Bloginomicon

I admit that I haven’t been following the Democratic National Convention. I know that I’ve missed some truly amazing speeches. Michelle Obama’s speech was, I’m told, nothing short of awe-inspiring, and Hilary Clinton’s motion to nominate Barack for President was apparently on the same level. I also missed Bill Clinton’s speech, which is kind of a bummer, because, well, I like Bill. I did find this quote from his speech, though, and I love it:

“People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example, than by the example of our power.”

That’s just brilliant. And so true.

Now, every Presidential campaign will bring with it some moments of interest, one or two moments of great inspiration (very few, though I will say Obama is the first candidate whose speeches I’ve actually downloaded to my MP3 player to listen to later on), and some moments of profound, truly inspired idiocy. McCain, a man who has never been afraid to stoop to levels of campaigning which really ought to be beneath a man of his stature, provided one already with his earlier speech comparing Obama to Paris Hilton. More recently, though, he’s demonstrated how willing he is to drop to what many of us would consider the bottom of the cesspool, then grab a shovel and start digging.

Consider, for example, this excerpt from a May speech of Obama’s:

Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall.

I think this is a good speech. He acknowledges the threats that face our nation today, but emphasizes that we must talk to those that oppose us. We never cut off relations with the Soviet Union, even though they were a much bigger threat to us than, say, Iran. McCain’s campaign took this speech, did some quote mining, and pulled up the phrase:

Iran… tiny…

then squatted and spurted out this ad:

This ad strikes me as so blatantly misleading as to be just plain ludicrous, and it’s downright shameful how willing the McCain campaign is to appeal to the ignorance of the voting public. Of course, it’s also frightening how well this tactic works; Bush Jr. managed to stick around for eight years using pretty much the same strategy.

As always, things are going to simply get more ridiculous, more offensive, and more appalling before they get better.

Someone get the barf bags.

(Tip o’ the hat to Kaigou for the info.)

This past weekend, we went and visited Jennifer’s sister up in Washington. On Friday night, while sitting around and watching the Olympics, we caught this ad:

Followed immediately by this one:

At the time, I didn’t really catch the irony. I was mostly stuck on the whole notion of premium M&M’s, which strikes me as just absurd. But the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I am struck by the mixed messages that are being sent by these two ads, particularly since, as the Hathor Legacy points out, the Green M&M is almost always portrayed in a sexualized way. Even this commercial makes me a little wary, mostly because the intent of Green’s photoshoot is pretty obvious in the reactions of the Red, Blue, and Yellow M&M’s at the end of the commercial.

I just can’t help wonder what sort of mixed message my 7-year-old niece would have gotten if she’d been awake and watching television with us at the time. “You’re beautiful as you are, hun, but you’d be even more beautiful if you threw on some high heels and sexy stockings?” Seems somehow wrong to me.

Funny, but while I was writing up this blog entry, Jennifer pointed me at this video, the LHC rap:

Which is cool not just because it’s a rap about the Large Hadron Collider, but also because the lead rapper/artist/presenter/scientist in this video is a woman. Makes me want to be a high energy particle physicist all over again.

And buy a chemistry set for my little niece.

Here it is, folks, Story of the Week #5.

I hate vampire stories. I mean, really hate them. I know, it’s a weakness of mine, but I can’t seem to find any vampire stories that do anything original with the trope. I mean, there are a few vampire stories that are good, as long as the story is about the characters surrounding the vampires, rather than the vampires themselves. I really enjoyed Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, after all, because the vampires were really just sort of peripheral to the whole show. Angel was okay, but Angel’s brooding got more and more annoying. Quite frankly, I preferred Angelus to Angel. Evil vampires out for some serious blood and mind fuckery I can take. Brooding and depressed vampires are just dull. “I’m immortal,” they say morosely. “Allow me to whine about it as I seduce you.”

