&quot;No, Not the Mind Probe!!?!&quot;

Oh look - it's you!

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Yes, it's me! ;D

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*waves!* Seems like ages since we last nattered!

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I know! I've been sort of lurking about but a combination of rl and apathy has meant I haven't really commented on much or written a whole lot. I hope things have been at least tolerable for you since last time, or if not at least that there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel... :)

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The boss came back a fortnight ago, so I've just had two weeks off (yesterday was my first official day back, in fact). AND I got him to agree to holiday pay!

So yes, thank you, I'm feeling a good deal better after two weeks of DVD-watching, BF-audio-listening and a good bit of writing, too!

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Excellent! Don't let him take you for a ride now. I'm glad to hear that you used the time productively. :)

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Heh, thanks.

And I'll try not to let him take me for a ride. It's feeling really weird, not being in charge any more - I keep wanting to have a go at him for not having done X or Y!

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XD - and I bet he doesn't listen to advice either...

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No, he really doesn't!

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Yes, I'd sort of formed that impression of him from some of your lj posts... :)

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*nods*

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pitry.livejournal.com

Th only thing they missed is that the titles are not alliterative!

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An extreme example of a missed opportunity if ever I encountered one! :D

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librarylover82.livejournal.com

Some of mine were alliterative, so it is an option in there.

One I got was The Avatar Deception. I think many people online are guilty of that one! It made me think of "Do You Want to Date My Avatar" by the cast of The Guild.

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Yes, that goes on a lot on the internets! ;D It could also be the sequel/horrible twist conclusion to the multi-billion grossing James Cameron spectacular, in which it turns out that the blue cat-people actually harbour a ravenous hunger for human flesh or something...although probably not.

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brewsternorth.livejournal.com

The Icarus Hijacking.

Which sounds like some jet-age nailbiter involving a shiny futuristic Concorde-like airliner.

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It does - I can kind of envisage the overblown cover art now... ;D

The one I liked best so far (as opposed to found funniest) was The Hades War, which sounds like some sort of grim 60s or 70s SF paperback with a picture of a guy with a spacesuit and a laser-rifle on the front...

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akashasheiress.livejournal.com

The Solomon Maneuver.

Some of these could be used to make up Doctor Who episodes/serials.

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brewsternorth.livejournal.com

Between this and settiai's Randomizer, you could make up some pretty cracky Doctor Who story-prompts, to be sure.

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Yeah, some of them do... All you'd really need would be to randomly add "...of Death" at the end of some of the others to make them Who-compliant as well ;D

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Sorry to but in, but LOL! Or, alternatively 'of Doom' or 'of Terror' (or Death of /Terror of) just to make it even more random.

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Attack of, Horror of, Revenge of all work pretty well too... ;D

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clocketpatch

The Peking Run

Hmm... sounds like an epic heist.

You doing okay on the other end of the Internet? I haven't seen you around for bit.

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Or a massive intercontinental road-race of some sort... O.o

I'm doing all right, you know? Just sort of, you know, life and stuff meaning I haven't been doing as much online as usual. And how are you? Keeping fine for you, I hope? :)

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The worst thing is, they're just so typical of that particular beast, I'm barely even amused. (Although isn't a Final Warning normally what you get from utilities after you haven't been paying your bills? Which, of course, makes for a slightly shorter and less dramatic novel...)

I got a list of five, and thought: Hmm, haven't I seen those around somewhere? :lol:

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When I say keeping me amused for a bit it was as much a case of "Aha - clicky button! Click it and it does stuff!" as any brilliance it might have produced. ;D The Final Warning is...not the best example, but I thought it'd make a suitably dramatic (or not!) subject line for this post... It might be a very short novel, as you say.

I do, as I said above, like The Hades War, because it just seems symptomatic to me not of cheap thrillers but of a certain type of slightly distressed SF paperback my aunty used to buy me from car boot sales for about a penny each when I was a nipper. You know, with the back cover falling off and as said a picture of some slightly disreputable-looking bloke in a spacesuit or a spaceship (with fins!) hanging in the starry void. And the thing is, some of these books as it turned out when I learned more about SF were acknowlegded classics by Writers of Note, but in the shoebox of moudly paperbacks all novels regardless of standing or quality were created equal. Frank Herbert and Joe Bloggs rubbing shoulders in some sort of spirit of secondhand egalitarianism. Or something.

Which, I'll admit, is a lot of associations to attach to one three-word randomly generated fake book title, but...well, I probably should go to bed now or something. ;D

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I have a sad feeling that I would manage a better novel about the final warning letter for an unpaid bill than for a thriller... :lol:

The Hades War does sound cool. I know exactly the type of book you mean, although the title conjures up more one of those slight political fantasy reworkings of GReek myth for me. Which shows that my sf reading period was shorter than most of my other ones. Heh. That's cool - that's how it should be, I think. (Except the one time someone bought me a few second hand books when I was young, it was my Mum and I refused to read them for ages, because she was my Mujm, and obviously, she would have chosen rubbish books... Erm. Hmm. I was horrible to choose books for. :-D But I have the same kind of thing with old Penguin greenbacks. (Some of those not-much reprinted murder mysteries are wonderfully bizarre, like The Daffodil Affair which is a parody where a house and a horse get stolen.)

That's the fun, though, isn't it? (I like the idea above of getting a title from here, and a cast from the randomiser. That's quite cool.)

Edited Date: 2011-02-10 09:04 am (UTC)

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A novel about a final warning letter for a bill sounds more intriguing than it probably should, actually - there'd have to be some sort of twist though...

The beauty of those sort of SF novels of a certain age is that it quite probably would turn out to be some sort of recasting of Greek myth or something. ;D I don't know, I'm envisaging some planet called Hades, probably because it's the kind of place nobody would visit unless they were some sort of down-at-heel space-prospector desperate for that lucky strike. And then there's a war there. Or something...

The thing that strikes me about some of these books I have (and you probably have too) is...they're sort of forgotten, aren't they? If you lost any of them, you might never be able to replace it... I don't know, it's a thought, anyway.

How do you steal a house? O.o

Yes, it could be a meme. Or, "randomly generate a title, write a drabble for it," or something.

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Yes, that's what intrigues me. Oh, dear :lol:

I'd have probably done better if I had found a few more books like that. :-)

you lost any of them, you might never be able to replace it... I don't know, it's a thought, anyway.

Don't say that! I have lost The Daffodil Affair - and The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, and any number of others. Well, I've lost the Daffodil Affair, but the things I give away because of lack of bookshelf space & now I'm cross with myself. (I had all of Ngaio Marsh's books, and I had to go round trying to rebuy them this last year. *bangs head*)

And I can't remember how they stole the house, but they did it during the Blitz, so people didn't really notice. But then, I had already read Joan Aiken's books,, and she manages to have someone steal a lake...

:-D Why not? Go for it - see how virulent it gets!

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Oh no... Well, yes, my deepest sympathies because I know what that's like. I've gradually become something of a hoarder of books for precisely that reason, even if the storage of them is a bit of a headache sometimes...

Heh - I'm intrigued now about houses, the stealing of...

And well, you never know, I might put it out there...

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Oh, go on! :-)

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Since you twist my arm... ;D

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It's a lie! I never touched nuffin!

;-)

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My arm has a different version of events! :)

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pedanther

There's actually an anecdote in Dracula of all places about how to steal a house -- not that anybody attempts it in the story proper, but one of the heroes tells the anecdote while they're plotting to break into one of Dracula's lairs, as an example of what you can get away with in the middle of a city with a bit of daring and cunning.

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