Space Pilot

Space Pilot Comics brings you movie night in its new schedule of the last Thursday of every month. I have to draw the comics sometime.  Tonight's SF movie is Things to Come, a great H G Wells story making a classic motion picture. TRIVIA: This movie was a collaboration between a great director, Alexander Korda, and a great science fiction author, H G Wells. Name another classic sf movie created by such a collaboration. Movie Night comes with the assistance of archive.org.

This chocolate fudge cake was huge! Half of the cake slice looked like a whole one on its own. It tasted yummy with a great, oozy sauce. The ice-cream was delicious - very creamy and vaguely vanilla. I would give this warm chocolate fudge cake 6/10 [Life According To Lucy, blog post] Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of the death of my daughter, Lucy. My wife and I went out and bought chocolate. My son and his girlfriend went out for a sunny day in the park and a nice meal. We all met up at the end of the day by video-link for a good family chat. These were all good Lucy things to do and in a way brought us closer to her. At this time I've been reading a series of books that Lucy particularly enjoyed. These are Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books about a young girl in the Discworld discovering the secret empowerment that her granny had had and that she was in the process of inheriting. I can see why Lucy enjoyed these as Tiffany is very like her - clever, talented a

Tomorrow is the big day. We are taking over room 2 at The Stove in Dumfries High Street and making it into a comic and illustration factory. You can sign up on our Facebook Event . Here's the blurb. A spin-off from last year's Drawing Stories. We're trying it out as a one day event which might suit the folk who can't commit to a full run of evening classes. Taught by Mark Toner and Steve Pickering, illustrators from Shoreline of Infinity magazine, this day workshop will cover basic drawing skills where needed and aims to have all participants creating a fully illustrated work by the end of the day. It runs from 10am to 4.30pm, costs £38 and it would help us if you'd sign up here to give us an idea of numbers. Under 16s must be accompanied by a supervising adult (or why not take the course too?).

To all who share those Irish genes with me, enjoy the dear ould saint's day. To all who don't, we accept you as our brothers and sisters and hope you can enjoy a wee tinge of the green today too. Did you ever wonder why the flying saucers are usually flown by wee green men? Where else will you find so many little people than in the emerald isle? So, give a wee nod to old St Pat on this holy day and watch the skies!

I'm in the High Street in Dumfries on Saturday 23rd March, running a one-day workshop in illustration at the Stove. My comrade in drawing Steve Pickering will be co-presenting and it'll be a great day for beginners and experienced artists alike. You can sign up for it on Facebook , where I've posted all the details. That will give us an idea of how many to cater for.

We've had some fun with our weekly movies and they may go weekly again, once I've got the book club up and running. In the meantime we still have our monthly movie on the last Thursday of each month and there is a little opportunity for us all to make our mark in the movie world. My pal Russell Jones (whose poetry I am currently turning into a comic) has a poem called An Official Guide To Surviving The Invasion which is being made into an apocalyptic movie down at Govan Baths (yes, the baths that are being renovated). They need some cash to complete the filming and you can get your name in the credits by helping out. Visit their Indiegogo site and pledge a wee bit of money. It'll bring a smile to Russell's wee hirsute face and get you on the first rung to being a movie mogul. An Official Guide to Surviving the Invasion Have fun. I'll see you on movie night.

I spend my working day illustrating short stories, poetry and drawing comics. I do this because I love telling stories. The main reason for running this web site is to share that love of stories with others and try to attract readers to the kind of fiction that I particularly enjoy. There's no prize for guessing that the mega-genre science fiction figures large in that. So, starting in April, I'm launching the Book of the Month here on the Space Pilot website. I'm going to give away a free eBook on the first Monday of the month that you can download, read, share with your friends, anything you like. All I ask in return is that you come back here and post a comment under that eBook post, telling the rest of us what you thought of the book and maybe engaging with the comments and questions posed by your fellow readers. It's a free book club and you don't even need to give me your personal data to join it. So it's really free. As this summer sees the

Over the past few months I've been wondering when it was that British calendars started setting the first day of the week as Monday. For a while now I've been having to switch my start day to Sunday whenever I set up a new computer or a new online account and, only recently, I discovered that the Monday start comes with the UK localisation features. However I grew up with my weeks starting on Sunday. So I wondered who had decided and when that Monday is the first day of the week in the UK while, say, in the US the first day is still Sunday. A quick bit of research brings up ISO 8601 (see timeanddate.com ) which was devised by the International Standards Organisation in 1988. It defines a completely standardised system of describing times and dates. This was deemed necessary because of the vast variation in cultural definitions for these things. Here's a wee example local to me. In Ghàidhlig (Scots Gaelic) there are two names for Sunday: Didòmhnaich, the Lord's Da