909 ONLINE

Check out this new Online 909... how awesome is this? Thanks to Lost at E Minor for pointing the way to this - check out the full story here.

FILM 2008

I spent my lunch hour today trawling Apple Trailers for the best big-budget Hollywood cheese coming in 2008. Here's a quick rundown, with links to the trailers. I'll do them in the order of how excited they make me. Here goes.

First up, Iron Man. This just looks fucking boss. It seems that technology has finally caught up with comics artists, and you CAN now make Robert Downey Jnr. fly through the air at Mach 6. Awesome.

Next up we have Hellboy 2, and it looks like Guillermo Del Toro has pulled out all the visual stops in this one. Check out the mad clockwork device Hellboy is fighting on, and the Pan's Labyrinth-esque bad guys. Ho yes.

Gus Van Sant's new skateboarding thriller Paranoid Park looks very interesting, like a slightly more serious repost to surprise indie hit Brick.

After the disappointment that was I Am Legend (as a friend described it: "That was Will Smith's Castaway..."), Smith returns to form with irreverent superhero comedy Hancock. Digging the tone of this one - superhero / bum. Nice.

Zombies get a j-horror tinged shot in the bum with The Signal. Looks like a cleaned up cinema version of Black Gas, in which the zombies didn't so much eat each other as just get Tourette's and start dishing out the Ultraviolence. Superb!

Next up, Teeth looks pretty awesome - about time someone made a decent movie about vagina dentata, I feel.

I'll give Cloverfield a bash as well, in the hopes that perhaps the monster JJ Abrams is hiding is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. "Nobody steps on a church in my town!"

Another project by JJ Abrams: his crack at the Star Trek franchise could be worth a look -hard to tell from the teaser trailer, but the casting of Simon Pegg as Scotty bodes well, for me at least.

As a kung fu fan I'm probably morally obliged to go and see The Forbidden Kingdom, it being the first on-screen pairing of Jackie Chan and Jet Li. It looks absolutely fucking awful though.

Despite the presence of Hayden Christiansen, Jumper has a pretty awesome premise, and Samuel L. Jackson's in it... I think I'm sold on this teleportation whizz.

10,000 BC could be a laugh, although with Roland Emmerich directing you can expect this caveman romp to be rather po-faced and schmaltzy. The trailer with no dialogue looks pretty cool though.

A few more to recommend (or not as the case may be)... another J-Horror inspired yankee flick, Shutter, could be hit or miss, as could Clive Barker-inspired thriller Midnight Meat Train (great title). On the weird side, He Was A Quiet Man sees Christian Slater playing an office worker who saves a colleague from another worker's violent office slaughterfest. And winner of the Weirdest Videogame Adaptation Yet award has got to go to Postal, although it looks like an Epic Movie-style piece of shite. You Don't Mess With The Zohan has got to be Adam Sandler's weirdest yet - it's about a former Israeli black ops agent who becomes a New York hairdresser. Frankly, it looks bizarre. I may end up breaking my self-imposed Jack Black boycott to watch Kung Fu Panda, just for the animation. But it'll probably be rubbish. And finally, here's the preview for Mark Millar adaptation Wanted, which you are only going to enjoy if you haven't read the comic first, because they've completely eviscerated the story as far as I can see.

Happy viewing - choose wisely, and may the force be with you.

RUSSELL TEAPOT

Check this out - Russell Teapot, a diverting webcomic site.

Thanks to Dalai for the link.

LONDON ANTI-SCIENTOLOGY DEMO

If you're in London, please go to this on my behalf.

Plus, new Anonymous video.

THIS JUST IN:

Scientology has now posted a pretty amusing copycat response to Anonymous' original message. The group claiming responsibility, The Regime, are a thinly-veiled bunch of Scientology counter-hackers.

CHANOLOGY: WE ARE YOUR SP'S

More fun from the Scientology vs. Anonymous war - a video celebrating Anonymous' takedown of the Scientology site. Accompanied by a fun animation abouit Xenu, and a link to Anonymous' YouTube account, Chanology, with some other fun Scientology-related videos. Enjoy!

Plus some news coverage of the war:

Sky News

NBC

More of that infamous Cruise video... This time, Tom saves 9/11 firefighters with LRH tech (LOL).

And finally, the Chanology entry on Encyclopediadramatica.

SIX SENTENCES

Just a quick post to ask you to pop over to a fantastic little Flash Fiction site called Six Sentences. The idea is - what can you say in six sentences? Obviously quite a lot, as this fantastic site has been running for no short while now, and provides an almost bottomless well of fictional short sharp shocks. Have a gander at a piece of mine they were decent enough to publish: it's called Handle, and it's in marvelous company: check out these other stories, hot off the feed:

Bravo, Dear Brother by Erich Drach
The Assignment by Roger Daubach
Enough by Lissette Diaz
Vegetable Soup by Eva Romero

Enjoy!!

