Update 2024: It is fascinating to note the change of attitude now that Marvel movies are mainstream, and the geeks inherited the earth. Along with, it’s sad to say, our own various strains of toxicity.

This post is possibly ever so slightly out of date, being a letter to the Glasgow Herald which I posted on the Intrepid forum three years ago but never quite polished to the extent that I was happy sending it to the herald itself. Prompting this, and other rejoinders by Intrepid members, was an article by Alison Rowat about the then [Glasgow Science Fiction convention] which some of us considered tantamount to bigotry, had it been said against one of the traditional minority groups. I’ve rewritten my rebuttal so that it flows better. At the time of writing the original, I was very, very angry. Perhaps it could function as an open letter to other media types – and there are many – who see us poor SF types as an easy and not altogether human target.

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Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe, being a BBC overview of computer games history, inevitably got to the point where it mentioned GTA. The programme was a fun once-over by the jaded eye of Brooker and I enjoyed catching all the old games I recognised, with a spark of memory, the ones I was familiar with and being amazed by the new ones since I departed the industry. Although I’d known of the controversy at the time, I hadn’t really paid much attention, and seeing it in context was quite enlightening. Just how much passion had flared over this game was put into persective, with archive BBC news clips and talking heads decrying it. All the controversy, all the hype, but not much that I didn’t know or was surprised by except for this little nugget: GTA was “directly inspired by” Turbo Esprit, a game for the Spectrum.

Um. What?

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A while back I wrote about the veracity of the Hired Guns background story as it appears in Wikipedia. Short version: you can’t trust the article. Longer version: I can’t add my own history because my recollections are not a proper reference, even though I wrote the damn story in the first place.

So now I’m delighted to see that the HG entry now links to a proper reference, in this case to Gamasutra – to a page discussing the history of computer games. The amusing part about this is the description it gives on the Hired Guns backstory; that the supposed hostages are merely a ruse to draw in some mercenaries for a live field test of their new weapons systems.

Now the only place that this version of the story has ever appeared on the internet is when I wrote it into the Wikipedia article, for reasons discussed in that other post. Which means that Gamasutra is obtaining its information from Wikipedia, which is now obtaining that very same information from Gamasutra!

The circle is, as they say, complete!

And for value-added lols, I now have an insight into the kind of time-travel story where a time-traveller accidentally kills Shakespeare as a young man and is forced to take his place and write all of Shakespeare’s works to restore history (because he just happens to have them all memorised). Where, then, does the information come from in the first place?

The answer, of course, is a Wikipedian editor who lives outside of time.

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A strange and compelling and downright geeky thing, that nevertheless I’ve been playing solidly for the last twenty minutes. I was given the book Cosmos as a kid and it’s shaped everything since. Never since Sagan has science meshed so seemlessly with poetry.

Here’s where you can find the original with some downloadables

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The ‘maemo’ being the Nokia N810 I bought a few weeks ago because my Samsung Omnia was being such a pain in the arse. So I’m attempting to blog from somewhere other than an actual computer. This may be less considered than some of my other posts. In any case, the miscellaneous requirements of being both a Sunday morning and in the back room compell me to write trivia. The N810 makes an excellent eBook reader and in conjunction with free eBooks and a small pile of real books I’ve borrowed and bought, I have much more pending being read than at any other time in my life! Time to prioritise.

All of which is making me slightly angsty that I’m not pursueing the writing as much as I think I ought to be. I’ve made decent progress rewriting Bit Patterns to be an original screenplay and my serious novel is sitting at 15000 words of background notes (which would be novella sized all by itself.) Oh, and I’ve now got a paid writing gig which kicks off in Jan. But I can’t talk about that yet. ;)

All of which says nothing about Intrepid. I’m a quarter of the way through fine-tuning the edit of The Stone Unturned. Any more commitments and I’m going to sag in the middle!

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I ordered a keyboard adaptor - the tiny purple thing in the corner - and had to collect it from a neighbour, because it wouldn’t fit through my letterbox. So, Amazon…. what were you thinking?

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Recently I completed the first draft of a screenplay for Intrepid, that old Star Trek fan film for which I’ve directed a number of episodes. The story takes place shortly after the events of the pilot episode. It was quite a journey getting it to the point where it made sense to me, let alone to the stage where it made sense to anyone who read it. Events in the Intrepid universe overtook some of the plot points and I had to rewrite it, an actor who played a key role wasn’t available so that meant another rewrite. A lot of headscratching and aha moments occurred before the stage where it was actually, genuinely complete.

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That would be me.

Seems that there’s been a recent study showing that we’d all rather stay in and watch TV or waste time on the Internet. Well, that’s pretty much true as far as I’m concerned, but nothing beats actual data. So on this morning’s adventurous trip to the shops with the express purpose of obtaining caramel cheesecake, to undo the cycling I did the other day, I was stopped by someone from the Evening Telegraph.

She was looking to speak to ten people and ask then what adventurous thing they’d done recently. It’s a regular feature in the paper where the public is asked a question. What had I done? Aside from visiting the crash site of the light aircraft in the park earlier on (the pilot was OK and more of which later), I thought the perfect answer was a plug for Intrepid. After all, as I said, we’d been filming at Glen Doll which gave us the opportunity to go camping and do some hillwalking; an excellent antidote to sedentary habits.

I’ve no idea whether it’s ten people or it’s more and whittled down to ten. Hopefully I’ll make the cut!

Update: Yep. I’ve just been in the Mon 17th edition along with nine others. Intrepid itself wasn’t mentioned, although it did say about Star Trek fan films and the wilds and cliffs. The actual quote from me contains about 60% of my own words!

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