purplerabbits

Yes, it's Friday 13th and it's been dark all day. It's the end times. Or maybe January, which is almost the same thing.

So what's been going on in the world of my giant brain? Last night I dreamt about Rocky Horror and Time Curry was refusing to go on for his "Don't dream it, be it" number because he hadn't had his funding from the Arts Council.

While I was walking to work I was thinking about whether to buy solar panels for all the businesses around me with the infinite amount of money that I was wishing for. And then I thought it would just save them money which they'd spend on other world destroying things, so I should give them to individuals instead. Or maybe the council.

And then I saw a penny on the pavement and it occurred to me that, quite apart from the issue of inflation, the people in the fountains won't be accepting pennies for wishes anymore because they have iron in them these days.

Just think, if I wasn't so easily distracted I could have saved the world by now.

In the news:
BONG
Pluto definitely not named for the dog.
BONG
Greenpeace produce horrible scaremongering video of shite.
BONG
Alison decides not to let iTunes update itself just yet.
BONG
But doesn't Islam traditionally ban things made to look like living things?

ION: my new bunny icon still makes me happy.

I have been playing so much Pelpet that my eyes want to read boustrophedonically...

This morning's Doctor Who dream involved:

• A pair of people who had convinced Rose and the Doctor that they were versions of them from the future. The audience was meant to be suspicious of this if only because the older version of Rose was done in rather bad drag (but the actor had got her accent and mannerisms down pat)
  
• A further future version of the Doctor who was probably genuine but possibly evil
  
• The Doctor's mum ferchristsake
  
• Who was a spritely 60 year old wearing tracksuit and trainers
  
• A very giganormous monster which was a giant land octopus as big as a block of flats laid on its side
  
• Which swept accross the land gobbling people up
  
• Meanwhile the Tardis had a freezer containing joints of meat including a part of a human leg. "I can't eat that," said future Rose, "it's got a knee in it!" "Well I don't want it," said one of the Doctors. "It goes rather too well with a bottle of chianti."
  
• It seemed everyone knew who the leg belonged to as it was an ex (male) companion from a previous episode who had turned bad
  
• The giant octopoid took the Doctor's mum and when pursued to its lair it was discovered that it was turning captured people into sessile octopoidlets, with tentacles coming out of their heads and torsos and a gaping and slightly pornographic mouth running vertically down their front.
  
• And then it captured the present day Rose and did that to her and lo! the cliffhanger...

Need. More. Doctor. Who. Dammit!

Because I couldn't quite believe no-one else had done it. Of course now I will find ten of them...

As I woke up on Saturday I had that overwhelming feeling you sometimes get to remember the very important theme of my dream. So here it is:

God had many sons, but only four of them inherited his powers. Three of them could alter the very fabric of the universe, and one could do interior design.

It is this last Godling that we worship.

I found out the secret, last night. I found it because I was on a working holiday in hell. They didn't call it hell, of course: the advert said we'd be working with wine. But it was no vineyard but a wine factory we ended up in; a large, airy, glass and chrome factory that seemed the epitome of comfort and modernity, surrounded by bright green lawns.

At the factory we were taught to bottle champagne at the champagne bottling machine, and to tie string round the necks of other bottles, as well as a succession of other important tasks pushing bottle caps around. When we weren't working we stayed in high class hotels with shiny en suite bathrooms and beautifully kept rooms, and every morning we got up, ate a luxurious breakfast in our hotel and caught the magnetic hover train from the Metro right outside. Everything was shiny and new, and people on the train spoke to each other, discussing the various hotels they'd been picked up from, the high quality of the breakfasts and the maid service, and the wonders available in the craft market on the Metro platform where we bought small decorative objects to brighten up our hotel rooms and to give to our friends and family as mementos of this delightful holiday. I snapped up a dark wood horse carved in an archaic style, decorated with gold spirals and gold eyes. Others with less taste bought jolly naked Simpsons dolls, or naked vampire muppets with their purple and black wool hair draped over their bodies.

And then one night I had a date. One of the charming tour guides, he who had taught me to bottle champagne, asked me to dine at his hotel. Of course the food would be the same as at my hotel - a fine selection of haute cuisine brought by silent waiters, but he had a quirky smile and knowing eyes and his hands were long and clever as they twisted the wire cages round the bottle tops, and so I said yes.

I had been catching the magnetic train for so long that it was strange to get off at a different stop. His hotel was decorated in dark red and gold instead of dark green and silver like mine, but the food was good, and as we ate we sipped the fine wines we had been bottling that morning, and he complimented me on the garnet necklace I had obtained at the free craft fair, his eyes running appreciatively down the cascade of stones across my breasts. He clinked his crystal glass with mine and leant across the table to speak confidingly in my ear.

"Have you noticed," he said, "the assumption that all the hotels and the factory are in the same town, and yet I have never travelled between them except by underground train - have you?"

"Perhaps I'll go sightseeing at the weekend," I said, frowning as my head began to ache.

"And you have never stepped on the green turf at the factory," he persisted, "never spoken to the doorman of your hotel or the maids that polish your large lonely room, have you? The weekend must be very far away, my dear - have you any idea how long this little sojourn has lasted so far? How long the holiday was said to last on the application form that you did not fill in?"

My head was pounding. I sipped wine and tried to think. "No. But my room has a lovely view - the city at night..."

"Lights," he said, "twinkling flames in the darkness."

The light from the chandeliers fell on the wicked glint in his eye and his cute little silver horns. "So, would you care to take a walk in the darkness with me?" he said.

This is the piece I put in for Warren Ellis' Futurity Stunt, as details here. Enjoy...


In 1904 Aleister Crowley channelled arcane forces to ensure that The Age of Aquarius would begin on his word, recklessly oblivious to astronomy which schedules it for around 2060. His spells succeeded, but it wasn’t the future they ushered in. The Future, the true capitalised Shining Future, can only happen after our own deaths – whether it's glitter coated angel wings in heaven or chrome-plated jet packs in Las Vegas. What Aleister brought about in his clumsy way was futurism, the imperative that tomorrow happen today, and that every tomorrow bring a new perversion. And thus the whole premature blood and guts bukkake of the twentieth century is The Beast's fault, from every time you get stuck in a phone tree to the web cam in your fridge, from chatroom sex with girls with implausible vital statistics to the day you get dumped by text message. Uploaded lobsters send instructions to the nano GPRS transceivers in newly implanted vampire teeth with every spasm of their virtual feelers, and behind it all a chorus of celebrity bloggers document every twist on a tired theme, because it's not real if you didn't read it here.

And it's not tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes.

I'm typing up some notes from old creative writing classes, to save me carrying itty bits of paper from flat to flat and then never looking at them. Most with be going in my seshet journal, but this one is more like an LJ meme, except that it's all about words...
( Read more... )

Before camera phones there were radio cameras!

It cost 19 Guineas (£19.95) and was about a foot long...

Well I celebrated the shortest night by sleeping for twelve hours. I didn't have my curtains closed, so I must have really needed to be asleep. My sleep was full of people needing me to tell them what to do, but at least they were grateful for it, especially when I pointed out to Paul that you can't fight a house full of triads with only one gun while in a wheelchair - so I explained to them that we didn't really owe them thousands of pounds for hallucinogenic strawberries and they let us go. Honest.

Got two more BiCon bookings today and one yesterday, making 81. I intend to get some confirmation letters out today, now that we've heard from the venue about access to keys etc. And I must also book some disco equipment. Things are coming along, and Paul has added a link to the rules of croquet to the Web pages so everyone can learn how to play before they arrive... Volunteers to supervise a croquet tournament are more than welcome.

So now I must go wash clothes and tidy my room etc. I have too many essentially similar pairs of shoes and no room for an Ikea shoe rack - what to do?