I hardly need to say anything, right?

Deep Sea Creatures

Fueling the bug cannibalism:

100 minutes of counting or NOMNOM!

Apparently the econocalypse has really harassed Philadelphia, because they're shutting down their public library.

Doesn't require much imagination to imagine that happening in my location, perhaps my literal location, and I like to think I would do two things: check out as many books as I can, and don't bring them back, and move into the abandoned building.

How else can you fight against something like this?

Philadelphia Free Library system is broke and shutting down. from BoingBoing

Gaiman gets the gibbering madness, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden finds some sanity in the lunacy of Sandman. I read the Sandman so quickly I barely remember it - my favorite volume being Brief Lives - and, apparently, I read it after The Guns of August. The first volume had Great War references? Wow.

The introduction post here.

The first issue here.



Her analysis resemble the sort of things, or the sort of way, you learn at law school, Traveler, or Paedrag? I'm fascinated in finding out why law school isn't for me... and this gives me a little bit of an idea.

The name of this town is amusing, but the resemblance to the origin for my all-consuming, absolute panic at the moment is probably one of the most frightening things I've ever seen.

25 miles south of London. Replace with 150 miles west of Minneapolis, set the location as the main hub of a rural region, with a couple of really strong libraries and nothing else...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorking

Like Stross said, nuke it.

Were I a really ambitious person, I would post about this as frequently as the BoingBoing group, but that point is still a bit of a way away. Nonetheless...

Minnesota woman found guilty of filesharing twenty four songs, and fined 1.92 million."

Wired's followed every part of this thing, but courts aren't my idea of a really fun thing to keep my eyes on. The surveillance had some attention on here, but, in my mind, that was a little different. And you might notice I mentioned the finale of it more than the procedures of the court.

This information gets some attention. It's from Minne-freaking-sota.

The Time Shark found it, on this post, but I suspect the Boing types'll be mentioning it. Me, I simply think it's disturbing. The hell is going on?

Wonderful source for video game scifi...

Watched part of it thus far, and it's bizarre hearing a professor lecture on with pictures of the pre-release version of Starcraft, side comments about "require more minerals" and "mindgames."

It's not as though video game theory is rare or anything, but it's frelling Starcraft!

Starcraft Academic Class, from BoingBoing

Batman: No Man's Land, author Greg Rucka, in which Gotham is separated from the country
VS
The World Crisis: Vol 6, author Sir Winston Churchill, in which I learn more about Germany Vs Austria Vs Russia in the Great War

Which one is the victor? They're both really good reads, though they both have parts that didn't interest me.

The first half of the Batman book (strictly words) is its strongest part, as it focuses on the Gotham Police, before the superheroes rush onto the scene and rule the story. It concludes in an annoying fashion, reminding me that, yes, Batman is a franchise hero. Some parts are amazing, like how Rucka includes such things as jumplines and costumes and makes them work in prose. And Two-Face's final showdown. And Bruce Wayne.

I think I liked this book more than The Dark Knight. Two-Face was much more interesting, and, starkly differently than the movie, fascinating.

The World Crisis Vol 6 is... much different. Sir Churchill described how all three of the noble houses in the East fell, and that, if we ignore the Western Front, the East was the greatest war in history. He finishes the tale when the Czar topples, and the Communists party it up on the Russians. Much, much to ponder.

Trapped in a small town as I happen to be at the moment, a trip to das Mall auf America was quite quirky and intriguing. For some odd reason, which might have been helped by the fact that me and my sister were listening to Evanescence for the majority of the trip, I was in a vaguely surreal mood, and looking for things that were quite strange.

Or maybe the surveillance cameras set me in that mood. It feels odd but appropriate to acknowledge them. If nothing else, perhaps I can learn the trick of looking without looking. Anyway, what I achieved to find at the trip shall be kept a secret because I like to be a jerk sometimes until someone asks, my Strange radar kicked in, and I happened to find some things.

