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Graham

BBC NEWS: Serenity named top sci-fi film

Serenity, a film by Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, has been voted the worlds best sci-fi movie in an SFX magazine poll of 3,000 people.

Just the way it should be, I believe. But then, I never really did like Star Wars.

Getting closer to the transition between WordPress and Django. Have webspace, will probably move some time in April. In the meantime there won't be much forthcoming in the way of posts, I'm afraid.

Ta ta for now.

Flu, which I had thought was just a cold but has now confirmed itself, yes, to indeed be flu, has fucked me up royal fashion and I'm now consigned to drinking Lemsip with a dash of Scotch (alas, I ran out of Teachers and had to use some of my Grouse, which is a shame as I rather like it and it's wasted on Lemsip), hoping that my eyes will stop burning and that I can keep warm enough to not have to get into a red hot bath again today (not that I have anything against red hot baths but they're not good for you, you know).

Anyway, what news? Not so much I guess. Writing: done some, good. Managed to finish a story for the Machine of Death collection, whose deadline is the 31st of March and for which I was hoping to maybe finish another piece, though at this rate I'll be lucky to get the first one edited and polished on time. It went onto the page surprisingly quickly, so you never know, it might actually be good. Needs a little tweaking though.

And I'll only be able to get round to tweaking it if I stop fiddling around with the new version of this site, which I've written using Django and which I'm in the process of prodding holes in. So far so nothing yet broken. We shall see. No promises as to a delivery date, but I do suggest that all you Pythonists (and istas) out there check Django out. It is, I think it's safe to say, the collective erogenous zones of just about every species of summer insect going, and I don't say that very often.

What else can I say through the paracetamol fumes wafting from my cup? Err... nothing much. Galactica finishes on Sunday (boo), but Who starts a week on Saturday. Huzzah.

Right. Bed again, I'm afraid, lest being upright overcome me and I just fall asleep where I sit.

I woke up yesterday morning to find myself, somewhat disconcertingly, a year older than I had been when I went to sleep.

I don't have much truck with birthdays to be honest. As a kid, of course, they were second only to Christmas in the times-of-the-year-to-be-excited-about stakes, but, being a kid, that was pretty much entirely about the presents. Like most people I've found that the importance of the gift-getting part of birthdays dwindles into insignificance some time after one's seventeenth birthday (when the gift of driving lessons seems to say to you that you're an adult, even though you're not).

So yesterday was a fairly ordinary but nevertheless pleasant day. I stayed home - it's a quasi-tradition of mine to take my birthday off - and managed to get nothing done in the morning through listening to England beat Australia by four wickets at the MCG. The afternoon was spent doing other things that required undivided attention, such as trying to work my way around a potential knotty plot problem with novel-the-second, which I finally wormed my way out of by simply hoping that the problem would go away, which it duly did.

And with that I was finally in a position to say that yes, this story is definitely a novel and that yes, I will definitely try to start writing it at the beginning of March, depending on how I go. I have one character firmly ensconced in my head and am trying to come to an understanding of sorts about the second, though she's giving me some trouble.

I'd forgotten how much fun this bit of writing was. It's not as much fun as the actual writing, which always feels rather indulgent, like I shouldn't be doing too much of it, but it's definitely a tasty aperitif that sets the creative juices flowing.

Anyway, can't stop. I have a bolognese to finish.

It's rather amazing how, after a day mostly without internet connectivity, 160kbps (rather than the usual 4Mbps or thereabouts) can seem like all the speed in the world.

Won't last, though.