Monthly Archives: September 2008

A Dream of Vandermeers!

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Last night, I had this long, complex dream about Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. The gist of the dream was that they took a group of diner-goers hostage in order to explain their latest literary theory. Not surprisingly, no one understood it. Frustrated, the duo planned on killing a hostage an hour until someone comprehended it.


Vandermeers hard at work on what I can only assume is a new literary theory!

Since I seemingly grok Jeff’s books (and presumably the only one in the vicinity stupid enough to help), the cops called me in to decipher the theory. Problem was that it was complete unintelligible, When it became obvious that I had no idea what the hell they were talking about, the couple kissed and similar to the beginning of Pulp Fiction, Ann stood on the table pointing her gun at people. Before she could scream “Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!’”, I woke up.

Some weird ass shit there.

A Dream of Vandermeers! was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

Powerless – Heroes Season 2 blog

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[ Happy Mood: Happy ]
[ Eating a big smucking sammich! Currently: Eating a big smucking sammich! ]
Just for fun, I dug out the blow-by-blow I wrote watching Powerless, the final episode from season 2. Here it is, as it was:

00. Where the hell is Parkman?
Sorry about Alejandro, but I’m not missing the melodrama.

05. Ah, hunting Adam…
Suddenly Mrs. Petrelli is full of exposition. Is Matt puttin’ the whammy on her?
Oooo, snap — pragmatic as ever, though. Put a hit on her son. Um, again.
Wow, where’s Hiro been hiding this mojo?
Yipe, Adam took that rather well… but Hiro’s still just Carp to him.

10. Damn, Bob is cold. Bet he and Mama Petrelli could have been thick as theives back in the day.
And excuse me, but, “How’s about”? “How’s about…?”! Wha? Huh? Who? Did Sparky just roll in from a film noir marathon?

15. Adam and Peter are quite the duo. Ahh, Peter’s such a puppy.
He was almost tougher when he didn’t know who he is/what he can do.

20. Oh joy, the drama is back.
That woman-scorned thing, Bob should have picked up on that by his age…

25. Ambiguously Gay Duo, anyone?
Really? …Parkman and Hiro haven’t met already? Have to think about that one.
Oh crap. Is it bad that I miss Claire tha Killa? Wanna see her go all Dark Phoenix…
Mr. Muggles!! Barely squeaked him into the first half, but only seconds before…

30. Noah’s return! Who’s a good boy? You are!
Mmm’kay, wow. Kinda surprised Sylar took the shot — I thought he was cooler than that.
But in a split-second, better to chuck the power than maybe have eye-bleed.

35. Of course, the blood, the wonder-blood. Sylar can have all the powers he wants…
I see Elle doing things for Noah to spite Daddy, for not being the kind of man Claire’s dad is.
So Peter saved Hiro? Is that what that was?
Oh shit, whammy showdown! Why wasn’t Matt’s power strong enough to keep Peter from fighting?
Brother against brother, Hiro against hero.

40. Good boy, Peter, faithful like a puppy, too.
So Nathan throws him a Snausage and rubs his ears…
Hmmm, how long would a person have to be alive before the god-complex sets in? Seems when you can’t die, delusions of godhood are inevitable.

45. Good catch, Puppy Power.
Yayyy, Ted Sprague lives!
Nice design in the ash, sneaky.
Aw, nuts, Nathan’s gone all darkside again. You can’t mess with free will that way, you ass!
Who else wonders how Molly and Micah would get along?

50. Always reminding us that you don’t have to be crazy, or a mutant, to be heroic… but it helps.
So now we gonna orphan the boy? Dang, bring on the tragedy.
Finally, it’s Ando!
Man, Hiro, how merciless is that? But to think you’ve neutralized Adam?
I mean, if Uma Thurman can crack her way out a buried coffin, how hard could it be for a guy whose fists heal after every punch?

55. What — Sparky’s goin’ white-hat?
This is dark, this is wrong, so wrong…
With awesome power, and all that.
,nxcbxbcx… Sorry, had to pick my jaw up off the keyboard. Man down! Man down!
Well of course, Mommy Dearest is in the mix.

Volume Three. So… is he Gabriel, or is he Sylar?
…Well played, Zachary, delivering that line without a trace of irony.

Fearless Fourteen – A Quick Review

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[ Cool Mood: Cool ]
[ Currently: Breastfeeding my son – Situation Normal ]
Fearless Forteen is, as the title implies, the forteenth installment of the Stephanie Plum mystery series. This one is actually better than the last one.

Yes, Stephanie is still waffling between Joe and Ranger, but the humour is bang on in this book. Thedre were more laugh out loud moments here than the last three books combined.

Plot wise, Fearless Forteen has Stephanie working security with Ranger for a washed out singer and trying to track down a skip, whose son may or may not be Morelli’s. Stephaie has to look after until said son until the skip can be found. Given that he is a MMORG player and spray painter, hillarity ensues. Add to that Lula somehow getting Tank to agree to marry her and you have some very funny situations.

Still the book is short on character development, but that is a hallmark of Evanovitch’s writing. I stillfound the book enjoyable as it was a quick read that will left me smiling.

I’m cheating on you… with MySpace

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[ Shocked Mood: Shocked ]
Yes, I joined the seething hoarde of MySpace zombies. I posted a single blog entry, and I’ve been shamelessly using it to play a pointless, yet fun, little game called Mobsters. At which I kick ass, by the way.

I joined up initially to get access to my little brother’s and sister’s pages, but now it’s taken on an unnatural life of its own. I may need to hire an exorcist.

Help me not go to MySpace! Oh, cripes, there I am again.

Sigh.

Frost!

