Alan Baxter's Blog, page 122

I will kill George Lucas with a shovel

My friend Michael over A Nadder put me on to these and I did enjoy them. I have to say, I am in pretty much total agreement. Firstly, from the You AUGHT To Remember blog (wherein I'm hoping, by the capitalisation, that the spelling mistake is deliberate) we have a Cease & Desist letter addressed to George Lucas for crimes against his own previous brilliance during the last decade.

The letter begins:

Dear Mr. Lucas:

It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the...

Might need to reschedule

I was walking from King's Comics to Galaxy Books this morning before heading back to Freecon and saw this. It gave me a chuckle. Hundreds and hundreds of years of systematic indoctrination, persecution and abuse? They might need more than an hour to fix that.

Freecon 2009 – you coming?

No posts for days, then three in a row. I am the bus poster.

Just wanted to let everyone know about Freecon 2009 this weekend. This is a small and completely free SF convention held in Sydney each year. This year it's at Bankstown library (a two-minute walk from Bankstown Railway Station, toward Keating Park, the Bankstown Court complex and the Town Hall apparently).

It runs over Friday evening then all weekend. The sessions are Friday November 27th from 6 to 8 pm, Saturday November 28th from 8...

Speak of characters and critique shall appear

Funny. I'd just published the previous post about characters, then off I went to check my Google Alerts. I found a review of RealmShift by Karen Lee Field. I know Karen from a great writers messageboard that sadly no longer exists and I usually read her blog. I'm rather honoured to discover that RealmShift was the first ebook Karen ever read, on her new iPod Touch, and it was a pleasant experience for her in terms of ebook reading and enjoyment of my novel. It's an all round superwin!

Interest...

Cliched characters

I saw this via S F Signal blogger John De Nardo's Facebook feed today and it made me laugh.

The 10 Most Clichéd Character Types in Sci-Fi:

10. The Robot Who Wants To Be Human

9. The May-Or May-Not Be the Devil Guy

8. Pure Energy Beings

7. The Accidental Time-Tourist

6. Genetically Superior Smug Humans

5. The Monocultural Alien

4. The Captain Ahab

3. The Bumbling Robot

2. The Evil Twin

1. The Over-Obsessed Scientist

Click on the title link above to have a breakdown and examples of each of the ten – very a...

I'm genetically obliged to post this

Just so you don't think that I'm being plainly racist here, my British heritage makes me genetically obliged to post this. It's something I can't avoid, I was culturally committed from the moment I saw it. Here's a Chinese taxi driver with a no holds barred approach to his work:

refuse to carry frenchmen and dogs

I'd love to know just what his experience was that caused him to have that sign made up. You can only assume that it wasn't a single incident either. Or if it was a single incident...

I'm sick

Summer colds really suck. Summer colds especially suck when you also suffer from hayfever. I'm currently moping around the house, coughing my guts up, sneezing, getting through tissues like a man possessed and generally feeling very sorry for myself. I also have a headache.

It pisses me off because I had stuff planned for this weekend, starting tonight, and that might all turn to nought now.

Bastard.

I'm really sick.

That is all.

.

Unfriend becomes word of the year

My good friend and IT lifeline, James Frost, sent me this. According to The Register, the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year is "unfriend". As in, "Me and Haley had this huge, like, fight and stuff so I totally unfriended her on Facebook."

The actual entry is: Unfriend: verb; to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary, said, "It has both currency and potential longevity"...

Outlandish Voices podcast coming soon

I had an interesting experience last night. By the very generous invitation of Laura Goodin I went to Wollongong and recorded one of my stories for a podcast. Laura produces the Outlandish Voices podcast where short speculative fiction stories from established and emerging writers in the Illawarra region are read, usually by the writers themselves.

One of my stories, Standoff, has been podcast before, but that was read by someone else for the Wily Writers website. This is the first time I've r...

Ah, humanity, you dichotomy, you

It says on the About page here that I'm an optimistic cynic. Sometimes it's hard to be optimistic though. People can be so stupid. I was reading in the weekend SMH about this American-born Jew in Israel that "spends most of every day preparing for the arrival of the Messiah". This guy is 44 year old Yehuda Glick and he oversees the "manufacture of the utensils the high priests will need when the day arrives". Apparently they need all kinds of urns, trumpets and garments woven from golden...