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The Steampunk PC
Alas, it’s a one-off. The screen is a converted Dell monitor and the keyboard’s a rebuilt IBM. I’ve no idea what the typing experience is like, but how Goth is that? The handiwork of Steampunk obsessive Jake von Slatt. See how it was done, and more projects like it, here. The Clockwork Steampunk Stratocaster is…
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Myths of the Movies
Much-namechecked mate Steve Laws tells me that as children, he and his brother once dismantled all their fireworks to create a movie-style gunpowder trail. They lit the end of it, and… phfft. Instead of the combustion burning its way steadily and dramatically down the trail, the entire line of powder went up in the same…
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Judgement Days
I don’t know who’s been handling the job in recent years, but back in the day I used to help out judging the Manchester Festival‘s amateur film competitions alongside Norman J Warren, director of Inseminoid and Satan’s Slave. The field ranged from pitch-perfect recreations of 50s American SF on 16mm by the Spence Brothers of…
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Silent Witless
My friend David Mace writes that he just received an unsolicited flyer sent out by British Gas with the following strapline: Make sure you and your family are safe and warm from Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Seriously, to anyone who thinks that ineptitude in simple grammar doesn’t matter – it does. Because whatever your excuse for…
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Out of the Unknown
The classic BBC anthology series. Only a few still exist, but when they first aired I watched them all. Best TVSF I’ve ever seen, because they treated the literary sources with the same fidelity and presumption of serious intent given to any classic adaptation. I’ve no doubt they’d appear creaky and flawed if I saw…
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Nostalgia Corner
There was/is a chocolate bar called Topic, whose ad jingle went, “What has a hazelnut in every bite?” “Squirrel shit!” we’d shout back at the TV.
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The Living Dead at the Manchester Festival
One of the most heroic spectacles I ever witnessed on a public stage was that of Stephen Laws conducting an interview with Jorge Grau about his life and films. That’s Jorge Grau, director of the cannibal zombie classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue… kind of apposite because this was at the annual Festival…
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Is it just me?
A theatre not too far from where I live – it would be mean of me to name it – sends out a quarterly newsletter which includes a regular ad for pre-show dining at a nearby restaurant. The ad always includes this proud image: Now, I know there’s an art to photographing food in a…
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Soundscapes and Wide Screens
In a Blog post responding to Lost, In Transition, Carlo C draws attention to something that I hadn’t been aware of before; that in the Lost soundtrack, in addition to the forest whispers sometimes heard by the characters, there’s also ‘hidden audio’ that carries a certain amount of story freight. Or maybe the illusion of…
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Those Cancelled Golden Globes
“Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom. But NBC wants to try to keep that prom alive.”
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
