Bel Says:

Buying that brand new corset
Those little red numbers counting down to the end of the auction… I swear they’re mocking me.
16 minutes to go…
Now, I know exactly what I want— I’ve bid on it for heaven’s sake. It’s supposed to be in my size and I’ve memorized the sizing charts. It’s going to fit. Now I just have to win the damn thing.
15 minutes to go…
Last time I bid on something like this, I wasn’t home to watch the clock tick down to nothing and was outbid by 3 cents. That’s right— 3 freaking cents. I was unimpressed to say the least.
14 minutes to go…
I’m a very small lady. How big was the ‘person’ who outbid me by 3 freaking cents!?
13 minutes to go…
I was the perfect shade of red and this one is black.
12 minutes to go…
I have my bid in the space provided so that at the 3 second mark I can outbid myself.
11 minutes to go…
Oh for goodness sakes, I don’t like this waiting crap. Just get on with it.
10 minutes to go…
I wonder how long it’ll take to get here if I win it.
I wonder if it’ll be well made, or if it will be a matter of ‘you get what you pay for’.
9 minutes to go…
99 cents is a great price for anything… except a chocolate bar. Those should be less than a dollar. Rip off merchants.
8 minutes to go…
I wonder if I will want to go out and buy a new blouse to go with the new corset?
No—I’ll wait until I have it in my hot little hands before I decide.
7 minutes to go…
The stress is getting to me… I can feel my heart racing…. My hands are sweaty (and my typing is worse than normal!).

6 minutes to go…
Hubby is trying to talk to me and I snap at him to shush until the auction is over. I have to give it my complete attention… (Well, apart from writing this).
5 minutes to go…
¾ of the way there. My eyes are set to no blink mode and are starting to dry out. I hate having dry eyes.
4 minutes to go…
$8.77 postage. Amazing how they can charge us more than they’ll probably pay themselves for postage.
3 minutes to go…
Call of nature… NOOOOOO!!! Not now. Now I wish I was a man so I could just tie a knot in it.
2 minutes to go…
Kiddo is whining for the computer… she has an assignment to write up. Not Now—EBAY!
1 minute to go…
All the blood has rushed to my head and my mouse is over the ‘place bid’ button. I am so nervous I think I’m going to  make a mess. Oh no! The clock is under a minute…

To be continued…

Music: Europe — The Final Countdown

They smell of rotted flesh and fetid breath. They shuffle and moan. They’re scary and disgusting. Anita Blake and Alice Parks make them quiver in their puss-sodden boots. Well, perhaps they would if they had a mind of their own.

Zombies are the bane of many a hero’s clean getaway. Low budget films have been known to be some of the biggest hits when it comes to Zombies. One drive-in theater in Tucson, Arizona had a 6-mile traffic backup on the opening night of Carlton J. Albright’s film The Children of Ravensback back in the 1980’s.

Then there’s the typical creep out movie, which the Irish Film Classification Office banned… would it be classed as a love story? Boy Eats Girl by Stephen Bradley. Boy commits suicide and comes back to life. Definitely a Minties moment; even if just for the bad breath.

The classics, as in books, aren’t even safe from the re-animated folk. Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice having been rewritten by Seth Grahame- Smith in 2009. Pride Prejudice and Zombies may also become a movie, perhaps in 2011. The rumor mill on IMBD says it’s in the pre-production faze and David O. Russell could step up as Director.

Michael Jackson made a good Zombie in the music clip for Thriller. If you haven’t had the chance to head to the Gallery of Modern Art to see the photographic work of Douglas Kirkland, get onto it. They’ll only be there until October 24th. I had so much fun looking through the photos he took during the 1983 filming of Thriller. The amount of work that goes into the makeup was just mind boggling.

While you’re in the CBD checking out those photos shuffle on over to Wickham Park Brisbane at 3pm Sunday 24th of October. Zombies are going to be taking over Brisbane to help rains funds for the Brain Foundation. http://www.brisbanezombiewalk.com/ Head on over to their website and register to participate in the Zombie walk.

And if you are going, but not in your Sunday best zombie garb, you may need The Zombie Survival Guide, written by American author Max Brooks, published in 2003. I saw a copy last weekend at ACE Comics in the Queen Street Mall, and couldn’t help giggling.

I will NOT be seeing any of you at the Zombie walk, or at any of the latest zombie movies because, well, frankly they scare the living crap out of me.

If you do go to the Zombie walk on Sunday, send us photos of yourself all Zombiefied. We’d love to see. Though I may end up peeking through my fingers at all the scariness.

Jamie Says

Cyborgs and robots and mutants, oh my!

Technology, like fiction, evolves at a rather rapid pace. And when you have a group of authors with a curiosity about the future, it is inevitable that you are going to get something at the very least entertaining, and, at most, philosophically special.

The term “Cyberpunk” was coined in a short story of the same name by Bruce Bethke published in 1983, about a group of teenage software hackers. This was really the first example of people using their new-found computer skills to subvert the system.

Cybernetic Punks, “Cyberpunks”, were those outsiders who lived in a kind of moral blind spot, using their talents for either the good of the world, or just for their own benefit.

Before Cyberpunk was published, however, a movie by Ridley Scott hit the cinemas.

Showing the world a bleak future, where man had already settled on distant worlds and the rise of technology had given birth to robots that were identical to man in almost every way, Blade Runner was one of the first (and still finest) examples of future life where technology rules above all else. It also asked the question “What does being human mean?”. This question has become fundamental to a genre where people upgrade themselves with bionic body parts, artificial brains and the ability to plug themselves into the net.

Not long after, an author by the name of William Gibson set in motion what would become a great movement in speculative fiction by publishing Neuromancer; a tale of a “console jockey” whose lifelong career as a hacker has been all but destroyed by the company he stole from.

