Aberro Specus

Because SOMEONE had to go and double-post last night, then turn around and post again today before the 24-hour grace period from her their first post was up, posted again, I have to double-post this evening, so one of them, I hate to say, is going to be a copy-cat post. Which I’ll get out of the way first! So without further ado, here we go.

Top 5 Books You Should Read Before I Strangle You Cthulhu Rapes Your Mind.

5. Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse

This book sums up a lot of philosophical ideas about false perceptions, and is ideally a book that you’ll read and go “that was really interesting” and actually think about, instead of setting down and going “that was a good book” and reaching for the next book in your pile. It’s a well written, interesting book that can make you think, instead of simply being “entertaining.” Check it out, it’s short, easy to read, and intelligent. If that’s not your thing… why are you  reading my site?

4. Crooked Little Vein - Warren Ellis

If you know me in any fashion you know I love all things Warren Ellis. That isn’t the point though. This book challenges norms and makes you rethink the way you view American society, no matter how you view it now. It’s ALSO well-written, and short(ish) so it’s an easy read, and it’s also intelligent (see comment above). It’s definitely a good summer read, and it will make you go both “Oh God my brain hurts, why would anyone DO that!?” and “Holy shit awesome” at the same time.

3. Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves - Clifford Pickover

I believe I’ve actually mentioned this book here before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Pickover explores quantum physics, psychotropic substances, pop-philosophy, life experiences he’s had, and slips them all into various chapters in this book. It’s a fascinating read, and like the others on this list, will make you think, or at least explore different thoughts than you are used to.

2. Old Man’s War - John Scalzi

I was never really a Sci-Fi fan throughout the years. I enjoyed Dune. I enjoyed Ender’s Game. I enjoyed a good Sci-Fi move/television show. But I disliked the genre in general, I always stuck more to swords & sorcery fantasy type books. Then I read Scalzi’s work and I can now say I am a fan. The man spins a tale like no other I have ever read. If you’ve never read any sci-fi, read this book. If you’re an avid fan of sci-fi read this book. If you HATE sci-fi, read this book. Scalzi delves into emotions, character interaction, and makes you feel for his characters more than any other modern author I can think of. And there are four more books in the series to read if you enjoyed that one, plus he has a rather prolific blog that is quite interesting! I’d put this at #1, but I feel that the next book is better, regardless…

1. Through an Eastern Window - Jack Huber

Though this book is out of print currently, I would gladly pay $100.00 for it. This is one of the best books on Buddhism, specifically Zen, that I have ever read. It’s a personal tale of on man traveling to Japan to explore Zazen meditation on a first hand basis, and how it completely changes his life. Written almost like a diary, Huber explains his experiences in as much detail as he can, attempting to describe his “wow” moment during meditation, and his time in Japan in general. It’s an extremely short, extremely powerful book, and is the book that sparked my interested in Zen Buddhism in the first place.

Here is the list, I recommend reading all of the books on it. But if you absolutely can’t, read at least the first two on the list, they are amazing books. And I’ve found that I can find Through an Eastern Window in most libraries, although it is out of print. Now to work on post number two!

Also! Throughout the day, my other prisoners in this blog agreement and I  tend to have rather hilarious conversations mocking each others mothers, lifestyle choices, occupations, hygiene, and penis size, over twitter. We attempt to tag all of these posts with the term Brandon coined to cover this whole shebang “blogenning.” If you’re interested, you can read our asinine conversations here - Twitter # blogenning.

~Ian

The second edition of The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis is out over at SuicideGirls. Go read it. This weeks topic? Eye Tattoo’s. No no, not tattoo’s of eyeballs, inking your optic orbs.

Now, apparently corneal tattooing has been around for ages, covering up scars and leucomas and other disgusting shit. But it took Shannon Larratt, of the indispensable ModBlog and the BME online community of body-modification fanciers, to ask the question – what about scleral tattooing? Well, a specialist told him that tattooing your eyeball is basically dangerous and stupid. Shannon, being Shannon, decided that this was Condition Win and set out along with two friends to get stabbed in the eyemeat.

Enjoy.

~Ian

I just went for a walk. Yes thats right, that thing which requires physical movement and involves putting on foot in front of the other in order to induce this movement. Many people don’t understand this concept anymore. I figured I’d describe it to jog your wormhole ridden memories. Anyway… the point of this walk was to indulge one of my cancer forming habits. I was successful in this endeavor. I was also successful in the secondary objective of my walk, which was observation. When I’m awake, I observe. It’s a thing I do, I can’t help it. The point! I saw a few things which inspired me to rant. I’ve already ranted once today, which made me very happy, a second rant only improves this mood. So now, wired on caffeine (which is normal), slightly high on nicotine, and blasting Techno into my skull (using headphones in order as to not annoy my roommates, who aren’t usually appreciative of the Techno… although neither am I usually…) in order to induce hyper-ness, I’m going to rant to you, my semi-loyal readers.

