Actual Cannibal Ian Mayor

Hi, I’m Ian, I’ve written stories for games for twenty years. Mostly for #Ubisoft ( #Avatar, #TheDivision, #TheCrew, #GrowHome). I mostly chat about films, TV, cats and food.

Ukulele update. I can now play “You are my sunshine”, all three chords of it. My first dalliances into mini-guitar world have confirmed I have none of the tools to do this. No ear for tone, no sense of rhythm and giant sausage fingers. But I persevere, better strumming next.

"Warns"

Kit writes great genre fiction (containing varying shades of smut… often way beyond my quintessentially English tolerances), from fantasy to contemporary crime. Subtextually it all possesses a pleasing rage and sense of social justice. If any of that sounds your bag, drop a few bucks on this.

Norman Rockwell’s triple self-portrait, 1960

7 reasons why The Thing (1982) is a Christmas film: 1) snow 2) bearded men concealing surprises 3) compulsory party games 4) introverts shunning group activities 5) digestive issues 6) revellers bursting open to reveal partially assimilated canine lifeforms 7) knitwear

Absolute carnage at the Barbecubes grill.

Absolute scenes at Wrestlemania Newcastle (nephew visit)

By Jane Fisher

Have you ever tried to spell the word “mousse” by staring at the word “mouse” for five minutes?

Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright take five on the set of Alien. RIP Tom Skerritt

The best Mass Effect game. /salutes

First “big coat” day of the season.

Farewell, USCSS Nostromo Captain Dallas. Farewell, Tom Skerritt. 🖤🖤🖤

Can confirm that this is a real trailer of the Mass Effect game that BioWare was developing up until its closure yesterday www.reddit.com/r/masseffect...

Pouring one out for Bioware this morning, and thinking of their rise and fall across such a long period. It's oddly close to home, for someone who never worked there, and only in an adjoining industry. But I did get to see behind the curtain once, and it stuck with me.

End of work cocktails, a new family tradition.

Fucking idiot

INVISIBLES

What a pretty thing.

Negroni. My wife and I had a cocktail debrief of our day tonight. It was delightful.

Overthinker by Nicolae Scarlat

BioWare. Pioneers and expert crafters of a specific type of narrative game. A giant of a studio, fucked over by ghouls. Wishing everyone affected by this the best of luck.

The Society of Authors has withdrawn from the ill-conceived concession to the dark side that was the "ethical GenAI" charter because of the mass and vocal outrage of authors. Publishers need to be made afraid of this level of anger too.

@n-auchterlounie.bsky.social Happy Nigel day!

At long last, we have created a way for you to take away Nikki's free will, from the classic horror movie "don't take away Nikki's free will"

How does one even hold a ukulele? /checks internet Apparently, ten different ways.

Hey everyone, why not read a contemporary London crime story with queer leads and slick prose.

"Aaron had known, the moment they got the safe open and unzipped the bag, that it was a dangerous amount of money. It was the sort of money someone came looking for." Read the first chapter of "The Safecrackers' Take" here: https://moriarty.inferiorwit.com/m12_chapter01

Always in awe that Dolly Parton wrote “Jolene”, “I will always love you” and “Whoomp! (there it is)” on the same day.

We already have flying cars. They're called helicopters. They're really expensive and there are good reasons you have to have a pilot license and work with air traffic control to fly them. Putting jets on a sedan is not going to result in a better vehicle or transportation experience in any way.

Of all the warnings that 2000AD gave me as a child, I believe the most useful one in my personal life was the warning against guys like this. Similar to the warning given by Labyrinth. It said, little girl, you meet a guy like this? You open the valve on his pressure suit.

Floaty McSpaceRace it is.

Art.

Thinking of starting a noodle delivery service called “Send Noods”.

Beautiful and fun bus stop art in Newcastle.

How cool is this? White dwarf stars change colour as they consume planets in their orbit, so we can analyse the chemical composition of distant (dying) solar systems!

If there’s one gram of good that’s come out of the industrial plagiarism machine, I haven’t seen it.

Humans are amazing

Corridor. Original for sale at andiwatson.bigcartel.com

The British Fantasy Society does not allow the use of generative AI in any of its spaces. For more on this, read the interview with outgoing chair Shona Kinsella from earlier this year. This position has not changed since last week's AGM. ⬇️ britishfantasysociety.org/its-a-cheat-...

This went places I did not expect

The question is not whether I should kick the puppy. The puppy is innevitably getting kicked. The question is whether I can kick the puppy in a sustainable, inclusive and empowered way. How can people be supported in kicking puppies for good? Let’s stop the puppy kick gatekeeping already.

A reminder for those at the back.

Well, I'm out. @societyofauthors.bsky.social