New fiction by Debi Linton (a story about lesbians who kill vampires) and Richard Flowers (a 10,000 word SF story).
Reprint fiction by Simon Bucher-Jones (as part of the promotion for something I can’t talk about yet, but which I’m excited by).
*TWO* articles by David Allison
Holly Matthies on rugby
Possible articles on First Past The Post And The English Civil War (by Gavin Robinson) and David Bowie (by Gavin Burrows) (both of those time-dependent – both are very busy men, with other deadlines around the same time)
A comic strip by Prankster
And Bill Ritchie has suggested several things as well.

I’m still hoping to hear back from some of the other people who’ve contributed to PEP! 1 and 2, and I’m going to ask a few other people, but hopefully that should whet people’s appetites…

I’ll be typesetting next week, so expect a PDF by the end of next week, and print copies of both issues shortly thereafter

Simply, my Scribus problems escalated – at some point a system update replaced a load of my fonts with similarly-named ones, and confused it enough that I didn’t just have to redo the last 15 pages and add in a missed line from Plok’s article, but had to redo the lot – and not only redo it, but try to redo it so it still looked more-or-less like what I’d done the first time. I should be getting – soonish – the proof copy though. This *WON’T* happen with PEP! 2, so expect the print copy of that not long after the print copy of PEP! 1…

Anyway, links…

Millennium gives a very thorough look at the Lib Dem Conference, while Jennie, who isn’t named Sue no matter what her latest subtitle thinks, has the first in a series of posts on why you should vote Lib Dem.

(I’ve actually taken two weeks off in April/May – a week for sleep and reading, to try to overcome my current exhaustion, and a week for non-stop pre-election campaigning for any cause I can find – Lib Dem, No2ID, Hope Not Hate, whatever…)

Double Articulation is back, and Jim has reposted this, on Steve Gerber’s Thing…

George Monbiot thinks if we name more plants and animals, we might think twice about making them go extinct.

James Graham absolutely eviscerates a recent Fabian leaflet over on the Social Liberal Forum.

LessWrong have a very good piece on ‘undiscriminating skepticism‘ – which sums up a lot of my problems with a lot of the darlings of the ‘new atheism’ very well.

And some of Ronald Searle’s drawings as a court artist in the trials of John Bodkin Adams and Adolf Eichmann.

A short list of what’s been proposed for the issue – bear in mind that *NONE* of this is confirmed yet, life gets in the way, people’s plans change etc…

Alix Mortimer on ‘the neutering of political personalities’
David ‘Vibrational Match’ Allison, with what promises to be another standout piece, on “80s Transformers comics, Morrison’s Zoids, various Transformers and Pixar movies, All Star Superman, Joe the Barbarian, maybe Oh Fuck I’m 40 [the Richard Herring show]” and *possibly* a second piece, on ” The Prisoner, Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle and Prisoner comics, Morrison ‘s Mister Miracle, and Seven Soldiers #1.” if he has time to write both (unlikely, but here’s hoping…)
Debi ‘Innerbrat’ Linton on prehistoric animals that sound like band names
Holly on The Clangers and rugby.
Gavin Robinson on ” how gender ideology is a lie that makes itself true.”
Richard “Millennium’s Daddy Richard” Flowers on Babylon 5 and/or Zoids
A comic by Wesley Osam on band names that sound like prehistoric monsters.

Along with possible contributions by Gavin Burrows, Alex Wilcock and Bill ‘Pillock’ Ritchie.

I’ll be contributing at least three, possibly four bits – an article on Cerebus, one on the Beach Boys’ Smile, and possibly one on Seven Soldiers. I’ll also be doing introductions to everything, in the form of a surrealist play entitled “Rassilon And Omega Are Dead (Or, Waiting For The Other)”.

