Undead Son

Got the new computer yesterday, and spent hours moving files over, downloading freeware (Mediamonkey, KM Player, LibreOffice, etc.) tweaking setting, organizing files, and so on.  This is a much less traumatic move than the last one I did, since my old machine still works well enough for me to loot it, and I'm not just starting from scratch.  Also less of a software jump.  Last time I got a new computer I was going from Windows ME (The Mistake Edition) to Vista, then getting rid of Vista and reverting to XP, which everyone else had been using for years.  This time I'm moving from XP to 7, and I've already acquired some familiarity with 7, so it's not so bad.

Having a new machine always makes you realize just how fucked-up your old one was, and makes you wonder how you ever dealt with it for so long.  I always wait so long between upgrades that I can accidentally get a new computer that's like 10 times better than the old one, because they don't even make shit as weak as my old one anymore.  Okay, I could have gotten a much cheaper device, but this one was custom built and comes with a guarantee on parts and labor from a local guy, so I can not worry about it tanking on me and having to ship it off somewhere for weeks.  Plus it came without any of the bloatware big box vendors always cram in there that takes forever to root out.

I'm rediscovering what it's like to be able to watch videos (old one wouldn't do it without fucking up the sound card), or listen to music without worrying I'll have to do a system restore.  I can move stuff around in the files without Windows Explorer seizing up on me and requiring a hard reboot.  My picture viewer doesn't freeze if I try and zoom something in too far.  So many little things

I want to thank everyone who contributed so I could afford this.  As I told the guy who built it "I live, work, and sleep on this machine" and I do.  Instead of selling off something to be able to squeeze in a half-assed replacement, now I can rest easy with a machine that will carry me a long way.  Thank you all so much, your generosity - as always - surpasses my hopes by a good long way.

Grabbed this secondhand back in Feb for my birthday, and just recently got around to it.  This has been a year of unfinished games for me so far.  I hung up partway through Assassin's Creed 3 back around the holiday, and then I tried to get into Dishonored and again hung up on it about halfway.  I don't know, they were fun enough, but I just didn't get any emotional investment going in the stories, and there's not a leveling mechanic like there is in Skyrim to keep me interested in spite of the lack of gripping writing.  I even count Borderlands 2 as unfinished, because even though I went through the game like 3 times, I never finished True Vault Hunter Mode.

I was looking forward to Arkham City, because I actually really enjoyed the first one.  It was neither too long nor too short, too easy or too hard.  The voice acting was great and the writing was solid enough.  Arkham City has even better voice acting, great character designs, better dialogue (though the story overall doesn't make sense).  But rather than getting really into it, I just ended up being annoyed.  Getting around the bigger city should be fun with the grapple and the gliding, but the way it's laid out is a pain, with this big area in the center you can't get into until later, and everything you need to reach is on the other side of it, so every new objective means a miles-long hike across the rooftops.

Two, the Riddler's bullshit has been amped wayyyy up, and you can't even turn around without seeing a fucking "?" glowing on something.  I didn't like the Riddler scavenger hunt in the first game, and I wasn't going to mess with that crap in this one either, but large sidequests are apparently dependent on you collecting as many Riddler greeblies as possible, and it just pissed me off.  I'm playing as Batman.  Batman solves crimes, not fucking kid's puzzles.  I wanted the rooftops to be a dark, murky world of shadows and danger, but instead they looked like a fucking Romper Room set with glowing Riddler shit everywhere.  Plus, you can't even ignore him, because he keeps popping stupid riddles up on the fucking screen in front of your face while you're trying to do something else.  They should have called it Riddler's Annoying Bullshit City.

Bossfights.  Too many fucking bossfights.  You have one with Ra's Al Ghul, one with Penguin, one with Mr Freeze, one with Clayface...on and on.  Pretty much every villain you can think of has a fucking bossfight.  I was getting some tips on one fight and saw that pretty much the whole rest of the game was bossfights: Clayface, Joker, Hugo Strange, Joker again.  I mean what the fucking fuck?

And sidequests that aren't just there if you want them, they fucking come after you and harass you.  Zsasz' sidequest is started by answering a phone, then you have to race to another phone, and another.  It's not fun, it's irritating as fuck.  There's too much shit crammed into the cityscape, and I couldn't get anywhere without Oracle bugging me, and then a phone ringing with Zsasz wanting me to race, thugs complaining about each other, prisoners to rescue, helicopters yelling at me, Joker leaving me fucking voicemail.  It's like, can you all shut up for three seconds so I can follow this blood trail?  I'm trying to do something here in between thugs sniping at me with high powered rifles and Riddler calling me a dumbass.

