
Blue Moon Brewery contest (check due date)
Illustration resumé - August 28th
ArtSpots scholarship entry - July 31st

So the great Chocolate Stout Vegan Cupcake experiment was deemed a success. I took a few from the first batch to the Shop Downstairs and the owners plus a random stranger give me their opinions. Random Stranger (who's name is Stacy, as it turns out) was enjoying her cake until I told her it was vegan - a which point she got all amazed. And it's true: as cake goes, they're pretty good; as vegan cake, they are damn tasty.

I need to work on my icing. I was short on powdered sugar yesterday and margarine hasn't willing crossed my threshold in over a decade, but today I'm going to work on a vegan "butter" cream reci