So, anyway, given my hatred of vampire stories, I figured it was high time I wrote one of my own. I’m sure there are some elements of vampire mythology I’ve gotten wrong here, and some purists may dislike it. Whatever. The vampire mythology is really wide open. If Brian Lumley can make vampires the victims of some sort of space parasite, then I can do whatever I want to.

I will say that this story is extremely rough. Most of my stories of the week get at least half a revision, just to clean up some major continuity bugs, but I don’t have time to do that with this one. So you get to see it as is. I’m not all that thrilled with this one, but I suppose it could be worse.

The two of you who are my regular readers will recognize a couple of elements from my earlier stories. You might recognize a name from “In the Living Room, a Painting”. And, of course, the story takes place in Roosterville. Here I tried to pull a Suzuki, and recast that first story in a way that lets it stand alone as its own story, yet still expand on it, just as Koji Suzuki did with his three Ring novels.

One final note: I know that my Latin is completely off base. Sue me.

(more…)

Gay marriage is legal in California now, though predictably there’s a proposition on the ballot to make it illegal. The ballot language — “Revokes the right of gays to marry” — is under protest from the folks who want to do just that, because representing the proposition’s actual intent on the ballot is deceptive.

Whatever. I am voting no on the proposition. Even in a democracy, you don’t get to vote on who is allowed to have rights. On issues like this, on equal rights and so on, the judiciary has to trump what the people say. Any democracy where the rights of one group are up to majority vote is no democracy, just a parody. Democracy gone wild, really.

But there is one argument against gay marriage that has always fascinated me, just because of its sheer weirdness. These are the folks who say that allowing gays to marriage somehow cheapens their own straight marriages. It took me quite awhile to parse this argument. After all, my own marriage feels just as strong and sacred as it did before gay marriage was legal anywhere, so I never figured out what I was missing.

But now I think I have it. Marriage is like M&M’s.

See, just as marriage is about a relationship between a man and a woman, M&M chocolate candies are all about the little “M” on the outside of the candy. Now M&M’s allows you to customize your M&M’s if you want; when I went to my friend J’s 40th birthday party last year, his wife had ordered some of these custom M&M’s, with messages like “Over the Hill” and “J’s 40!”. With the little M, M&M candies used to be special; no other candy had just that combination of shape, flavor, and lettering. But now that you can have your own message on your M&M’s, the whole M&M experience is cheapened. It’s less notable now. The whole meaning of what M&M’s are has been tossed out the window. So by allowing gays to marry you essentially give people the right to have their own messages on their M&M’s, thereby cheapening the whole experience for everyone.

Ludicrous? Well, so is the original argument.

Anyway, the takeaway message here is that I’m voting No on Proposition 8, and so should you.

The Academy
by Bentley Little
ISBN: 978-0451224675
Published August 2008 by Signet Books
Rating:

I’ve been a fan of Bentley Little’s for years now; whenever I’m in the horror section at Borders, I check to see if there’s a new Little book out that I haven’t read yet. Some writers have compared Little to King, Straub, Barker, and other greats in the horror fiction field. One blurb on one of his books, from Stephen King, describes Little as “A Master of the Macabre”; and on Little’s latest book, The Academy, there’s a blurb from King that describes Little as “Horror’s poet laureate”.

The first book of Bentley Little’s book that I read was The Ignored. That book is, in my opinion, Little’s best; not only is it a fine horror novel, but I think it could stand on its own as a respectable mainstream novel, with the likes of Upton Sinclair or John Updike. It’s the rather hokey supernatural stuff at the end of that novel, in fact, that are its biggest undoing.

Likewise with his 1998 novel, The Store. That novel can be read as a great condemnation of the influence that major “big box” retailers such as WalMart have on small towns in America. It’s great satire, another brilliant novel unfortunately done in by overly dramatic supernatural influences at the end.