PEP! 2 – the magazine for people interested in interesting stuff – will be out in May…

I’m uploading an unproofed version, which will be freely available for download to anyone who wants to read it, In two days I will upload a revised version, with any changes the authors want to make after seeing the completed work, to Magcloud, and in two weeks you’ll be able to buy a paper copy.

The contents are:

The Function Of The Filth by David Allison
I Love LA by Andrew Hickey
Sick With The Fear by Bill Ritchie
Be Extreme by Gavin Robinson
Why Gavin Is Right (But Also Wrong) by Andrew Hickey
A Fractal History Of The Origins Of The Time War by Richard Dominic Flowers and Alex Wilcock
Nine Carols And Lessons For Godless People by Andrew Hickey
We Have The Music by Holly Matthies
Why You Should Vote Liberal Democrat by Andrew Hickey
Hopelessly Panglossian by Holly Matthies
What The Well-Dressed Sidekick Is Wearing by Bill Ritchie
Scott Walker Is God by Sean Witzke
A Discourse On The Minor Works Of Grant Morrison, With Reference To His Adaptations Of Television Series Originally Created By Mr Sydney Newman by Andrew Hickey
The Prismatic Age by Botswana Beast

You should read it if you’re interested in Grant Morrison, Doctor Who, cranky genius musicians from the 60s, Radio 4, the possibility or otherwise of political progress, The Avengers, the effect of cultural messaging on health, superhero comics, and my stupid bad jokes filling in columns where we run out of text.

If you’re *not* interested in any of those things, then I wouldn’t bother with this blog either, if I were you…

History is, to fundamentally disagree with Alan Bennett, very much not “just one thing after another”; it is a method of organising events into patterns and as such is at least as dependent on the person doing the organising as it is on the actual events.

Everything is fragments, he is never talking about what we think he’s talking about. In 30TH CENTURY MAN, he mentions that the songs aren’t meant to be taken too literally and that he finds an idea thats usually political and expands out to a more personal singular notion. Walker is an existentialist in a way that few are – he makes every aspect of life into a challenge of the self.

Was Morrison satirising stories like Attack Of The Cybermen and Warriors Of The Deep? I don’t know. But I do know that had someone suggested a ‘the Voord become Cybermen on Planet 14′ story to the production office at that time, they would probably have exploded with delight.

It’s not as if I’m unaware that proliferation was an occasional standby in days of yore; everyone met their antimatter opposites at one point and another, but it wasn’t at all a commonplace device – too silly, unrealistic – of the 1980’s when everything was singular, contemporary and probably really quite miserable, standing about moodily in the rain.

Because Steed was older, after all; and therefore — follow close, because it gets a bit dubious here — he came from a younger age. Something like an ultracompetent, super-precocious child, a Merlinic brat — the final evolutionary flower of the invisible and decaying garden of Establishment, he’s a trickster and a psychopomp, but it’s not his job to experience the outside world, only to be brilliant in his way. That is to say: brilliant and static. Because Steed is everything he is, precisely because he’s a finished, final, perfectly refined product…and it’s Emma’s job to experience. She’s the hero. She’s the knight in shining armour, here; and Steed is only her…

I like sports not for the hooligans or the bullying PE teachers who foist them upon us at impressionable ages but for the stories. I will forever be devoted to the poetry of baseball, however slim it may be in this age of steriods and soulless ballparks with corporate sponsors. I’m even willing to admit there’s something worthy in the action-movie nature of handegg, though neither is my favorite I can see they perform a vital service in our society.

We fought against the recent criminalisation of ‘extreme pornography’ not because we as a party find that sort of thing of interest (though that law casts a wider net than you may imagine. I’m as vanilla as they come, but I own a copy of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s comic Lost Girls, which may well fall under that law. First they came for the masturbators…) – most of us find that kind of porn fairly icky – but because finding something a bit icky is not actually a good reason to criminalise it.

