Nothing, I bet. But my life is full of robust activity, described by discretely consumable media!

Reading:

• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Well, at least it has a slightly less smug title than god is not great.
• Going Solo, by Roald Dahl. Just finished Boy, the first half of his autobiography, where he describes the hell of British boarding schools and his pastoral Norwegian summer vacations. (Coincidentally, the latest issue of National Geographic Traveler ranked the Norwegian fjords as the best place in the world, but I still can’t bring myself to believe that anyone can swim in the north Baltic. Just not possible. Too cold.) Anyway, Dahl goes to Africa to work the Shell company, then signs up to fly in WWII and protect Britain’s wrongfully seized overseas “possessions”. Adventure and ethnocentric domination ensues! Ha, ha, just kidding. Empire’s great. For King and Country! Seriously, though, Roald Dahl, freaking awesome, underrated because his finest works happen to appeal to children as well.
• Marco Polo, still.
• An exceedingly dry history of the Ancient Mediterranean. The basin of Western civilization and culture, the history of human life comes to us in - pot shards. Or potsherds, if you will. If you want to know about the Phoenicians, those first great seafaring kings, then you’ll want to know that they produced hand-marked pottery laquered sometimes in green and black! If you want to know about the great civilization of Carthage and its titanic struggles with the Romans, the conflict that engulfed the sea, then you’ll definitely want to know that they made exquisite ewers and amphorae much in the Hellenic style. Etc etc ad nauseum.
• Glory Road, by Robert Heinlein. A scifi approach to fantasy. A bit more plot-driven than his usual ideological meanderings, a bit more action-packed. It’s fun and only occasionally makes me feel like an inferior person for being poor and having once worn glasses like some kind of goddamn unAmerican sissy.
• Grant Morrison’s run on JLA. I was never a DC boy growing up (”The ‘d’ stands for ‘dumb’!” I once quipped), but I follow quality wherever it may go, and Morrison’s 125 issues of JLA are fantastic. Funny, great character moments, gripping, ROLLER-COASTER plots.

Playing:

• The original Suikoden. Yes, my laptop has four gigs of RAM and a 512 meg video card, and I’m using it to run PS1 emulation. But you know what? It’s a good game. The sprite animations are really well done, and the plot involves - get this - toppling an evil empire! I’m really interested in the unique and original plot.
• FFXII. STILL. Damn.

Watching:

• Season Two of Torchwood. The Doctor Who spinoff was stupid, trashy, and silly in its first season, but unintentionally so. It took itself deadly seriously, never accepting its fate as popcorn scifi. It wanted to be dark scifi, dark fantasy, a character-driven melodrama, Lovecraftian horror, and once, awfully, grindcore. It wanted to be sexy, and there was lots of sex, for sure, but employed in such an immature, licentious fashion as to actually be completely unsexy.
  Season Two, though, is already a marked improvement. The first episode had more fun than the entire first season put together, and James Marsters as a rival Time Captain gave it some much needed levity. The second episode I can’t remember. That’s not a great sign. Give me a minute. Oh, yeah. Sleeper alien terrorists. Pretty fun. Again, a bit too maudlin at points, never having a sense of its own stupidity, but fun at other times. Know your limits, Torchwood, and I will appreciate you for it. Realize that sword-arms and high tragedy do not mix.

Posted in Games, Reading, The Glass Teat | 2 Comments »

Happy to say that two of my stories are to be included in the EDF Year Two anthology. They’re good stories, and in good company!

What? You haven’t read ‘em? MONSTER! Read them now! They’re under a thousand words each. What else are you gonna do with your time? Nothing, I bet. (”Chrono-Conundrum!” “Ars Draconis!”) I can recommend them unequivocally because, like all fictionists, I am essentially an egomaniac.

My earlier post “You Don’t Have to Read Dan Brown” has been expanded, revised, and published as “You Do Not Have to Read Dan Brown” on good ol’ RevolutionSF. It is an incisive piece of literary criticism, viz., I tell you what to think and it makes you feel smarter to agree with me.

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish where my online persona and my real persona ends. I am not half so colossally arrogant in real life - I’m still married, aren’t I? That is my barometer for everything. “I can’t be so arrogant - I’m still married, aren’t I? I can’t have run over that bum - Randi wouldn’t stayed married to a guy who did that. I can’t be a total drunk - Randi’s still around.” Hopefully, Randi will continue to have healthy enough mores to be a reliable barometer, and I will retain my ability to notice if she’s around or not.

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Missed yesterday due to school botheration; to catch up to quota today, I need 3800 words. It’s possible; not probable. I have no class, which helps, but I also have books I want to read and games I want to play. I’m shooting for 2500 before lunch, and then we’ll see how I feel. It seems like my discipline has eroded since Khatima; I have trouble concentrating, and keep wanting to check my email, then getting bogged down in chats and reading scraps of videogame news, rather than working hard, so I can have some free time later, and actually play videogames. I must remember that I am master of my own mind, and must corral this ornery beast, forcing it along the chute of my intentions. Yes.

I reviewed District 9. Best movie I’ve seen all year - though I’ve only seen three.

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My review is up at SFReader.

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North Carolina, no longer content to let its southern counterpart produce the most embarrassing conservatives in the nation, is reviving one of the South’s greatest traditions, after mint juleps, white seersucker, and hangin’ colored folk what looks at your wimmens: a good old-fashioned book burnin’!

Mark Grizzard, shepherd of a mighty flock of fourteen, is celebrating Halloween by putting to the torch such Satanic works as the writings of Mother Teresa, various popes, Rick Warren, Billy Graham, and the NIV Bible.

I understand the antipapism - after all, they are licentious idolaters bound for Hell. But it’s hard to get more conservative than Billy Graham. And the NIV Bible? You could call it a bad translation, but “Satanic” - wow! It’s an interesting example of cognitive dissonance that he calls the Bible the infallible word of God, when he clearly means only the King James version, other versions being demonic corruptions that will send you straight to Hell. Does that mean that the original Greek and Hebrew are Satanic? Or somehow even holier than the KJV? If so, then isn’t Mr. Grizzard imperiling his own soul by not learning Koine Greek or Hebrew? But learning a language is hard; manipulating weak-minded Baptists with fear and hate is easy.

It hurts the scholarly brain to think of what works were lost in medieval biblioclasms - works of Aristotle, Euripedes, Seneca, we know to be forever lost. Thank Gutenberg for the printing press, and thank Gore for the Internet! It is now impossible to kill a text, and pulpit-thumping fanatics like Grizzard, who may have been real hazards to humanity six or seven centuries ago, are now consigned to pathetic irrelevance.

Tags: Jens Doesn't Care Much for Religious Fundamentalism
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Reading:

• The Travels of Marco Polo, by… Marco Polo. Do you know who’s the greatest, most benevolent, richest ruler of all time? Kubilai Khan! Yes, perhaps 25 million Chinese perished under his rule, but, still, he’s a helluva guy! Haha. That said, the Khan, who built roads, established a courier system and some rudimentary forms of welfare, was probably a cut above the rest of thirteenth century rulers. He was the strongest in an age when nation-states went to the most psychopathic bullies in the playground. Though I am curious as to how conscientious he may or may not have been. Both Marco Polo and Robert Shea (in his Zinja books) give a very sympathetic portrayal of the Great Khan. And he inherited his empire, and the onus to keep it running (and the only way empires can continue to run is by - what, children? Anyone? Anyone? Further conquest! Correct!). But the fact remains that his final conquest of China killed 25 million people, more than all Hitler’s concentration camps combined. Hohum. The actual book itself is rather dry, often a plain recounting of exports and populations, but there are cultural notes that are invaluable, and occasional folk tales or legends that are fascinating.
• Nine Princes of Amber, by Roger Zelazny. I understand “Amber” fans are fanatics in the unabbreviated sense, but I don’t see why. The book is fine. It is unexceptional fantasy. Maybe it improves in later installments.
• god is not great, by Christopher Hitchens. Finished this one recently. Hitchens isn’t interested so much in the philosophical argument for atheism as in the historical argument against religion, for which he provides ample fodder. Interesting and enlightening.
• Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Reading this with the wife right now. I always knew fast food was bad, but GODDAMN. Not this bad. I always thought, “Oh, it’s unhealthy, tastes like offal, and degrades your quality of life.” I had no idea it was so complicit in the crapification of America. I enjoy blaming George Bush for every ill of the nation, but it was mostly the happy, prosperous marriage of fast food and the automobile that fucked us up so badly.
• The Truth, by Terry Pratchett. I’m listening to this audiobook while I work out and wash the dishes. It’s like any other Pratchett book - that is, fun characters who are deep but not terribly broad, an engaging plot, beautiful witticisms and turns of phrase, lots of little pointless (but enjoyable) vignettes.
• Yes, I’m reading four books at once. How is this possible? My uncompromising experimentation with my own brain chemistry has yielded amazing results.