For one, the first woman we saw at the aquarium seemed cheery but also sort of slow. Maybe she was tired? Or maybe she genuinely was slow? It certainly made things on a weird start. After that, the wanderings were piercings and piercings and boots, three crowds who seemed way, way too pushy, and Macy's plastic legs.

Sure, Macy's certainly has plastic legs, but your surrealism sense gets boosted, and everything looks freaking strange.

On a completely different subject, Leon: The Professional is very much a movie of contrasts. One part is an action movie with loud bullets, and the second is a light romance about a working man who finds a very young girl who he thinks of as a daughter. The girl is very curious about him. And a DEA officer who, for some reason, is insane.

If you're interested in looking up the Twin Cities RNC, these pages should keep you busy for a long time. I've been spending hours and hours on it; I said I would be watching this carefully, and my instincts are proving me quite right:

"Making Light" saying things with more coherent wording than me.

This guy on Livejournal mentions some videos and argues for the idea that everything is already such that there's no other choice than to act.

See the title; I'm just reading really damn good books lately. Not all of them are mindscrew, see that Birds of Prey underneath this on the posts, but most of the SF ones are. There's a reason that for the moment I've been reading nothing but dense and sometimes heavy books - they're just more satisfying.

Examples?

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. They're actually one book in two. The first one is like a series of badass novellas, in which the scale of the story becomes greater and greater, but the second book makes that insane, to the level of a cosmic Dune story.

The difference between Hyperion and Dune? Hyperion isn't as suited for roleplaying in its setting, as there is no other way that setting could work. It also has the most terrifying mastermind idea I've seen in books in eons. It's just brr. Gets me on a primal level, it does.

Spin Control by Chris Moriarty. The millions-of-mind-in-one Cohen guy gets POVs, Li smokes like crazy in a crater, seventeen year old girls become cold soldiers like Rei Ayanami, online games, an entire homosexual culture that absolutely worked for me, and there's lots and lots of political spy intrigue.

Verra fun. The child soldiers boggled my mind. Moriarty has got to watch some anime to come up with that.

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I felt like I aged reading this book, and that is not an exaggeration. Because of this book, I now have a deeper interest in WWI... or, as I'm very careful to say now, the Great War. It isn't fun disturbing, but I think I needed to read it.

I had to pause between the diplomacy and the war parts of it. Sir Edward Grey's speech about England defending Belgium absolutely boggled my mind.

Last Call by Tim Powers. Strung out gamblers fighting gangsters. Sound like a contemporary crime story? This is Tim Powers. There's tarot cards, The Waste Land allusions, lots and lots of allusions, and surreal imagery I'm definitely going to be looting when I write my own bizarre western.

Strangely, it's also extremely like American Gods, another dense book. Ozzie, at the start of the book, seemed a lot like Mr. Wednesday. My theory, considering the dates of the two, is that Gaiman went "I can write a book like this!" and created an even more astonishing one.

Some of the minor characters were annoying, but I really liked the heroes. It was quite fun going on a road trip of words with them.

What am I reading now? The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. Both of them are amazing reads. Oh, yes, I am very into the density. And I don't think there's a coincidence that the majority of these have won various awards.

This is from the insanity of Improv Everywhere, of course. I love almost anything these people do.

Another instance of cheerful chaos!

There's six panels in this podcast list, and oh bog, they're interesting. I've only listened to a few thus far. Of the two, one was boring with the writing neep, but the other is fascinating. It's sort of a retrospective on Shadow Unit's first season and quite mind expanding.

4th Street Fantasy podcast!

Because of this podcast, I'm starting to be able to wrap my creativity around the idea of everything being a computer. The panel's on secure computing... and it wanders onto the bloody end of civilization. Among the notes from the panel... why not? It's online, but it's still a panel.

