Messages

Suspiciously hetero? Are you saying they're all a bit closeted in reality?

I wouldn't waste too much energy discussing That Party. Any discussion that starts off being about the importance of voting shouldn't automatically get sidetracked into becoming about them.

No you didn't want Kitten to win, Larf, you fibber.

You're just yanking our chains, aren't you?

'Course you can ask people not to vote BNP, same as you get blanket pleas to vote 'not Tory' and 'not Labour'. There's a question as to whether or not it's democratic when you have a newspaper like The Sun historically just urging its readers not to vote Labour, and whether or not it should count as a declarable donation to Tory campaigning expenses.

On the other hand, maybe the free press should be allowed to be partisan and newspapers should campaign on behalf of the political party that is the best friend to their owners.

My point is, it's not as if some sort of exception is being made when one is urged not to vote BNP. All parties are subject to public commentary, and it just so happens that the balance of public opinion is that the BNP is quite revolting.

Did you see that girl on Big Brother who was shouting about being an anarchist one minute and then complaining about how everone else had eaten her spaghetti while she was having a nap the next? How I laughed.

Yes Uncle Dudley, I won't forget.

What about boating at the Inn on the Lake?

My office isn't too bad. Reasonable shelter from trees, and not too stifling as long as there's a bit of a breeze going. Mind you, last August it got baking in here.

There's a horror sub-genre where writers are haunted by their characters come to life (all a bit Stephen King - was The Dark Half one of those?).

In the Mouth of Madness is one.

Ah, yes. The Purple Rose of Cairo. Brilliant!

I was trying to think of one where a character from a book comes to life, but I'd forgotten all about celluloid.

Pete's Dragon.
King Kong.
The Valley of Gwangi.
Superman.
Edward Scissorhands.
Escape From the Planet of the Apes.

Splash!

Hercules in New York.

Bristol board, I hear, is what's recommended by a lot of the pros.

There's a goth message forum I look at regularly, but there hasn't been much going on there lately. There's about one new thread per day that gets about 4 comments, compared with last year when there were about 5 new threads a day and a hot thread would get over 100 posts.

I'm rather fond of the American monthly comic book format myself. But then, I buy comics like supermarket shopping anyway, so if I miss an issue of something I'm folloowing it just goes on the 'wants list' and I'll pick it up sooner or later at a mart or on eBay.

The main advantage of the American format for me is simply the volume of material. A writer's six-issue run on something like The Flash gets you the same length of story you'd get in 24 issues of 2000ad, and these days 2000ad just doesn't run epics like that anymore.

With the accelerated pace of story-telling in a British anthology title, everything has to work in short bursts and deliver a cliffhanger every 5 pages, and everyone'd get bored if a series went on too long.