"It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way."

“I grew in Thatcher's Britain. We would look out of the window every morning to make sure the bitch hadn't put Daleks on the streets yet.”

I'd been looking forward to seeing this, so it was fortunate I managed the bare minimum of organisation necessary to make it to GOMA today for the sole session. Despite reading Ellis' work and online commentary for the last decade, I've never actually seen or heard him in the pre-recorded flesh, and that alone made Captured Ghosts interesting. It's essentially a talking heads documentary, but manages to be amusing, engaging and generally optimistic and warm-hearted. It often feels a little like an exploration of the rise of Warren Ellis as internet brand (which would be a worthy tangent to follow in its own right - Ellis was using the internet to successfully build social networks before the term even existed), but there were enough glimpses through the eyes of the people who know him to confirm a lot of my sense of what drives him as a writer rather than Internet Jesus.

Which, of course, may equally be a result of careful image construction, but I don't think so, if for no other reason than it resonates more with the tone of much of his work. It was interesting, too, to see work like Transmetropolitan and The Authority looked at outside of the context of the heavily-polarised, fanboyish forums I remember seeing them discussed in when they were first published.

In an interesting coincidence, it turns out Dad helped himself to my copy of Crooked Little Vein earlier in the week when he dropped his computer off to be fixed up. If I'd known, I could have warned him. As it was, Mum dropped it back today, passing along Dad's comments "I don't think it's really my kind of thing..."

I'm deeply curious as to what point he reached in the book before realising this, but suspect that asking him will only cause embarrassment.