John Mortell’s blog

The Gifted Babies have a trailer up of their new film ‘Milton Murder Mystery’. It brought a smile to my face anyway…

Milton Murder Mystery Trailer from Gifted Babies on Vimeo.

Fascinating article in the Guardian here, which suggests that in order to buy us more time from global warming we should paint everything white?

It sounds simple, but the effect could be dramatic. Study after study has shown that buildings with white roofs stay cooler during the summer. The change reduces the way heat accumulates in built-up areas – known as the urban heat island effect – and allows people who live and work inside to switch off power-hungry air conditioning units.

Aware of the benefit, California has forced warehouses and other commercial premises with flat roofs to make them white since 2005, and, if such an effort could be extended, the results could make a big difference.

Together, roads and roofs are reckoned to cover more than half the available surfaces in urban areas, which have spread over some 2.4% of the Earth’s land area. A mass movement to change their colour, Akbari calculates, would increase the amount of sunlight bounced off our planet by 0.03%. And, he says, that would cool the Earth enough to cancel out the warming caused by 44bn tonnes of CO2 pollution. If you think that sounds like a lot, then you’re right. It would wipe out the expected rise in global emissions over the next decade. It won’t solve the problem of climate change, Akbari says, but could be a simple and effective weapon to delay its impact – just so long as people start doing it in earnest. “Roofs are going to have to be changed one by one and to make that effort at a very local level, we need to have an organisation in place to make it happen,” he says. Groups in several US cities, including Houston, Chicago and Salt Lake City, are on board with his plan, and he is talking to others.

The idea is a form of geo-engineering, a broad term used to cover all schemes that tackle the symptoms of climate change, namely catastrophic temperature rise, without addressing the root cause, our spiralling greenhouse gas emissions. And if altering all of the world’s roofs and roads sounds extreme, then take a look at some ideas from the other end of the geo-engineering scale: giant mirrors in space, shiny balloons to float above the clouds and millions of fake plastic trees to suck carbon from the air. An increasing number of climate scientists argue that the world has little choice but to investigate such drastic options. Carbon emissions since 2000 have risen faster than anyone thought possible, mainly driven by the coal-fuelled boom in China, and a global temperature rise of 2-3C seems inevitable. Last year a special edition of a Royal Society journal dedicated to geo-engineering said the geo-engineering schemes “may be risky, but the time may well come when they are accepted as less risky than doing nothing”.

Definitely one of the stranger things that I have encountered in my recent memory. These seem to be audio adaptations of Marvel Comics done by Marvel themselves in the 70′s. A lot of them seem to be straight adaptations of the first 13 issues of the Fantastic Four comic. They even have an introduction by Stan Lee! Worth a listen. Group 1 is here and 2 here

My mate Cethan worked on this film for the Bangor Film Festival. Its not bad in my opinion:

This is a comic based on an upcoming video game. Yet it’s surprisingly enough actually quite good. I’m not quite sure why they decided to animate the comic (though that is something that seems to be becoming a trend) but the music and Ben Templesmith’s art actually combine to make quite a creepy experience.


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Just a couple of links that are pretty interesting. The first is a new Stephen King series ‘N’ which has been made into a combination animated comic/cartoon in association with Marvel Comics. Seems pretty good from what the first episode shows anyway.

Next is ‘wrestling mania‘ which is more for my own entertainment, a handy blog with most of the big American shows on video.

Finally up, is a blog by my mate Harry from TCD. Definitely one of the more interesting characters I’ve met debating, his blog hasn’t a whole lot on it yet, but is worth the look.

Librivox is an volunteer organisation devoted to putting up various public domain books in audio form. While I know that audio recordings aren’t for everyone, its still quite useful for the like of me who travel a bit and yet can’t always read while doing so. Currently I’m downloading their H.P. Lovecraft collection. Obviously,given that these are recorded by ‘the man on the street’, some of the audio recordings could be of a slightly better quality, but the vast majority of them are pretty cool so take a look…

One of the best single comic issues of last year recently became available online here. It’s always good to see such unique and talented voices like Frazer Irving and Simon Spurrier *make it* across in the U.S comic scene. And that final page … Genius.

Just as I was trying to kill some time today I wandered into waterstone’s to see if I could find ‘Sandworms of Dune’ the final book in the ‘Dune’ series. I’ve no idea if it’ll be any good but I seem to recall enjoying the previous book ‘Hunters of Dune’ so hopefully. Oddly enough then, after going and buying this book I see on Whitechapel that apparently there’s a new ‘Dune’ movie planned. While to be honest, I doubt anything will ever live up to the planned version by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the art for which would have been by Moebius, I’ll be quite interested to see how this version of the movie turns out…

Update: there’s some pretty good informationa and artwork here

This is a pretty good short story – take a look:

Borislav moved from his booth into the freezing wreck of a warehouse, where the survivors sorted and sold the effects of the dead. Another awful winter. They burned furniture to stay warm. When they coughed, people stared in terror at their handkerchiefs. Food shortages, too, this time: the dizzy edge of famine. Crazy times.
He had nothing left of that former life but his pictures. During the mayhem, he took thousands of photographs. That was something to mark the day, to point a lens, to squeeze a button, when there was nothing else to do, except to hustle, or sit and grieve, or jump from a bridge. He still had all those pictures, every last one of them. Everyday photographs of extraordinary times. His own extraordinary self: he was young, gaunt, wounded, hungry, burning-eyed.