I, too, would happily have Jon Stewart’s Love Child

Offered without commentary:

On another note, can anyone validate the rumor I heard that Palin will be dropping out of the race soon in order to “spend more time with her infant child”?

One last political note for the day

It’s an absolute shame that McCain’s running mate has dominated the news, or at least my own brain. Really, the most important note of the week was Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Here it is. You should watch it if you haven’t already:

Obama is, and I’ll happily say this without feeling like [...]

Shuddering…

“I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem…” -Sarah Palin
The more I learn about this woman, the more frightened I become. And the more I would want to slap McCain around and ask, “What in the world were you thinking?”, if I seriously believed [...]

Sarah Palin

So, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is apparently going to be McCain’s running mate. An interesting choice. I wonder if McCain’s gunning for the disaffected Hillary Democrats who feel spurned by the party’s choice of Obama over Clinton? If so, will her anti-abortion / pro-drilling stance still appeal to the Clinton holdovers?
It’s also kind of a [...]

This is weird…

How did Story of the Week no. 2 — “Jenny Goes Home” — end up linked to from a World of Warcraft site?

Story of the Week #6: Trying to Stay Dead

FORWARD

This is probably the most pretentious story I’ve written yet. But I’m not letting that stop me.

There are many reasons why I didn’t move on to a Master’s program in philosophy after I completed my Bachelor’s degree. One of them is a profound lack of sympathy. I read Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, for example, and thought, “Yeah, I’ve felt that way from time to time myself.” I just didn’t whine about it for seven hundred pages. In French. My response to Nietzsche less nuanced, and I was just afraid that Heidegger was going to give himself a coronary, given how hard he tried define “to be”. The poor fellow never succeeded, either.

Still, there are some areas of philosophy that continue to intrigue me. The nature of consciousness is particularly interesting, and I’ve spent a lot of time wrangling with the difference between consciousness and highly developed responsive behaviors. If we split open my epistemology professor’s head, for example, and instead of brains a million trained fleas poured out, and it turned out that he had just been a flea-controlled automaton all along, who’s to say he wasn’t conscious anyway? Philosophers  worked on this question long before Alan Turing came along and named a test after himself. The answer — “Fuck if I know” — continues to inform philosophy and psychology to this day.

So inevitably I began to wonder whether the people around me actually had consciousness at all. Were they conscious entities, like me (I decided they were, by the way, just to soothe your possible concerns)? Or just very sophisticated flea machines? You can’t ask them, “Are you conscious?” because they would answer “Yes”, regardless of whether they were or weren’t because the fleas in their heads would be programmed to. But I continued to think about it, because it was an interesting way to frame questions of consciousness, epistemology, ontology, and ethics. I imagined a procedure which could take a conscious person, remove their consciousness, and yet retain their ability to interact fully with the world, and a world full of people like that. I even wondered what it would be like to be a person who interacted with the world but had no true sense of self. Well, of course, the answer is that it wouldn’t be like anything, because with no self that can experience the lack of self, the lack of self cannot be experienced.

I discovered, to my dismay, that there has already been a lot of work done in this field, though the philosophers who work with these concepts have the decency to use the term “zombie” to refer to de-consciousnessed people who continue to behave as though they were conscious. Technically, the term is “philosophical zombie”. Or, to those with a more Simon Peggish bent, “P-Zed”.

So anyway, I decided to deal with these issues in this week’s story of the week. I decided to use the term “animus” to refer to the consciousness, because it can act as such a cool root to a number of different related terms. I had fun playing around with point of view and tense as a way to express varying levels of experience of self; so any violations of rules related to these concepts were perpetrated deliberately. I’m interested in feedback to this story, if only because I want to know how well my messing around worked out.

Enjoy!

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Someone get the barf bags.

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 [...]

Mixing Messages

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. [...]

Story of the Week #5: Sangrilicious

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.

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Parsing an anti-gay-marriage argument

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 [...]

Book Review: “The Academy” by Bentley Little

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 [...]

Story of the Week #4 - Floaters

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!

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Still kicking

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 [...]

Story of the Week #3 - Roosterville

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.

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New online story

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.