Most of Little’s books are like that: unfettered and unbridled condemnations of large institutions and their dehumanizing effects over regular people. I’ve never met the man (I did have the opportunity to chat with him online once), but I have this image of Little as a card-holding NRA member, secluded on his property in Arizona and probably voting Libertarian. The dehumanization in Little’s books are usually shown as an institutional supernatural horror, which often brings people, particularly those in authority, to their absolute worst, in brutal and quite often sexually explicit ways. In The Association, we get a glimpse of how a home-owner’s association can drive a typical homeowner to utter ruin. The Policy shows a family devastated by an evil insurance corporation, sort of Michael Moore meets Freddy Kreuger.

In his more recent books, however, it feels to me that Little is scraping the bottom of the barrel in his search for ways in which he can demonstrate the inhumanizing effects that large institutions can have on people, and his supernatural elements are becoming more and more banal. In Dispatch, which I believe is Little’s strongest novel since The Ignored, the “big bad” at the end turns out to be just another misshapen, evil beast. And to be honest, I’m not even sure I got the point of The Vanishing, his 2006 novel.

In his newest novel, The Academy, Little takes on charter schools, and the result is, unfortunately, disappointing. While he handles the trope of a haunted school much more adeptly than Michael Paine did in The Night School, there’s still quite a bit that’s lacking. The dehumanized victims of the supernatural forces are brutal and vicious in typical Little ways, and in typical Little fashion we witness most of it through the eyes of people who are on the periphery, affected by the forces but not altered by them. But here the causes of the events are given such short shrift that it almost feels like Little uses the novel more as an excuse to showcase brutality and depravity, rather than examine its effects. I went through too many scenes wincing, rather than wondering what was going on. And when the forces behind the events in the novel are finally revealed, I found myself disappointed. It’s an interesting villain behind it all, but given so little face time that it’s barely seen at all. Most of Little’s villains are faceless and operate entirely through intermediaries, but the villain here seems mishandled, even clumsily written.

In general, I enjoy Bentley Little’s novels, and I recommend him. The Academy, however, is not his strongest novel, and I can’t recommend it to anyone.

Well, here it is. Story of the Week Number Four: “Floaters”. Like all the other stories I’ve written for this little project, this one is inspired by true events.

Anyone, have fun with this one. It’s a little bit gruesome toward the end, so if you have a weak stomach, you might want to avoid this one. Because I believe this may be the first story I have ever written in my entire life that might have some disturbing content.

Enjoy!

(more…)

No time for anything more than a drive-by posting. Here’s some stuff going on in our lives.

• The Kitchen Remodel. It goes well, and is almost done. To me, the only issue is that the refrigerator makes me feel short, what with the placement of the handle and the high shelves. Jennifer has been dutifully taking pictures and recording the progress. See them here. Or if you really want some fun, you can see a slideshow of pictures of our original kitchen here.
• Work. I’m a PHP developer. Mostly I hack away at Moodle. Part of the fun here is that Moodle is a total LMS (Learning Management System) solution, but it’s built around some assumptions about how the educational institutions that use it will implement their business logic. Ours is completely different from the Moodle assumptions, so most of my time is spent rewiring Moodle to make it work according to our own business logic. It’s fun on the whole, though I was really thrown for a loop when part of the API changes significantly from one version — the version we use is 1.5 — to a new version — the most current stable version is 1.9. For example: a function called get_record() has changed radically, without my knowledge or approval (not that the core developers need my approval, of course). I spent days trying to figure out why my new code was throwing SQL errors at me, until I actually read the function itself. I’m also trying to figure out how to implement some test-driven development procedures in hacking at this legacy code. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Believe me, it’s twice as fun as I make it sound here.
• Writing. My Story of the Week project has been going well, and has actually inspired me to work on other projects, like The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster and critiques of other writers in my writers’ group.

That’s it for now. I hope you’re having fun as well.

This is my third Story of the Week, and this one was by far the hardest to write. I think it’s because I actually had a plot that I wanted to use, and a pretty complicated one (by SOTW standards, at least). It has issues, but I think it has, at least, a lot of potential.

