Kate Worley, RIP

She passed away this weekend (for those not familiar with her, she was the writer of Omaha The Cat Dancer, and had been fighting cancer for a while now.

Suggestion

If you work in a cube farm and you do not possess an Indoor Voice, please chop your fucking vocal cords off for the good of the rest of us.

Thanks,

yendi

(seriously, there are people here who are capable of making it impossible to get work done while wearing headphones and listening to Bad Religion)

A rerun

shadesong is asking folks to help write the worst erotica ever. I've already suggested that the publication of Laurell "K." Hamilton's Narcissus in Chains has raised the bar impossibly high for bad erotica, but folks are trying their hardest (yeah, yeah) in that thread.

Which reminded me of one of my own favorite works, my MST3K of the the worst "erotica" I've ever encountered (worse than LKH, even). It's online here for now, and will probably move to a new home some time in the future.

Background: The hack writer of this piece showed up on a mailing list that a bunch of us used to belong to, and basically posted nothing but crap until he got sick of being ignored and left in a huff. I made the mistake of visiting his website, and saw that he wrote the worst fairy porn ever (which is pretty much redundant to begin with). And I just couldn't resist writing nasty things about it. So here it is. Apologies for folks who have seen this before (I post a link about once a year).

Warning: This is a damned long read (and shows up funny on some browsers, although it looks just peachy on Safari and OSX). All the characters are copyright Best Brains, Inc, except for those that are copyright some wannabe goth porn writer.

The Chronicles of Riddick.

I went to a screening of this last night (along with jet_li_wannabe and lj-less Tracy).

Worst. 1988 Olympic Documentary. Evar.

(okay, had to get it out of the way).

Actually, it was a surprisingly fun movie. Not brilliant, but a much better sci-fi yarn than I've seen in a long while (possibly going back to Pitch Black, although I may be forgetting a movie or two), certainly better than either of the films that Lucas has released since then (if less epic).

Which isn't to oversell it. It's still got cliches, some bad overacting (and underacting, mostly on Vin Diesel's part), and mediocre fight choreography. Plus a mad religion that converts you by sticking pins in your neck, which convert you until it's conveniently time to unconvert. And Judy Dench as a weird elemental.

But hey, it's got Angel's Gwen Raiden (wearing much less leather, alas), as well as Keith David (one of my all-time favorite b-movie actors). And Thandie Newton (who used to have a career, until that Jonathan Demme bastard got through with her). And Caesar from Xena (he was also in some movie that Peter Jackson was involved with). And lots of fun action sequences, with some nice twists on the traditional cliches.

If you liked, say, Soldier, you'll like this one. Worth catching as a matinee or on video.