dogpoet

Further Ahern/Survivalist notes: as I'm planning to read at least a few more of these, maybe any further discussion belongs in the fantasy epics thread rather than this one? There's at least twenty of the things and I can't see them getting more rather than less realistic as the tale progresses...

What Lou said: no kites until it's died down a bit, eh?

Not good, Tigger.

I think the lifecycle from an egg to a fly is more than a fortnight, though.

Wasn't overimpressed by the first Thistlebone collection.

Obviously I'm not a reliable witness, and the fact that I didn't much like it might make it the best thing ever, but even so: not even the magnificent art could carry it for me, particularly as the script had Davis doing a load of caption boxes over a full page drawing of a dead crow or whatever.

A "meh" on the rocks, please.

Gone though the first collection of that SB Davis Thistlebone horror story from 2000AD, and sadly wasn't overimpressed. The art is (needless to say) magnificent and the rustic setting and nature imagery give Davis a lot of material to work with, but the story is even thinner than Lena Zavaroni and mostly pasted up from cliches. (You can see the final twist coming a mile off as well.)

You'd think that when a comic like 2000AD does folk horror they'd try to do something batshit weird, barking mad and completely foul like Blood on Satan's Claw rather than a half arsed copy of Ramsey Campbell at his dullest trying to pass itself off as magical realism, wouldn't you? This reads more like an "us to!" Epic/Vertigo knock off from the early '90s than something that belongs in 2000AD...

5 hours ago, Bran the Blessed said:

Awww, I'm sorry it isn't better, because it sounds and looks fun in a really pants-on-head sort of way.

I also admit I don't know what "crusties" means here, nor who a Deadhead is. ;XD

Oh, it's definitely fun, it's just not as fun as a book this daft should be, which is rather a shame.

Cliff notes:

A "Deadhead" is a fan of the popular American beat combo, the Grateful Dead. Right up until Jerry Garcia died in the mid '90s they had an enthusiastic following who turned up at as many concerts as they could (often following the band around the 'States for a whole tour at a time) and behaved and dressed like it was still 1967. That a lot of these guys (it was mostly a male thing, can't imagine why that should be) were young enough to be the kids, or by the end grandchildren of the band's original following just made it even odder.

"Crusties" were a short lived UK phenomenon from the late '80s and early '90s. The term was first used in print in '90 or '91, but it was describing a group of sorts who'd been around for at least three or four years before that. The crusties were sort of punked up hippies, for want of a better description. White dreadlocks, German army parkas, para boots and body piercings happened a lot. The girls had a taste for stripey tights and neon hair dye. There was a large contingent of genuine drop outs as part of that thing (inbcluding members of several of the big bands) but also a lot of middle class music fans who'd adopted new age travellers as fashion templates. The biggest band for this bunch were probably The Levellers (kind of a folk rock version of the Clash), but the likes of Back To The Planet (a ska-punk band who were a pretty much a British poundshop version of Fishbone without the horns) and New Model Army (who were probably the original begetters of the whole thing) also got a lot of attention. Also, a lot of ravey type stuff, particularly at the ambient end of things like Sunscreem. There was also an American revival of the look and lifestyle a decade or so back called "crust punk" but I don't think there were any bands in the 'States who came out of that.

Going through the first couple of Jerry Ahern's Survivalist potboilers. These are in most respects even dafter than the Bradley Denton. There's a scene in the first one where the protagonist has to land a 747 because the pilot and co-pilot were blinded by a nearby nuclear flash. Did they not have electromagnetic pulses in 1981?

Good luck with that, Tigger, and many happy returns.

I've just read what may well be the stupidest science fiction novel ever: I'm not sure that it's worse than Habitation One but there's no question that it's even dafter, which is no mean feat.

An alternate history with Patton pushing on from Berlin to Moscow in the final stages of WW2 and the soviet union getting partitioned along with Germany isn't completely ridiculous, but Bradley Denton fails to show his working out that this would leave to an alliance between the United Kingdom and the ChiComs (who didn't turn communist until after the war was over anyway and needed an alliance between Mao and Stalin to arrange that), or the invention of punk music in 1945.

Given that the plot involves the American space programme being destroyed by riots when a famous "wrack" singer died on the first manned moon mission and her daughter being manipulated by various sinister factions to cause or prevent a nuclear war with the "lemon limeys" and/or reboot the space programme, any description makes the book sound a lot more fun than it is. Denton makes a surprisingly sharp guess in having the wrackers pretty much be crusties in a book that was published in 1986, but he's probably just achieved that by treating them as punked up Deadheads, which makes it seem less prescient. It still looks pretty odd in a book that's pretty much a mid '80s hair metal "power of rock" video stretched out to novel length and with an even stupider plot.

And of course, the book is full of stupid made up swear words instead of having the anti-authoritarian rebel rockers cuss each other out with proper punk style potty mouths. I found this hilarious, if I'm honest.

If you've ever wondered what sort of book the late Mick Farren would have written if he'd been dropped on his head when he was a baby, this is probably it right here...

Keanu is by most accounts far too nice a guy to go around kicking ass, sadly.

(I was thinking of the missing cigarette at the end of the beloved and esteemed Constantine film...)

I don't think I read any comics that came out that year in 2022.

Should I be worried about this?

It has not been a fine vintage, that's for sure.

Maybe the calculations about the Aztec Calendar running out in 2012 were a decade out?

How about that purple guy?

(This one's a bit of a downer...)

Before he slaps on his cologne (the sweetly musky smelling "His Balls") and heads out to face the day...

Maybe I should have gone for the Joan Baez or Judy Collins version of that one instead, then...

(Or Gaudete. Everybody likes Steeleye Spann, right?)

How about something a teensy bit less camp?

I was looking to see if I could find a live clip of Pentangle doing the Cherry Tree Carol and found this version instead:

And now I'm rereading Cryptonomicon to see if Root's backstory adds anything much to the original tale...

I'd have thought you'd be a Pogues man, John?

(I apologise for the Saville: I just did a search and didn't vet the video first.)

This one should be safe, though, and it never seems to get mentioned as a Christmas song...

Is that a punk era Chaz on the right?

Hope everybody has a good one.

Let Roy Wood sing for you the song of his people...

Just bumping this thread with some news that might be of interest to Jason: looking at Amazon, Rebellion have finally got around to releasing a Finn collection, even if it looks like this is just the Liam Sharp episodes and doesn't include the Paul Staples series.

Tom Tomorrow stil bringin' the awesome:

I'm not sure that Kanye isn't just using his mental illness as an excuse to act out with impunity, though. Anybody who spends as much time as he does bragging that he's not taking any meds because they make him less awesome has relinquished any right to sympathy, imo.

No argument about the other tit, mind: you seen that after spending a load of time ranting about how Twitter's management were too busy being right on to take any action against people using it as a platform for sexual abuse he's fired all but one of the staff who were in place to try to fix that that as part of his staff purge?

On 11/18/2022 at 4:58 PM, Bran the Blessed said:

Mind you, I would have to pay for copies of my first edition, and use some sort of freight transfer service or a third party to even get any copy of my book, at all.

Perhaps you could get Dan to send you a copy if you're still in touch with him? Paypal him the cost of the book and and another ten dollars for postage if B&N won't ship to the Czech Republic...