My observation senses were assaulted before I even got out of my apartment, as I opened the door to see a gaggle of people entering the apartment across from mine (which they recently moved in to). Four girls and two boys carrying a case of beer (I believe it was Miller Lite or Budwiser, some nasty beer I only let pass my lips if it’s free). Now first off, this group’s combined age looked to be about 72… aka each of them looked about 12. I’m dead serious. I’m only fucking 21 myself and these kids looked like high schoolers. Not what I was expecting, although I’m not surprised. They probably are all 18-19, and probably did buy the beer themselves. Not that I have anything against “under-age” drinking (although I wouldn’t call drinking that cat piss “drinking”…) but still… pathetic. I continued to move into the outdoors after I squeezed passed this group on the stairway and was almost immediately assaulted by a car speeding past blaring rap (see my previous rant for my thoughts on that one). I proceeded with the immediate cause of my venture, and then decided movement down the street was in my best interest. In my walk I observed 3 more cars blasting rap, 2 of them speeding down my tiny one way street (a good way to smash into someone at the intersection by my apartment). I also saw 2 people walking their dogs, another sitting in an SUV with his tiny yapper dog going insane, and a few talking on their cell phones while driving down the street.

Now, I’m all for do what you want, when you want, but Jesus Bloody Fucking Hitler Christ, pay attention to what you are doing, and stop being so fucking stupid. The only people I walked past that I didn’t want to kick in the chest and then bitch slap were the two walking their dogs, as they weren’t doing anything blatantly retarded. If you started giving two tugs of a dead dogs cock (I’d like to thank Warren Ellis for introducing me to that colorfully wonderful phrase) you might realize that there are other things going on around you, like people trying to cross the street, or those of us trying to enjoy or sins of the flesh in peace an quiet, not pounding bass and drums with some retard “rapping” over it.

I’ve been reading Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan recently (and anyone who’s read it will distinctly notice it’s influence on my rantings…) and the society in which Spider Jerusalem rants about is now, with far less technology, people doing retarded things to other people, sometimes without even realizing it, and not even noticing that there are consquences.
-I just switched over to some Buckethead because the repetitiveness of the Techno was already stating to get to me.-
I’d love to be in a medium which people payed attention to get my point across. You aren’t the only person on the planet, and your lifestyle is interfering with others ability to enjoy life. And I’m not just talking about myself right now. I can put up with a lot of shit, I try not to let it bug me, because I appreciate the philosophy of “Live and Let Live,” but someone people can’t put up with shit, and there is a lot of shit in the world. I walk outside and I can smell it, hear it, see, it and taste it. It’s invading the world around us, and we need to do something about it. Look outside, do you like the world you see out there? No? Do something about it. Yes? Wipe the blood, grime, and shit from your eyes and open them wider. It’s a shit-hole world we’ve been stuck with. Don’t settle for it.

I realize I’ve combined two seemingly different rants, but really they are directly related. You figure out how, I can’t shove everything in your face.

Out for now, I’m sure something else will inspire me to scream at you some more.

~Ian

Hey look I’m alive again. Somewhat. I guess it really depends on your definition of “living.” Anyway…

I’m a bit behind on my news due to becoming a hermit (it’s true, I’m avoiding social interaction… as well as social Interaction and Social interaction… Social Interaction is cool though). As it stands I’m going to post a few things that happened earlier in the week (aka Sunday and Monday).

Sunday: The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis @ SuicideGirls

This sunday’s was the first, and sort of an introduction. It was good. Here’s an excerpt.

It was a grim Sunday in Iceland when my hosts drove me out into the interior of the country — the central area that they close off for six months of the year because if you go there you will just die. The interior of Iceland looks like the moon, only with moss speckling the rocks. Apollo astronauts trained here. The moon probably looks nicer. And in a spacesuit you don’t have to inhale the tang of geyser-polluted air that makes much of Iceland smell like an army of sick old men have been farting on it since Noah was a boy. We drove out to a black cave in the middle of nowhere. Just a hump of black rock. The hollow didn’t extend back more than thirty metres from the mouth. It was full of language: Icelandic words scratched into almost every inch of the rock. “My neighbour,” one of my hosts said, “was one of the last people to be born here. In 1929.” I looked around again. All those scratches. The marks of families who’d lived in this cave, generations going back hundreds of years. And empty for less than a century. It wasn’t a cave. I was standing in an old house on a stand-in for the moon.

