automatonrevolution

One of my stories, called “Memories” has been published on http://digitalisobscura.com/

This is the first story I’ve ever had published, anywhere. I hope its not the last.

Heres the deal

01. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
02. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
03. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
04. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
05. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And so on and so on and so on…

And heres the questions that Kai asked me.

>1) What’s your happiest memory of last year?
I have very few happy memories from last year. Even so, of the ones that I have there are a few that stick out so strongly that its hard for me to pick one. So, in all honesty, the memory of when I was happiest would either be that afternoon when we sat out on the grass by your (Kai’s) flat, reading books and watching Tommy draw chalk pictures on the pavement…OR…the holiday I had with Patrick and Liz up at Tomich in the Highlands, which was the first time I’d been able to be relaxed and relativly carefree in months.

2)How’s the story going? y’know the one you poked me about a couple of weeks ago.
Slowly, like most of my stories :P. I’m having trouble getting the “Edinburgh” to feel right within the framework of the story. The stuff you linked to has been very useful though. Its changed my origional concept a fair amount too. Which is probably a good thing.

3) If you could write one book, KNOWING it would be accepted, what would it be?
I have an idea for a book concerning the insane god Nyarlathotep, from the Cthulhu Mythos. I’d love to write that one, but its pretty ambitious and I’d like to become a better writer before tackling that one.

4) What would you rather be - an award winning book writer, with all the fuss and success that comes with it, or an anonymous award winning book writer?
I’d prefer to be an anonymous award winning book writer..provided it made me enough money that I would be able to concentate on actually writing more or less full time. I mean…I need to pay for my World of Warcraft subscription “somehow”

5)B5 game?
The B5 game is pretty much on permenant hiatus. I just havent a clue how to run it over an email system…my head just isnt geared for that kind of GMing. One day I’ll be able to ressurect it, but I have to apologise and say, “not yet”. I’m sorry.

If you haven’t seen the last episode of this season of Dr Who, look away now.

No, really….

Look away now. Because I’m going to talk about it, and there will be spoilers.

I’m not kidding.

Still here?

Okay, first of all, I really enjoyed it. While I didn’t think it was as good as the one previously, and certainly not as good as “The Weeping Angels”, it was still a good episode. it was nice to see Martha doing more than just tag along, and it had some nice special effects too. I thought the teeny tiny OLD Doctor was done pretty well, and it managed to look a bit like David Tennant. Some people will probably not like the idea that the Doctor could become uper-powerful just because everyone in the world was thinking about him and transmitting through a telepathic satellite network, but I reckon its a pretty neat idea, because it links to something that the Doctor himself always maintains about Humanity. That humanity is capable of achieving amazing things when we work together in a common goal, and theres also the power of ideas in there as well. It reminds me of the old question of what would happen if everyone in the world jumped at the same time.
And…it reinforces something that the new series of Dr Who has made pretty clear. Time Lords are NOT just aliens with two hearts, fancy tech and a tendency to regenerate. They are much more than that, and when you take that into account, the idea that the Doctor can tap into the power of billions of people focusing on one thought isnt so far fetched. Hes the Doctor.

My biggest niggle with the episode is the big fat reset they did. They pushed the Earth forward a year, making massive changes to the human race, the world, and the available tech level, and then they reset it all at the end of the episode. It makes a certain sense, that the entire set of events were happening as a gigantic paradox, that was only able to exist because of the Tardis/Paradox Engine, and that without that engine it all reset itself…but….I would really have liked to see the sorts of stories they could have written with this new, devastated Earth. I know they wouldnt do it, they rely a lot on linking their stories in with current events, reaching out to a wider demographic than us hardened sci-fi fans, but I still feel its a missed opportunity.

I REALLY like the revelation about Jack. It makes more and more sense the more I think about it. And I really liked that they are addressing what happens if you can’t die but can still get older.

