As regards the previous post: In case any of you are still here, I know I said I wasn't going to post any more from this instance, but my new instance is giving me a Bad Gateway.

BAD GATEWAY

NO BISCUIT

Just finished the first volume of Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, an anthology by Mike Allen. This one came out in 2008, and is very loosely themed around fire, gears and resurrection, with an unconventional introduction about a phoenix and a magical train.

The line-up of contributing authors (or "pinions" as Allen calls them), features many of the decade's big names in SFF and horror. Catherynne Valente's "The City of Blind Delight" is most closely tied to the themes and has the rich multisensory charm for which she is known. The Cats Rambo ("The Drew Drop Coffee Lounge") and Sparks ("Palisade") both make fine appearances, and Tanith Lee provides a characteristically glamorous look at another world where all the gender and sex stuff has Gone A Bit Wrong ("The Woman"), though not without a few silver linings!

There are a lot of dystopias here, and though in most cases the promised element of beauty is certainly there, as the anthology proceeded through one awful future or parallel world after another I did struggle with the downbeat vibe. There are also a couple of high fantasy numbers that have dated badly, both as regards shallow depiction of women and/or rape and in terms of general cliched style (though I guess anyone who deliberately reads a story called "Choosers of the Slain" deserves what they get).

My favourite stories were both set in what is pessimistically referred to as the "real world": Michael J. DeLuca's "The Tarrying Messenger", about a self-righteous student on a cycling tour who comes upon a strange form of evangelism in the Arizona desert, has beautiful writing of a kind that seems to have fallen from fashion lately, and which draws a strong feeling of magic from beautiful, sharp observations of places and buildings (and, of course, people). And I also liked "The Occultation", an early one by Laird Barron. Like many Europeans I am a bit obsessed with American motel culture, especially when things get ghostly.

And finally Leah Bobet's "Bell, Book and Candle" also deserves a mention. None of the main characters in it are truly human but Bobet makes the reader identify with them as if they were, while still keeping their essential otherness and weirdness intact. That's difficult to achieve - so difficult, in fact, that I tend to avoid books with casts of non-human characters.

Anyway, although I'm by no means a fan of all speculative fiction - I skew towards horror and dark fantasy - the quality in most of these stories is high, there's plenty of variety, and I sense I will be reviewing more of these books in future! I also recommend ordering directly from Mythic Delirium: mine crossed the Atlantic impressively fast and with a signed dedication!

https://mythicdelirium.com/clockwork-phoenix-tales-of-beauty-and-strangeness

#MikeAllen #LairdBarron #LeahBobet #CatSparks #CatRambo #CatherynneValente #TanithLee #MichaelJDeLuca

#Horror #Fantasy #HorrorReviews

OMG the amount of JSON Undefined messages I've been getting. A big thank you to anyone interacting with my posts lately because honestly that's often the only way I know the post has gone through at all >_<''

Currently seeking funding for my trenchant mumblecore epic called "J-son, Undefined" about a young person who loves dungarees and pudding-bowl haircuts, hates labels of all kinds, and struggles through a series of meaningless jobs, all of which they refuse to declare to the Inland Revenue because their identity can't be, like, reduced to a series of checkboxes in an online tax declaration form, why would anyone want to limit themselves like that?

Ah quote-post is working today I think. (sorry if you've seen this already)

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9h0um0dsb5

OMG the amount of JSON Undefined messages I've been getting. A big thank you to anyone interacting with my posts lately because honestly that's often the only way I know the post has gone through at all >_<''

Currently seeking funding for my trenchant mumblecore epic "J-son, Undefined" about a young person who loves dungarees and pudding-bowl haircuts, hates labels of all kinds, and struggles through a series of meaningless jobs, all of which they refuse to declare to the Inland Revenue because their identity can't be, like, reduced to a series of checkboxes in an online tax declaration form, why would anyone want to limit themselves like that?

Ah quote-post is working today I think.

