Alan Baxter's Blog, page 117

The new Apple iPad

Meh.

I'm tempted to leave this post at that, just a single word. But if I'm honest there is more to this iPad thing than that. Fundamentally, Apple have gone to great lengths and enormous fanfare to release what is essentially a big iPhone without the phone or the camera. Sure, it's a swish looking thing – Apple products always are. And the interface would be awesome, just like the iPhone, because Apple know how to meld man (or woman) and machine.

But is this iPad really anything spectacular...

"Trial Not Required" in M-Brane SF #13

My short story "Trial Not Required" has just been published in M-Brane SF magazine. It's in issue 13 and starts on page 13, which is kinda cool. The PDF edition of the mag is out now and the print edition should be available in the next couple of days.

The publisher, Chris Fletcher, asked for a little afterword about the story to include in the issue. This is what wrote:

"Trial Not Required" is a story born of a single absurd concept that occurred to me one night – wouldn't it be strange if...

Blade Runner spawns a web series

The greatest movie of all time is Blade Runner. I've said it before and nothing yet has changed my mind. No, not even Avatar, which today toppled Titanic as the biggest grossing movie ever. I'm so pleased that a sci-fi movie has replaced Titanic in that spot.

Anyway, back to Blade Runner. The film's director, Ridley Scott, has announced that there's a new division of his commercials company (RSA Films) working on a web series called "Purefold". The series will be a bunch of linked 5 to 10...

No censorship in Australia

Go and read Kay Smoljak's piece about ISP filtering, game ratings and so on. It's a good read. Get behind her ideas and let's try to stop censorship in this country.

Read it here.

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Aurealis Award winners 2009

The Award ceremony happened in Brisbane last night. I was very sad not to be able to get up there for it, but finances are only so elastic. I was greatly heartened, however, to discover a great little Twitter party happening as the Awards were announced. I got to vicariously enjoy the ceremony by tweeting with people like Margo Lanagan, Felicity Dowker, Tansy Rayner Roberts others while the results were tweeted live by several people in attendance, including Donna Hanson, who was generally...

Scientology Quote of The Week

It's been a while since I posted a quote of the week. However, sitting there this morning, reading the Sydney Morning Herald while enjoying my wife's wonderful poached eggs, I did laugh when I read this one. (By the way, I wasn't eating my wife's breakfast. I was eating the eggs she so kindly made for me. She was enjoying her own breakfast. Aaaaanyway.)

Here in Australia, Senator Nick Xenophon is calling for an inquiry into the tax-exempt status of the Church of Scientology. He claims that...

A Little Killing at Pow Fast Flash Fiction

My nonsense yarn "A Little Killing" has been picked up by Pow Fast Flash Fiction. You may remember this story from a contest I entered a while ago. It took second place.

The contest was to write a piece of flash fiction (under 500 words) using three of the following words:

murder, mystery, fire, gates, cat, warlord, gold, dwarf, planet, ship

Just to be a smartarse I entered a whacky little tale using all ten words. Now Karen over at Pow has picked up the story for her new flash fiction site. a

Jay Lake's larval stages of the writer

The wonderful Cat Sparks drew my attention to this one. Bloody funny. Mostly funny because it's so bloody true! And naturally, you could replace the word "American" with any other nationality. In fact, you could just take the word "American" out altogether.

The larval stages of the common American speculative fiction writer

I have long observed that the common American speculative fiction writer (Scriptor americanus s.f.) goes through a number of stages during larval development, prior to...

Horror photographer Joshua Hoffine

Can you believe there's such a thing as a horror photographer? I had no idea, but this guy is simply awesome. Not only does he make horror into a photographic artwork, he does it all for real. Well, not actually real, but with sets, special effect make-up and so on. Like this:

"Lady Bathory" by Joshua Hoffine

He shot the blood separately and shopped it in post, but even that was shot on set.

How about this one:

"Baby Sitter" by Joshua Hoffine

All the people in his shoots are family and friends w...

I share this fear and reverence

As the alt-text for this cartoon says:

"That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm."

I share that fear and reverence. It's amazing that so much can be held in such a tiny space. Everything I've ever written could be stored on the tiniest MicroSD card with loads of room to spare. *shudder*

Original strip here, at the ever brilliant xkcd.com.

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