But now….what the hell was up with the two blatant movie referances? The burial pyre? Can anyone say Return of The Jedi?
The Flash Gordon one is more interesting, but still a bit cheesy. because I can think of two possibilities. One, the Master isnt actually dead and it was him who picked up the ring (Earlier incarnations of the Master have had long fingernails and a dodgly chuckle. Not to mention the Goatee of Evil). Two. It was the Rani. Remember her? She aint dead, as far as we know…

It shall be interesting to find out

So…two eyebrow raising things today…

First of all, if you hadn’t noticed, Tony Blair has finally left Downing Street. Toodle-pip, so-long, you won’t be missed. The decietful, lying, spin-obsessed, evangelical, self-righteous little git has finally left. Now, thats not the thing that got my first eyebrow wiggle…its the news that hes quitting as an MP altogether to become…

…a Middle East Peace Envoy!!!!
Can you imagine? One of the prime architects of an ongoing Middle-Eastern war thats cost tens of thousands, if not more, lives and given ammunition to the recruiting campaigns of Fundamentalist Terrorists, is going to be going over to the Middle East as a spokesman for peace. Doesnt the hypocrisy stick in his craw even a little? it beggars belief, it really does. Its like sending Sauron the Deciever to Gondor to ask them to quit sniping at Rohan.
“Hi, Im Tony the Cyber Controller. My Cyberman army and I thought it would be jolly nice if you Time Lords could leave the Daleks alone for a bit”

Sheesh.

Eyebrow raising point number two is the news that the US Senate has Subpeona’d The White House. Apparently they reckon that Bush has no valid reason NOT to hand over details of his contraversial spying programe aimed at the American people. he has, it seems, until July 18 the hand the documents over, and the Senate seems unimpressed by his “but we’re at war, i can do what i like” argument. Going to be interesting to see how that plays out….

…or “Two injections and a wisdom tooth later”.

So, it all started on Friday lunchtime. I’d had my lunch. and then my top left wisdom tooth started to hurt. Not hurt as in “slightly sore”…hurt is in “Pass the painkillers NOW!!!!”. it was very unpleasant. Now, my wisdom teeth have been know to shift slightly in my head now and then, quite uncomfortably, since they first grew in, something to do with the way my gums didnt recede properly, so I resolved to wait till the next day to see if it would go away. I do, after all, have an appointment with my dentist soon anyway, so I figured I could let it subside and then mention it to the dentist.
Of course, it didn’t subside.
So on Saturday morning, when I was still in horrible unable-to-eat-anything pain, and had already cancelled two possible social things for the day, I steeled myself and called the emergency dentist. Fair play to them, they must be busy as all hell with the distinct lack of dentists in Edinburgh that are taking on new patients, and they asked all the right relevant questions like “Are you in pain after taking painkillers” (answer being YEEEEEESSSS!!!), and they got me an appointment for eight pm that same evening.
When I got there I was told the tooth had to come out, which i was sort of prepared for in a “im flippin terrified of dentists” kind of way…what I wasn’t prepared for was the why. The tooth wasnt shifting…it was barely there. It had disintigrated and was mostly just root. It had literaly collapsed. No option really…remove it….
Ick.
So…now theres an odd gap where my tooth used to be, which Im still uncomfortably aware of, and I spent most of Saturday night with a numb mouth wishing I could have a beer but knowing I couldn’t…hard to drink beer with a numb mouth (then theres all the serious medical reasons why you cant drink alcohol so soon after an anesthetic).
At least I had a really good episode of Dr Who to watch. it was a stormer, really good story, really good concept, well told…I loved it.

Its late, and im tired, so I’ll keep this short.

Tony Blair has finally announced his resignation, properly. And its about damn time. The lying little toerag should have slung his hook a long time ago. I guess better late than never….

Anyway, I’ll post more about this when im more awake. But for now, im just glad its finally happened.

Okay…if you havent seen Saturdays episode of Dr Who…look away now.

Still here?