Texture, after the witching hour, Jan 25

HACKERS DECLARE WAR ON SCIENTOLOGY

Hacker group Anonymous have declared war on Scientology, even goingso far as to issue a press release, re-printed by How To Rockstar.

Have a look at this video (provided by Warren Ellis).

Scientology's Religious Freedom Watch group have provided a reward for delivering the hackers into their hands. A quote from their site, about the hackers: "The threats have come from a person or persons using the monikers of ElBaldo, Eggshell White, Advocate of Painful Death or similar names." Similar how, one might ask? Those are a pretty diverse and ridiculous bunch of handles. Reckon they might be a false lead, guys..? Whichever way you cut it, it seems that Anonymous certainly advocate a painful death for Scientology, so this should be an interesting one to watch play out. I know who I'll be cheering for.

Thanks to Dalai Dahmer, who brought this to my attention. To quote him: "Culture wars, man! It's the future, finally!"

PS. Here's Kim Masters discussing Cruise's 'religious' views, just in case you want more.

PPS. Now watch Jerry O' Connel's pisstake of Cruise's original video (see previous posts).

WEAPONIZER RECOMMENDS: FAITH ERIN HICKS

Faith Erin Hicks is a comics creator I have just come across today - her work is fantastic, managing to be both edgy, funny and touching at the same time. Manga influences hide in her art, amongst more classical lines that bring to mind Kent Williams and Ashley Wood. Her first comic was Demonology 101, a marvelous tale about good versus evil, set in a high school with all sorts of occult goings on happening underneath the day to day beatings, tauntings and exploding watermelons we all expect from The Best Days Of Our Lives (I kind of freaked when I read this, as it's quite similar to a concept I've been working on, but Faith's work is more grand in scope and more traditionally a horror comic).

Her next two projects are even more impressive - undead extravaganza Zombies Calling (recently published by Slave Labor Graphics) attempts to explore the rules of surviving a zombie plague, with some great comedic twists. Meanwhile, ICE is a post-apocalyptic love story (which I'm still reading, so I won't comment any more except to say it's AWESOME!).

Please go and show Erin some love for her fantastic work. I have requested an interview with her, so keep watching this space - and if you leave a comment for her, tell her I sent you!

- Texture

MILK IS WRONG

Milk is made of pus.

So says Linda McCartney.

JESUS CHRIST'S INTERNET DIGEST: NO.5 IN A SERIES

"Big Baby Jesus I can't wait, n***a fuck that, I can't wait." Thus spake Ol' Dirty Bastard, also known as Big Baby Jesus. Our very own Big Baby Jesus is also feeling impatient this week, so he has decided to turn in another column of weird and wonderful internet links. Which is fine for him – all he has to do is click around the interwub like a single-fingered proto-human, I’m the one who actually types this shit out for him! Still, no complaints, how many other blogs have a quasi-mystical hero of a well-respected fantasy novel as a regular internet columnist? The day Gandalf starts writing about dubstep for Blackdown is the day Weaponizer throws in the towel. Take it away JC!

Yo, howdy, wassssssuuup and hello. It’s Jesus here, and I basically had to skip straight on to this week’s column from last week’s, due to the huge amount of awesome-ness which the internet had to offer you crazy sinners. That’s right, as February approaches, the neurons of the scientific community have started to recover from champagne-induced degradation, and have begun to fire anew with some weird and wonderful ideas.

For instance, Japanese scientists have furthered their attempts to create a kill-crazy cyborg, wiring up the brains of chimps to massive Robotech-style battlebots. All well and good, as you can see in this video. Except for the fact that chimps are vicious and predatory as a species, regularly resorting to cannibalism and barbaric violence, and raping each other to death for fun (a bit like humans do, now I mention it...). Surely this is the last kind of creature we should be wiring up with surface-to-air missiles and laser-targeted machine guns? We don't need the competition, frankly!

A slightly more useful invention perhaps is the Gin & Tonic Fog Machine, which basically gets an entire room of people drunk. Reports say that London Council are thinking of using the technology to recreate Dickensian London – simply by installing the G&TF machine on the banks of the Thames and allowing history to slide gently back to the smoky depths of the nineteenth century, complete with boil-featured prostitutes and people in top hats staggering about. It’s got to be an improvement, hasn’t it?

