Disconnect
After a long, and incredibly tumultuous, journey, Disconnect by myself and Gav Heryng will be released via ComiXology Submit and Mallet Productions on Wednesday 4th December (that's this Wednesday). The issue is a one-shot and costs $2.99.
Once again, here is the ComiXology link for it, once it goes live on Wednesday.
For those out of the loop:
"Kelly McLuhan is doing her best - a single mother with a child to raise, bills to pay and a persistent deadbeat ex.
Kelly also happens to be a drone operator, watching and killing people half a world away. As the trauma of her day job begins to seep into her home life, Kelly must meet her waking nightmare head on or risk losing it all..."
This is the second in a loose "War" trilogy (the first being Go Home) and deals very much with the now in comparison to Go Home's 'then' as well as PTSD and what Douglas Rushkoff calls present shock.
The story went through a number of changes and setbacks with creative team personnel changing. Comics can move incredibly slow sometimes. It's odd seeing something finally make it into the world that I wrote when I was in an entirely different place (physically and metaphorically). That said, the project would not be half of what it is without the contributions and input from former drone operator and whistleblower, Brandon Bryant.
Brandon graciously discussed his own experiences with me as well as making sure the technical side of things was correct. Brandon's suggestions also highly influenced the ending of the story, changing it from its originally written, more downbeat, form.
Huge thanks of course too to artist Gav Heryng, who renders the shock, grief and hope on the page with aplomb.
I'll be looking to send the comic out for review shortly too and hopefully will line up an interview or two. We shall see. If anyone reading this knows of, or a part of, any review sites too then feel free to drop me a line.
Links
Cinephilia & Beyond did a deep dive on one of my all time favourite movies, John Boorman's Point Blank. If you take anything away from the piece make it Alexander Jacobs' amazing and beautifully terse screenplay in PDF form. Thank me later.
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Next up is this fantastic look at 'dwelling as resistance' and the eco-utopian community Grow Heathrow that lies in the shadow of London's Heathrow Airport.
"Here dwelling is not about oppositional action; it is about the inhabitation of a site in order to produce a quasi-autonomous sphere in which the politics of its occupants are performed. It is this approach that accounts for a phrase that the protesters frequently use to describe their presence at Heathrow: passive resistance. For the squatters at Sipson, it is dwelling, not opposition, that has the greater amplitude. Here resistance is tantamount to indifference, for external interests are denied, or at least bracketed, while the requirements of dwelling are met."
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2010 best of lists? Pah! How about a list of those lists for your reference and pleasure?
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Remember the Russian owned rat-infested ship that was just drifting in the ocean? CBC has a fancy-looking piece up on its history and the shenanigans that lead to its fall from grace.
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The Star recently interviewed Zadie Smith and there was a few choice nuggets in there about writers in the modern age that caught my eye.
"The key with the unfreedom of the algorithm is that it knows everything and it feeds back everything. So, you can no longer have this bit of humanity which is absolutely necessary — privacy: the sacred space in which you do not know what the other thinks of you. You (come home) and close the door and go “Ah, I’ll put my sweats on.” I’ll be myself with the people I’m most intimate with who, in reality, are four people at most. That is what it is to be human. When that no longer exists it’s hard to be human. The recovery time to be human is gone."
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The Outline has a short piece up about GPT-2, an AI based on a language model using Natural Language Processing that has produced some...off kilter fiction.
"After a whole day of running and crying over a ruined world that she had never wanted to be a part of, she couldn't help but wonder where she had gone.
It was a Friday night. The school gate was closed, and she was alone."
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Misha Glenny (of McMafia fame) and Callum Lang have a new article up at the LRB about the current state of the illegal drug market in the UK, including how the recent DDOS attack that took down Dream Market is having an impact. It also deals with the current focus of the police on county line networks that are mainly servicing disadvantaged areas. What Glenny and Lang describe in the piece is a basically a tiered network, each offering a different level of service and customer experience. In a way it almost exactly mirrors the huge class divisions already present in the country.
"A step up from the county line networks is the urban full-service party supplier. Fallowfield in Manchester, Hyde Park in Leeds and Camden Town in London: three places where you may be handed a smart business card indicating that full service is available. One such card recently distributed in Ladbroke Grove had a phone number printed under the name Omar and beneath that the Givenchy logo. But Omar wasn’t selling perfume. Over the last decade, full-service suppliers have placed a good deal of emphasis on customer satisfaction. Their well-off, well-educated clients can afford to be more discerning than county lines users and if they aren’t satisfied they will turn to the dark web instead. So full service means offering quality products at competitive prices with a decent guarantee of security from arrest."
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Britain votes on Thursday 12th December. So the next time I send this out the political landscape of this country will either be something approaching hopeful or we'll be continuing on the path austerity set us down years ago. I'm hoping for the former but preparing for the latter.
See you in two!