Ok, then I’ll assume you want to read this.
First of all, I rather liked it. There wasn’t much messing about, at its heart it was a very simple story, and one that played well with the ongoing theme of the Doctor being old, tired and generally bummed about all the things hes seen and done. There was some good dialogue between him and the appalingly named Professor Lazarus (only a sci-fi show thats trying to be referential would name him that), and for the most part the action and so on was pretty good. It had a fun Spinal Tap moment (the Doctor having to put the setting on the Organ up to eleven) and resolved the issue over whether or not Martha is actually going to stay with him. So far so good.

But..they need to sort out their CGI. The monster looked fine…except for the Scorpion King problem..and by that I mean that the face they gave it looked awfull, and so obviously bad CG that it wouldnt have been out of place on a Playstation 1. It would have looked better if they hadnt tried to give it a face that looked like the actor.
And Martha’s mum….how dumb is she? Her son has been concussed by a monster created by an experiment funded by Mr Saxon…and the Doctor is trying to stop it…so when some bloke come up and says “Mr Saxon says the Doctor is dangerous”..she just goes along with it. Um…if it were me…id be saying “Mr Saxon is the frickin dangerous one…hes going around funding dodgy science projects!”.
Anyway…Jacks back sometime in the next few episodes…which will be cool.

Oh…and “Mister Saxon” is an anagram, by the way…quite an interesting one. Im not the only one who’s noticed it, according to the Dr Who Wiki….give it a go. You’ll see what I mean.

No, I have no idea what “Opposite Effect Sydrome” actually is. I just made it up. I guess what I mean is when, in an advertising context, an advert has the opposite effect from what is intended. Adverts, in general, are designed to make us consumers want to buy a product…not the other way round.

So I suppose my being increasingly turned off by the current Apple “Mac and PC” ad campaign means Im getting Opposite Effect Syndrome.

Now, granted, being a long term PC user I am unlikely to buy a Mac anyway, and Im probably pretty biased…but these ads are really beginning to get on my man-boobs.
You’ll probably know the ones I mean. Man in a suit on the left, representing the stodgy old PC, man in jeans and T-shirt on the right, representing Macs. They have a sort of “this is what I can do” conversation thats intended to be sort of funny, and to show how hip, user-friendly and fun Macs are compared to the lumbering, no-fun PC.

It aint working for me. I might just be getting the wrong end of the stick, but Mr Mac (or whatever hes called) just comes across as kinda smug and well…up himself. Instead of making me want to buy a Mac, its making me want one less. “Look at me” he says “I have this funky doody photo-editing thingy that makes holiday snaps so much more fun and easy to manage in my virtual photo album.” While Mr PC blithers on about Pie Charts and so on. The inferance being (I think), PCs can’t do fun stuff, Macs can.
Except..when I see that advert, when Mr Mac lists all the things the Mac can do with this funky doody photo software, im sitting there thinking….”But PCs can do all that stuff too. In fact, I bought my Mum one of those programs last Christmas and even SHE can use it.”

Maybe I havent been watching the right ads, but so far Mr Mac hasnt said he can do anything that I know that PCs cant do as well. I know that the idea is to make Macs look better than PCs (maybe they are, im not going to argue that cos I dont know for sure…im talking about the ads here….), but misrepresenting the PC as some bumbling dinosaur isnt doing the Mac any favours in my eyes. Sure, even I can see that Apple have been able to write a better user interface than Microsoft for years…but instead of highliighting THAT sort of advantage, these ads are playing cheap shots and making MR Mac, in my eyes, look like a smug git.

Maybe Im missing the point. Feel free to say so. Either way, I’ll quit whinging now

…but I have the heart and stomach of a Dalek??????

Alright. Tell me I’m crazy. Tell me I’ve lost the plot entirely…but……
In Saturdays episode of Dr Who, “The Shakespeare Code”, when Queen Elizabeth the 1st turns up right at the end and declares the Doctor to be her sworn enemy…didn’t she look a little bit like Davros, the creator of the Daleks?
Maybe its just me, but the makeup they used made her face pretty Davros-ish…you could have painted her green and it would be complete. Even the way she said “Doctor!” and “My sworn enemy”, sounded an awful lot like Davros to me.

