Plokta

Plokta is a British science fiction fanzine, first published in 1996, which has won two Hugo Awards.

Subtitled "The journal of superfluous technology" the magazine includes articles (largely unrelated to science fiction), photographs, illustrations and cartoons. The production team has been nicknamed "The Plokta Cabal".

The editors are Alison Scott, Steve Davies and Mike Scott. "The Plokta Cabal" also includes Steven Cain, Marianne Cain, Giulia de Cesare and Sue Mason (who has won two individual Hugos for Best Fan Artist). They have also organised a number of related conventions.

Plokta has been nominated nine times for a Hugo Award for Best Fanzine, and won in 2005 and 2006. It also won the Nova Award for Best Fanzine in 2000 and 2002.

The name Plokta is taken from the humorous acronym for "Press Lots Of Keys To Abort", a technique for stopping computer program execution when one doesn't know the proper procedure to do so.

A Captain Britain villain for Marvel Comics created by Dr. Who writer Paul Cornell has been named 'Dr. Plokta' after the fanzine.

PLOKTA

The term PLOKTA (sometimes rendered in lowercase, plokta) /plok't*/ is an acronym for Press Lots Of Keys To Abort, and essentially means pressing random keys in an attempt to get some response from a (computer) 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. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into "plokta mode" usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping for some useful response. This will sometimes eventually result in beeping sounds from an unresponding computer as its keyboard buffer fills up.

A slightly more directed form of plokta could often be seen in email messages or Usenet articles from new users with terminal-based clients - the text might end with

as the user vainly tries to find the right exit sequence, with the incorrect tries piling up at the end of the message.