Matt Webb, mysterious Rotwangian wizard-engineer of Schulze & Webb, on design and what it means to be a 21st Century design unit, among other things. Pay attention. These are the people who get to have a say in how you get to live in the Western World.

”

Go here, my little badgers of delight, and click on the bit that says MP3 JUKEBOX. And be enthralled by the spectral and uchronic sounds of the Moon Wiring Club, whom I have described before as "like a gang of mad people were put in charge of a time machine." It is very definitely night music. Especially if, like me, you spent your childhood staying up late on Friday nights to watch old horror films.

G’night.

On my internet knocking-shop tonight:

* The Self-Portrait Imagethread (Jul 2009) - always good for a laugh. Currently featuring less close-up photographs of stubbly and confused-looking young men than usual.

* I’d Like To Politely Ask For Help With My Webcomic - help this person out?

* The July 2009 Book Club

…actually, it occurs to me that I really have to find time to sweep the place out again…

So. BBC TV’s ROBIN HOOD gets cancelled. ITV’s PRIMEVAL and DEMONS get cancelled. ITV also declares that it will not run drama series, aside of course from soaps, before 9pm.

BBC’s response? A teenage-themed prequel to the thirty-year-old ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES comedy workhorse, and, for the fourth time, the loathesome and archaic children’s book JUST WILLIAM will be adapted for television.

Why not put up a sign outside Broadcasting House saying YES TAKE THE LICENSE FEE AWAY FROM US WE’RE NOT GOING TO PUT UP A FIGHT IT’S A FAIR COP GUV and then have the cast of TORCHWOOD sit around it crying? (They’ve had enough fucking practise.)

(John Barrowman on TORCHWOOD’s reduction from 13 episodes to 5 as it moves from BBC2 to BBC1: "I felt like we were being punished. Other shows move from BBC3 and 2 to 1, and they don’t get cut. So why are we? It felt like every time we moved we had to prove ourselves.")

I don’t even like TORCHWOOD and ROBIN HOOD and PRIMEVAL and I’ve never sat through DEMONS. But this is so clearly a full-on retreat from the 21st Century and any storyform that doesn’t look like it was originated in The Days When Beige Rocked that I can only assume the hatches are being battened down and everyone in British television is preparing to not actually be here in five years. ITV’s already made it clear it intends to become a delivery system for game shows and reality shows. James Nesbitt, possibly the most popular actor on British tv today, is saying he’s probably going to have to move to the States because there’s not enough work left for him in Britain.

YES I’M A BIT RANTY TODAY WHY DO YOU ASK LITTLE FUCKFACE BOY

I discovered today that, through the very good technology house Expansys, an unlocked iPhone 3GS costs pretty much a thousand pounds per unit.

Which is a bit strong for something that only learned how to do MMS five minutes ago. But.

A thousand pounds per unit actually forces you to recontextualise the iPhone a bit. That’s not a mainstream consumer street device anymore. That’s a digital instrument. That is something very different from a mobile phone. That’s something you don’t dare carry around in your pocket because it costs a thousand pounds. And if you do carry such a thing around in your pocket, you are either a wilfully conspicuous consumer of a piece with the people who used to lug mobile phones around when they came in briefcases or you are some kind of scientist performing science on the street with a digital instrument or else why would you be carrying around a device that costs a thousand pounds per unit?

Perhaps iPhone 3GS users need a bumper sticker for the backs of their instruments that reads IT’S OKAY: I’M DOING SCIENCE.

Featuring my friend the thereminist and violinist Meredith Yayanos, a piece from the CONTRAPTION EP by Beats Antique: Oriental Uno, "a reconstructed experiment of a traditional eastern European brass tune."

Better late than never, this is warrenellisdotcom. Good afternoon.

(Emma Rios)

In which I take a break and Paul explains how an episode of FREAKANGELS is illustrated.

Full details here.

1.

Garen Ewing’s retro ligne claire-style webcomic series THE RAINBOW ORCHID is going to print. Read much of it here.

2.

Rich Barrett is 16pp into a creepy online graphic novel called NATHAN SORRY that looks like it’s going to turn into something fun.

3.

ELLERBISMS has been on a roll lately.

4.

My favourite comics-related blog is probably still Brandon Graham’s because it’s so beautifully random.