This is where the Punk from Cyberpunk really became recognised. It was seen for a long time, and still is by many people, that for the fiction to be CP it has to have not only advanced technology but also an oppressive atmosphere.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992, became what was hailed as the end of Cyberpunk and the beginning of the Post-Cyberpunk genre. There was seen to be some kind of emotional evolution between what had come before and what was new. It may have been because Stephenson had used the technology of the day to predict a different kind of future than the earlier writers had envisaged; it may have been because his main character was not only a hacker and the world’s best sword fighter, but also a pizza-man.

The protagonists of Cyberpunk fiction are usually outsiders: people who don’t fit in, hackers, couriers, revolutionaries, loners. They become anti-heroes: people you would never picture saving the world, but who become monumentally important for a brief moment.

Now, I have left out many, many of the important works of CP fiction that have helped build this genre. This is not because I don’t recognise them as part of CP, nor because I have a grudge against them or think them unimportant; but, this is a Cyberpunk 101 article, and if I were to cover this topic properly, I would be typing for hours. That’s not what I’m here for.

I’m here to get you reading Cyberpunk… to make you love Cyberpunk. Even  if I’ve made you hate Cyberpunk, I’ve done my job, because then you will tell other people about it, and maybe one of them will become curious enough about it to read one of these great books.

And the future is not only written by Americans and Europeans. Australia  has its own Cyberpunk authors. Marianne de Pierres is a Queensland-based author who has dreamed up one heck of a future for this great land.

Movies like The Matrix, Japanese anime including Ghost in the Shell and games like Mirrors Edge have brought Cyberpunk to the attention of audiences that Sci-Fi books can’t get to.

It is an all-encompassing kind of fiction.

Visit The Cyberpunk Project site for more info.

Rockabilly / Pinup
I am a fan of those who can really pull off this look. Curves are okay and though comfort isn’t always at the forefront of the mind when going shopping there is a wide range of really extreme Rockabilly/ Pinup beauty queens in my opinion. Look at Dita Von Teese. Just WOW!

Tattoos have come into the modern mix, which, love ‘em or hate ‘em, make for an added extra layer of colour and expression of the women rocking out.

Vintage American cars, set and styled hair, tight ¾ length pants, circle skirts or pencil skirts for the gals. Guys cross Steve McQueen with Elvis Presley (the early years) and come up with a very distinctive style. Leather and Brylcreem (hair grease) are the must-haves for every young rockabilly man.

Want a movie with rockabilly? For the Johnny Depp connoisseurs, there was a movie back in the last millennium called Cry Baby. Johnny was time warped into “Drape” (or Greaser) Wade Walker. Wade was also known as Cry-Baby for his ability to shed a single tear. He falls head over heels for “square” Allison Vernon-Williams who, incidentally, is tired of being good  (sounds a bit like Grease, but it wasn’t quite as popular).

Rockabilly lives a very flamboyant life in modern society, and Brisbane isn’t left off the hit list of places where it’s okay to let your inner rockabilly rock on.

Though I’ve never set foot in the place myself, Cadillac Barbie in West End seems to be the place to go to get your hair well and truly sorted for your first foray into the style.

Want to find a sweet rockabilly ride? Try the Queensland Auto Spectacular in Early April 2011.
I went in 2009 when it was held in Cleveland show grounds and it was enough to make you want to pull out the bobby socks and circle skirts and jive the night away.

GreazeFest at the Rocklea Show Grounds Auguat 2011 looks to be a HUGE fest of all things 1950’s.
What would GreazeFest be without a soundtrack (available on the website) including acts such as… Marti Brom, Big Sandy, Deke Dickerson, The Planet Rockers, The Detonators, and The Retro Rockers.
Everything old is new again. The 1950’s were very fashionable indeed.

Jamie Says:

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

– Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett has been a constant source of amusement for millions of people for almost thirty years. For myself he has been a font of imagination and strangeness for over a decade, even if I did approach it from a rather odd angle. So when Marianne asks me to write a blog about why I love his work it’s kind of an important moment.

During the mid 1990’s I had made a rather serious move from one Australian state to another due to family issues. While looking for a new house almost everything we owned was in storage, all except for the family computer.

It was around this time that the first Discworld computer game was launched on the market, and since my family was desperate for ways to distract a curious child they bought me this strange game that had some of the first, and finest in my opinion, voice acting ever used in a video game. The combination of strange humour, deranged logic and unusual characters sunk a hook into my brain that would later prove to control a rather large part of my life. And this was from a game that was loosely based on the Discworld novels.  

It was only really when I got to high school that I really developed a relationship with Pratchett’s work.

My English teacher had trusted me with her private library, which was better stocked than the school’s when it came to the more mature speculative fiction books, within which held every Discworld book that had been released up to that point. Needless to say I devoured these books in rapid succession, reading three or four every week until the well ran dry. Nowadays I can afford to buy my own supply.

Openly proclaiming an admiration for Pratchett’s novels usually elicits one of two responses: Either people will admit a similar appreciation or a strong distaste for it. From those of the latter group I have talked to about their feelings it seems that there is a shared opinion that, since the Discworld books fit more into a parody of fantasy role than fantasy itself, they find it hard to appreciate. Some people really do think that irony means “sort of like iron.”

To say that Pratchett has attracted a cult following is rather understating things, with millions buying and reading his books, conventions dedicated to his world happening every year, not to mention the three computer games and multiple mini-series that have appeared on-screen in the last few years.

Unfortunately, in 2007 Terry announced that he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, a brain related

disease that is eventually fatal, therefore any newly released book is accompanied by a sense of sadness.

Terry now writes with the help of his assistant and voice recognition software through which he will continue to bring humour and creative insanity to the world.