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Stephen Wiltshire is an artist who draws and paints detailed cityscapes. He has a particular talent for drawing lifelike, accurate representations of cities, sometimes after having only observed them briefly. He was awarded an MBE for services to the art world in 2006. He studied Fine Art at City & Guilds Art College. His work is popular all over the world, and is held in a number of important collections.

Stephen was born in London to West Indian parents on 24th April, 1974. As a child he was mute, and did not relate to other human beings. Aged three, he was diagnosed as autistic. He had no language and lived entirely in his own world.

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

When a hungry astronomer falls asleep while working on a problem, he discovers a solution not in outer space, but in the surreal food-chain of his subconscious mind.
An animated film by Malcolm Sutherland, with sound by Leon Lo. Made in 2009.

The Astronomer’s Dream (2009) from Animalcolm on Vimeo.

Anyway it’s a nice idea, throwing up a short installment of fiction and then asking for the readers to vote on the direction before the next installment is published.

I’ve no idea what the story is about but Underland Press say they are into the macabre and darker side of fantasy so I may give it a try if the big pile of books I’ve just received isn’t too distracting.

Every week, the author posts an installment. Installment length hits the sweet-spot of online reading—long enough to get interested, short enough to read in the cubicle at work. At the end of every installment, the author writes in a plot branch point. Does the heroine kill her lover? Will the zombies catch the soldier? Is the box empty, or is it filled with bees?

THE READERS DECIDE.

On Monday, the post goes up. Voting is open through Thursday. The author writes Thursday and Friday. The editors edit Friday and Saturday. The post goes back up on Monday. Part literature, part exquisite corpse. The pace of print journalism, the imagination of fiction, the spark of reader participation.

Like modern-day explorers, the two academics featured in The Linguists travel to forgotten places around the globe to unearth rare treasures—in this case, endangered languages. On a shoestring budget, professors David Harrison and Gregory Anderson navigate difficult terrain, searching for speakers of these forgotten and mostly hidden languages. While more than 7,000 different languages are currently spoken around the world, many are rapidly disappearing. Language diversity is shrinking as colonialism and economic unrest destroy traditional tribal tongues. When young people abandon their ancestral language, the passive suppression of their culture begins, and soon those languages will cease to exist. Joining a traditional ceremony in a remote village in India, observing a Kallawaya healing ritual in Bolivia, and completing an arduous journey into Siberia are all part and parcel of heeding the urgent call. The word connoisseurs are well suited for the monumental task of researching and documenting native tongues; they speak 25 languages between them. These humble ethnographers are in a race against time to preserve the increasingly rare words, which are intricately linked to the vanishing traditions and heritage of Indigenous populations. Well-paced and laced with humor, The Linguists serves as an insightful, contemporary adventure film with a strong emphasis on cultural history.

… (more)

I love platforms for media that might not necessarily find homes with traditional publishers and something like this could be great for those still producing fanzines/ezines. There is a fair amount of content already there with a number of things available for free. Whilst there is some overlap with a site like Lulu, I can see a place for somewhere dedicated to digital content rather than print on demand.

Unfortunately I’ve been sick as a parrot the last week so I’ve not had a chance to really nose around though I did spot a taster for the superb Murky Depths magazine plus a fiction collection I might nab.

Have a look around, you might find something you like.

Lunch Bag Art

How cool is this dad?

He creates a new piece of art for his kids lunch bags every day during his lunch and the posts the images here.

Records were melted and sculpted to form a cascading wave, dotted with bursts of colorful labels. The resulting structure speaks to the inevitable waves of technology that render each successive generation of recordable media obsolete. The piece also aims to physically manifest the ephemerality of music as well as one man’s musical tastes, as represented by his personal record collection

Check out Mark Gervais’ cool flash animations he projects onto his window. Damn good idea which now gives me ideas for several nasty pranks.

You can buy the DVDs but not here in the pleasant green land it seems

For those of you who didn’t sign up for the Tor ebook giveaway to promote the quite spangly new site, they have now made all the ebooks available to download until Sunday July 27th.

Go and grab them quickly before they disappear.

There are also a load of nice desktop wallpapers of cover art for those of you who like pretty pictures…some of them really are very nice.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

PDF || HTMLnew! || HTML zipnew! || Mobinew!

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Farthing by Jo Walton

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

The Outstretched Shadow by Mercedies Lackey & James Mallory

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Lord of the Isles by David Drake

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Through Wolf’s Eyes by Jane Lindskold

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Reiffen’s Choice by S.C. Butler

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Spirit Gate by Kate Elliot

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Starfish by Peter Watts

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Touch of Evil by C.T. Adams & Cathy Clamp

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Orphans of Chaos by John Wright

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

In the Midnight Hour by Patti O’Shea

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Battlestar Galactica by Jeffrey A. Carver

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Flash by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Soul by Tobsha Learner

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Darkness of the Light by Peter David

PDF || HTML || HTML zip || Mobi

Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosanew!

PDF || ePub

Nevermind I enjoy short stories in general and Cory’s short stories have always been an enjoyable read, so a comic based on his short stories will no doubt entertain me.

As with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it’s on a non-commercial basis. I’ve uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories “Craphound,” “Anda’s Game,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “After the Siege,” “I, Robot” and “Nimby and the D-Hoppers.”

Atheist Anonymous Comic 6 by ~Devain on deviantART

Farbrausch have created some of my favourites so here is a fairly recent one.

Check out some more of this guys art too.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Temple of Doom

The Last Crusade

It’s called Lens Head and comes in two different patterns but I quite like this camouflage version. Have a look at some of the other patterns on this site, there are some superb Star Wars models.

It clocks in at around fourteen pages to print and cut out and the instructions are in slightly broken English…but just look at the awesome robot.