| Warren Ellis has written around thirty graphic novels, comics, prose fiction, journalism, videogames and screenplays. Sometimes he take photographs. He also creates and co-creates websites, including this one. He has awards and stuff, he's been in big magazines and newspapers, and he's been published in NATURE, which he always mentions because it makes him laugh.
Warren Ellis is represented by agent Angela Cheng Caplan at Writers & Artists and manager Aaron Michiel. He's a consultant to artbomb.net and opi8.com He's on the web at warrenellis.com, strangemachine.com and diepunyhumans.com. He's thirty four and lives in England and he never ever sleeps. Never.
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| 36: Things Online That I Am Sick Of |
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Today, the things I am sick of:
RSS. The geek superpower of being able to collect in a single window the
most current entries from dozens of blogs all making the same pot/kettle gags
about Michael Moore's weight. Sing hosanna, the next iteration of the Apple
operating system will contain an RSS thing. See, when Bill Gates talks about
starting a blog, everyone says blogs must be tired. But when a corporation that
partners with the loathesome Pepsi to make people swallow the latest Britney
Spears horseshit says they're making an RSS enabler, suddenly there are angels
in the air. When did it get so hard to just go to a website?
Blogs with the suffix -pundit in the title. These must all immediately be
changed to -wankerinbasement. Not only is pundit just a horrible word with
intimations of some barstool idiot with an uninformed opinion on everything,
but, frankly, if they had any kind of useful take on anything, they'd have a
real fucking job doing it.
Blogs as tool of "emergent democracy". Worked out well for the Dean
campaign in America, eh? Emergent democracy apparently means getting seven women
in immense glasses and 1974 nylon floral print dresses to turn up outside your
speaking engagements. It means paying for a computer and a net connection and
often webspace and calling it Free Speech. Listen, free speech is that place
in Westminster called Speaker's Corner where people can stand and rant about
anything they like. Getting billed to broadcast what passes for thinking in
your TV-deadened head is called Hard Money. Using your own money to tell
anyone who'll look that hospitals should compete for your business and that schools
don't need heating is called Being That Mad Bloke In The Corner.
"Free Culture". Or: people with salaried day jobs telling me I shouldn't
have the right to own and control my ideas and creative property and have it
handed down in any way I fucking well see fit. You go and make a living solely
off your own imagination for ten years and then come back and talk to me,
shiteyes. Or go and design your own house and build it with your own money and
sweat -- and I'm going to come and fucking live in it. How's that? Get away
from me.
Bar staff complaining that passive smoking poses a health risk to them.
So your job is to cajole people to buy tasty poison, break up fights, get
bottled, mop up spew, breathe in old mens' aspirated diseases as they bellow for
more beer over the counter, deal with a dozen different kinds of physical
assault -- and it's passive smoking that's a threat to your health? You don't need
new laws -- you need new jobs. (No, this has nothing to do with the web.
Shut up.)
Hippies. (Thought I'd throw a crowd-pleaser in there.)
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-- Warren
Warren Ellis can be reached at brainpowermail@aol.com. BRAINPOWERED is copyright (c) 2002-2004 Warren Ellis. All rights reserved.
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