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Matthew Claxton Profile picture
Matthew Claxton
@ouranosaurus
Second-rate SFF writer. Reporter. He/him. Irregular newsletter about sci-fi at https://t.co/reMoXoTBsC
Jul 10, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Pirating books and pretending it's some kind of liberatory act is roughly the same as doing a dine & dash at a nice restaurant and thinking you're sticking it to "the man," when actually the waitress will get the cost of your meal docked from her pay. Do you want to know the single way you can make books cheaper/free for people right now?

Call your local municipal/regional politicians and tell them you are a single-issue voter and that issue is LIBRARIES.
Jul 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Me, sweating: So there's this, this guy? I dunno, he's a detective. Also, it's the future. Anyway, someone murders a robot. *sweating intensifies* Did I mention the robots? Those are important. His mom is a nanobot swarm now? The detective, not the robot's mom. Fuck, I dunno. Creating a contest where authors have to publicly pitch their ideas is definitely going to divide authors into two groups, and it's not going to be "Good writers" and "Less good writers."
Feb 11, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Good thread on the Freeman On The Land roots of a lot of the weird beliefs/behaviour of many of the Ottawa protesters, mentions seminal Canadian case Meads vs Meads.

One thing it doesn't flatly say is that these beliefs ≠ simply not liking govt. Lots of people on right, left, even center dislike either current govt or want to replace it with some other system entirely, i.e. libertarians, anarchists etc.

Freeman, or other followers of OPCA (organized pseudolegal commercial arguments, per the Canadian courts)…
Feb 9, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Anyway, here's a little bit of what it's like to be a reporter over the last couple of years. I mostly only catch the edges of this – the contempt from Facebook comments, the accusations that we're on the take, the casual drive-by claims that I'm a liar.

A lot of my colleagues get it worse than I do by miles.
Sep 15, 2020 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
I have written/deleted like waaaaaay too many cynical tweets today, so let's talk about something that's really important: How Star Trek: Voyager could have been really, really good. 1/ Cards on the table: I am a DS9 guy. DS9ers and Voyergerites are natural enemies. Sometimes for old times sake we pick up our rhetorical broken pool cues and smack each other around in the piss-stained back alley that is the internet. 2/
Aug 30, 2020 • 26 tweets • 4 min read
Just started watching the Little Nemo movie, and pausing to note that the script/story credits include Chris Columbus, Moebius, and Ray Bradbury.

WHAT?!? And Brian Froud involved in the design. Sure. Why not.

How was Jodorowsky not involved in this too?
Aug 21, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Been thinking a lot about Stephen Pinker and his fellow "Things are getting better all the time!" cheerleaders.

*glances around at everything*

We all agree they deserve to wear an "I'M A DIPSHIT" sign in the public square for a day or so, right? The basic flaw with their thinking wasn't their analysis that SOME things were getting better and better.

It's true, for decades levels of violence and poverty were falling around the world. In general, things were getting better.

But that's obviously not the whole story.
Aug 19, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Minor mystery here for fans of @LegionFX: There's an auction of TV props coming up here in B.C. that includes this item: Image @LegionFX Almost everything else displayed on the website obviously comes from Project Bluebook, which also filmed around the Vancouver area and was cancelled a while back. There's alien heads and 1950s-era costumes and what have you.
Aug 13, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
After the wombats evolve into the next dominant intelligent species, their archaeologists are going to have some WILD digs, I tell you. "Whatcha got this time?"

"Layer of microplastic beads, asphalt, asphalt, microplastics again, some kind of giant drill."

"What's in the top layer?"

"The usual, whoooole bunch of homo sapiens bones."

"It's why we call it the YOLOlithic."
Aug 4, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I got soooooo many pics. Thread starts here:
https://t.co/q8BvDbAwOE
Aug 4, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
GUYS! #DinosaurAuction Image Image
Aug 1, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
As someone who became an SF fan and writer largely because I encountered old Heinlein juveniles when I was about 9 or 10 years old, I firmly and completely agree with this. (I was born in 1978. I encountered Heinlein riiiight around the time he passed away. I might be The Last Heinlein-Created Fan.)
Aug 1, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The Hugos may be fan-voted, but is there any rule against the award show being professionalized? Is there any reason it has to be run like an ad hoc "Let's put the show on in a barn!" presentation? By contrast, I've attended the BCYCNAs multiple times. That's the British Columbia and Yukon Community Newspaper Awards.

Yeah, an award for local journalism in one (1) province and one (1) territory in western Canada.

And it's waaaaaay more professional.
Jul 29, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Keep thinking about this and wondering why there aren't more gatherings for pro and neo-pro SFF writers that are DISTINCT from fan cons and actually "professional," i.e. the opposite of barcon?

Did the Nebulas have a track like this, or am I misremembering? Just to lay this all out there: I haaaaaate networking. I hate being told to network. I hate it when people say to "just make friends in the community" and networking will sort of happen on its own.
Jul 26, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
“I do this because I can’t pay rent.” vancouversun.com/news/rv-commun… It's far from the ONLY reason there's a homelessness crisis in Metro Vancouver, but one reason is the deployment of government as a tool of gentrification.

Why can't you live in a motor home? Because it's against the bylaws! Why? Because it's unsightly and annoying!
Jul 18, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Woke up today thinking again about "The Passing of the Western," a short story by Howard Waldrop.

Some days, I despair of ever being a good writer, because I will never create anything that good/weird as long as I live.

1/ "The Passing of the Western" is about an alternate history of the western settlement of the U.S.

No, wait…

2/
Jul 16, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Some of us were on a first-name basis with the children's librarian from the time we were seven. Related story – when I was in my 20s, I checked out tons of graphic novels from my local library.

There were one or two local jackasses who were tearing/cutting out whole pages from a significant number of books.
Jul 8, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Going to write a space opera set in the year 3000 and have a scene where characters play what's recognizably a tabletop RPG with the reverence we reserve for chess or go. "These character sheet templates were illuminated by monks in the scriptorium on Althor VII."
Jun 24, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Thinking a lot (re: Foundation TV hype) about how in science fiction we conflate "important" with "good."

Foundation Trilogy? Interesting central idea. Formative in the genre AT THAT TIME. But it's just not well written. It's just… not defensible as that kind of "classic." Honestly, how embarrassing for a forward-looking genre like SF would it be if a book series cobbled together from hastily-written pulp novellas was one of the BEST THINGS IN SCI-FI EVAAAAAARR????

It'd be pretty bad if we hadn't advanced in 75 years?
Jun 10, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Metro Vancouver homeless in 2011: 2,650

2017, last year for which full numbers available: 3,605

Pretty sure we could have housed all those people for less than $1.1 billion. In 2005, homelessness was at 2,174.

The numbers accelerated sharply through the mid-2010s, pretty much in lockstep with a huge increase in property prices that saw massive numbers of renovictions and the destruction of a huge amount…
Jun 9, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
When Terry Pratchett died, I hadn't yet read all the Discworld books. None of the Tiffany Aching series.

And I just… didn't want to read them all then. I didn't want Discworld to be over, not yet.

1/4 I decided I'd save them, for when I needed them. Books like Small Gods and Lords and Ladies and Guards! Guards! had been so formative and I could re-read my copies over and over and still laugh and sometimes tear up (see: end of Small Gods.

2/4