Stuff you want to buy now – For Him, it’s the magnificent Gun Camera, excellent for papping up and coming celebs and politicians. Watch as they cower in fear before the might of your shiny barrel! Or something. And for Her, we have the rather magnificent Hello Kitty assault rifle, perfect for the mass-murdering female who wants to combine ‘cute’ with ‘shoot every fucking thing that moves.’ And for both, it’s the new Size Zero iMac, which basically just folds away into the Fifth dimension when you aren’t using it, and weighs so little that it actually makes you lighter when you carry it.

Some internet news now – it seems Facebook is indeed run by Nazis who want to steal your identity. The government certainly agrees, and hope to shut down Facebook as soon as they’ve finished copying all of your personal details onto the MI6 server. My editor tells me that he had fun trying to upload his band’s songs to his Facebook profile – they requested a jpeg scan of his photographic ID to: “…prove [he] owned the copyright.” Shyeah, right – like you’re going to upload a scanned passport to the least protected server in the UK!

It also seems that there is about to be a crackdown on sites which encourage the nebulously defined concept of ‘extremism’, to prevent people from being ‘groomed for terrorism.’ Quite aside from the nefarious linguistic trickery which establishes a concordance between the tactics of paedophiles and terrorists through the term ‘grooming’, this raises some interesting questions about what forms extremism can take. For instance, I’m Jesus Christ. If I use my column here at Weaponizer to recommend that you go and murder as many people as possible with your Hello Kitty assault rifle, am I grooming you for religious terrorism? I guess only if you actually do it! Well, if you do, please remember to post me the link to the YouTube footage.

Last week, I tried to give you a link to a video showing Tom Cruise explaining his wacky Scientological beliefs. The link died as soon as it went up, but thanks to the efforts of Weaponizer reader Hatie Kolmes, we’ve discovered another link to the same vid. Thanks Hatie!

To compliment this marvelous movie, here’s some BBC hack wittering on about how poor Cruise-y Wuise-y has been discriminated against by people who think Scientology is a form of crypto-fascist mind control bollocks made up by a bloke who wrote shit sci-fi novels. Not that we at Weaponizer think this of course – we are tolerant of all religious creeds, even those that advocate pink Japanese cat-related mass murder; or those that reckon space midgets are responsible for your bipolar disorder and the fact you’re a homosexual… whatever… we’re very tolerant.

Finally, I leave you with news that the Internet will soon be in your eyes. If there is any further proof needed that William Gibson was a true prophet who actually invented much of the 21st century 20 years before it happened, here it is.

Until next time – pray for deliverance, sinners!

- JC

JESUS CHRIST'S INTERNET DIGEST: NO. 4 IN A SERIES

"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," sang Patti Smith. She was right - Jesus actually died because of the sins of furtive masturbator Judas Priest, a close personal friend of the Messiah whose constant self-abuse eventually led to a nasty traffic accident.

But that's not what IT Specialist and Web Columnist Jesus 'Hellboy 2' Christ is here to tell you about today.

Jesus has more important things on his mind - like Life, The Universe and Brazillian Chicks. Take it away Jay-Cee!

Hi friends, Jesus here. My long absence from the Weaponizer blog can be explained with three simple words - holiday, Cuba and cocaine. However I'm back, and thanks to my regenerative powers, I'm sporting an entirely new set of nasal passages, to replace those blocked up by my recent Cuban jaunt. You'd also be amazed at how fast Jesus can recover from the clap...

So what's been happening in my absence? First up, I found this piece about a newly discovered backwards galaxy which actually rotates in the opposite direction to conventional galaxies. Yes, that's right, this is the galaxy where you get up at half past ten at night, half an hour before you go to sleep! (Thanks to the Pythons for that old chestnut). Of course, being a pan-dimensional godhead myself, I can make time run backwards and forwards whenever I like... which really helps during sporting events. Many's the time I've stopped time and jumped on pitch to help my local softball team win points... I hate to see those pre-teen bitches cry, is all.

In other news, scientists have recently managed to produce the darkest material so far created by man - so black that it's: "blacker than a black Corvette." While this is impressive, many find fault with the findings, who still say that the new material is not even half as black as Darth Vader. James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, went on record (in my imagination) to say: "Of course Vader is blacker than a Corvette... how stupid is that? Nothing and nobody could be blacker than Vader! These so called scientists will be compelled to feel the POWER of the DARKSIDE!"

A little satanic cooking now - a man was recently reported as having cooked his own hand because it bore 'the mark of the beast'. In fact, the man was suffering from delusions - what he thought was the beast-mark was in fact a hand-stamp from a local nightclub he had visited the previous evening. Restaurants in the area are capitalising on the story, serving up Devil's Hand-burgers to the ravenous locals, in the shape of a six-fingered meat patty on devil's food cake baps. There's no accounting for taste!

