Sick Sick Sick

Parry, pre-purge.
Parry, pre-purge.

You’ve got to admire the sheer gall, if you’ll excuse the pun. After Bruce Parry’s Amazon was accoladed to the skies last week, it seemed like the smiley ex-Marine could do no wrong. He’d come up with a perfect bit of telly, thrilling, moving and thoughtful.
So how does he follow up last weeks masterful episode? By spending most of it throwing up, noisily and on camera. I had to turn the show off after half an hour, especially as I was becoming uncomfortably reminded of the bout of food poisoning I’d suffered over the weekend.
Shame, really. I was quite looking forward to seeing Bruce in a dress, which had been promised in the trails. Actually, thinking about it, that might have brought on my own Achuar purging ritual.
You do have to wonder about a tribe that thinks it’s natural and healthy to throw up copiously every single morning. It seems like officially santioned bulimia to me. It was certainly clear that the regime wasn’t doing Bruce any favours. I’m really in no place to comment on the rights and wrongs of other cultures, but I don’t think that’s something I’ll be trying any time soon. It’d ruin the taste of my morning coffee, for one thing.
I wonder how long it’ll take an Internet scamp to edit out everything but the puking and put the unexpurgated highlights up on YouTube? End of the day?

Thieving Bastard

I think theres room for another lock there...
I think there's room for another lock there...

Somewhere, some merciless little shit is building himself a bike, using bits he can scavenge from other cycles. Mine, mostly. So far, he’s taken my front wheel (and had the cheek to leave his battered old wheel in part exchange) and, on Friday, my saddle. I haven’t cycled home standing up since I was about ten and let me tell you, readership, it’s great for the thighs but Nether Gods, can you feel it afterwards.

Now, it’s entirely likely that I’ve just been unlucky and I’m not being targeted at all. But that’s not the way I feel at the moment, and I’m completely paranoid about leaving the bike anywhere, regardless of how well secured I’ve made it. I can’t afford a new saddle until payday anyway, which means I’m stuck with a bus trip in, or walking to the station. Neither option appeals especially.

I just feel a bit hopeless and a bit silly. And a lot angry.

I wonder how hard it would be to hack an AutoTaser for bike use?

That should be the middle finger, Ross…

The Reithian ideal, by which to my mind all British TV should to some level adhere, states that television should “educate and entertain.”
With that in mind, let’s summarize the best that Sky has to offer this autumn.
Ross Kemp sucks the life, danger and interest out of gang life. The campest game show ever returns. Wayne Rooney sucks corporate cock for a jazzed up soccer school. A new season of Lost, the most infuriating show on the planet. And Hairspray, the High School Musical. There are no words I can summon up for this one, but the image of a water buffalo in a tutu defecating moistly into John Travolta’s mouth springs unbidden to mind.
I don’t recieve Sky anymore, and thank the Nether Gods for that. Who in their right mind would willingly pay for that panoply of shite?
Give me darts and fighting any day.

A Day Of Tweaks And Noodling

Off sick today, which is always a bore. I’ve been pretty much stuck upstairs, shuttling between the bedroom and the loo (don’t ask, really, unpretty situation.)

Which leads, of course, to a day of Rob’s favourite pastime, Fannying Around On The Laptop. Listen to the author’s squeals of joy as he archives off 10 gigs worth of ephemera to the external drives! Rejoice with him as he gets Last.fm working along with Growl, and spends the day watching a window pop up on his desktop every time a new song plays! Gasp in near-orgasmic wonder as he … oh, you get the idea. Geeking out is what I do, and it can sometimes be good to have the excuse to do nothing but for a day.

So, concerning the local amenities, I’ve juggled things around eso slightly. There’s now a Last.fm list widget, so that you too can enjoy my musical “tastes”. I prefer to call them eclectic, although the accusation often levelled is “schizophrenic.”

Philistines.

There’s also a Facebook widget, and updates to the blog will now appear as new Notes in my FB profile. Sharp-eyed readers may notice a change to the quote in the header, and really sharp-eyed observers will note I’ve tweaked the logo. Notice I have resisted the temptation to stick a lightning bolt in the middle of it.

There’s been a few updates to the growing pile of juicy content in the writing rooms. Satan’s Schoolgirls will always update on a Sunday, so Chapter 5 has just gone up. I upped a new short story Saint Charlie to the Short Fiction room earlier this week, and I’m rather proud of it. Any updates to the fiction or film room will always be noted in This Week’s Special, the text box to the top right.

A couple of interesting links, because obvs I sent a chunk of time hitting the feeds today.