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9h0um0dsb5

The aforementioned banger in video form. It's kind of like the video to "Dominion" by Sisters of Mercy but if the entire camera crew and all the actors had just stayed in a pub and got drunk instead of going out to the location.

Fascinating Fact: Richard Strange also played the executioner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJXmZQ_8Zrs

One of the undoubted benefits I did get from my stint on Mastodon was finding out about Radiogarden

https://radio.garden/visit/alencon/7OsDbShL

Admittedly it's limited by not being able to search for radio stations by genre, but even so I've found some great international stations. My favourite ones for New Wave are Dublin's Gem New Wave, which goes beyond the usual 80s hits to offer a full range of late seventies/eighties music, including the more guitar-based and reggae/rock crossover acts that are often overlooked. They also play Army of Lovers at nine in the morning as mentioned previously. Galaxie New Wave from northern France is also good for vague froide and NDW obscurities.

But I also love the simple titled "New Wave" channel from Aurich, Germany, which I only discovered a few days ago and which seems to be manned by someone obsessed with Legendary Pink Dots (I've never heard them on the radio before!), Fischer-Z and even more obscurely, Richard Strange and the Engine Room. I'd forgotten how much of a banger "Damascus" is when it gets going!

#radio #RichardStrange
#LegendaryPinkDots
#80sMusic

OK so once again this account failed to upload my latest round of catspam so I've ended up posting it to @Sonnenbarke@blahaj.zone. I can't find out how to quote posts from there in this account, however, as when I try to visit my Blahaj account logged in with this account it just automatically seems to switch me over to that one. I'm trying to see if there's some way of linking these two accounts - I am seeing a "switch user" prompt but it only shows one account as an option.

So yes, I am continuing my Grand Tour of the Fediverse in the manner of a Victorian lady just out of finishing school, straggling across the continent and beyond with the aid of a long-suffering "companion", 12 servants to carry all my dresses and 3 donkeys for my photographic equipment because I don't trust the servants with my precious plates, oh heavens if anything were to happen to my precious plates or my lenses I would surely be undone. Are we in Italy yet or are we still in Switzerland? Does anyone know how to say "please unpack that enormous brown trunk, my smelling salts are somewhere in the bottom" in Vivaro-Alpine dialect?

@ouinne@wandering.shop Yeah I think the Mouth of Madness is overrated - a lot of horror writers in particular seem to love it, maybe because it's about books and writers and channels HP Lovecraft in a fairly obvious way, I don't know. It does have some good bits - I like the scene on the road at night, and the creepy painting - but it loses its way quite badly.

@deimos Oh good! Thanks for the encouragement. I really like CalcKey but as it's still a fairly new thing there are bound to be times when it's not available and I do like the idea of having something for back-up! Honestly I'd rather endlessly cycle between two or three fediverse accounts than go back to any of the current centralized social media. I can't stand the idea of bestowing my precious catspam on any of those appalling failsons LOL

OK so I now have another CalcKey account at https://blahaj.zone/@Sonnenbarke.

To summarize: I now have 3 Fediverse accounts.
- this one
- the Outer Heaven one I'm trying out
- and the Blahaj one.
I'm going to be kicking around the latter two for a couple of weeks (maybe less!) to see which I like best and then I'll choose that as my main one and either delete the others or keep one as back-up account (unless that's frowned on for whatever reason!)

Nine whole euros of "self-love" on sale at Leclerc today. Laughing in the faces of all you fools who pay top dollar for masturbation sleeves

This week I've been teaching Duffy about three vital topics in France (and everywhere), clothes, hair and make-up. Because he has ADHD he finds open-ended questions hard in conversation so to get him talking I've been making him provide detailed descriptions of the best-dressed popstars of the 80s and say what he thinks of their looks. We are starting fairly simple with Japan, see below (note Mother of the Revolution David Sylvian's honest-to-God "gilet jaune".) But as Duffy gets better at things like accessories we will be moving on to bands like Sigue Sigue Sputnik and eventually the complicated sartorial panoramas of the Visual Kei bands from Japan (the country).

