FilmForce has substantiated rumours of Farscape returning as a standalone project with no new episode commitment attached, independent of Sci-Fi Channel
An independent PC developer has created a program called MyTunes that lets users of iTunes share MP3 files almost as easily as they could using programs such as Kazaa
For dedicated fans of the legendary science fiction hero Doctor Who, the long wait is over. A new animated version based on the ninth incarnation of the doctor, played by Richard Grant, has been placed on the BBC’s Internet arm BBCi and can be downloaded for viewing. The 85-minute series called The Scream of the Shalka also coincides with the show’s 40th anniversary
Warren Ellis has released another iconic image into the ether. Disturbing on first read, but oddly comforting when read again:
She opens her perfect mouth and the sound of a modem pours out. The long shriek of signal, and then the radio-static-and-rubber-band song of connection.
And then another. She looks up, opens her mouth, and the electric scream beats up into the night. Another two, three signal-songs harmonise. More. A row of Shrieky Girls, all in black and hazmat orange, standing outside the club, looking up and dialling in.
Inside the place, there’s an ozone pressure from the mass of Shrieky Girls beaming internet whispers to each other. Shrieky Girls dance, turning slow circles on the floor as the DJ plays tripped Bristol beats spiked with Shrieky connection-sound samples and tranquillised by sibilant female voices whispering about sex and vodka in the dark.
Shrieky Girls lock us out of their world. Their shared gaze darts around the room in flock patterns, homing in one on one guy’s piercings, one woman’s shoulderblade brand. People still flinch when they see twenty, thirty girls all turn around to look at them at exactly the same time.
In the back, picked out in stopmotion by strobes, a Shrieky Girl stands against the wall and pulls a boy in to her. She unzips him, closes fingers around him, pulls him inside sharply. Her lips part, and you expect a sigh, but you hear connection hiss. On the floor, twenty, thirty Shrieky Girls stop dancing, and all their backs arch in exactly the same way. Heads thrown back and mouths open in modem screams.
It’s not that Shrieky Girl who finds someone worth going home with. But, when morning finally comes, it’s all of them who share the modemed sensation of a warm arm closed softly around them. It’s all of them who see him wake up and smile at them and look at them, and see him keep looking and smiling at them even though the make-up’s half gone and the hair’s been smashed by the bed, because it was them he wanted to be with, not the look.
Two, three hundred Shrieky Girls smile just a little bit and hold an invisible hand for a while.
Shrieky Girls are never alone. They live in an invisible web of constant secret conversation, transmitting raw feelings like they were texting notes.
Twenty, thirty thousand Shrieky Girls smile just a little bit and turn away to dance.
The homeless children of Miami have developed their own complex folk tales that are littered with angels and demons.
On Christmas night a year ago, god fled heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why god has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from hell.
The gateways from hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors and Jeep Cherokees with black windows. While the demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.
Way back before he became editor of Doing Freedom! Magazine, Carl Bussjaeger wrote a short story for the publication: Postage Due…
Dear Postal Customer:
The United States Postal Service is chartered by the federal government as the sole carrier of routine correspondence within the United States. This position has been uniformly upheld by the Courts, ruling that private carriers may not offer general correspondence service. Accordingly, we at the USPS have recognized our responsibility for all such correspondence carried by various providers utilizing the Internet. We have determined that it is within the scope of our charter to regulate messaging via electronic mail; the Postal Service has primary authority over correspondence, regardless of the medium, whether paper or electronic.
Therefore, we have reviewed your electronic postal usage for the past year and have billed you accordingly for the postage due.
While it was intended as humour, enough people took it seriously that he may have inadvertently triggered one iteration of the email postage urban legend.
Joshua Lane of Animated Bliss has personally verified the info with John Sirabella, President of Media Blasters:
AnimeWorks is ready to rain down Zim’s doom upon the heads of animation fans everywhere with its release of Jhonen Vasquez’s Invader Zim. Anime fans have been screaming for this DVD release since Zim first aired on Nickelodeon in 2001 and now it’s finally here. Coming Spring 2004 will be the first of three double disc sets and a limited edition boxed set which promises to send fans’ blood racing through their veins like giant radioactive rubber pants. The pants command them!
I was wandering through the hallowed halls of the Pagan Prattle today and ran across an old article. It was about some loony fundamentalist in New Mexico indulging in that favourite pastime of all nut cases who wish to keep their flock in the dark — book burning. While Harry Potter was the draw card, Stephen King, Eminem, AC/DC and Snow White were also rubbing shoulders on the pyre.
While the story wasn’t news to me, it had featured locally about the same time, the comments it attracted were fascinating.
It seems the title of the post is a magnet for fuckwits from both sides of the camp. Some of them were rabid enough to have required a stern pointing and laughing at by Feòrag, which is always amusing, but most of the mouth breathers proved too stupid to get the humour.