Good news too from the world of Sexscience - check out this learned study on Brazillian Women, which attempts to explain their reality-warping powers of babe-itude. My latin lovelies call me Jesus, but they pronounce the J softly, if you know what I mean.

Finally, two short clips to keep you entertained. In the name of religious tolerance, here's Tom Cruise explaining his wacky Scientological beliefs - gasp in awe at his scintillating powers of description: "I was like... wow. This is IT!" Yeah, sure it is Tom.

**Editor's note - this clip has since been removed. Which is a shame because it was pretty fucking funny. I've replaced Jeezy's link with a different one, which will take you to a written factual analysis of those same beliefs... Weaponizer apologises for the break in service!

Clip number two is a little teaser for the upcoming documentary Aliens Versus Predator - Requiem. The BBC film crews spent two years filming this moving and emotional study of two of the universe's most dangerous biological entities. Sadly, David Attenborough's contribution to the project had to be abandoned, as he fell victim to a nasty chest-bursting infection in the middle of production. Still, the intricate camera work and unflinching appraisal of these two interstellar beasties enjoying a good old fashioned romp through a backwoods hick town in the USA is compelling viewing nonetheless.

Until next time folks, remember to say your prayers - I just took off my Out Of Office funcion, so I'm back on the mainline. Hit me up!

- JC

NEW 4AM PODCAST FROM WARREN ELLIS

Warren Ellis: The 4am 9

WEAPONIZER: THE FUTURE

It's 2008, welcome to the future. I've been debating recently what to do about The Future, particularly in terms of this site. I know why I'm here - writing is what I do, and much of what I am, and the internet is a fantastic way to give your writing a home without having to become an Author published by the mainstream. But who really reads blogs, or finds them interesting? What's the difference between a blog and a website?

I personally think it's got everything to do with how many people contribute. If I post a self-indulgent uber-rant here every week or two, it's a blog... but if more people contribute, and we have everything here from serious investigative journalism to poetry to web comics, then it becomes something more. The potential for what it could become, almost limitless.

Initially I wanted to start using the Weaponizer name to publish books, and that's something I still intend to do. I am now of the opinion that in order to make publishing worthwhile, I need to go some distance before I begin. I don't want to just publish myself, any more than I want to continue doing Weaponizer as a simple, self-contained blog. Instead, I want to bring together a cohort of talented, engaging, serious, non-professional writers and artists to collaborate, exchange ideas, give each other feedback, and provide a shimmering, multi-faceted body of creative work, right here on this site, for all to see. When I have assembled such a team, then together we will begin the work of making a name for ourselves. With your help, we could make this site the formost home of online and in-development fiction in Scotland.

Scotland has a rich literary history. You all know about Conan Doyle and Walter Scott and Stevenson, but what about more recent creators such as Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Matthew Fitt? Most of these writers are published either in England or in the USA - and to get that far, they had to compete against the hordes of writers from these countries; often as much-maligned outsiders. Yet some of these creators (Millar, Morrison) are among the most successful Scottish artists working today, dominating their chosen fileds.

This generation of creators has produced an inspiring canon of new Scottish fiction, and I believe that there are many artists and writers out there with equal talent and potential. I want to provide somehwere for these new writers to meet, influence each others' work, and get a sense of community.

Are you a writer, an artist, a musician? How many times have you met a fellow creator in the pub or club, exchanged phone numbers or emails, but never contacted each other again? Art is often a solitary pursuit, but what if all you had to do was meet online? Meet somehwere where you could gossip, argue, work, and play... A place where you could get real-time feedback from other creators... A place where you could fight writer's block with written assignments, creative techniques, workshops and sound advice... A place where an artist could find a writer, a writer could find an editor, and a reader could find the best, the freshest, the most raw art in Scotland.

Such a place doesn't exist outside the staid confines of the literary establishment, and the odd writer's groups (Writer's Bloc, Laura Hird's site, and the awesome Writers Against Writing, to name a few) which pepper the back rooms of fair-trade cafes and University buildings, fighting the good fight... but such a place is, I believe, necessary. I think it's vital to our development as Scottish creatives, and so I'm taking it upon myself to build this place. This place is Weaponizer.

So what does The Future have in store? My ideas so far include a free forum, the classes / workshops / assignments mentioned above, hopefully some guest lectures / essays by published writers, an online store, regular real-world seminars and gigs, plus self-publishing opportunities for those who wish to sell their work.

I'm excited about The Future. Look for me in the clubs and bars, look for my digital shadow as I ramble my way around the blog-o-verse... Join me, make me less pointless... Make us less pointless... Make Scotland less invisible...

Let's steal The Future for ourselves, and let's do it right here.

Peace.