It was then that I realized that they were all grinning weirdly, and backing away towards the cars, and that the nearest settlement was fifty miles away.

I have always hated Sundays.

Monday: Ectoplasmosis

From the minds of Eliza Gauger and John Brownlee, two of the badass ex-writers of (the now dead) Table of Malcontents. It’s kind of like this site, but more badass, and far more prolific… and they post like every 10 minutes… Check it out.

Wednesday: Jellyfist!

Jhonen Vasquez, creator of the awesomness that is Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, Squee!, Filler Bunny, Invader Zim, I Feel Sick, and the director of the badass music video for Mindless Self Indulgence’s “Shut Me Up,” is working on a new project with artist J. Goldberg called Jellyfist. Here’s an excerpt from SuicideGirls.

Now he is ready to unleash a new creation! A collaborative effort with artist J. Goldberg, this beautiful and peculiar book is described as “the work of two artists who battle with interpretation and pull down the curtain between audience and creators, revealing artistic collaboration in all its alarming nudity” in the official press release. Yes, friends, say hello to Jellyfist.

And also, an excerpt from the official press release.

Jellyfist is a 48-page, full-color book of strange, disconnected stories written by Vasquez and drawn by Goldberg, a newcomer to comics. Begun as a simple, spontaneous collaboration when Vasquez wrote “a tiny, incredibly vague surreal script” and gave it to Goldberg to draw, Jellyfist soon grew into a side-show-freak embodiment of the issues that arise when one artist tries to draw what another has envisioned. After the initial story, Goldberg began to take more time and care to draw the scripts Vasquez gave to her. “So I started getting a lot more bossy in my writing direction,” Vasquez said, “and then the battles begin.”
“So far, it has been a very bizarre, and crazy-making-hair-pully-outy-type experience,” Goldberg said of working with Vasquez.

I’d expect nothing less from Jhonen, although honestly I’m slightly dissapointed it wont be his unique art style, although from the image posted the art looks great…

So far that’s it. I’ll make another post once I get caught up on things happening in the second half of the week. Also I may or may not post a review of Live Free or Die Hard, which I saw last night. So far I’ll just say, it was a lot better than I expected. Also saw a trailer for a new Jodie Foster movie, The Brave One, that actually looks kind of good, to me.

~Ian

A good review was posted over at Alterati back on the 19th of Fell by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith.

“Even if it wasn’t two bucks a pop, Fell is one book I find a place in my budget for. The combination of Ellis’ trademark warped humor and human empathy for his characters, plus Ben Templesmith’s evocative and uncompromising art is pure harmony. I couldn’t imagine a better team telling this story. Ellis writes Richard as a noir cop archetype, not a cliché.”

Click here for the rest of the review.

~Ian

Warren Ellis posted pictures of both Brandon and myself in his Friday Telescreen.

ME! - Middle column second row down.

BRANDON! - Right column third row down.

Yay!

~Ian

And we love Warren Ellis.

A Friday Telescreen

Tomorrow, I’m posting nothing but self-portraits of the readers of this site. Take a self-portrait and email it to warrenellis [at] gmail.com. Making no promises about being able to post them all, but I’ll run as many good ones as I can.

So Warren Ellis wants our pictures. Give them to him!

~Ian

Snatched from Warren Ellis, who snatched it from here. Check either of those for the site.
This is a design brief from the Touch project.

“In this project we want to design and test a range of icons that explain important aspects of RFID-based interactions. How do we visualise the presence of RFID? Are there useful ways of representing the kinds of interactions and functions involved? Is the job of the icon to indicate the active field, the verb, or the technology? At a different level, do we also need approachable graphics to alleviate anxiety, confusion or frustration? Do users know what the limits of the system are and do they care?”

An interesting project, seems relevant, especially considering all the changes with the T implementing the RFID Charlie Cards recently.

“If we take the example of an NFC purchase interaction (a till or cash register), will users know whether the transaction involves giving or receiving? Will they intuitively know the risk involved? Where does the content (the amount of money) get represented?”

So take a simple RFID transaction, like using a bankcard at 7Eleven (which I do practically everyday) and figure out how to represent this transaction with icons that are easily understood in order for people to better understand how RFID works. It’s a noble cause… now if only it would help get RID of RFID…

Check out the full story here.~Ian

…is GOD. Bow all ye mortals before his might!

As you all know by now:

- http://www.warrenellis.com

- http://the-engine.net/