Looking at alternatives to the fediverse. It's sure going to be hard to choose between them with all the amazing free gifts they're handing out when you sign up. I'm really torn between the chunk of authentic Wittenoom blue asbestos you get for signing up with Bluesky and the blood-soaked eye bandage and radioactive Sheffield policeman's hat Threads is offering

"And the company takes what the company wants
And nothing's as precious as a hole in the ground"

#MidnightOil

Weird Horror mag is free to read online. Check it out.

https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-city-that-fell-off-a-cliff

The anthology Found (“Eighteen stories of found footage horror”) by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias came recommended by several horror aficionados, and I approached it with high hopes. I’m a fan of films in the same vein (my favourite is Lake Mungo) and existing fiction by the likes of Gemma Files (the novel Experimental Film and several stories) and Terry Dowling (“Cheat Light” is just one of the many jewels in his fantastic Basic Black collection). But does this new round of tales from the post-copypasta era measure up?

You can’t deny the editors are committed to the bit. The book is designed to look like an old videocassette box, and the first few pages are full of dire warnings not to go any further. Iglesias’ introduction is pretty standard but Cull goes right off the deep end, cobbling together a Thin-Man style yarn about family homicide and cattle mutilation which pretends to be real, fapping about the murderer while overlooking the victims in the highest True Crime style.

By this point the gag was wearing thin, and Holly Rae Garcia’s opening story “Two Months Too Long” didn’t come a moment too soon. It’s a great piece of bad taste horror that will make you laugh while also feeling slightly unwell. The next few stories struggle to live up to this flying start, and “The Veiled Lady” by Angela Sylvaine, though good, is more about diary entries (it’s not the only tale in the book to be about writing rather than film). But there are a few great stories which are also bang on theme.

“Ghost Town Adventures” by Joe Butler is probably the closest to the classic found footage narrative, and its opening pages are for my money the scariest thing in the collection, though there’s stiff competition from “Walls and Floors and Bricks and Stone” by Georgia Cook, a highly unsettling look at the bond between families and the buildings they inhabit. Tim McGregor’s “Green Magnetic Tape” explores jealousy and old secrets within an uneasy couple in a way that is affecting as well as sinister.

“Grave Issue” by Bev Vincent is another of the writing-based stories, with a contagion narrative inspired by Ramsey Campbell, Borges and maybe later writers like Mark Samuels. Not amazingly original but still effective. And “This Video Is Unavailable” by Robert Levy is a bracing take on Youtube/Tiktok influencer culture; Levy loses the realistic voice of some of his characters at the end, which is a shame, because this kind of fiction usually stands or falls on the author's ability to hide their own hand. But it’s still a memorable story. Overall I would’ve liked to see more explorations of very recent video phenomena, but maybe that was foolish given the nostalgia-crazed cover!

So yeah, though there is a certain amount of filler here, and some of the stories felt pretty well-worn in terms of plot, if you like the collection’s theme and fragmented, multi-perspective narratives in general then I do recommend Found.

https://www.abebooks.com/9780648731535/Found-Anthology-Footage-Horror-Stories-0648731537/plp

#HollyRaeGarcia #JoeButler #TimMcgregor #GeorgiaCook #HorrorFiction #HorrorReviews

ETA sorry i keep editing this, having problems with posting right now...

@CoolerPseudonym@wandering.shop It always just reminds me of the song Blue Sky Mine by Midnight Oil, which I suppose is not entirely inappropriate

I find all this aerospace content about honeycomb panelling very taxing because it always makes me want to eat a Crunchie even though I know they're no good any more.

In their heyday they were wonderful chocolate bars. I could easily eat the panelling on a whole thrust reverser nacelle if it was made of Crunchie. I sadly have no memory of the 2000 Britvic partnership that produced the Crunchie Tango, though I really really love Tango so I must have been sleeping on the job

https://superbrandsnews.com/vintage-ads-cadbury-crunchie-exciting-biting-1959/