And you never see her legs. Shes always wearing those big dresses.

Its Davros, im telling you. The last time we saw that ugly goit was in “Remembrance of the Daleks”, when the Hand of Omega crashed into Davros’ ship after going back in time and destroying the Dalek homeworld. Just before impact, we know that Davros was getting into an escape shuttle, and in the shot of the exploding ship, if you look closely, something small and white moves away from the ship just before it explodes.

Now, its not too much of a stretch, in Dr Who terms, to suggest that that white thing was Davros escaping, and that since he was close to an explosion caused by a ime-traveling device of infinate cosmic power (in an itty-bitty wee space), that Davros might have been transported back in time.

Im just saying……

Those of you who were masochistic enough to subject yourselves to the inane ramblings of my previous blog, “Storm In An Ale Mug”, may remember a post I did called “Not a Democracy…A Hypocrisy”. In it I ranted about the state of the Union, about how we arent being democraticly represented if Labour could get in with a majority even though 64% of the electorate didnt vote for them, and how we’d been steamrollered into a crazy war on a false premise yet Blair somehow hadn’t been arrested…

Well. This is part two.
Its taken me a few days to calm down about this. If I’d posted about this on Wednesday most of it would have been swearing.

They’re replacing Trident.
Rather than actually keeping to our signatorial obligations and working to reduce our nuclear weapon capability (when I say “our”, I mean the “USA”…more on this later) as per the Non-Proliferation Treaty that Britian is signed to…our Government is going to replace Trident, each missile already many times more destructive than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, with all-new and improved even more deadly missiles.
The Hypocrisy of this staggers me.
Let me explain.
- Iraq has been reduced to a blood-soaked hellhole, its infrastructure destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people killed…on the pretext that Saddaam had WMD’s..
- We’ve nearing the end of a long and fraught dimplomatic process with North Korea to get them to dismantle their current Nuclear capability in exchange for consessions from the West,
- The drums of war are beginning to start again..this time aimed at Iran, because the US insists that the Iranians are building Nuclear Weapons instead of a civil nuclear power plant.

In short we, the West (especially Britian and the US) have a long history of telling other countries that they cant have Nuclear weapons, because of the Non-Proliferation treaty…the examples above are just the most recent ones…yet Blair and co are going to spend billions of pounds replacing Trident with a new, more powerful weapons system. Classic hypocrisy…We’re telling everyone else they cant do it, then turning round and doing it ourselves.
It makes me sick to my stomach.

The part line is “Better to have them and not need them, than need them and not have them.” This would seem like wisdom….but….
The actual success of the so called Nuclear Deterrant concept is unproven at best. Its one of those things that we can never truly know if it actually made a differance or not, and more to the point, we are continually being told that the threat now comes from rogue groups like Al Quaeda rather than enemy states…a Nuclear Deterrant isn’t going to bother terrorist organisations at all. If they use nukes, it wont be a missile, it’ll be a dirty bomb.
And the other problem is that we will have them, but not be albe to use them without foreign permission. Thats right folks…just like Trident, this new nuclear system will incorporate so much US technology (on loan, not bought outright) that again we won’t be able to launch them if we need to without first calling Washington and asking if its ok. The launch codes for Trident are held by the US…not us. This new system will be no differant.

And, dammit, is it really so naive to believe and hope that these treaties that our Government signs aren’t just words on a page? That when they sign up to prevent the proliferation of these vile, disgusting devices of mass-murder that they actually MEAN it?

Over 90 MP rebelled against the Government in this vote…with a number of them resigning as well (including some I really didnt expect to), but still its going ahead. Blairs legacy has a skull carved upon it.

Not a Democracy. A Hypocrisy.