Category: Me

I wasted some more money on Kickstarter

Anyone tempted to buy an Amabrush, the next-gen electric toothbrush that cleans all of your teeth simultaneously, so it’s over in in just 10 seconds?
Don’t bother. Complete and utter waste of money. They had a great goal, but failed miserably at making it work.
My mouth tastes minty at the front. It did nothing else whatsoever.
Kickstarter? More like Kickintheteeth. I need to stop backing unproven tech start-ups.
Here’s a review that goes over it in tooth-nerd-like detail that I can’t be bothered with:

This quote gets posted every year.

This quote gets posted every year.

“The future is inherently a good thing, and we move into it one winter at a time. Things get better one winter at a time. So if you’re going to celebrate something, then have a drink on this: the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year.”
– Spider Jerusalem/Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

Despite the barely-semi-ironic ‘2016 is the worst year ever’ nonsense we’ve been spewing since Bowie died, and despite certain voting decisions that people have made that I personally disagree with, and despite the bloodshed and carnage of certain parts of our world, Spider Jerusalem hits the nail on the head.

Humans are incredible, and civilisation isn’t a state of existence but a journey.

Sometimes the journey’s unpleasant, but even if as individuals or groups we stumble occasionally, or meander from side to side like drunken idiots, or we falter because we don’t like the look of a particular landmark on the road ahead, or we just turn around and go back towards the places we really should be avoiding, humanity as a whole is still walking in the right direction.

Yes, the destination seems to be forever just over the horizon, a weird, golden glow of world peace and cultural enlightenment and technological harmony that we have a terrible feeling humanity will never reach, or at least that we’ll not live to see humanity reach. Why does it seem unachievable?

It’s because we keep redefining humanity’s end goal and barely even notice that we’ve just passed by where we said we were hoping to reach last year, last decade, last century.

There’s seven billion of us, and most of us are still walking towards that glow on the horizon.

Here’s to 2017.

American Horror Story: Hotel (1 of 2)

American Horror Story: Hotel (1 of 2)

The fifth season of American Horror Story turned up Neflix UK the other day, so I watched the first episode last night and am watching the second episode now. (Well, I clicked pause.)

This might be a bit late for people who actually watch TV, but here are my somewhat disjointed thoughts:

I’m not yet hooked by it in the way that I was about, say Asylum or Coven (aka Evil Hogwarts for Girls), but it’s appropriately different from the previous seasons, which is one of the strengths of the show. Even when it misfires, it keeps things fresh.
And then there’s the Sarah Paulson Game, where you wait for each recurring actor from previous seasons to show up. Interesting that they’ve chosen to use Freak Show‘s Edward Mordrake as the apparently sympathetic protagonist, considering how small a role he played in Freak Show (although I understand he’s also in season six, Roanoke, so I guess he counts as a regular now).
Not sure what they’re trying to do with Denis O’Hare’s character, Elizabeth Taylor, this time. Let’s see what happens with that.
The director clearly loves the set/location they’re using for the Hotel Cortez, with long, lingering shots of the art deco. I can see why. It’s lovely.

Lady Gaga seems to think she’s in one of her own music videos, which is appropriate, since the entire thing seems to be a particularly bloody Lady Gaga video, but without her music.

 

For a show that has frequently dabbled with sex, usually of the really sinister or sordid kind, and just as often represented it on screen, it’s somehow managed to completely avoid any nudity beyond the occasional pair of (usually male) buttocks. That trend continues with lots of careful hair placement and, I think at one point, some digital nipple erasure. American network TV, huh? You can show caved in heads and disembowelled torsos, severed limbs and flayed muscles, but a lady-nipple is a no-no. Still, it helps resist the temptation of turning the show into an HBO-style boobfest which would probably detract from the show’s splatter-horror heart.
That said, how graphic was that rape scene? The reflection in the mirror showed a lot more than you could if the attacker was male. (Was the attacker male? Hard to tell. Not sure it was even human.)
If the show could be said to have any message, it’s ‘VACCINATE YOUR CHILDREN, YOU IDIOT!’ I’m just a few minutes into the second episode, and it’s been repeated again, thanks to a stupid mother who read some stuff on the internet. I guess the need to protect children is an important part of the Lowes as characters, but coming at a time when completely preventable, yet extremely serious, childhood diseases are coming back in the US, thanks to the fraudulent work of a stricken-off British doctor, it needs saying.

As mentioned, the show hasn’t quite hooked me yet, but it’s not the first season of American Horror Story that hasn’t. Murder House, the very first season, didn’t grab me with its first episode, but I went back to it nearly a year after and ended up mainlining the first three seasons via Netflix. Even seasons that never quite seem to work out what they are, like Freak Show, are still worth watching. Let’s hope that principle still stands for Hotel.

 

EDIT, HAVING SEEN THE REST OF EPISODE TWO: Oh look, Dandy’s back, playing another psychopathic man-child! He does it so well though. And yes, it’s Evan Peters, probably the most varied of the regular team, this time chewing scenery as psychopathic Clark Gable.


(As an aside, I really need to work out a Featured Image to use for my posts aboutCold Iron/Streloc.)

First blog post

This is my very first post, as WordPress has so politely pointed out.

So, what comes first?

To begin with, who am I?

I’m thirty-*mumblemumblemumble* years old and live in the north of England. I’m a writer, though not yet published. This blog is basically for posting bits I write about things I’m interested in. Sometimes fiction, sometimes rants, sometimes rambling, though I don’t know what proportion that’ll be in. Let’s see how things turn out.

I dabble in various creative projects from time to time, including helping run live-action horror roleplaying events) and trying to get short stories published, but mostly I work on fantasy novels that, if I had to categorise them, would probably be dieselpunk-ish.

Basically, think a fantasy world stuck in the middle of its equivalent to the First World War, with an emphasis on people being bastardly to each other and something grimmer and nastier than the war sitting just outside of reality.

As yet, the first in the series, Smog & Mirrors, about a police constable, a mercenary and a spy each investigating a massacre at a monastery in their own way, is unpublished, although I’m still hawking it around agents. The second, The Guns of Luvania, in which various factions in the titular kingdom vie to secure, overthrow or abolish the monarchy, is about 80% finished in first draft form.

The third book, Zergansk, is unwritten, although I’m probably going to blitz a good chunk of the first draft come November, for National Novel Writing Month. The plot is still very vague at the moment, but it’ll be focused on a Verdun-style siege of the titular city and its ring of fortresses. The Guns of Luvania starred several returning minor characters from Smog & Mirrors, and I’m thinking of doing the same again with Zergansk, specifically the two characters in the series so far who are at least three hundred years old, Johann Ceralius (who is undead) and Professor Aximund (who has made pacts with certain demons in exchange for long life). If I do stick with those two characters (along with the multitude of other viewpoints required for a story about a battle) Zergansk will be split between two time periods: an Elizabethan-style era where Ceralius is still alive and Professor Aximund is still human, and the ‘present day’ of trenches and barbed wire. Both stories will be set in the city Zergansk, running in parallel, and gradually building up to finales in both eras, one of which sets in motion the events leading up to the other, three hundred years later.

Does that make sense? If so, you’re doing better than I am, because I’ve no idea how that’s going to work. Let’s find out.