Posts by stephen clover
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I've just discovered 'mansplain' also [....] which I am intending to look out for in my future posts, and why I am desisting from further comment
HA! yeah, fine in a one-to-one or one-to-few convo, but it's a tough one, though, on forums:-- cos you'll typically be 'talking' to a wide range of knowledges.
So you end up torn tween turning up the mansplaining for fear of readers not knowing what yer on about.. or going light on it, and invariably have some other person jumping down yer throat and getting all mainsplaining on YOU.
gee the internets is a rough place.
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Another as-of-yet culpably omitted luminary: Stanislav Lem. I still have Solaris down as one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
Oh christ, how did I forget Lem. He's so great. Something about living under Soviet rule/in the Eastern bloc gave him some kind of rare perspective into politics, science, existence...
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is also a great book and a great example of political commentary as sci-fi; file it with Brave New World, and 1984.
Finally: Grey Matters by William Hjortsberg is surely one of the absolute all-time underrated classics of sci-fi and I urgently recommend it to anyone I can. I even suspect David Mitchell of cribbing from it for Cloud Atlas.
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I find Macs Gold a bit tasteless
I agree. I'm almost positive that Macs Gold has declined in quality and flavour since Macs was bought by <whichever big brewer bought them> and it's now horrible: tasteless, overly-sweet and the complete opposite of refreshing.
Ditto most of the (original) Monteiths range, including but not limited to Original, Golden, and Pilsener.
Frankly, if you can now tell the difference between Monteiths Original and Lion Brown, or Macs Gold and Speights Gold, I take my hat off to you.
As for Heineken, ever since its been brewed in NZ it's been getting worse and worse and now tastes like fermented apple juice. And not in a good way.
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Wow, what a great thread! Read through the whole thing last night, and not much to add other than to express relief that Paul Litterick received the flaming he so deserved for his outrageous declarations of outmoded snobbery -- delivered presumably from the safety (and mindset) of an ivory tower somewhere -- re. sci-fi vs. literary fiction, readers vs. fans, Margaret Atwood, Iain (M.) Banks, umm.. and so on.
Personally I have no taste for space opera, fantasy, dragons, cave bears and what-not; my preference leans towards Dick, Gibson, Ballard, Burroughs, Vonnegut et. al. I think Kilgore Trout is my favourite sci-fi author; if not him then Phillip K. Dick, for sure. Properly engaging with Dick's catalog over the last five years or has and continues to be a life-changing experience. And his "non-genre" books, mostly published posthumously, are a revelation of the quiet horrors of existence: I would happily file them amongst Plath, Yates, Salinger, and the like.
No-one's mentioned Neal Stephenson in terms of one of those pesky genre-straddling authors, but look: simplistically put, he went from Snow Crash (cyberpunk) and Cryptonomicon (sci-fi, probably) to a series of historical doorstops that on sight fill me with frankly the same horror as for e.g. the discovery of the existence of another pile of cack from Stephen Donaldson.
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As one of the top two British MCs he's like Miles Davis to Roots Manuva's Ornette Coleman
O M F G that's a totally brilliant simile, nice job.
OT but not OT, if you get what I mean: In a rare celebrity Google Street View sighting, the lead singer of psychedelic American rock band The Flaming Lips has been snapped sitting outside in a bathtub by Google's all-seeing eye.
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Try drinking Mac's Great White. 'What arrr' ya?' Belgian Witbier is not what the 'Real Kiwi Bloke' drinks, apparently.
'Real Kiwi Blokes' get told to "get fucked" in our house.
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That's not any BBQ I've ever been too. Why cook slabs of meat instead of cutting to single serve size for the convenience of your guests.
For some reason I was annoyed by the caption which said something about "steaks on the barbie". That's not "steaks on the barbie", that's about $300 of premium eye fillets "on the barbie".
Yum.
(Presumably the fillets were oven-roasted in foil, bbqd to char/braise, and then sliced into manageable pieces for guests. I have actually been to BBQs where eye fillet is cooked, but yeah.. it doesn't happen often.)
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Wow. There's news of some more bad -- no, appalling -- behaviour coming down the pike. Not my place to tell you, but it should be public soon enough.
Dying here.... ;)
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Earlier there were posts from people who seemed expert in the matters of suppression orders and whatnot. [1] What is the situation once the order has been breached? Common sense would suggest that the order would persist, but does it? I ask because 10 seconds googling just found me a page on an infamous NZ blog where the identity of the (alleged) person in question is divulged via a pictogram.
And, subsequently, [2] is it a breach of a suppression order to link to another site where the suppression order is breached?
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I'm more of a Philip Glass fan
Me too. Ain't he great?