Try to envision a version of Captain Scarlet where the good Captain spent half of his time convinced that he was really Tam Shankley, a bedraggled bachelor from East Kilbride. Imagine if Tam spent whole episodes crying and wanking himself off with his crude puppet fingers — picture that and you’ve got some idea of how reading The Filth will make you feel.

And he is frail in his good suit, but it’s hard to believe — perhaps because I’m about a third his age — that he can really be that old. There’s a twinkle in his eye, Andrew tells me (if I’m too far away to see hats, I’m definitely too far away to see this), and there are young women hooting and hollering (I heard some filthy things during “I’m Your Man”! if I were of a weaker constitution it would’ve fair put me off my Aero Bubbles).

At the risk of paraphrasing Douglas Adams: it’s possible that this has already happened: that in fact the Great Houses have “won” a previous iteration of the Time War and replaced their predecessors. Or, more bluntly, the enemy of the Time Lords – whoever that may have been supposed to be, or whoever it may turn out to be, i.e. the Daleks – wins and history re-writes itself around them so that they become the Great Houses. And equally, the enemy of the Great Houses is the Time Lords.

But I think it says something that the two most entertaining and interesting performers of the night – and the two who looked happiest, too – were Moore the pagan and Ball the climate denier. Certainly were I picking ‘teams’, I’d want them on any team I could get them on. Those who actually support rational decision making, and aren’t just interested in picking ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, should be trying to include rather than exclude these people.

Vote Labour or Vote Tory: all other options have been deemed non-mutual, incompatible with life as we know it! And may the gods help you if you want to make any bigger changes – under the current system, your proposals cannot be countenanced!

I also like the horror-film references that turn up in many of the lyrics (she gets a lot of points for referencing Lon Chaney in the first verse of the first song, though loses some when the mentions of werewolves make it clear that it’s the inferior Chaney Jr she’s talking about).

“Don’t have any of the symptoms of diabetes? BE AWARE THAT IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT INDICATORS OF UNDIAGNOSED DIABETES.”

Making women more free and making women more equal to men are clearly not mutually exclusive. They can hardly be separated. What feminists want to take away from men is not freedom but undeserved privilege. It should also be obvious that groups with undeserved privileges have a vested interest in keeping freedom and equality opposed to each other. If freedom and equality are opposite extremes, and if extremism is bad and moderation is good, then it follows that freedom and equality always have to compromise with each other. This means that neither freedom nor equality can ever be attained.

The urge to question – “what does this song mean? what is this about?” is a wrong step – the better question is always what does this song make me feel? All of Tilt is meant to make your chest get tight and your head feel weightless, to try and sing along with Walker and be overtaken. To fixate on minor sonic manipulations and ignore the big picture.

What it boils down to, though, is that you make an assumption – say, that everything floats. You then test it, by for example letting go of a lead weight. When it lands on your foot and breaks your toe, that’s new data. You then revise your assumption, possibly to ‘most things float, but lead weights fall and hurt your foot’. If you keep re-testing your assumption, and revising it when things go wrong, you’ll eventually get a model of reality that fits all your data.

It’s all evidence that there is one big story. We just can’t see it: it’s too big. We don’t have the perceptions to see all of our own history properly. Likewise we cannot see all of the history of the Time War. All we can see is the way that the stories we do understand are warped and reflected around it.

Which also offers a particular sort of newness, you see: because in the ability to go and enjoy brand-new episodes in a narrative, and interactions among a set of characters, that were all long since put to a hasty death…is that most fabulous thing, the ability to not only re-have one’s cake, but re-eat it too. To pick up where one left off, where one fundamentally cannot pick up where one left off…

Doo dah dum dum, dah doo dum dah.

(Quotes from myself, Bill Ritchie, Holly Matthies, Gavin Robinson, Sean Witzke, Richard Dominic Flowers with Alex Wilcock, Bot’swana Beast, David Allison)

PEP! Issue 1

(Part of the problem I’m having with this is getting all the good material into few enough pages while leaving it readable and well-designed. At the moment it’ll require charging $16 for the paper copy, which would be slightly too much…)

I’ll be writing linktext throughout, and I’ll be doing a comics piece and a music piece, but I’ll write these after everything else is in place, to try to provide a throughline for the magazine.