The guys at scans_daily came up with the goods again, with a wonderful piece by Darko Macan, about a bookshop that has every volume in the world … excpet one. The ending is just heartbreaking.

"Mister Bookseller"

Finally, as a writer, I am by definition a language technician. My chosen language (or rather the one that circumstance and to a certain amount laziness has forced onto me) is one of the most illogical and eccentric on the planet. With a vaudvillian twinkle, Ed Rondthaler takes us through a few of the pitfalls and pratfalls that the English language has in store for us.

(Youtube vid, better quality here)

scans_daily: Star Wars Tales

I seem to be bumping into a Wired interview with Leland Chee at Lucasfilm in my feeds an awful lot today.

Leland is the keeper of the Star Wars archive, and the man with all the information on the ever-expanding SW universe at his fingertips – or more accurately, on a massive Filemaker database called the Holocron, after a Jedi data-storage device.

More importantly, he’s the guy that decides what is and isn’t canon in that universe. Subject to a George Lucas brainfart, of course.

Which makes the discovery of this little gem on LJ so frakkin’ sweeet. Totally uncanon, hugely funny. Star Wars humour can often be clunky at best and downright juvenile at times, so it’s a joy to run up against this strip, which manages to be hilarious, elegantly written and subtly satiric.

Which, much as I hate to say it as a loooong time SW geek, is not praise you can often aim at the franchise itself…

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Designing the Death Star, a task loaded with pitfalls...
via Sore Eyes.

A Momentary Escape From A Non-existent Summer

I spent the morning sweeping up leaves and digging up spuds from our dreadfully neglected vegetable patch, in weather chilly and wet enough to need a hoody. This is autumnal activity. It’s early September, and I’ve seen no decent sun this year at all. I’ll take any escape from this seemingly endless dull grey procession of dark, dismal days.

(Regular readers may recall me griping in similar fashion this time last year.)

Which was why I was so drawn to Julien Bocabeille’s Oktapodi. A sharp, bold little tale of octopi in love, I enjoyed the beautiful blues and bright sun of the Grecian setting as much as the story and animation. And it is very funny and well made.

(Via /film.)

Rice Boy

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Following a recommendation from Katherine Farmer at the Forbidden Planet Blog, I’ve just spent the morning reading Evan Dahm’s Rice Boy.

It’s an extraordinary, surreal, moving and thoughtful tale, telling the story of the titular Rice Boy, a limbless, mushroom-like blob, and his quest to prevent a war and save his world.

The artwork is lush, while still remaining accessibly cartoony, and the story twists and turns, leading to an epic climax with a twist that I genuinely couldn’t see coming. I’m reminded in a very good way of Lewis Trondheim’s Donjon books. It’s a genuinely all-ages story, with enough to keep an inquisitively-minded reader absorbed for hours. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

The good news is that while you can read Rice Boy for free on Evan’s site, you can also now buy it in a lush hard back edition with tons of extras. For 18 quid, it looks like a bit of a bargain, and a perfect example of the new try-before-you-buy self-publishing model that I’ve banged on about in the past before.

Speaking of which, the trade of the first arc of Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield’s Freakangels is out soon…

(Via Forbidden Planet.)

Things aren’t what they used to be… thank God.

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Six and thrupence for the ween. The other one you can have for free, he does nothing but eat and go on about something called GTA4.

 

 

Now, every so often I get into an argument (or as I like to call them “reasonable discussion at high volume” about the state of the nation, or on days when there really is nothing better to do, the world. The general consensus seems to be that we’re screwed, and the handcart to hell is now loading on platform 666.

I tend to be the dissenter in these discussions, largely because I’m prepared to take a slightly more open view and actually look at how we used to live. It’s not pretty. Global war in the teens and forties. Poverty and want in the fifties. Race and sex wars in the sixties and seventies. Kylie and Bros in the eighties.

That’s without even starting to consider where we were a hundred, a couple of hundred years ago, where people from my level of society would have been living in a slum, scraping a living at a manual trade if you were lucky, and dead at fifty. The quality and sheer joy of my life would have been dismissed as the rantings of a lunatic.

In my opinion, the best time to be around is right now. We live in a world where for the first time people are being accepted on the basis of their talents, regardless of creed, race or sex. Global communication is accessible and instantaneous. Despite what the press would have us believe, we’re actually in a better place now than you’d think.

Katherine Whitehorn agrees with me, and gives the argument some much-needed perspective.

It’s all good armament for the next time the volume gets raised on an reasonable discussion.