I took my first Story of the Week, “On the Road to Orlgrunt”, to my writers’ group this past week. The consensus was that while it wasn’t a great story, no one would become upset if they saw it in a fantasy magazine. They did give me some solid ideas for improvement, though, which makes me happy.

It was my online buddy zarchasmpgmr who pointed me at this article, and suggested that perhaps I could do something with it. This is the story that resulted from that. It’s another bit of backstory for one of the main characters of The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, and I think it shows that I’ve been watching a lot of The X-Files lately. The story’s beneath the fold, and commentary follows the story.

(more…)

I’ve just added one of my older stories, “Thanatotherapy”, to my website. This is not this week’s Story of the Week. It’s just a story that was on my website a couple of years ago, released under a Creative Commons license, and is now back.

Enjoy.

Actually, I’m not entirely convinced that this video is not a hoax:

What do you think? Fake video? Or is this person genuinely this stupid?

California Tradition

In order to bring a fresh take on the traditional Overdue Budget Party that California throws for several months, Governor Schwarzenegger last week signed an executive order recommending that the state cut pay for all state workers down to the Federal minimum wage, and lay off thousands of part-time and temporary employees. One hopes that he remembers he’s a state worker as well, and that his own salary is adjusted accordingly.

State Controller John Chiang, a Democrat, has stated his intention to flat out refuse to implement any such executive order. He says that Schwarzenegger’s understanding of state law related to state workers’ pay is flawed. And even if Schwarzenegger is right, then the state simply won’t be able to implement the pay cut. The state’s payroll software was written twenty years ago, in COBOL, a language that nobody programs anymore, except for retirees and part time workers. It’s been patched together with duct tape over the years, and no one’s really touched it since Y2K. This is kind of funny. It means that the very people who would end up rewriting the payroll software to implement the pay cuts were themselves let go. Irony. Ur doin it rite.

Election News

Am I the only one who thinks John McCain’s campaign took a wrong turn on the way to nasty and ended up in downright surreal? The ad that called Obama a “celebrity” and compared him to Paris Hilton was, well, inspired, in its own back of the short bus kind of way. The best part of the ad, though, was Paris Hilton’s response. “I guess that means I’m running for President”. The real shocker, of course, was her coherent delivery of an energy plan which sort of makes sense (though I question whether limited offshore drilling will provide any short term relief). Here’s Hilton’s response, in case you haven’t seen it:

Response from the McCain camp:

“Sounds like Paris is taking the ‘All of the Above’ energy approach that John McCain has advocated — both alternatives and drilling. Perhaps the reality is that Paris has a more substantive energy plan than Barack Obama.”

This amuses me because the plan Hilton talks about is pretty much the same as Obama’s plan anyway. But that McCain’s team has chosen to view Hilton’s spot as a de facto endorsement only strengthens my notion that someone in there got their political science classes mixed up with their “Introduction to Surrealism” art class. It hasn’t quite got the Dada-ist feel that Mike Gravel’s ads did last year, but it’s bizarre nonetheless.

Or maybe I’m just too old for these newfangled politics.

I’ll leave Gravel to finish things off for you.

Apparently McDonald’s is under boycott for “supporting the gay agenda” by having representatives on the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. I support the right of people to boycott McDonald’s for this reason if they so choose, but, as usual, the forces behind the boycott are being hypocrites and inconsistent. Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has compiled a helpful list of companies and corporations that also “support the gay agenda” by having representatives on the NGLCC, or by offering domestic partnership benefits, or any other similar outrages.

These organizations, represented by their logos, are the ones who are actually founding members of the NGLCC (click on the thumbnail for the entire spread):

And these corporations are the lesser offenders, who simply have members on the NGLCC or support the “gay agenda” in other ways:

Again, click on the thumbnail for the full effect. And, of course, neither list is even close to being exhaustive.

As you can see, if you’re going to be consistent and really care about boycotting organizations that support the gay agenda, you have to go all out. It’s like obeying the Ten Commandments; you can’t just obey the ones you find convenient, you have to obey them all or there won’t be any point to any of them.

