Category: And also

(Just read over the other post. What a jumble of words! That seriously needs an edit to make it easier to read. Too busy though. Here’s something nicer to distract you all.)
Happy anniversary Doctor Who! 46 years – incredible!
This great short animation is getting circulated everywhere, with good reason – it’s an amazing mash-up of 2001 and Who. Visually stunning. To think people are doing this kind of work sitting in their bedrooms is staggering.

And from my archives – here’s the Doctor Who comic I wrote back in ’97, as illustrated by Paul Potiki. I showed it off here and talked about it two years back, but why not give it another airing?
And my happy words at the end of the 2005 revival season: “And it is still my show, the one I loved as a boy because it was the right mix of wild and scary and creative and moral and true. Everything is in the right place, everything works. The hearts beating in this show are the same ones from November 1963. It feels exactly as it should.” (Although: “It’s the best revival of a TV show there will ever be.” I guess I stand by that, but BSG fans may beg to differ…)
Nice one Doctor!

So we’re off to Phuket on Sunday. Need to pack some books to read on the beach. But what? Cal and I combed our shelves for unread tomes, and pulled down a big stack. We need to whittle it down some. But what to choose?
I don’t know that some of these are entirely appropriate for the beach, either. Pooh to that.
Here’s the shortlist, subject to amendments. To help us decide I’m including excerpts from the most negative Amazon reviews!
Madame du Pompadour (Nancy Mitford) – “If Madame De Pompadour was this boring, why did Louis put up with her?” (one star)
The Impressionist (Hari Kunzru) – “I tried very hard to find something redeeming in this book, a reason to continue reading. Finally, I thought I had, but it was only a spider crawling across the page.” (one star)
Catherine de Medici (Leonie Frieda) – “superficial and shallow” (two stars)
A Guide for the Perplexed (Jonathan Levi) – “The tanscendent power of a story” (five stars – there were only three reviews! But I’m eager to get some tanscendent power going on. Awesome.)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) – “To the Lighthouse” is a rambling monotony, a lifeless droning. No matter how loudly the literary lemmings scream, that will always be so. (one star)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) – “It make “Tess of the D’Urburvilles” look like a fast-paced romp.” (one star)
Neuromancer (William Gibson) “Absolutely unreadable; I couldn’t force myself farther than 100 pages into this morass.” (one star) (this one’s a re-read, but I haven’t cracked the cover for 15 or 16 years)
The Best of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (Katherine Mansfield) “Reading these stories was a deeply enriching literary experience.” (five stars, clean sweep of the seven customer reviews)
Letter from America 1946-2004 (Alistair Cooke) – “a remarkable collection of essays” (five stars in every review, another clean sweep)
Good News, Bad News (David Wolstencroft) – “The good news is, I finished reading this book. The bad news is, I can’t believe I paid $8 for it.” (one star) (I don’t even know where this book came from, it seems to be a thriller of some kind, but it’s on the shelves and could be the most beach-appropriate book of the lot)
Advice and opinions welcome. Thanks to other advice I’ve already cut Peake’s Titus Groan and Thackeray’s The Virginians from the list. Utter foolishness.

(This is a rather pointless post. But the subject amused me so here it is.)
Here in New Zealand we have what’s known as a “cultural cringe”. It’s basically a national inferiority complex. We’re famous for getting overexcited when celebrities know our country exists, and for being a bit ashamed of our own cultural production. We crave the validation of big important foreigners. The cringe still exists, although the fact we’ve teamed up with the Aussies to pretty much take over Hollywood in the last decade alleviates some of the anxiety.
Which is a longwinded way of expressing my odd pleasure when I stumbled upon a scam site disguised as a blog. It appeared, I presume, as a pop-up ad when I visited some site this morning – my work computer doesn’t have much blockery going on.
I won’t link to the site, because that’s bad form (and makes google think it’s legitimate). Here’s a cut-and-paste of the text that caught my eye…

My name is Erin Jones from Wellington, New Zealand, and I started this blog because I want everyone to know how I went from being broke to completely paying off my debt in 30 days by spending a few minutes filling out a form online that qualified me for a $12,000 Financial Aid Check from the New Zealand Government.

So far, so standard – websites long ago figured out that they could detect your location and customise their content to suit. (This can lead to unintended amusement – “Dating Action – hot girls like Shawanna waiting for u in Wainuiomata New Zealand“) But the cultural cringe kicked in. They weren’t just popping up a location – they were talking about my government, dude! I wanted to see just how much they loved my country, so I scrolled down further – and saw this “picture of the actual grant check I received in the mail”:

Wow! That says New Zealand and even has a little NZ flag on the image! IT MUST BE TRUE! THEY LOVE US!
I checked out the picture’s properties and noted that the url ended “/gr-nz.jpg”
Hmm, I thought, I wonder what I’d find if I put in “/gr-us.jpg”? Or…
Well, see for yourself:
http://www.erinsgrantblog.com/erinsgrantblog/files1/gr-us.jpg
http://www.erinsgrantblog.com/erinsgrantblog/files1/gr-ca.jpg
http://www.erinsgrantblog.com/erinsgrantblog/files1/gr-au.jpg
http://www.erinsgrantblog.com/erinsgrantblog/files1/gr-uk.jpg
So I’m proud to announce that Erin’s Grant Blog thinks that NZ’s con marks are worth just as much as those in the US, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. I’ve tried a few other letter combinations but I can’t find any other countries that enjoy the same status. So that means that today we Kiwis can stand proud, because we are being treated just like the others! We’re in the big boys gang! Our internets are being targetted just as theirs are! That fake bank check didn’t create itself you know – somewhere out there is a scammer who cares about New Zealand.
It warms my heart.

I’ve started writing some relatively lengthy posts over on Gametime, the NZ groupblog with a focus on role-playing games, about my experiences at Chimera, which was a live role-playing convention held last weekend.
I talk about colonization a lot. The curious can find it here.

I just want to say cheers right now to my brother, who saved my bacon on Saturday. I went down early to the Marie Antoinette setup and spent a long time getting things in order, and as the clock ticked down it was time to dress up – only Muggins here had forgotten to bring his white shirt from home.
Cue anxious phone call to my bro, who cheerfully came down to grab my keys, drove to my place, rummaged in my wardrobe and retrieved the shirt, then ferried it back to me with time to spare.
Respect, brother, respect.
If you have had occasion recently to say “cheers bro”, I’d love to read about it in the comments. It’s always worth taking a moment now and again to recognize folks helping each other out.

Two friends have received packages of great awesomitude in the post in the last couple days:
Draw, who blogged the arrival of the international compilation Abstract Comics: The Anthology by Fantagraphics, which features his work.

And Jarratt, who on Twitter announced the arrival of the board game he created with Qarl, Endeavor, released by Z-Man Games (and hitting just in time for Gen Con)!


I can only imagine the buzz you must both be feeling right now. HUGE congratulations!

I can remain silent no longer. The Daily Mail has run “never before seen” “photos” that purport to show “Neil Armstrong” on the “moon”. Luckily the comments there are full of people who aren’t so foolish as to believe that ridiculous story!
No, we’re on to you, NASA. The real truth is plain and now that I’ve seen it I can’t keep it to myself. If you believe the lies about MEN on the MOON, then I urge you to look at the evidence proving the whole thing to be an enormous hoax. Follow this link. Your eyes will be opened.