Humph. Apart from a 'Stark Industries' Tee (Howard era) and some earrings based on Captain America's shield, two Loncon beer 'glasses' and a couple of mugs with wolves on them, I seem to have acquired a Micro Drone plus camera. How did that happen? Well, it was that or a drinking horn and the micro drone is of marginally more use. And more fun.

The World Science Fiction Convention takes place in London this August. The committee have, seemingly, got their act together, and have been coping well, despite having their British SF guest of honour (Iain M Banks) die on them last year and the usual hotel registration difficulties. This weekend, many of the staffers have gathered at the site to ( Read more... )

Dear Harry Potter fandom ( Read more... )

For many years, female comics fans (and some male ones!) have complained bitterly over the way female superheroes (and, indeed, female characters in general) are depicted in comic books, often in quite unfeasible poses and costumes. Well, fan artists are striking back. The result is The Hawkeye Initiative, over on Tumblr, where artists are ( Read more... )

Watching The Beast Below, this time without the tears, it becomes more susceptible to reasoned analysis, though I will leave the deep Dr Who meta to people like parrot_knight, louisedennis and calapine. saxonb has not ventured an opinion yet, but I will be interested to see what he thinks of it. The themes of hard choices made with courage, self sacrifice and deep insight are among ( Read more... )

Ina and I are home from Eastercon.

We cut Miss P's claws (you had to be there), met lots of friends, made new friends, and attended a variety of events, some better than others. (Step forward Mitch Benn and purplecthulhu, for entirely different reasons, as brilliant highlights.) I'll write a sort of review later ( Read more... )

Nothing.

Sod all.

Recovering from this week and forgetting all the things I haven't done.

Seeing fredbassett, lukadreaming, louisedennis, charlieallery, stevegreen, la_marquise_de, fjm (and Miss P), mevennen, johannes_d, and frandowdsofa, among many others, all of whom are certain to be attending, if only for a day (Hell, three of them are guests of honour!)

Making the acquaintance of the Park Inn Hotel's swimming pool.

See you all in the bar!

major_clanger has some really useful things to say about some of the comments to be seen both on various websites and on LJ about the rights and wrongs of this affair...

http://major-clanger.livejournal.com/493289.html

Be warned that he will strictly enforce the commenting policy outlined re this

This post will condemn particular religious and political leaders. However, I am not going to put it under a cut, as their words and behavior have made the national news.

Firstly, I am now fixed in my determination to keep out of the USA. Dr Peter Watts, award-winning author of the excellent Blindsight amongst others, has been arrested, pepper- ( Read more... )

The discovery that the cats had peed all over the shelves on which we kept most of the photo albums galvanised us into taking action. Among other things, this resulted in an expensive order to Arrowfile (http://www.arrowfile.com/) which used to be Flashfoto and has been our album supplier of ( Read more... )