And still I find it so hard to say what I need to say... But I can mumble general comments

Bought a new computer today after my laptop exploded.  I don’t know what’s going on lately but my phone exploded (Nokia E71: I don’t recommend it.  It does what I want it to do, but Nokia’s interface programs are extremely fiddly and idiosyncratic.  I really don’t know why I stick with Nokia.  Sure, they’re better than Motorola — there’s several months of my life I want back — but they just seem so glitchy.  I’m looking forward to the LG watch phone but I think that they have a long way to go before they grow the e-beard), then my computer exploded (something appears to have caught fire inside it; the ventilation on the Acer Aspire 5920 is really, really shitty — seriously, what is it with so many laptops having the air vents pointing directly downwards where there’s no airflow?), then my car exploded.  Poor car.

I just wish it were symptomatic of super powers.  Then, at least, I’d be able to say: ‘Well, all my gizmos exploded, but at least I have superpowers.’

In related news, why is Australian science fiction so crappy?  TiVo caught Subterano which screened at some godawful hour the other night.  While it’s probably the case that Esben Storm is the worst screenwriter in Australia (even worse than Mick Molloy, which is quite an anti-achievement), the actors really aren’t doing much to salvage it (with Tasma Walton — best known for being Rove’s wife — being the sole exception).  Absolutely nothing makes sense, and you can see that Storm thought: ‘Ooooh, what would happen if we remade eXistenZ on a billionth of the budget and none of the creativity?’

Worse, I can’t understand how this dreck could find the funding to be made.  Given that Storm wrote the horror years of Round the Twist, we know that he didn’t have a soul to sell to raise the funds.  On further investigation, it seems that the Australian Film Finance Corporation coughed up the cash.  Given that the film died and went to straight-to-DVD hell, I’m guessing that the film didn’t break even.  How is it that the AFFC can facilitate the production of some excellent Australian movies and yet get roped into some absolute trainwrecks?

Alas for us who are to lazy to write our own suckarse screenplays.

But back to the main point.  Why is Australian scifi so craptastic?  Of everywhere on Earth, Australia should make the best science fiction.  Australia rewrote the book when it came to biology.  We’re in the process of crafting our national identity.  We’ve got a very different cultural narrative to that of the USians and Brits.  Between biology, identity, and culture, we should be generating brilliant futurism.  Instead, we make cruddy knockoffs of American(/Canadian) and English science fiction.