entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

• Warren Ellis brings us a disturbing answer to a troubling question.
• iayork could've been the coolest Dad ever.
• E. Howard Hunt died three months ago, and talked about LBJ's involvement in the assassination of JFK.
• "I have a great idea.  Let's rebuild the Internet from scratch!"
• Baseball might be getting rid of its longest-used performance enhancer, but in the meantime, the one undetectable performance enhancer might not be all that enhancing.
• Fox News never fails to disappoint: "Could [Seung-Hui] Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?"
• The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has decided that the bit in the Second Amendment about "a well-regulated militia" was just fluff.  This is a complicated one, because i don't disagree with the decision, but i'm not crazy about the way they got there.  I wonder about how laws like Minnesota's Personal Protection Act can help Americans be responsible gun owners, and what the effect of these laws are (and, Seth, if you happen to be reading this, you're still a douche).
• This one's a real corker: Jundallah, a wholly owned subsidiary of Al-Qaeda, has been receiving carefully funnelled financial support from the United States and is fighting the Iranian government.  Follow all the links.  You know what?  Nothing surprises me anymore.  All of my predictions have come true.  At least we have the liberal media hammering the ... oh, wait, a Blue Angel crashed.  Sorry, where were we?

From an e-mail exchange back in December:

warren_ellis

According to my agent, I can now talk about this.
So.
I just sold my second novel.

ronebofh

Cor, you're the next Jeffrey Archer.

warren_ellis

Die, Ron.

I lie, i lie; i had dinner with palecur, rjray_rss, and erikred, the last of whom drove us from downtown Oakland (after we BARTed up from Fremont) to downtown Berkeley last week for a last-minute booksigning by Warren Ellis at Comic Relief, which is in the process of being evicted and thereby searching for a new location.

(Now that, kids, is a run-on sentence.)

We arrived at Comic Relief just a couple of minutes before Warren bounded in. As fate would have it, i ended up first in line. Rory the Man at CR broke out the free candy. Warren was as charming as he could be, given that he had a cold (i was as tongue-tied as a teenaged girl — what a dork). He signed my copy of Hellblazer: Haunted and heartily endorsed my acquisition of Dean Motter's Mister X Volume 1 (after all these years, i know where Robert Reimann got his mr x persona; in many ways, he expanded and improved upon Motter's design). There's a panel in Mister X which is reproduced full-page in Transmetropolitan (i noticed when i first saw it that it had a Hernández Bros. look and feel). Unfortunately, my copy of MXV1 has two misprinted pages, so i need to harass the publisher so i can get a proper copy to replace it.

( behold! facial hair galore! )

(if you're not in the SF Bay Area, feel free to skip this)

So i missed out on meeting Warren Ellis at Spookycon because a) i was busy this weekend, and b) i wasn't feeling enough motivation to drive up to SF and drop $25 admission for the privilege.

The good news is that His Exalted Munificence has scheduled a book signing appearance at Comic Relief, this Thursday, 17:00-19:00.  I will be there around 16:00 to get in line.  I'll bring my Hellblazer: Haunted to be signed, because it's just so good.  Who knows what would've happened if those craven scumlords at DC hadn't canned Shoot.

If you make music, have it online, and want Warren Ellis to publicize it on his personal research weblog, send him a link.

UPDATE: You could also leave him a comment.

Musicians and photographers: Warren Ellis wants links to your work.

I neglected to inform you that last week's good news was an 11-6 victory over GPS. The bad news was that they lost every single game last session. But today we beat 3 Diamon Stars 6-5, and since they were the only team to defeat me so far, i greatly enjoyed that outcome. Also, The Boy has joined our team and we spent the early afternoon getting him gear to play. So it'll be good next week.

In other news, why aren't you people reading mistersleepless, Warren Ellis's LiveJournal? Not only is he putting out a novel on it, but he's also regaling us with wondrous things like a snippet from his upcoming novel.

Warren Ellis wants to see puny humans.

Via Warren Ellis's Bad Signal mailing list, he's let us know that Tilda Swinton will be playing the archangel Gabriel, and Rachel Weisz will play Constantine's partner, in the upcoming Hellblazer abomi^Wmovie. These actually sound like saving graces.

Ellis also says that Keanu is an underrated actor. I think he's just messing with us.

Just finished Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. Fun RTS, good story by Warren Ellis. Good bargain bin game.