Penwing's Journal

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Earlier this week, I was stood talking to my colleagues about my frustration with the latest issue of Attitude. I was complaining, quite vocally shall we say, about how the cover story was Mark Wright from TOWIE a straight man with, as the article was keen to point out in the first paragraph, very tiny nipples. And it was that last fact I was loudly proclaiming when a member of the university's training team walked past.

Cue shame and embarrassment.

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The Manchester Sci Fi Book Group at Madlab is reading Brasyl by Ian MacDonald for next month (the meeting where we discuss it will be on 15th May at 7pm in Manchester MadLab (3rd Tuesday). As this is my suggestion and I'm advocating it, I thought I should try and put a few notes up about why I suggested it.

First of all, we must get one FAQ out the way - it is not based on, or the novel of, or the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's film Brazil.

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I've not really got a whole lot to say about this but it didn't feel right to relegate it to the earlier odds and sundry post.

Basically, my brother, in an extended period of sheer lunacy, has quit his job and gone over to America with less hand luggage than I would take to work with me in order to cycle round as many state capitals as he can for five or six months.

Lunacy I tells ya!

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One of the Eastercon panels I went to was about Science Fiction on stage. Mostly the agreement was it was pretty healthy, pretty diverse, pretty damn good, but pretty hidden. Small venues, tiny fringe pieces. Mostly adaptations (1984 at the Royal Exchange, Midnight from LassFest spring to mind). What was needed was a mainstream SciFi original to allow it to break through and become something special.

Time travelling giants wandering round Liverpool in a three day street-theatre spectacular.

Will that do you?

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I was going to blog about BBC Three's documentary on the young lad who "woke up gay" after a stroke. Unfortunately, I missed the first twenty minutes or so but what I did see left me feeling very sceptical. It focussed far more on the change from beer-swilling, rugby playing, hyper macho guy who seemed to mistake sex with relationships into a equally stereotypical camp gay hairdresser. It was the swing from one stereotype tyo the other which seemed much more pronounced than his underlying sexuality - indeed very few people accepted his belief that he was straight before the stroke.

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Oh dear, I'm about to add more column inches (*fnar* *fnar*) to Anglican Mainstream's twenty buses in London ad campaign promoting the (lack of) virtues of conversion therapy for LGBTQ people. "NOT GAY! EX-GAY, POST-GAY AND PROUD! GET OVER IT!" reads the ad.

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It hasn't been immediate or internet quick, but it really hasn't taken long and the apology from BSFA seems genuine. We won.

And in a very real way we lost. We seem to have hounded people out of the roles they did as volunteers. Martin McGrath has already said about feeling harangued and personally blamed for what went on and this, it is suggested, was not an isolated incident. This is not an image of fandom I like very much either.

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I think Sundays are Eastercon are where I start to go into a mindset of relaxation and subsequently seem to attend fewer panels. While I was tempted by Biology of the Zombie Apocolpyse, Discuss the Hugo Nominees and Occupy the Metaverse, I ended up going to the Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog - which could have done with subtitles for the Sing-Along bits... then again no-one wants to hear me singing especially at 10am with hangovers...

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EDIT TO ADD: If you have come to this article first, please do note that I have a follow up post following the BSFA's response.

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You last saw your intrepid hero (*waves*) about to go watch Paul Cornell host an all female (get that Radio 4) Just A Minute featuring topics such as who you would put on a stamp (a lot of China Mieville lust on that stage) and what you would say to Christopher Priest. After some pattering, I hijacked a team (complete with homemade 3D Printer) to lead them to stunning bottom of the heap pub quizzery (we got over half right)...