Incidentally, if anyone has any visual art they’d like to submit (Prankster, I know you do comics – fancy doing a one-page strip or something?) I’d be very grateful…

Politics
Be Extreme by Gavin Robinson (an argument for extremism)
‘something about liberalism’ by Alex Wilcock
Sick With The Fear by Bill Ritchie (about how pervasive cultural messages cause anxiety)

Comics
The Function Of The Filth by David Allison (“A sort of Ultimate Filth Essay, built around an almost feminist critique of Morrison’s use of pornography and biology as metaphors for ‘persistant, nagging soul-ache’. “)
The Prismatic Age by Duncan Falconer (previously published at Mindless Ones)

TV
‘Something About The Avengers’ by Bill Ritchie
‘Possibly Something About The Avengers’ by Alex Wilcock
‘A Fractal History Of The Origins Of The Time War’ by Millennium’s Daddy Richard (not sure if he’s wanting this under his own name or as Millennium yet)

Music
Pure Pop For Then People by myself – an article on the LA Powerpop music of the last decade or so
Scott Walker Is God by Sean Witzke
We’re Ugly But We Have The Music by Holly Matthies

Sport
No Joy In Stretford by Holly Matthies

Incidentally, I’m well aware that the list of contributors is heavily skewed towards men, and this is something I want to fix in future issues. Unfortunately, I did ask a few of my favourite female writers to contribute, but other than Holly they either didn’t reply or have too much else on to get anything done for this issue. Some have expressed an interest in writing for future issues though.

The magazine will run to about sixty pages – more than I’d anticipated, but I’ve just got so much good stuff to go into it it’s unbelievable – which means that the paper copy would normally cost about a frankly excessive $12 US. However, the POD site it’ll be done through is having a discount this month, so if you buy it between Xmas day (when it goes on sale) and Jan 1st, you’ll get it for a more reasonable $8 (prices will vary depending on page count).

We’ll be making it free as a pdf shortly afterwards, and we’ll be making little or no money from the actual magazine (I’m expecting one cent US per page of text per copy sold to be what gets to the writers, if anything ever does) but it’ll be a nice item to have, so if you can afford it, buy a copy…

For about a month now I’ve been planning a new colour glossy POD magazine, which I will be editing, called PEP! The first issue will, all being well, come out before Xmas, and will be a mixture of political comment, short fiction, entertainment reviews and science journalism – a similar mix of content to what you find on this site, but by a variety of writers. There was also going to be a comics section, and I actually asked the Mindless Ones to contribute to this, but since they’re doing their own thing my comics posts will probably stay on here rather than competing with their ‘zine.

Content is far from finalised, obviously, but provisional contributors to the first issue include Pillock, Alex Wilcock, Millennium Elephant, Holly, Sean Witzke and Debi Linton, as well as myself, and possible subjects include a science column, a piece on Margaret Atwood, a piece on The Waltons (possibly the same as the previous piece) and a discussion of Doctor Who continuity. Issue 1 should be out around Christmas, and will be 40 pages for $8.40 in print (I’ll probably release a free PDF version a month or so later).

In other news, my temporary writer’s block has gone, and so I’m about to start a second interlinked series of posts, a la my Hyperposts. A preliminary schedule for next week’s posting is:
Tomorrow – DARKSEID! (Authority post 1 – at the request of Pillock)
Tuesday – linkblog only as off to see Richard Herring live
Wednesday – A Hard Day’s Night full review (getting back to my Beatles posts)
Thursday – Cerebus (Authority post 2)
Friday – Smile 2004 vs Smile 1967 (Authority post 3)
Saturday – And Another Thing… (which I’m going to write about without having read it – Authority post 4)