Zombie Lapdance

This is your last day to put in nominations for the Hugos. Which is assuming you’re already a member of WorldCon, the previous Texas one or the upcoming LonCon in London.

As it’s a Texas-ish publication, you should consider RevolutionSF for fanzine and the RevCast for the new fancast category.

Here’s some more suggestions, mainly people I owe a favor to, but nevertheless they’re all totally deserving!

Novelette

Babylon Moon by Matthew Bey

Short story

texas died for somebody’s sins but not mine – By Stina Leicht
I Will Trade With You — by J. M. McDermott

Best Graphic Story

Black Science
Sex Criminals
Adventures of the Red Panda

Editor Short Form

Rick Klaw

Professional Artist

John Picacio

Semi-Prozine

The Drabblecast

Fanzine

Space Squid
RevolutionSF
Bookworm Blues
My Bookish Ways

Fancast

Revcast
SF Signal Podcast
We’re Alive: A story of survival

John W. Campbell Award

Max Gladstone
Marshal Ryan Maresca
Rhonda Eudaly

Ping!

Sorry, I know I haven’t been around much in the past three months or so. Mostly it’s working a full-time job that’s kept me away. But also I’ve installed a blog at MatthewBey.com that has taken over the duties of my more flippant blogging.

But I promise I’ll continue to post here. This is a good place to write about sci-fi books and movies and various other geek topics, so I’m certainly not gone for good.

I’ve been watching Bollywood movies for a few years now. For the most part I’ve focused on recent films, but a certain classic from the 70s has come up in conversation on a routine basis: Sholay.

Wildly popular and starring the great Amitabh Bachchan it is often credited as being the first Bollywood western. It takes place in a remote community, where an ex-police officer hires a pair of charismatic train robbers to kill bandit.

This is an epic movie, filled with desperate human struggle and grand landscapes.

Aside from the location and the language it is a near perfect imitation of the American western. It has so incorporated the tropes of a Western that it even has a horse and buggy chase.

Here the buggy startles a herd of goats.

And here the buggy continues to flee, despite losing a wheel, which is straight out of a Roy Rogers flick.

And then we go straight into the scene with the Hitler impersonator.

Okay, maybe that’s not something you’ll find in your average western, but this next shot is a direct reference to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and that earns a little bit of sympathy.

It looks like C. Deskin Rink has been busy promoting the Helmut Finch manuscript he found. You can read "What They Consumed" at Bete Noir Magazine, issue #1.

Let me catch you up on the developments in the fishing front. I am no longer a loner fisherman. I hardly go out at all unless I’ve made plans for a group outing. Sometimes this means taking Space Squid Editor Steve and his kid out fishing. More frequently I’m in the company of two other guys as part of a group that has come to be known in the circle of facebook friends as "The Fishing Team."

There was one truly disappointing day where I didn’t get so much as a nibble. But since then there’s been some accommodation to the seasons and nearly every trip has been more successful than the last.

The Fishing Team discovered that in the cold weather the fish are only biting where the water happens to be warm (i.e. Barton Creek) and where the authorities have stocked trout.

Here’s the previous trout with vaguely keeper-sized sunfish caught down at Barton. The largest sunfish on the left is a redear, while the smaller ones are redbreast.

On return trips to the trout-stocking area, The Fishing Team mastered the technique of dragging canned corn along the bottom. This was our haul from Saturday.

We tried our damnedest to catch the limit, but we fell just short.

A trout bit on my corn bait, but when I tried to set the hook, the trout’s lip came right off.

When you fish in public parks you always have to deal with tourists.

Even though the trout all came from a breeding pond somewhere, some trout are bigger than others.

Here I have a catch arranged from biggest fish to smallest, utilizing perspective to give you the illusion of a vast length of trout vanishing into the distance.

You know the best part about the slot limit on Lady Bird Lake?

Great news, everybody! The esteemed horror podcast Cast Macabre has just posted its production of "Beneath the Red City." You may remember this story from its first appearance in Innsmouth Free Press where it won the best of issue award (because you wanted me to be a winner, thank you so much).

The best part of this production is the performance by Mr. Norm Sherman, the ruthless leader over at The Drabblecast. If there is anyone in the world who can put more crypto-Lovecraftian glee into the reading of a story, I don’t want to meet them. It would be too terrifying.

I’ve posted some of these photos on facebook already, and I know that many of you from up north are entirely uninterested in the pathetic version of the cold we have in Austin, but I took a couple of neat pictures from our recent cold-snap and "snow" event.

On Friday morning, I woke up early to a winter wonderland! It turned out to be about 85% slush with a dusting of snow, but that didn’t stop me from attempting to roll a snowball.

Which I then turned into a snowman and a heart-wrenching time lapse video.

My cat is not particularly cut out for the cold.

This is a waterscape playground at East Metropolitan Park. Presumably they left the water running at full volume throughout the weekend to prevent freezing.

For those of you who don’t live in Austin, you cannot fully appreciate the asinine depths of our morning public radio DJ, John Aielli. He’s been getting on the radio and rambling his fool head off since the 70s.

But now you can get the highlights of his epic fail DJing from the twitter account ShitJohnAielliSays.

Some of the recent highlights:

"Can you _imagine_ living in those castles? I guess they liked the showy space. But eh… they were cold. Nice to look at in the summer though!"

"That was Sharon Van Etten, a song called "Don’t Do It", but then you can… then you can’t… back and forth. (deep breath) Whatever."

"Just last night I made some spaghetti; helped it warm up the house. Well, for the first time ever I didn’t burn myself!"

I swear it is worth getting a twitter acount.