Writer Si Spurrier is not a real man because he’d rather watch LABYRINTH than THE GODFATHER, but we like him nonetheless, and would like to announce that he is launching a new weekly column at bleedingcool called SHORT AND CURLIES.

This is the first edition, which he’s calling #0 because he can’t fucking count. The same kind of mental disability that leads to watching LABYRINTH and cooing over David Bowie’s wig rather than watching THE GODFATHER like a real man.

Made by big machines.

Photo by Dave Walsh.

Thanks to Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, comics writer Mark Waid finally tells in public what is possibly The Greatest Story About Insane Comics Fans Ever Told. Scroll about halfway down the page here, you’ll find it. It begins like this:

Via xplanes, this is a Gyrodyne Model GCA-55 :

And, obviously, I need one. See to it.

The work of Ellen Rogers (which to me haunts a similar space to the Ghost Box record label, Moon Wiring Club, detourned library musics and spooky 70s childrens tv) continues to fascinate me:

From Enemy Combatant:

And, for every item of good news about a book, there’s something like this, from my friend, the nonpareil scholar of Weird Shit, Jess Nevins:

Bah.

I got to flip through a copy of Geoff Manaugh’s THE BLDGBLOG BOOK, print annex to the fine BLDGBLOG, the other month while at the Architecture Association.

I shall be at the launch party at the Architecture Association in London on July 7 to buy my copy from the AA shop downstairs. But you needn’t wait. You need this book. Geoff Manaugh writes and thinks like some unholy hybrid of Umberto Eco, Paul Morley, William Gibson and an unhinged ayahuascero dressed only in pages from a furniture catalogue dated 10 December 2012. The book is a mad wunderkammer of mad and lovely things, making the real world into science fiction and making science fiction into the real world. The great joy of BLDGBLOG is when a discovered thing sends Geoff’s brain into some lunatic alternate world of possibility, and then folds the whole the back on to the present day.

I worked out on a calculator that Geoff is approximately eighty times smarter than I am. But I don’t know how to use the more complicated-looking buttons, so it could turn out to be more.

[ http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=warrelli-21

Really interesting short article by John Robb this morning concretises the nature of Taliban structure in a way I’d heretofore been unable to pin down:

I know I’ve recommended reading Robb before, and he appears on the sidebar of People Much Cleverer Than Me, but I would commend his site to your attention once again for these wonderful little bomblets of clarity he produces.

This is Warren Ellis dot com. Good morning.

By the band Dark Mean, from their EP entitled FRANKENCOTTAGE. I’ve been there, and I approve of the sentiment. You’ve been there too, I’m pretty sure.

Good night, internet.

(link degrades in seven days, mp3 provided for review purposes only, contact if you need it removed)

More media-engineering brilliance from the mad scientists of Schulze & Webb:

Obviously less useful for my Foreign Johnny readers, unless you’ve worked out how to access the BBC from abroad.

At bleedingcool.com:

1. bump, 2. wonderland, 3. the swan whisperer

Apparently inspired by my ROTOR idea, TAG is now live:

And it’s actually rather good:

This is Warren Ellis dot com.

The shortest and most accessible piece of Philip Jeck I have immediately to hand in mp3 form. As I’ve said before, I didn’t really “get” Philip Jeck until I saw him perform live, but you’re very probably much less stupid than I am. Philip Jeck makes fine night music. Although it’s probably not wise to listen to a great deal of his work in the dark in a Finnish hotel room in the middle of the night while exhausted and slightly drunk.

This is “Wipe,” from his album “7.”

Good night internet.

(link degrades after seven days, provided for review purposes only, contact me if you need it gone and it’ll be removed immediately)

Currently occurring in the depths of my internet knocking-shop:

* Post your Dr. Sketchy’s Artwork - The boss herself, Molly Crabapple, comperes a thread where Dr Sketchy’s visitors and customers show off their work. Join in.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: International Patents, Inc. - the weekly space where I call out some ancient character from the public domain and have artists reinvent it for the 21st Century.

* The LongBox Digital Comics thread - this one’s going on and on. Will Longbox be the iTunes for comics? Will Longbox kill the comics shop?

* Whitechapel UK Midlands Meetup - where they will all huddle in some shitty pub and mutter together in their funny accents

Monthly reboot in a couple of days’ time.