Mr Prophet (General Purpose Genre Guru)

Life, the Universe and... y'know... stuff.

They call me Mr Prophet

Just to be clear, I call myself the Prophet, but in no way claim divine insight or anything. It's a sort of joke from my heady college days, when friends would gather in my room because it was large, and I always had tea. Thus my room became Mecca, and I the Prophet. It used to say here that it would take too long to explain. I guess I was lying.

In real life my name is Luke and I was born a few months before Star Wars came out. Perhaps as a result, there can be few people as certain of their paterntity as I am: My Dad is forever reminding me that he is my father!

Thanks to my friends, the Droolers, I now go by Mr Prophet here at H2G2.

Here's a link - for those who are interested - to my personal website; a little place I call Lost Vegas.

I am also the Keeper of Sarcasm for h2g2. I'm really happy about that; oh yeah, ecstatic. (Just doing my job)

In Memory

I'm going to get a little sombre now. I hope nobody minds.

• Of Linda Smith and Ivor Cutler.
• Of David 'Olag Gan' Jackson and Michael 'Admiral Ozel' Sheard, stars of the British cult convention circuit.
• Of James Doohan and Ed Bishop, cult heroes of the last golden age, whose legacy is the current golden age.
• Of John Peel. The rest is silence.
• Of Katharine Hepburn and Gregory Peck, among the last of a golden generation of screen actors, and of their contemporaries gone but never forgotten.
• Of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia.
• Of John Thaw, Chuck Jones and Spike Milligan.
• Of Nigel Hawthorne.
• Of George Harrison.
• Of the victims, survivors and families of the September 11th attacks.
• Of Douglas Noel Adams. Farewell, Sir: So long, and thanks for everything.
• Of Kirsty MacColl.
• Of the mighty Ocelot, housecat extraordinaire. Tragically, the off-site image restrictions mean I am unable to bring you a glorious photo of the late, great Ocelot, but this lard-ball mog looms large still in all our hearts.
• Of those gone before; especially those whose time came too soon.

Things to do...

OK. Back from seriousness now. Here are some things that I like to do:

• h2g2 Fiction Central has some excellent stuff, so I'm going to link to that. The page also links to my own fiction entries, and in time I may add more.
• Yes, indeed I do write, whether this is a good idea or not. For stuff which might - for any reason - contravene the House Rules, or that I want to keep hold of the rights on, I maintain a site on a server named Ocelot (after the cat). This site I call The Lost Vegas Public Library.
• Also writing - of a sort - are my entries in the Fantasy Film League.
• Time for a small confession: I am a roleplay gamer. I always worry about saying this, because people tend to react either by staring blankly, or by saying: "Oh; Dungeons & Dragons/Final Fantasy?" As a matter of personal taste I haven't played D&D in years (although I have a bit of a yen to get back to some good, old-fashioned high fantasy monster beating), and Final Fantasy isn't roleplay gaming. At some point I intend to write an article explaining why¹.
• As though that weren't enough, I'm also a big fan of Science Fiction in all its glory and ghastliness. I used to be more into fantasy than SF, but it all gets so samey. Still a huge fan of Lord of the Rings, but I decided a while ago that any book with four or more unpronouncable, made-up names on the back cover was not worth the bother.
• I'm embarking on my first University Project. Hopefully it will go well. I'm adding a link to the University of Life as much to help me find it as anything.
• I am an obsessive. I don't think it's clinical, but I tend to dramatically overthink things in minute detail. A testament to this can be found in the form of the Lost Vegas Institute for Slayer Studies (eLVISS); an open-all-hours shrine to my own obsessiveness.
• I like movies. I could easily be considered a film nut (not a buff; a film buff always knows who the DP was, I just know what a DP is²), and I have watched a lot of films over the years. Inevitably therefore, I have watched a lot of dross, and so I have created The Prophet's Bad Movie Mecca as a means of warning others away from repeating my mistakes.

...People to see

I don't really like people; not as a species or in crowds anyway. However, there are many specific people that I do like; here are some of them; specifically, researchers with whom I share one or more obsessions:

• First and foremost; my sister, who goes by the name White Hart in these parts, and who is at least as big a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and Angel) as I am. She is also one of the only people in the world who has read Lester and the Unusual Pet, and thus doesn't think I'm mad if I call someone a Potato Animal. Other people sometimes think we made the whole thing up, but we didn't. Honest.
• Methos is - like me - a fan of the Highlander TV series, and of the character Methos in particular (you'd never guess). We also share a taste for folklore.
• Sho is a fan of Stargate: SG-1 and the Clangers, and wrote a fan fiction based on a plot bunny we came up with in conversation: Stargate meets Smallfilms in Postgate: PG-1. She also beta read my own fanfic efforts, and in all honesty probably deserves substantial credit for her insightful recommendations on my fan fiction article.
• Then there's Joanna, Princess of Darkness (plus whatever else she has in her name this week), who agreed to be the sub-editor for my University Project, and who is therefore wonderful in my eyes.
• Latest, but not least, Konrad is a fellow archaeologist, and perhaps more importantly has willingly taken on the mammoth task of editing my over-sized samurai entry.

There will be more to follow. This space is always under construction, and new stuff will be added as I think of new rules for living, find new cool stuff to do, new cool people to recommend to you, and - inevitably - as new people come to require our memory to keep them with us. Until then, whatever gods you prefer be with you.

And remember: Winners don't use drugs.³

Peace.

The Prophet.