Cobrabay

Last weekend I was in Bristol for Bristolcon. Bristolcon is a great one-day convention, and I'd say the best one day con currently running. It's greatest strength is it's programme, Bristolcon runs two full programme streams, and you are quite often having to chose between to excellent items. For this reason, and despite it theoretically being in commuting distance I travelled there on the Friday before so I could hit the first item at 10am, which was "Seriously Inventive Ways Of Killing People", ably moderated by anne Lyle, despite sounding like she was losing her voice, and running though to "GSV Farewell, My Friend", a tribute to Iain M. Banks at the end of the main programme. The highlight item for me was the GoH interview with Mark Buckingham. I was familiar with his work from Marvelman, Hellblazer and Fables, but I'd never seen him at a con before so I had no expectations, but he is a seriously superb guest. Entertaining, enthusiastic, and a great interviewee. If I see him on a con programme again I'll be tagging his items as definites.
Apart from making an early start on the con prorgramme, the other reason for heading to Bristol the day before was so that I had some time to do a bit of sight-seeing and shopping. Bristol has such an excellent selection of indy shops & markets and, for when sustenance is required, great cafes. I was fairly restrained this trip, only bought 3 CDs (well, 1 CD, 1 double CD, 1 CD boxset), a BluRay, and a couple of 2nd hand books. I wanted to give the con dealers room a fair chance the next day.

The main new bit of sight-seeing for me was accidental. I was heading back in the direction of the con hotel and discovered the street art on Nelson Street. This is part of the See No Evil Street Art Project.

I took a few photos ( Collapse )
I think I have taken more photos in Bristol than anywhere else this year. Back in August I was there for a house-warming, and spent some time Gromit hunting. I've a set of those I took on Flickr.

Since LJ seems to have had/is having another of its all too frequent periods of access problems. At some point I must look into adding some bling to this user, it looks quite desperately plain.

Household Management, a marvellous little story by Ellen Klages on Strange Horizons.
Only 2 days left on the Strange Horizons fund drive (see http://strangehorizons.com/fund_drives/2012/main.shtml), a site well worth supporting. They publish quality SF and Fantasy, available on-line for free, but paying their authors pro rates. They are not far off their initial funding target for the year, and I've just donated a few quid myself.

I really like my Kindle, it is robust, simple, a good basic dedicated e-reader, but I'm getting fed up of feeling like I'm dealing with a sleazy black-marketeer rather than a responsible retailer every time I buy an ebook from Amazon. What with the proprietary formats, tax avoidance, charging 20%/paying 3% VAT scam, squeezing the publishers, remote wiping books from Kindles, closing peoples accounts without explanation or appeal, the zombie Amazon storefronts , and so on, I'm thinking I should look for a less evil alternative.

With that in mind, the new Kobo Glo is looking like a nice alternative. This review on Engadget compares the hardware favourably to the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight and in a number of respects as good as or better than the similar Kindle Paperwhite. It has the advantage of being a tenner cheaper than the Kindle Paperwhite, and I already have a Kobo account from way back. My current Kindle (the recent non-touch basic model) is selling for about £50-60 on eBay so it could only cost £40-50 for the replacement, and while I can continue to read my Kindle books on my PC, phone & tablet with the relevant Kindle software, they could just as easily fall through my copy of Calibre and a few Python scripts and emerge as DRM-stripped EPUBs from the other end to be installed on a new e-reader.

Despite feeling perfectly fine on Sunday I now feel achey, headachey, have a forehead I could fry eggs on, and generally feel crap. Spent today working from home, though I have so few functioning brain cells my main contribution to productivity has been not going into the office and so not passing the lurgy on to my colleagues.
Bristolcon was excellent, a very good programme with very engaged and full audiences in almost every item, and very interesting programme participants. I traveled to Bristol on the Friday before and spent the afternoon shopping and sight-seeing. Found St.Nicholas Market almost by accident, and proceeded to buy a couple of second hand books, a couple of prints, chocolate, and had a late lunch of Pieminster chicken pie and mash. Thus fortified I headed to Rise records, one of my favorite record shows, with a brief stop in Fopp on the way, then across the road to Forbidden Planet. There was a definite Alphonse Mucha theme underlying the day. The chocolate was by Chocolate Amatller (70% Ghanaian) with a detail from an Art Nouveau picture on the pack with turned out to be from an Alphonse Mucha design done for the company in 1900 though I didn't know that until I googled the chocolate yesterday. Then I found some inexpensive A4 prints and bought one of a Mucha Bières de la Meuse poster, and the book bought in Fopp was a collection of Mucha art, which for only £6 was very reasonable. Rise was as good as ever despite having part of the shop closed for refurbishment, and as on my previous visit I ended up buying CDs I didn't even know existed but was very pleased to find. I was a lot more restrained in Forbidden Planet, but I knew I'd have a con dealers room to check out on the Saturday, so ended up getting just the latest issue of Fairest (the Fables spin-off with a new arc written by Lauren Beukes) and Hawkeye #3. Then back to Bristolcon where I dropped off my slot punch which was needed for the con badges, and helped carry a few boxes in from the car park, after which the bar called, and I ended up staying far too late, I think it was nearly 2am when I turned in, not so much driven by the lateness of the hour, but by having drunk too much Stella to be able to maintain a cogent argument about the influence of cyberpunk on Hollywood cinema.
The con itself ran very well. Even with just 2 streams I was nearly always having to choose between two interesting looking programme items. The dealers room was not large but I picked up some nice 2nd hand graphic novels, a couple of new indie comics and a book. One of the items I specifically want to mention was Anne Sudworth's GoH talk. That was really fascinating, she is not only interesting and charming, it was a real insight in to how she does her art. As she is also a guest at next year's Eastercon that will be an opportunity for people to see something they missed by not going to Bristolcon.
I didn't stay Saturday night, but left right after the closing ceremony, and came home a lot more heavily laden than I had set off.

Looks like Wokingham was a lot more Sci-Fi in 1962 than when I moved here a few years ago. This Pathe newsreel clip from 1962 visits a Space Age Hairdressers in Wokingham, Berkshire. The surprising thing is that the place shown is still a hairdressers, though with a different name and owner, see it here on Google Street View http://goo.gl/maps/bMWyC
There is a silent out-takes reel with a lot more views around the town on the British Pathe web site, http://www.britishpathe.com/video/out-takes-cuts-from-cp-405-reel-1-of-2-window, the Wokingham scenes are from 49 secs to 6 min 37 secs.
HT for link via Gavin Rothery's blog http://www.gavinrothery.com/my-blog/

To peteyoung and purplecthulhu. Have a great day!

Just a couple of minutes walk from the Chicon 7 hotel there is a great Indian restaurant just perfect to be filled up with hungry fans. We ate there last night, having had their Khyber Snacks platter of a selection of their various appetisers, for entrees Saag Gosht and Chicken Tikka, with their bread selection, also for two, but easily enough for three. The Lamb Saag was very rich, with lots of tender chunks of lamb, and the Chicken Tikka tender, moist and flavourful. By having the bread sampler we got to try at least three of the breads, and all were excellent. For two courses each, plus breads and drinks (they do a lovely lassi) we paid $30 a head including tip, and well worth it. Lunch times they offer a buffet which I would expect to work out cheaper.

To find the Khyber Pass head to the East side of the street level floor of the East Tower of the Chicon 7 hotel, go down the stairs into the Illinois Center, you will see a sign for the Khyber Pass Indian Restaurant. It is around the corner on the left. They also do carry out. See also www.khyberpassrestaurant.com

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Sad news.

Happy Birthday to del_c and jamesb. Have a great day guys!