All you can really hope is that the worst offenders are too busy leaving inane comments on web sites that they don’t get around to passing their wit and intelligence onto another generation.
The ABC is under pressure to join a national internet peering network to relieve internet service providers of the cost of delivering the public broadcaster’s content to subscribers
The latest compilation project from Illegal Art is titled Sonny Bono is Dead:
This project is a protest against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which passed through Congress in 1998 and was upheld by the US Supreme Court earlier this year. This act diminished the public’s ability to access older works while granting more control to corporations anxious to preserve a few copyrights from the 1920’s. Copyright law continues to expand and defeat its original purpose of promoting advances in the arts and sciences. These excesses damage the evolution of our culture and only serve corporate interests.
We encourage artists to liberally sample from works that would have fallen into the Public Domain by the year 2004 had the Sonny Bono Act failed. Artists are also encouraged to create new works by sampling Sonny Bono’s output (or other artists who embraced the notion of copyright lasting forever). The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2004.
Cinema Secrets, the makers of a Michael Myers Halloween mask, won a lawsuit against Don Post Studios, who had designed the mask used in the 1978 movie, by proving they took the idea from the movie.
Nosferatu, an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and one cinemas classic films, was almost lost due to copyright law. Florence Stoker, widow of Bram Stoker, sued the producers of Nosferatu for infringement and won. As part of the 1925 decision, all copies of Nosferatu were to be destroyed. Most were.
Over the next few years, any copies that became public were also destroyed. This may have meant the end of the film, except that a few isolated copies managed to survive Florence Stoker’s death in 1937.
Etrema, an innovative technology firm based in Iowa, sells chrome discs for US$1,500 a pair. Called Whispering Windows, they can turn any wall, window, drab conference table or even your head into a speaker
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons over a spoof news ticker. The show’s creator Matt Groening said Fox News raised the unlikely prospect of suing a show broadcast by its sister channel, Fox Entertainment, because it wanted to stop the Simpsons parodying its famously anti-Democratic party agenda
The US Library of Congress has created four exemptions under which it is legal to crack digital copyright protections — lists of sites blocked by commercial Internet filtering software, but not spam-fighting lists; computer programs protected by hardware dongles that are broken or obsolete; computer programs or video games that use obsolete formats or hardware; e-books that prevent read-aloud or other handicapped access formats from functioning
A Sotheby‘s auction next month will include around 600 books, mainly on witchcraft and the occult: a tiny part of the vast library of the late artist Robert Lenkiewicz.
The collection includes many rarities such as a first edition Malleus Maleficarum and a 17th century spotter’s guide to witches and demons, by Joseph Glanvill.
His Saducismus Triumphatus was a desperate attempt to convince sceptics that ghosts and demons were all too real, and included the first-hand evidence of one Elizabeth Styles that the devil had appeared to her in the shape of a handsome Man and after of a black Dog. Then he promised her money, and that she should live gallantly, and have the pleasure of the world for 12 years, if she would with her blood sign his paper….
The Complete Far Side has been released, featuring over 4,000 cartoons, including 19 Larson made after retirement, letters from readers, and more packed into 1,250 pages in two hardcover books boxed as a set. My life is complete.
Even though it comes with a hefty price tag, it’s still cheaper to buy it in the US and ship it home yourself. Australian book stores suck.
I’ve been reading a lot of web comics lately, as the alleged funnies
in the daily paper haven’t been amusing for some time (with the possible exception of Bristow — consistent amusement).
You probably know of most of these, but for the uninitiated, here are some of the better ones, with a sample moment of genius from each:
Angus Oblong has written an adorable children’s story called The Cutie Bunch Friendly Pal Pack
The BBC has launched the beta of iCan, its service for enabling Britons to act collectively to participate in their governments
Reducing journalism to a branch of corporate and government public relations is the hidden agenda of the media deregulators, in Britain and America
Warren Ellis has let Transmetropolitan‘s Spider Jerusalem out of his box with a frighteningly accurate portrayal of el presidente and his daddy:
When they’re not around, I put the TV on. Purely out of curiosity, you understand. Up here, we can snatch some forty thousand channels out of the air. Most of them, of course, are still showing CSI and LAW AND ORDER. There are twelve different channels showing LAW AND ORDER 24 hours a day. In some countries, Jerry Orbach has become a cargo-cult figure. They don’t understand the language or much of the situations. They comprehend only that Jerry Orbach is immortal. They watch and divine from the show that he outlives the young gods who are selected to be his assistants. Criminals fall. DAs change. Assistants fade away. Jerry Orbach is forever. Jerry Orbach is, in fact, some kind of avenging God-King who will hunt and incarcerate Scum until the end of time.
Speaking of which, here’s the President.
Not the real President, you understand. The actual elected President is elsewhere, no longer the President, hiding in some remote residence with a Federally-mandated Secret Service team who make no secret of their loathing for him and shit on his breakfast every morning. No, he’s long gone. I’m talking about the Acting President. The one who wasn’t elected.
The one who looks like one of those fucking experimental Chimp-Things we used to stick electrodes in and fire into space.
The worst thing is that I used to know the bastard.
Back then, he was simply Junior, living large in Texan sinbins at night while his crazed Daddy ran naked among his cattle herds, his awful ululating howl echoing across the plains as he brought down another cow with his garotte. I met him once. He showed me the garotte and told me it was made “from the guts of Sand Gooks.” Daddy was obsessed with the Sand Gooks. He saw them everywhere. His handlers shivered nervously as Daddy got down on his hands and knees and sniffed my crotch like a dog. “You,” he snarled, “have known the dusky terrorist pleasure of a Sand Gook woman.” He asked me what it was like and stuck his gnarled hand into his pants. His handlers rammed a sedative spike into the top of his head and dragged him off, brownish urine spraying from within his twitching fist.
Junior just laughed. He slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go to the den, Fellow American.” The “den” was a bunker under the family mansion. There was a mountain of cocaine on the big teak desk there. Gulls were flapping around its peaks. Tony goddamn Montana would have quailed. Junior slipped on a gas mask, shoved its open intake pipe into the pile, and flipped on the compressor. Enough coke to kill a flock of young tyrannosaurs hoovered up into Junior’s head. He ripped off the mask and shrieked. Bloody residue dripped out of the pipe and back on to the pile. Eyes bulging, he looked down at the pile. He yelped. “My God! I see Jesus! I see His Face in these Satanic drugs! I am Saved! Glory Be!”
He looked at my face and laughed. “Relax, sport. I’m just practising. I’m going to be President one day.”
I backed up towards the door, reaching behind me and cranking the gun hidden under my jacket up to the “Rectal Vesuvius” setting. “I thought you were a religious man, like your daddy.”
“Ringo says religion is a political tool,” he honked, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to claw through to his sinuses.
“Who the fuck is Ringo?”
Junior wrenched open a draw in the desk and ripped from it a scrawny-looking cuddly toy with its eyes plucked out and awful stains on its mouth.
“THIS is Ringo!” he exulted. “RINGO is my FRIEND!” He clutched the scabby thing to a chest already pebbledashed with cocaine, bloodclots and snot.
My back bumped into the door. “And? he says things, does he?”
“Yeahhhhhh,” Junior sighed, stroking Ringo’s stomach in a disturbingly sexual way.
“Well, um, excellent. I should be going. I have to accept a shipment of dolphin steaks tonight.”
“No,” he intoned. “You have to press his stomach.”
I took a good grip on the gun’s butt. “Why?”
“You have to. You can’t leave until you’ve pressed his stomach.”
Well, shit, I thought. How much harm can that do? Junior held the skinny mutilated horror out at arm’s length towards me. “Press his fucking stomach!”
I moved forward and pushed two fingers into the thing’s gut. A voicebox ground into life, with the hideous rasp of an eighty-year-old chainsmoking hooker.
“Women are best when they can’t talk any more.”
I flinched back, but he grabbed my wrist with a crazy man’s strength. “Morrrrre.”
I pressed the stomach again.
“Where’s my dinner, bitch?”
And:
“God says queers are special firewood.”
I twisted my arm around and he squealed as his wrist bent, but he refused to let go. I put the base of my left hand into his nose and turned it into a bathmat. He reeled backwards, clutching the toy, his fingers twisted into it. It kept rasping: “Americans are born, not made.” “Stupid people just like stuff simple.” “If they can’t see you drinking, you’re not an alcoholic.”
Junior dragged himself into the seat behind the desk. “You’re doomed now, you stupid fuck. I’m gonna be the President one day. Daddy says. He says Presidents are people like us.”
Ringo said: “Fuck America and get rich like astronauts.”
“Oh God,” Junior groaned. “Where’s my Womb Thing?”
He scrabbled in the desk for a moment and produced a glass screw-top jar filled with a thick, clotted yellow fluid. Junior unzipped a badly discoloured little penis and began to jerk off into the jar with the maniacal fury of an ugly ape in humping season.
He left him there. I believed it was all over for Junior: that soon he would be found wearing a Big Bird suit while balls-deep in a spaniel on Main Street at noon. But no. Here he is on my television, telling me he’s my President now. America’s last sick joke at its own expense, before it sinks into the finality of senility and incontinence.
I quit politics a while back. And now, finally, politics have quit me.
I hear filthy assistants returning. Back to scratching myself in front of MTV.
You know my fucking name.
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