Ideas:
ways to counter microprocessors being different types, and deliberate variety
people installing backdoors at every level (mmmm, conspiracy)
people who don't want electronics at all, or work minus them for a while

As much as I complain about short stories, I might have to write some on this trippy madness. The books are in other places for now, but the ideas are twitching.

Apparently in January, a guy named M Dot Strange... well, actually, ... designed a bizarre eighty-nine minute movie called We Are The Strange.

Oh yes, we are indeed.

The guy connected sound effects from the arcades, NES animation, stop motion and badass looking CGI. It's extremely weird and fun when it isn't slow.

The trailer is here. I'm about twenty-three minutes into the movie, and it's a bit more well designed than it. The link to this movie is the whole bloody thing, though.

The Internet never ceases to amaze me with its free stuff.

I love reading con reports... so it seems appropriate that I should be writing one.

For most purposes, this was my first real anything convention. I went to SogenCon twice, but for various political reasons it was rather disorganized. Detour was much more interesting. The size alone shows the difference: SogenCon might have had 900 or less people. Three frelling thousand people went to Detour.

This might not seem too amazing to most of the people reading this, but it boggled the mind of this guy who lives in a small town next to a college and corporate town of 12K people. Dad said that it's the size of another local town...

So, yes. I haven't seen this much leather short of a shopping mall, this many chains probably ever, and the five women walking around in skin tight rubber, three of them dressed in Eva plugsuits, er, say no more.

I can't be too coherent, because it's my first Uber convention. But as for some of the highlights, I played the legendary Dodonpachi freaking finally, a Motoko Kusanagi cosplayer joined my twenty-people Ghost in the Shell panel, I chatted with a girl dressed as a Ragnarok Online alchemist, and I saw and slightly joined in my first rave.

When I wandered to the front of the rave, in the middle of the psychedelic lights and the electronic music in the bloody Twin Cities, I could understand why people become addicted to conventions and dances. It really does feel like you're standing in the center of the world with everything revolving around you. I hadn't felt that feeling since eighth grade.

Tantric master breaks ice record sounds like the Polar Bear Plunge, doesn't it?

The winner of Jeopardy resembled Caprice Quevillion... and Natalia Tena, whose personalities don't seem to be that much different.

I'm a bit late to reporting the news, but I'm not sure what to say, other than my Paranoid side feeling distraught.

Bhutto's death isn't good, and it's going to have reverberations. Perhaps the problem is that the reverberations won't be as strong as they might have been...

Give her a moment of silence, for her, and for some part of Pakistan. She knew what she had to do, and knew that she might die for it. The question now, is, as Dad said, how long until Musharraf gets the uniform back on?

And on debg's journal, they reflect my opinions: Oh Hell

I got the above words on a critique of my Gaimanesque short story "The Heart of His Valor" and the woman who said them didn't say anything for the rest of the manuscript. I like to think she was so in love with the story that she couldn't find anything else to chop apart on it.

After all, the entire freaking class said "this is good" and "I like the Celtic allusions", which surprised me immensely, and "I like your vision of Hell."

Obviously, I'm doing something right. It's going to be a bastard to modify in time for the portfolio, though, in this creatively drained state. Still. They loved the Gaimanesque story, and only a few of them even mentioned the testicle televisions. I must pursue this further, because it's probably the most descriptive thing I've written since Enemy Territory.

Musharraf declares a state of emergency.

I don't know all of the background or anything, but the US tries to cover its connections with the country, the Benazir Bhutto reports complete with the bombs as a greeting, likely some of the reason for this to begin with... and the 'media restrictions and detainments' add up to cruelty and stomp on the human rights.

And there's the Burmese Internet takedown, with all the rest of it. Burma shut the freaking civilian Internet access down and destroyed an online journal. And probably more than one, and there's certainly the detainments...

It's probably conceited to think so, considering all the other troubles tossed around, but the shutdown of the Internet, for me, is beyond words. Pick a dark emotion and I probably feel it for the people trapped in that situation. It gets me way too close to home.