Editorial

Here we are, tip-toeing round the house because it's New Year's Eve, Alison is eight months, 3 weeks and 6 days or so pregnant, and we're afraid she's going to deeble at any minute.

Plokta [Acronym for "Press Lots Of Keys To Abort"] v. To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Someone going into plokta mode usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and presses down, hoping for a useful response.
(The New Hackers Dictionary -- Eric Raymond, MIT Press).

So we came third in the Novas. We're not depressed (sniff!). If we hadn't voted for Attitude ourselves we'd have beaten them (though not Banana Wings which won handsomely). Unfortunately, a lot of our readers told us that, although they would have liked to vote for us, they couldn't because they hadn't received six fanzines in the previous year. This is utterly disgraceful. We want every single one of you to get out there and pub your ish! Failing that, we'll just have to fall back on Plan B. You wouldn't like Plan B. This is the one where we send the boys round blitz everybody on our mailing list with vast numbers of badly-duplicated crudzines in the run-up to the next Novacon. Wouldn't you rather have it the easy way?

Beware of cheap imitations of Plokta and its editors. The editors of a sadly defunct rival fanzine, apparently jealous of Plokta's success, have taken to imitating the Plokta editors in word, thought, dress and waistline.

Steve Davies -- Martin Easterbrook	Alison Scott -- Margaret Austin

We did receive quite a lot of applications for the Ploktacard^TM. We've sent them all off to a third-party streetcredit-scoring organisation, and are waiting for the results.

As you can see from the colophon, the next issue of Plokta is going to be produced by remote control while half the cabal are either in Australia or labour.

We're really sorry about the delays sending copies to the US. It's all the fault of Alison's boss, who believes work should come ahead of mailing fanzines. This issue should reach you quicker as we're arranging for TNT to pick them up from Alison's house now that she's not working any more.

We did receive a lot of complaints about the obscene picture of Simo we printed last issue. We're sorry and we promise never to use the picture again.

Some older fans on our mailing list appear to have got the impression that our technology means that producing the fanzine is effortless and the problems that plagued previous fannish generations no longer trouble us. We'd like you to know that both the laser printers gave us endless grief last time, with a toner-crazed Steven feeding several hundred sheets of paper individually through the printer by hand. What's more, every so often Windows NT (for the uninitiated, NT stands for No Thanks) has a hissy fit, takes away its ball and refuses to play any more.