Undead Backbrain

The contest is closed now, of course, as Guilala has been revealed as Kaiju Search-Robot Avery’s weirdness of choice. We seem to have two potential winners, Mike Hawkins and Tom R. VanSlambrouck, who both picked the Space Chicken.

When I get a chance I’ll draw a name at random to be the final winner. Hey, maybe I’ll give both a prize!

Mike and Tom, please contact me by email to the address provided on the About This Site page in the menu on the right.

Our long-running series of articles on the Top 20 Craziest Kaiju — with titles chosen by Kaiju Search-Robot Avery — is about to end. This time tomorrow I’ll be posting Avery’s Number One choice.

So you have approximately 24 hours to submit your guess at Avery’s Number One Craziest Kaiju and potentially win a great prize.

See here for the details.

With the chance of winning a unique, artist-signed art poster featuring Todd Tennant’s great King Komodo comic kaiju, what have you got to lose?

Leave your choice as a comment to the competition announcement page.

24 hours from… now! Go for it!

I’ve just updated and perpetrated a major upgrade on my list of Giant Monster films. You can check it out anytime via the links to the right on the Backbrain main page — or here.

Having reason to believe that the type-out-the-code type spam filter I had running was in fact proving a problem for potential commenters, I’ve once again deactivated it. I’ve re-activated a different spam filter. Let’s see if that works.

We returned from attending the 2007 World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs NY on Sunday — via London — and it’s taken a few days to recover from all that chaotic shuffling between zones, dodging temporal glitches, being swallowed by daylight saving sinkholes, and generally feeling as though I’d been removed from the time-space continuum for an indefinite period then shoved back in again once jetlag had fried my brain.

I plan to write little about WFC itself — plenty of others have done that — but should say that it was great to be part of the vociferous Aussie contingent as organised by Garth Nix, Jonathan Strahan, Trevor Stafford and Deb Biancotti and to meet assorted luminaries of the field: publishers, editors, agents and writers. I got to know a few people better, missed talking to some I’d wanted to talk to, ate, drank, bought books and DVDs, made some useful contacts and set up one or two possibilities.

One thing I have to write about is our involvement in a Duran Duran concert on Broadway, fulfilling one of my partner Cat Sparks’ dreams. Later.

Another is to mention the most bizarre event of the trip. Picture the scene: Cat Sparks, Alisa Krasnostein and myself in New York, looking for somewhere to eat. I’ve been on a wheat-free diet, so it hasn’t been easy. “I’d like some decent sushi!” I declare. Cat says, “Well, I want a pizza.” As for Alisa, she rather fancies something kosher. “What we need,” says Cat, jokingly, “is a Jewish pizza and sushi restaurant.” Not very likely. Yet… I kid you not … less than a block further on we stumble across something called Jerusalem 2 Pizza. There’s a big sign in the window: FRESH SUSHI NOW AVAILABLE. We go in. Sure enough, it’s a kosher pizza joint with a new sushi bar area at the back.

Only in New York! Cat began to wonder if it was some sort of sign from God, telling her to convert to Judaism.

After that, we went to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square. Now, WFC was over and much to my regret I hadn’t been able to really chat with guest Kim Newman. Every time I tried we were interrupted by someone and in the end it just didn’t happen much beyond “Hi! Love your work!”

So I load up with horror DVDs and am looking for somewhere to pay for them, when who do we run into but … Kim Newman, also loaded up with DVDs. So we got to chat after all.

Administrative note: sorry, folks, but the level of spam has increased, so I’ve re-instated the anti-spam software offered by my provider. This means you’ll have to type in a displayed code each time you send a comment. However, I’m not confident that this action won’t cause trouble of its own, so if you find you’re not getting through, please email me and let me know. Use the email address that appears at the bottom of the page here.

And it hasn’t ended yet!

Sorry, I haven’t been able to do much here or on my website over the past week, but things have been hectic, thwart and generally appalling. Work is keeping me totally pre-occupied — with suddenly imposed deadlines and an impossible amount of material to find and coordinate for the RQF. If you know what that is, you’ll understand; if you don’t, believe me, you don’t want to know.

But on top of that I’ve been working on the edit of Daikaiju! 3: Giant Monsters vs the World, the CRC of which has to be at the printers next week to make sure we have copies for Conflux. Parts of it are running very late and I’m being forced to ask for a lot of goodwill from contributors — goodwill which they’ve been willing to give… so far.

At the same time, I’m coordinating a mini-film festival for Conflux, and for various bureaucratic reasons, I suddenly need to do a whole lot of paperwork for the Australian Film and TV Classification Board so that we’ll be allowed to show the films, as non-controversial as they may be. I’ll post about the program later. There’s some excellent work, including a couple of zombie films, a new Australian ghost flick and much else besides!

To make matters worse, there’s been some bad news, health-wise, regarding a friend.

Anyway, bear with me and I’ll soon have good news (hopefully) about Daikaiju! 3 and lots of great info about the Conflux film festival — including reviews and interviews with assorted filmmakers. Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s an interview I did a few weeks ago with the producer/writer of a new SF film, First World, which will be screened at the convention.

Right from the inception of Undead Backbrain, I’d been having trouble with the comment function. It seemed to be treating many legit messages as spam, sometimes burying comments so deep in the cyber-dump, I couldn’t bring them back from the dead. Then a few people whose messages hadn’t even made it through to the spam-filter informed me by email that the Backbrain wouldn’t accept their comments at all. The type-the-code function in particular was problematic. Well, I fiddled and now things seem to be working.

So comment to your black heart’s delight, Backbrain Invaders! Your messages will only be censored if you’re a spammer — or intolerably obnoxious.

Note: Sometimes there will be a delay as I have retained the manual approval of messages (for fear of being inundated by spam), but the delay shouldn’t be too long. If your comment doesn’t appear after a day or so, feel free to email me. (If you don’t know my email address, go to my website and find it.)

One other thing: if you’re receiving my posts via LJ syndication and wish to reply to one of them, can you please do so by going to the actual site? If you reply through LJ, your comment won’t come up on the blog, I won’t receive notice of it, and I will only see it if I remember to check the LJ feed.

Today I entered the evil realms of blogdom, where many terrors lurk and unsuspecting innocents disappear, never to be heard from again. My plan is to make this site a place where I post News, Idle Thoughts and Notice of Additions to my main site. Blog technology will, I hope, make the process easier.

It’s probably a good moment to remind anyone who sees this to rush out and grab yourself a copy of Doctor Who Short Trips 20: Destination Prague, which includes not only my Sixth Doctor and Peri story “Gold and Black Ooze” but a wealth of other excellent tales by the likes of fellow Aussies Sean Williams, Stephen Dedman, Lee Battersby and many others. The anthology, which was edited by Steven Savile, is reputed to be one of the best that the official Big Finish series has produced — and from what I’ve read of it non-Whoites have a pretty good chance of enjoying it nearly as much as the Who faithful. So why wait? Go to your nearest online bookstore and order it now!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the cover: