Warren Ellis is closing down the forums at The-Engine.net

THE ENGINE will close a little before midnight UK time on August 31 2007.

The first year was about getting creators together and facilitating conversations that didn't have anywhere else to go. The second year was about just providing people with an interesting place to talk. Two years is enough. Time to move on.

Which is a great pity, but better to go out on a bang than a whimper. Warren, like the net, never stands still. For those of you who never came across this wonderful forum before, go and check it out before it shuts for good.

Warren has mentioned it briefly and so too have Torrentfreak and .NET magazine, so as a fully paid up Angel, it seems right to mention it as well. A Swarm of Angels is a new initiative to create and produce a £1m feature film that is funded and crewed almost completely via the internet. The film will be Creative Commons licensed and could well mark a new way to create indie films. It’s exciting and there are already well over 700 talented people on board. It has indirectly become a LinkedIn equivalent for creative types as well. Join up and contribute. Full details can be found here and here.

Lots of interesting stuff from the last ten days or so.

• Windows Antispyware has been rebranded Windows Defender as is now available as a beta 2 product.
• Windows Vista Feb CTP is apparently feature-complete and available for download. Yet to see where though.
• For the movie fan with lots of hard drive space, try DVDWMV to rip your DVDs to wmv files and DVD Audio Ripper to get at the soundtracks.
• PC Mag details components to choose and how to build your own Media Centre PC.
• If you're still ripping music, you can also look at albumart.org for some of the harder to find CD covers.
• Warren Ellis and Joss Whedon got into a bit of a bitch fight in a thread on Warren's forums. Comment 17 is cracking....
• MSDN has put out a complete list of all command-line tools it has released here
• Lifehacker has put out an advanced user guide to Flickr, a large list of bittorrent sites and pointed to a nice article on choosing the right career for yourself and a neat utility called WhyReboot.
• Pointlesswasteoftime lists his top ten sci-fi films that have never been made.
• Racketboy starts his series on games that truly pushed the platform they were written for. Part 1 covers Atari 2600 to Sega CD.
• Public Domain Torrents offers an extensive collection of Classic and B-Movie torrents. The copyright of these movies has expired so you are free to share them.

• Something is going to have to change soon. It's getting harder to write or work at home again.
• Jim wants to know if I'll be at any conferences this year. Much as I'd liek to say yes, the answer is probably not. Mix 06 / Web Tech Ed:TNG or ICANN Wellington would be nice though.
• I mispelt an entry a search on wikipedia the other day and found the GTD style of time management which seems to suit me well. More investigation required.
• Another addition to the folksonomic world side of Web 2.0 - ma.gnolia - is recruiting beta testers as we speak. I hope this beta is more friendly than the last few I've seen - neither Flock nor IE7 were that great.
• Want to build a Vista VM running the Expression suite and Winfx libraries. Can't think of a point when I'd have the time to play with them though. Karli has been kind enough to give me some copies of Beg and Pro C# 2.0 which I probably will run through.
• Something will be done with hmobius.com soon
• Warren's Nextwave and Blackgas comic series have both been released in the shops. Nextwave #1 has already sold out but is being reissued next month and Blackgas is still around if you like a good old-fashioned zombie storyline.
• Went to see Soufly last night at the Academy supported by Skindred. Very similar bands in the response they get and the type of songs they perform (albeit with different styles). Unfortunately Max had almost lost his voice and kept disappearing off the stage throughout the gig leaving time for the kind of uncalled for extended solos that gave guitarists the 'widdly' and 'self-loving' catcalls they don't often deserve. Bad timing I guess. Max and crew can be so much better. Will have to check out more Skindred stuff though. Benji is putting out music that's jsut as good as Dub War ever made.
• Devin's latest newsletter pointed out his new album Synchestra is now out (Kerrang gave it 4K this week as well) and the MySpace area he's put up for some nice clips from it to listen to. I've never given MySpace much of a look before, but I can feel a lot of music being streamed my way.

With a new job approaching, I felt the need to perhaps retrieve some normalcy from past time when work was five days a week. A quick dive into the local comic store got me the latest slices of action from the mad genius that is Warren Ellis.

The second collection of his Global Frequency series has been out for about a month now and is well worth it. What immediately strikes you as you read each instalment is the discipline it probably requires to keep each story down to just 22 pages when epics like Spiderman have finished after fifty years. No wonder that Warner Bros commissioned a pilot based on the GF characters. Disappointing though that the pilot was rejected by the board after filming was complete.

One thing about Warren’s storytelling is that he is addicted to finding new ideas in technology, the internet and the cultish side of things. A wide-open mind is required to read his stuff, especially some of the more extreme episodes of GF, which most horror films should aspire to. Much more accessible then is his current mini-series, Ocean, set out on Jupiter’s moons. It’s only half way through its six issue run but already includes the malevolent, self-interested corporations of the Alien series mixed with motifs from Arthur C.Clarke’s Space Odyssey series. Given its name, I wouldn’t be surprised to see elements of James Cameron’s The Abyss at some point either. So far it’s great, but yet another three months before it’s conclusion. Grr.