Warren Ellis

No problemo. I remember reading it at work when it came out, thinking...what the heck IS this thing? It came to me originally from the mailing list of Warren Ellis, a cranky, foul-mouthed British comic book writer who hates and despises everything he sees, hears, and reads. That morning he sent an e-mail out to the 12,000 people on his mailing list saying: "Here's something that isn't terrible. In fact, it might be the best thing you read all year." That's the sort of endorsement that encourages you to keep at it. http://www.warrenellis.com

I read some musings by Warren Ellis [1] which brushed up against easier space travel, very briefly: "The Olympus Mons mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that, were you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way to space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere, taller than ours, but there’s barely anything to it at that level. 30 Pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth. You may as well be in space. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you could quite literally walk to space." It's mostly not about your question, but I liked this part. [1] http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314

Author Warren Ellis also noticed this recently when digging into how to promote his new book: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14404 His conclusion? Not Facebook

...and another starts to use it http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13077

This is utter bullshit. Warren Ellis's excelent "How to see the future"[1], addresses why we're perpetually bored by the times we live in, and are always nostalgic about some bygone golden age: ...We look at the present day through a rear-view mirror. This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic- seeming future narratives. He said, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” He went on to say this, in 1969, the year of the crewed Moon landing: “Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.” He goes on to cite some examples of stuff that seems banal and boring because we're just so used to it: There are six people living in space right now. There are people printing prototypes of human organs, and people printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh and the human electrical system. We’ve photographed the shadow of a single…

Or haunted beef: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=12765

I'm not the only person who thinks so: "Clay Shirky looked like Tom Hanks but I didn't ask him about his latest movie role (I hope)." (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/11/usercreated_con.html#c32… "If Shirky ever has a movie made of his life, it’ll have to be Tom Hanks that stars. I think he sounds and looks a lot like Shirky!" (http://blogs.technet.com/johmar/archive/2008/09/18/web-2-0-expo-day-3-… "Imagine hair on him and Shirky looks, talks and acts exactly like Tom Hanks. Not just similar, but eerily exact." (http://www.chrisroberson.net/2008/04/cognitive-surplus.html) "One thing I’ve definitely gotta say about this guy though is that he sounds and looks a lot like Tom Hanks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that." (http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5885#comment-229940)

Orbital Operations by Warren Ellis http://www.warrenellis.com/orbital-operations-a-new-newsletter/ Various musings from author Warren Ellis - comic books, script writing, weird fiction are probably the mainstays but it can include all sorts.

I’m always reminded of Warren Ellis’ talk “How to see the Future” when I read stuff like this. We have to strive to reduce the banality with which we view the world, and things like this go a long way. http://www.warrenellis.com/how-to-see-the-future/