The best part of encouraging these folks to expand their boycott? Once they decide to be legitimate and consistent, then they’ll no longer be able to use the Internet, since Cisco routers pretty much dominate, and they won’t be able to use any computer with an Intel chip to do so anyway.

The editor at Asimov’s Science Fiction rejected “Padma”, saying it was “…sweet and evocative, but… not right for me.” I find that an interesting comment. I’m not sure I would ever describe that story as “Sweet”. Still, kind words, so the story bounces off to another market like a cat I’m trying to shoo from my lap.

Meanwhile, Pseudopod rejected “Night of the Frozen Elf”. In this case the editor said, ” It was well
received by our submissions staff, but I’ve decided not to purchase it because I’m a humbug like that.” I hold no ill will because as an editor myself I understand that being in a humbug sort of mood can be the only reason a story gets rejected. “Night of the Frozen Elf” has also been sent off to a new market. I also sent the editor of Pseudopod a nice thank you note because I was told that it’s the polite thing to do.

So two rejections today. Not particularly great news, but at least they were nice rejections (believe me, I’ve gotten the other kind too). And I’ve got three active submissions right now, but that’s two short of my goal of having five active submissions at all times.

It looks like I may be able to get my con fix this year after all. On Friday and Saturday, September 26 and 27, there’s a local con called From the Land Beyond, which looks like it will be an awful lot of fun for a local con. It certainly won’t be to the scale of Dragon*Con or ComicCon, of course, but even so, got a pretty decent collection of guests.

From television, they’ve got Erin Gray, who played Colonel Deering in the 1980’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century television series. Like every other male geek (and probably quite a few female geeks) who grew up in that decade, I had a huge crush on Erin Gray (of course it would never rival my crush on Kathy Coleman, but that’s a different story). Colonel Deering was sexy, tough, intelligent, and didn’t take crap from anyone. How could I not have a crush on her? I’ve run into her at Dragon*Con and a couple of other places over the years, and she’s just as good looking as she was way back when. I’ve never embarrassed myself in front of her like I did in front of Denise Crosby that one time, but I’ve come close.

They’ve also managed to get Richard Hatch to show up. Hatch, of course, played Apollo in the original Battlestar Galactica series, and plays Tom Zarek in the new Battlestar Galactica. I’ve seen Hatch a few times over the past few years, and he’s struck me as not just a good actor and a great (and funny speaker), but also a genuinely classy guy to boot.

They’ve also got Michael Berryman, who manages to beat out Lance Henrickson for the title of ugliest character actor. He usually gets cast as mutants and other nasty critters (he was the lead mutant in the Hills Have Eyes movies), which is kind of a shame because I’ve seen him in other roles, and he’s quite talented. Sadly, looks are everything in Hollywood, and I haven’t seen him in a role that showcases his talents since the season three X-Files episode called “Revelations”.

They’ve also got Scott Sigler attending. I just finished reading Sigler’s novel Infected, which I really enjoyed and which I recommend to just about everyone. They’ve also got some local writers which I’ve never heard of, and that’s okay too. I’ve tried hunting down some of their books, but it’s been pretty difficult for some reason. I fantasize about being a celebrity author at one of these events myself someday, but it might be years and years until that happens, if ever.

Anyway, it’s called “From the Land Beyond”, and it’s being held on the 26th and 27th of September at the Scottish Rite Center in Sacramento, It’s only a couple of miles away from where I live, so I really have no excuse not to attend, do I?

While my heart aches for the loved ones of the poor fellow who lost his life in a seemingly random and undeniably brutal attack, my first thought upon reading this article was, “There can be only one”. Though you’d think the immortals would be more subtle than to behead each other on a Greyhound bus.

(Of course, I mentioned this in another forum the other day, and got a number of virtual stares. “What? What does that mean?” These were people who should have known better. It’s better than when in the early 90’s, before Star Wars had its revival, I said to some kid, “May the Force be with you,” and he said, “What?” I’m too young to be this old.)