Your Sunday morning pimpage:
-Fellow WIBite Keyan Bowes has a story up at Cabinet des Fees, “Nor Yet Feed the Swine”, a creepy take on the Curlylocks nursery rhyme. Bet you’ll never see strawberries the same way after reading it…

-Fellow VDer Stephen Gaskell‘s “Aequestria” is in the current issue of Interzone: a neat SF take on colonisation, with a nice twist at the end (and gorgeous, full-colour artwork by Jim Burns).

-And, with some delay because I hadn’t got around to reading it until recently, Angela Slatter‘s “The Chrysanthemum Bride” in Fantasy Magazine, a horror story set in Ancient China, about a vain woman taken to be the bride of the Emperor. You know it’s going to end badly and suspect some of the ending, but you still can’t stop until the end…

(somewhat spoilerish)

So… attempted to watch Twilight yesterday with the BF, in English without subtitles. Gave it up after it became clear the BF was not following the English but could predict how it was all going nevertheless (a particularly hilarious remark was “are you sure Bella’s not a vampire already? I mean, pale skin, Gothic makeup, those kind of all add up, don’t they?” I had to explain the Twilight theory to him, which made him roll his eyes).

Settled instead for The Thirteenth Floor, a movie about guys who run a simulation of the real world and make an extraordinary discovery. Divergent opinions on this one. The BF liked it; I wasn’t so keen. I was ahead of the major plot points by 20-30 minutes. And I’m not prone to rewriting stuff ordinarily, but I thought my first hypothesis about the nature of the world was much more fun than what the movie turned out to be about: the Russian doll’s game of a simulation within a simulation wasn’t nearly as interesting as my theory that the simulation was bleeding into the real world and making everyone act crazy. The “oh, we all live in a simulation ourselves” was… lacking subtlety, I guess?

Still–way better than Twilight (yes, I know. Not hard).