Daily archives: April 4, 2013

Spinneyhead Books is publishing flash fiction on Google+

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Spinneyhead Books has a page on Google+, which is publishing flash fiction by Ian Pattinson and Garth Owen for the folks in its circles.  These short tales will be collected and published in the future, but for now, this is the only place you can see them.

Riot Day

The Riots always started on the third Wednesday in June. The rituals and symbols differed from town to town, but they always ended with the fire.

The crowd swirled and eddied around Market Street as the panes were rolled out. Many of them were using the time to buy bricks and bottles. Perched on a vantage point up above them, on the rooftop garden of the old multi-storey, Mikey watched the activity intently. “What did you do for the first Riot Day Granddad?” he asked.

“Well, I wasn’t one of the rioters.” Mikey’s grandfather admitted. “In fact, I stopped the rioters burning down the local library.”

When viral marketing goes horribly wrong

This entry was posted in B Movie Night North Korea on by

You may remember the original Red Dawn, a piece of gung-ho anti-communist nonsense from 1984 about the Russians invading Colorado. It’s been a while since I saw it, but I don’t remember it being all that good. Despite my reservations, it’s got a cult following and inspired a remake, which was shot in 2010 and starred Chris Hemsworth- later to be Thor.

The new version of Red Dawn changed the invaders to the Chinese. However, for various reasons it was shelved and didn’t see the light of day until last year. Not wanting to miss out on the now lucrative Chinese market, the invaders were changed to North Korea.

Worried that they had a crap film with a ludicrous premise, the studio knew they needed a really good marketing campaign, so they put in a call to Kim Jong Un. “Kimmy!” they said, “Kimmy, baby! We need you to prance around a bit and look threatening, so that the kids’ll buy the set-up of our new movie. Can you do that for us, sort of Gangnam Style but with nukes? We promise you the real Mickey Mouse, and we’ll build you a better theme park. Just act all tough and say some nonsense about how you’re going to destroy America. There’s no need to actually do anything.”

Kim was a bit late getting into the role- the film’s been and gone and is already out on BLu-ray– but, you have to admit, he’s very convincing.