Toluu

Warren Ellis

Music by new, unsigned or independent artists, curated by Warren Ellis at www.warrenellis.com.

Polar Nuclear LighthousesYesterday

This is quite amazing to me. Never heard of these before. The great northern coast of Russia is inside the Arctic Circle, and the shoreline is hundreds of miles from civilisation almost the whole way along. Lighthouses were required for the coast, because it’s a handy passage but it spends a hundred days of the year in near-permanent night. The problems were that they’d be miles from anywhere, and couldn’t realistically be supplied or crewed.

So the Russians erected autonomous nuclear-powered lighthouses. Which worked great, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, they probably would have been fine after that, if people hadn’t looted them for copper and anything else that looked like it wasn’t nailed down too hard. Including, apparently, reactor shielding.

So many of these great polar nuclear lighthouses are now radioactive deadzones. I would tend to doubt that the one in this fantastic series of pictures on EnglishRussia is one of them. But, honestly, you never know, abandoned-site explorers can be a little on the mental side. Anyway. Go and look.

THE GREATEST FILM TRAILER EVERJanuary 6

Your Doomed WorldJanuary 6

* Tentacle-equipped UFO rapes windfarm turbine to death.

* Detox: doesn’t work. I am actually one giant toxin stack, and live in constant fear of stealth detox in the night. This news soothes me.

* Desktop particle accelerators: there’s an idea that’ll end well.

* The mayor of a small town in eastern Germany has gone into hiding after a threat on his life appeared on a neo-Nazi website. This follows the near-fatal stabbing of a provincial German police chief, at his home, by a neo-Nazi.

* A Hamas spokesman has claimed that the organisation will kill Jewish children anywhere in the world in retaliation for Israel’s continuing flattening of the Gaza Strip.

* The Arctic is melting twenty years ahead of predictive climate models. (And appears to have reformed around my bloody house.)

* In the aftermath of Katrina,

PLANET OF BEERJanuary 5

PLANET OF BEER, the forthcoming collection of comics by Brian Sendelbach, looks fucking mental:

I Should Probably Drink Less On WeekendsJanuary 4