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[ Happy Mood: Happy ]
[ Listening to CBC Radio One Currently: Listening to CBC Radio One ]
Yup – it’s that time of year. Time to pull in the plants and kiss the tomatoes goodbye. Winter is heading my way.

See you in April.

Magyk – A Quick Review

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[ Happy Mood: Happy ]
Silas Heap is a seventh son. He is also a wizard. On his way home one night, he finds a baby girl in the snow. At this point the ExtraOrdinary Wizard appears to him and tells him not to tell anyone and raise the child as his own. His wife had just given birth to a seventh son, who died just before Silas got home with the baby girl.

The couple went onto raise the little girl as if she was their own. Then one day, the ExtraOrdinary Wizard appears and warns them to flee, that evil wizard DomDaniel has returned and is after their daughter Jenna.

And so begins a rolicking good read that takes the reader through an imaginative fantasy world. Part cyber-punk, part questing fantasy, I couldn’t put the book down. The ending of the book opens the book up to sequels, which I have already requested from the biblio. Another one for the next "What to Read After Harry".

Some Palin weirdness

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As I often do during my day, I checked my Google Reader to see what was going on with my favorite blogs. Tech-Ex included an entry with the heading “Hackers Break into Palin’s Yahoo! Email.”

In case you can’t read it, the post says:

Quote:
Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running-mate, has come under fire for using her private Yahoo! email address for state business. The reason? As a public official she’s supposed to use her official email address (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). She even has a Blackberry, so why would she even need to use Yahoo! mail?

At any rate, the hacker group Anonymous, famous for taking on the Church of Scientology, said Wednesday it had hacked into a second Palin Yahoo! account, and shipped off screenshots and emails to Wikileaks, the web site started with the intention of allowing whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, “an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. ”

Sounds like a good place to send them, if in fact Palin was hiding anything.

Here’s the announcement from Wikileaks (someone seems to be firing back at Wikileaks as it is unreachable at the time of this writing).

Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) Wikileaks’ sources loosely affiliated with the activist group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to avoid government transparency mechanisms. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, example emails, address book and two family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism.

That was enough to send me to Tech-Ex and read more.

Strange. The page is missing, but was yet to be deleted from Google Reader. I decided to click on the link within the Google Reader entry for the Wikileaks info.

Similar to as reported in the Tech-Ex entry, Wikileaks is still unresponsive. I got the same results after attempting to reload the page several times. I also go the same results when I tried to load the main Wikileaks page.

I’m not saying she nor the Republican Party had anything to do with this, but what the hell?

And for those who can’t read the final bit of small type at the end of the first image, here’s what else Tech-Ex had to say:

Quote:
While, of course, it would be easy to fake an email address like this, the quantity of emails, the contacts list, and the fact that Wired got a response confirming at least one email leads me to believe it’s not a fake.

Amy McCorkell, whom Palin appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in 2007, confirmed to Wired that one of the emails was legitimate.

The e-mail, a message of support to Palin, tells her not to let negative press get to her and asks Palin to pray for McCorkell, who writes that “I need strength to 1. keep employment, 2. not have to choose.”

Be sure to check out the Wired article while you still can!

Some Palin weirdness was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

Snapshot of a planet beyond the solar system

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How cool is this…

Quote:
After years of searching, astronomers may finally have recorded the first image of a planet orbiting a sunlike star beyond the solar system. The body, about eight times Jupiter’s mass, lies exceptionally far from its presumed parent star — roughly 11 times Neptune’s average distance from the sun.

Quote:
The faint dot in the upper left could be the first snapshot of a planet orbiting a sunlike star (central object) beyond the solar system. The planet’s unusually wide separation from the star may challenge planet formation models.

Snapshot of a planet beyond the solar system was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

The End?

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It’s sad when what you know-to-be-true is painfully documented in an lengthy, well-written article from a prestigious magazine.

Quote:
The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

Since my Mojo Press days in the mid-1990s, I’ve argued that the entire dinosaur-like publishing industry needed to change or be eaten alive by the newer mammalian media. I’m not saying that books will disappear, just the major publishers with their archaic methods.

I’ve long been concerned that Amazon will simultaneously save the industry and destroy it. Now others agree…

Quote:
The ultimate fear is that the Kindle could be a Trojan horse. Right now, Amazon is making little or nothing on Kindle books. Lay down your $359 and you can get most books for $9.99. Publishers list that same Kindle version for about $17.99, though, and—as with all retailers—charge Amazon roughly half that price for it. Which means that Amazon keeps only a dollar on each book, while the publishers make $9.

But Amazon may be offering a sweet deal now in order to undercut publishers later. If their low, low prices succeed in making e-books the dominant medium, they can pay publishers whatever they want. “The concern is they want to corner the market,” explains one books executive, and then force publishers to accept a genuine 50 percent discount. “If they took over as little as 10 to 20 percent of the market,” says an agent, “publishers simply would not be able to exist.”

This anonymous quote near the end of the article sums up my long-running feelings over publisher reactions to the changing world.

Quote:
“We’re an industry more willing to watch the boat sink than rock it a wee bit.” —ONE FRUSTRATED PUBLISHER

It does seem to be an industry bent on suicide. Possible solutions exist out there, but will only happen if the authors, publishers, and booksellers work together and stop pointing fingers of blame. I’m tired of hearing how things use to be and how bad they are now. The “good old days” of publishing are gone and ain’t coming back. It’s time to re-invent the wheel, to figure the new publishing dynamic.

With “The End,” New York writer Boris Kachka produced an excellent eulogy to the way things use to be.

(Thanks to Mark London Williams for the link.)

The End? was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon