Gawker publishes posts every fifteen minutes during weekday work hours.

A rolling bullshit-ticker for people stuck at desks in America all day, I guess, drawing in from all of the Gawker blogs. Every fifteen minutes. Goddamn. I don’t know why, but that’s made me kind of sit down and think. Obviously, it’s not new, they’ve been doing it for years and I just never noticed because the most attention I pay is really no more than having the occasional callous snicker at Valleywag.

Can you imagine what this site would look like if it updated every fifteen minutes?

And I guess that that’s the genius of the Gawker system. Sit on the main Gawker site all day and you’ve got a rolling bullshit channel. Just leave it up there and hit refresh every now and then. As Waking Vixen points out, it may not particularly repay intensive and involved writing — but in a Burst Culture condition, anything longer than 500 words, an mp3 or a bit of YouTube on a blog is probably overdoing it anyway.

Every fifteen minutes. That site’s your friend for the working day, isn’t it? Always sitting there on a tab. If it could push, it’d be updating itself right in front of you.

* There’s also a thread up for Garth Ennis & Jacen Burrows’ CROSSED.

* And people complaining about US network TV remaking UK TV shows (I haven’t seen the ELEVENTH HOUR or LIFE ON MARS remakes yet, so you won’t find me in that thread).

* The Self Portrait Imagethread for the month is up, featuring… muttering in German.

And all kinds of other terrible things, because I haven’t had time to look at the place much this week. God knows what’s growing in there.

You can find out all about Sam, including his British tour dates (which have to be seen to be believed), at his MySpace page. The following mp3 will be up for seven days only. Please give it a listen.

Sam Russo - \"The Dirty 13\"

Download audio file (Sam%20Russo%20-%20The%20Dirty%2013.mp3)

…a series set in a Lovecraftian industrial city in an alternate 1950s that centers on a mechanically gifted young girl approaching her 16th birthday, the age at which everyone in her family goes insane, leaving it up to her to unravel the mystery of their madness - and save the world…

* Matt Jones for Schulze & Webb on the "fanbrication" of near-instant, produced-on-demand products. Warning: switch brain to "On" for this one.

* Melissa Gira on How To Break Up Online. (Or: Don’t Fuck Obsessive Bloggers.)

* Thank you Moon Wiring Club for sending me your wonderful new long-player SHOES OFF AND CHAIRS AWAY. About which I will doubtless have more to say later.

In three years of research, Chris Morris has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other’s feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says "what was the question again?" On millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.

Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. It understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.

###

* Paul Pope’s appearing in LA on the 9th:

* I was going to write something about the Paul Little/"Max Hardcore" porn conviction, but Susannah Breslin, naturally, does it far better than I could.

* I’m definitely going to write something about the massively multiplayer futurecasting game SUPERSTRUCT at some point soon — suffice to say for now that seven-brained scenario director Jamais Cascio brought in both me and Bruce Sterling as judges.

* Brian Wood’s t-shirt image for the Laughing Ogre comics stores — he’ll be signing at the Columbus OH location this Saturday:

* Anna Lucylle has been beating up my old acquaintance Venom (she works in comics) for the sake of Art, it seems. That shot on the left is inspirational:

* Emma Rios is now drawing comics for Boom! Studios:

(found on Sami Blackmire’s journal, god knows where she found it)

Oh yes. In Kuala Lumpur last week, an entire family beat a couple to death in a ritual apparently intended to make the man stop smoking.

This "ritual" appears to have involved little more than repeatedly smacking the couple in the head with a mixture of religious instruments — broomsticks and motorcycle helmets.

And someone is reading this right now and thinking to themselves: well, he’s not smoking any more, is he? Huge Success.

I’m telling you. Three years from now it’s going to be Sarah Palin with a sharpened hockey stick up your bumhole with a cackling "you doggone Lung Terrorists just hate America, don’cha?"

Vote Obama: he inhaled.

* Eliza’s at Maschinenfest.

* House Of Zo:

* Matt (D’Israeli) Brooker records the sketches he did for fans at the Birmingham comics do over the weekend:

* Condolences to Melissa Gira on getting laid off from Valleywag. She seems to be taking the opportunity to clear the remains of previous lives out from her apartment, hence the image entitled "Stripper Trash":

* Steven Shaviro on a peculiar literary hoax called ISSUE 1:

This e-text is 3785 pages long (!); each page contains a “poem” attributed to
one of 3785 writers. The names of the writers range from Silliman himself and
other language poets, through a number of (now dead) poets and writers, onto
various bloggers (especially ones who appear in Silliman’s blogroll, it would
seem). In point of fact, none of the writers have actually written the pieces
attributed to them. My name appears among the list of authors, together with the
names of several people I know…

LEVERAGE is a Caper Show. The first episode introduces us to The Best Insurance Investigator Ever, who’s now on the skids after the insurance company wouldn’t pay for his dying kid’s treatment. The excellent Saul Rubinek (in, I have to say, a slightly underwritten role) plays an aircraft designer who wants The Best Insurance Investigator Ever to oversee a gang of criminals engaged to steal back his designs from a ruthless competitor. He’s got the thieves, he says: all he needs now is one honest man. And the designer uses the memory of his dead son to emotionally blackmail the last honest man into the gig.

The team are a Web 2.0-age scammer who wants to be cool but is caught using his ill-gotten cash to enact his Slave Girl Leia fantasies, a soft-spoken and bespectacled young guy who is actually The Most Violent Man Ever, and a pretty young thief whose main character trait is that she’s utterly insane. Later on, the wonderful Gina Bellman is introduced as the Queen of the Grifters — there’s a terrific short flashback showing how they first met, possibly the first “meet cute” scene involving the principals shooting each other.

(And the flashback scene introducing Parker, as a child, is funny as hell and reminiscent to me of the flashback-to-childhood scenes I did in NEXTWAVE.)

The trick to this sort of story is in the reversal, which is deceptively hard to write. The first big reversal comes when this team, put together for one night only, is brought back together by the designer, ostensibly to get paid, but in actuality to be killed. And so the one-night-only team has to stick together long enough to get paid and get out from under the police interest put on them when they survived the murder attempt. But that’s barely the first fifteen minutes of the hour-long show, and a clever script keeps them coming, to a climax that is scam, counter-scam and re-scam. The hour sags once at most — in all other respects, the pace is up, the lines are funny and the situations are smart. And Steve Jobs owes them money for the tricks they pull with an iPhone.

It’s all pretty tongue-in-cheek stuff — although I think the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE-inspired theme music is maybe one put-on too far — but it never loses sight of its simple aim, which is to entertain the shit out of you for an hour. It doesn’t sentimentalise, it doesn’t fall into the usual American tv trope of making it all about family, it doesn’t treat you like you’re stupid and it offers you no platitudes. It just asks you to go along with the ride. And the funniest thing, to me, is that the ending sets up the cast as a team of criminal Equalizers. Hence the title. “We provide… leverage.”

It airs on TNT in the US in December, I think. It’s a lot of fun. You should watch it.

* Brian Wood shows off the cover to NORTHLANDERS #14:

(via riotclitshave, still the best photoblog in the known universe)

This nightmare scenario in longsleeved-tshirt form was sent to me by the mentally ill people at Shatner Hasselhoff campaign control — where I found the following frightening image: