by Mur Lafferty

SuicdeGirls presents the seventeenth installment of our Fiction Friday sci-fi series, Marco and the Red Granny, which is brought to you by SG columnist Mighty Mur a.k.a. cyber commentator Mur Lafferty.

Marco and the Red Granny is set in a not-so-distant future where an alien species, the Li-Jun, has transformed the moon into the new artistic center of the universe, where the Sally Ride Lunar Base soon gains the nickname “Mollywood.” These aliens can do amazing things with art and the senses, allowing a painting, for example, to stimulate senses other than sight. However, humans remain suspicious of the Li-Jun’s emotion-imbued goods, so while their entertainment can be beamed back to earth, a trade embargo prevents anything from being physically imported to the planet.

In the previous installments, Marco, a writer whose career has long been in the doldrums, gets a surprise call from an agent he thought he no longer had informing him that he has received an offer from Mollywood for a much coveted Li-Jun patronage. Keen to catch up career-wise with his ex-GF Penelope, who’d unceremoniously dumped him after being recruited by the Li-Jun two years earlier, Marco hastily jumps on the next shuttle to the moon. Once aboard, he finds himself sitting next to a seemingly unassuming old lady called Heather, who turns out to be The Red Granny, a legend in Li-Jun’s reality show world for being a three-time champion of The Most Dangerous Game (which requires contestants to sign away the rights to their life).

After settling into his new accommodations at House Blue, Marco has a brief meeting with his new patron, a Li-Jun called Thirteen. It’s only then that Marco realizes he’s never been shown the terms of his employment, and a sense of unease sets in. That evening, Marco is taken on a trip to see The Red Granny in action in The Most Dangerous Game. After a bloody battle, the senior reality TV star is again victorious. The viciousness of the game leaves The Red Granny unconscious, and Marco shocked, disturbed, and in need of a stiff drink. Unfortunately stiff drinks are frowned upon by the Li-Jun, so Marco settles for an early night

The next day, Marco learns first hand about the process that enables the Li-Jun to put taste into paintings, music into pie, and stories into (nonalcoholic) beverages. Having had his deepest and most depraved memories dredged and thoroughly probed by the aliens so they can be monitored and recorded, Marco finally sees the terms of his contract. He ultimately accepts the Li-Jun’s too-good-to-refuse offer, and embarks on his new life at House Blue. However, though he’s been handed everything he ever wanted, somehow the reality of it is hollow.

Twenty thousand words into his new graphic novel, with his first deadline looming, Marco suffers from a severe case of writers block, and searches for inspiration in the bottom of a glass that’s actually had something worth drinking in it. To this end, he stumbles across an illicit drinking establishment on the seedier side of the moon which turns out to be run by a collective of folks who are strictly persona non grata as far as the Li-Jun are concerned – The Alcoholic’s Guild. There Marco has an uneasy encounter with a glass or three of gin, his ex-GF Penelope, who is now going by the name Knowledge, and her AG sponsor, Defect. After downing one too many drinks, Marco begins to get a sense of exactly how severe of an infraction the Li-Jun consider the consumption of alcohol to be.

While attempting to conceal his inebriation as he sneaks back into House Blue, Marco is caught red handed by his Li-Jun keeper Seven (it was probably his spontaneous vomiting that gave him away). The punishment is a second bout of mind raping/mapping. Afterwards, with his patronage in jeopardy, Heather gives him a ‘special’ necklace to calm his nerves and promises to plead his case with Thirteen.

The following morning, Heather takes Marco on a behind-the-scenes tour of the secret areas of House Blue where the Li-Jun infuse emotion into art. The Red Granny also reveals that everything created in Mollywood will soon be permitted to be legally imported back to earth. Duly inspired and placated, Marco is allowed to resume his patronage…However, that was before he got kidnapped twice in one day. The first time by Penelope/Knowledge and Defect of The Alcoholic’s Guild, who made him realize the Li-Jun had brainwashed him into compliance, and the second time by the Li-Jun, who were rather upset about the fact he’d just been fraternizing with said Alcoholic’s Guild – albeit initially unwillingly. Marco’s punishment for this infraction? He was to be a contestant in The Most Dangerous Game.

Having selected his weapon of choice, with a little help from Heather, we join Marco as he prepares for his first bout – armed with nothing more than a bad case of nerves/abject terror, a staff, and a seemingly unassuming knife. However, something Heather said gives him pause for thought:

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by Blogbot

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.

This week, Zephyr Suicide takes us on a tour of a group that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside; it travels through space and time in a TARDIS and is called Doctor Who.