Listening:

• There is nothing new under the sun. At this very moment, it’s Vashti Bunyan’s Lookaftering, a gorgeous album that somehow did not change the world. I got the Dodos’ newest, but it has not captured my heart.

Watching:

• The Prisoner. You may know this one. From the 60s. A guy resigns his job for private reasons, and he’s kidnapped and brought to the mysterious “Village” until he explains why he quit. Ensues numerous mind games between the prisoner and the Village. It’s an Orwellian study of free will versus conformity, and it’s also good scifi/spy fiction, or “spy-fi”, if you must. It influenced Lost, but this show has more originality and meaning in a single episode than that latter-day leviathan has in a whole season.
  The most thrilling aspect (to me) is that this bold, bizarre, unique work of art was the product of one man’s mind: Patrick McGoohan, writer, producer, director, star. A brilliant actor, a savvy storyteller. (The AV Club’s obituary for him opens with: “Patrick McGoohan was a son of a bitch.” I don’t doubt it. He was a badass.) The fact that he could bring his unique vision to life so vividly gives me an intensely fulfilling sense of accomplishment by proxy. I am proud of our modern era, proud that someone took the chance on this insane-seeming project with this insane-seeming creator. In Simmons’s Ilium/Olympos, a character dying of radiation poisoning reflects on how grateful he is that he could be of the same species as Shakespeare. That is how I feel for the producers of The Prisoner. This is bold, uncompromised art, produced with a lot of someone else’s money, for popular consumption. It is refreshing in this age of Heroes, season 4.
  That said, it probably couldn’t be produced these days. No one would take a chance on something so bizarre. AMC’s upcoming remake promises to be quite tamed. … but I’ll watch it anyway.

Playing:

• The World Ends with You, developed by Jupiter. I’ve tried to get into this critical darling three times now, and have finally succeeded. At first I thought the combat sloppy and frantic. Now I see the method to the madness. The story has gripped me. The J-Pop soundtrack and the beautiful character art always appealed to me. Now I understand the opinion that this is a modern classic, a work of unvarnished, unmatched originality in a traditionally stale genre. Too bad no one bought it, and they’ll never make a sequel, or anything remotely like it, again.
• Gun, developed by Neversoft. The guys behind Tony Hawk made a Western game! How weird. But it was quite good, especially for 2005. Video games are so technology-dependent that only the exceptional age well, and while the graphics are often hideous, the hit detection spotty, etc., the gameplay itself is still solid. It’s got a small open world, where Dodge City, Kansas, and Empire, New Mexico are less than a mile apart, and where you can trample passers-by to death with your horse and then scalp them, if you want, though the game never explains why you might want to. But it tells a good story (if a bit over-the-top), and the shooting is fun throughout the game’s short span. Recommended, if you see it in the bargain bin.
• Final Fantasy XII, STILL. It’s good. I get most of my gaming done at work, and the PS2 resides at home, so progress is slow.The story makes no sense, so I know it’s Final Fantasy. I read a plot description on wikipedia, and I still don’t know what the hell’s going on. The combat has grown on me. It makes transparent the repetitive nature of JRPG combat, and it may spoil all JRPGs for me in the future.
• God of War, at times. Brutal, fun, bloody, hard as hell at times. I switch to this to blow off steam when FFXII gets boring.
• Can’t wait for Dragon Age. I’ve been following this one for three years now. I play - nay, devour - everything Bioware releases, and this looks amazing. November 3rd! Or 4th! Something. The first Assassin’s Creed alternately bored and amazed me. A sequel is greeted with cautious optimism. I would love to play Brutal Legend, but Tim Schafer has turned his back on ME, the loyal fan who bought Psychonauts (for $35, on sale), by not releasing it for PC. I would’ve totally bought it legitimately, too. Sigh.

Posted in Games, Music, Reading, The Glass Teat | 2 Comments »

Maybe.

We’ve lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation for so long that it’s hard to take seriously anymore. It hasn’t been as bad in my lifetime as in my parents’, when the fiery death of the nation at the hands of the Russkies was an inevitability. But the possibility has always been there.

India and Pakistan have nukes. Why not me?

Anyone can build a nuclear bomb. Not everyone can make a relationship.

I read Dan Simmons’s Ilium/Olympos some time ago. I haven’t really talked about them here much, because I still don’t know what to make of them - hugehugeHUGE books, sprawling plots, several plotlines, some successful, some enthralling, others not. 1800 pages that manage to be less than the sum of their parts. The execution was lacking, but there were so many good ideas that the book is worthy of a read. I’m thinking of one particular idea.

In the future, a vaguely-EUish government is fighting the “Global Caliphate”, a Muslim theocracy. In the end, the great powers do each other to death - the Global Caliphate unleashes millions of robotic soldiers that scourge the Earth of most human life. At the same time, they send an attack sub loaded with twenty-eight cruise missiles topped with freaking black hole warheads, a single one of which would be enough to chew the earth to pieces. They intend on launching twenty-eight, but events intervene, and the sub sinks to the bottom of the sea, where the forcefields restraining the singularities decay over the next three thousand years, until the time of the book, when they become a problem again.

It’s a scary picture of blind fundamentalism coupled with weapons of unthinkable power. The only reason the US and the Soviets kept from nuking each other for so many decades was the relative sanity provided by our secularism. Neither side was sufficiently convinced of the afterlife or the supremacy of their religion to push the button. But a quick glance at history - hell, current events - shows that the only cause capable of manufacturing willing, happy martyrs is religion. The only reason that Simmons’s black-hole-submarine scenario is a seemingly outlandish work of fiction is because al-Qaeda or the Taliban or Hamas or the PLA haven’t developed black hole weapons yet. When you believe unfailingly that you will go on to a better world than this one, and everyone else will get their just reward, indeed, it seems crazy not to push the button. So ends progress, humanity, sentient life.

(The discerning reader may think me anti-Muslim, and not unjustly, for naming only Muslim organizations. Obviously they have no monopoly on atrocities, as we see in the past two decades of Christianity-sanctioned and -inspired violence in Rwanda and Uganda, or the war crimes in Croatia. However, suicide bombing is a mostly Muslim phenomenon, although it’s worth pointing out others in history: the Templars, for example, who could not flee the field of battle while their standard was raised and must fight until death; the Japanese kamikaze who died for their god-emperor; the Hindu Tamils and their suicide bombings against the Buddhist Sinhalese [they actually invented the modern suicide belt].)

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Alex has published over at Big Pulp; it’s a good story, and a quick read, so check it out!

Piccolet is ticking right along at 4500 words. They’re mostly pretty good. One of them is “torquetum”.

Posted in My Talented Friends, Piccolet | 2 Comments »

The first sentence:

“Piccolet was strumming his lute, fumbling for a rhyme for “potatori”, when his murderers arrived.”

Update: No, wait, I’ve revised it already.

“Piccolet was strumming his lute and trying to think of a rhyme for “potatori” when his murderers arrived.”

Eh? Eh?

Posted in Piccolet | 2 Comments »

My review of chapter 3 is up here!

Conversely, the best games make for the dullest review. I loved it. It was hard to get 500 words out of a three-hour game.

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