Members: 1,054 / Comments: 8,827

• WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Doctor Who is just a fun show. I’ve been watching it for years, and got started on some of the older episodes from the 1960s. It’s got aliens, time travel, paradoxes, and robots — what more could a girl want?


• DISCUSSION TIP: Don’t say it’s a kids program!
• BEST RANDOM QUOTE: “Should I be worried that I find girls with plastic cups on their heads holding sink plungers and egg whisks mildly attractive?”

• MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: Pretty much any of the episode / theory threads. No one gets angry, but it gets pretty serious in there.
• WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Anyone! It certainly would help if you watched the show though — it could get confusing otherwise. 



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by A.J. Focht

Muggles made Hollywood magic last weekend as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 took the weekend box office, and made box office history. Deathly Hallows had the largest midnight release ever, with $43.5 million earned that night, shattering The Twilight Saga: Eclipse‘s previous record of $30 million. Sparkly vampires suffered further at the hands of the wizarding world as Deathly Hallows also broke The Twilight Saga: New Moon‘s opening day record, raking in $92.1 million in the US. It doesn’t stop there; Harry Potter nabbed the opening weekend record from The Dark Knight with $168 million. The entire world showed its approval as it collectively shelled out $475.5 million to see the Harry Potter series – putting it one-sixth of the way to James Cameron’s Avatar lifetime gross record in just one weekend!

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by Bob Suicide

A study which purported to highlight the equality among the sexes when it comes to computer gaming was recently published in the uber-reliable Daily Mail. The survey was funded by the scientifically-minded, and above-bias team at Doritos, which lends further credence to the findings.

That’s right, Doritos. Now why would the chip company — known philanthropically funding scientific discovery in key areas such as how to make ranch “cooler” — waste it’s time researching women’s interest in computer games when it could be curing cancer, you say? Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with the recent launch of their own online computer game: Doritos Dip Desperado. No sir.

I’m honestly surprised that the survey didn’t find that “women say that computer games taste great and are less filling than the leading chip brand,” it’s that blatantly obvious this is a sad marketing ploy. But what the press release of an article did say was:

That while 50 per cent of men readily admit to frequent online gaming, a surprising 49 per cent of women confess that they too are addicted to Internet games.

And while men spend 22.3 per cent of their time online playing games, women trump them, whiling away 23.2 per cent of their time online playing games.

Revealingly, the study showed that not only are women just as keen on gaming as men — but that the majority would rather spend time playing on their gadgets than having sex.

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by A.J. Focht

After fourteen years, the Harry Potter series is coming to an end. The first book was published in 1997, and with the release of the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the journey comes to a close. Deathly Hallows premiered in London on July 7, and then in New York City on July 11. The internet has all but blown up since as fans avidly await the world wide release on July 15. The film is currently holding a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and shows no signs of falling. The video game by the same name and the official film soundtrack were released on July 12, 2011.

Harry Potter might be the biggest news of the week, but it wasn’t the only news. Yesterday, the first teaser poster for the Dark Knight was revealed. But that was only the second most exciting news surrounding the Caped Crusader in the past 7 days, as it was announced that Adam West will have a cameo in the upcoming film.

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By Nicole Powers

Gwen Cooper traded her ho-hum career as a policewoman to work as a professional alien catcher at Torchwood, an organization which legend has it is “separate from the government, outside the police, and beyond the United Nations.” Eve Myles, the Welsh actress who plays Gwen, in turn, has traded her life in very legitimate theater for one in the warped and sexy science fiction universe.

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by Aaron Colter

If you weren’t aware, a group called LulzSec has been causing mischief around the web for the past month or so, most notably unveiling the insanely lax security policies of Sony’s user accounts and dumping the email logs of the Arizona Police Department, which, like the diplomatic cables uncovered by Wikileaks, weren’t shocking so much as they confirmed negative assumptions – that the American government does, in fact, work with countries around the world for the benefit of multination corporations, and that too many police officers are egomaniacs with a hatred of anyone other than clean-cut white men.

LulzSec hit the websites of governments around the world, including Italy, Spain, and England, dumped the names of right-wing secret police in Columbia, accessed parts of the FBI, the CIA, AOL, and AT&T, and posted the image below on the PBS website for airing a biased documentary about Wikileaks and accused soldier Bradley Manning.

Before disbanding last weekend, LulzSec partnered with the Anonymous campaign to target institutions that restrict freedom of speech on the Internet, like the U.S. Senate, which caused them to become a target for others in the hacker community, as well as the topic of debate in the news. The group, reportedly made up of only six core members, recently called it quits on their 50 day sail of laughs, some say due to increased scrutiny from law enforcement agencies around the world, and the revealed identities of some members, potentially stemming from IRC chat-room leaks.

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