They tried to make the game bigger, and instead they just made it overloaded.  Too much going on, too many sidequests, too much Riddler shit, and less choice when it comes to whether you fight, sneak, or try and find some other way to accomplish your goals.  It's all "do this now, now do that, no that's wrong, start over stupid."  I was looking forward to this game, but it just ended up making me angry.

So, it's become apparent that I need to replace my computer.

This old beast is just about 6 years old and she is close to giving up the ghost.  I had to replace the power supply last year, but now it's reached a level of slowness and software problems that I can no longer put it off.  I was planning on replacing her this year anyway, but things are getting worse (had to do 3 System Restores just today) and I can't really hold off any longer.

Problem is, this comes at a time when we really can't squeeze that much out of the budget, so I am appealing to our loyal readers.  I don't like doing this (as we have a new book campaign coming in June anyway), but I'm afraid this old thing won't last until June the way things are going.  So: anyone who would like to contribute toward a new machine so I can have something to keep writing on, I would really, really appreciate it.

And since we never sold any bonus scenes for Queen of the Sky Frontier on Indiegogo, I am going to just offer them here right out.  For a donation to the Computer Fund of at least $100 I will write you a personalized bonus scene, limit 4 (it would be 3, but a new box is going to be around $500, so...)

I should probably also stress that you don't have to give $100, I'll take any amount you want to contribute.  I ain't proud.

I'm not going to harp on this one, and you don't have to worry about seeing this on your Flist all the damned time, but this can't really wait, and I have send up the Adventurotica signal.

Finally saw Prometheus.  When it came out I said I had no interest in it, and then I truly did not.  But I rewatched Alien recently and I just got a jonesin' to check it out.  Netflix is there and so...yeah.  A lot has already been said about this movie, so I won't belabour with a synopsis here.  The plot boils down to: Humans go to distant planet to meet Aliens.  Aliens turn out to be jerks.  Everybody dies.  See?  Simple.  Only the ideas behind the movie are not simple.  The mythology of the whole thing is quite fascinating, moreso because it's not explained, and so you have to make guesses.  The Engineers created something, and then either it got away from them, or they decided they didn't like it.  Or maybe there are different factions?  I hope we'll find out in the sequels.  I liked that the Engineers did not act like guys in funny suits, but like a genuine alien race - with their own agenda and motivations that we might never comprehend.

That said, the actual screenplay has a terminal case of the stupids.  The characters are stupid, they do stupid things - and I mean really stupid and nonsensical things - which we are meant to take as if they were intelligent and knew what they were doing.  Everybody is either a nonentity or annoying except Micheal Fassbender who fucking owns as the android David.  He's completely awesome, and I found if I thought of him as the main character, then everything worked much better.  I thought maybe we hate the humans because David hates the humans, and sees them as stupid and petty.

The look of the thing is gorgeous, and man, Scott still knows how to make a dramatic visual.  Some of the effects are unforgivably bad, like the already infamous old-age makeup on Guy Pearce, or the stupid wolfman-look of the one guy who comes back from the dead as like an alien zombie or something.  I think we were supposed to think of the black goo as some sort of ever-chaging, mutating threat that does different things, but it's just never explained properly.  I do have to call out the also-infamous self-surgery scene.  I was expecting to be squicked out, but it looked laughably fake - I was literally chuckling through it, as Naamah can attest.  The incision looked fake, and the alien squid-baby was one of the cheapest-looking animatronics I've seen in years.  No matter how much glycerine they poured on Noomi Rapace or how emphatically she grunted, I was not sold on the scene at all.  It was hokey as fuck.

So if you want a really atmospheric space movie with some cool visuals and a bunch of characters you will hate and can't wait to see eaten or dissolved or whatever, fine.  If you haven't seen it yet, go ahead.  It's entertaining enough.

So I finally got around to seeing two of the year's big movies.  I actually wanted to go see The Hobbit in the theater with the 3D and everything, but...yeah that didn't end up happening.  But that's why we have Netflix and a 50-inch TV, or in this case, good friends to loan us Blu-Rays.

So: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Trilogy was somewhat better than I was expecting.  Or maybe not better, but more agreeable.  Even as I noted it's flaws I was entertained, and really the things that bothered me the most were the "Jacksonian" flourishes in the action scenes - like the big battle in the goblin city toward the end that is this movie's attempt to out-do the Moria sequence from Fellowship and just comes off as trying too hard.  A great deal of the film's affability can be laid at the feet of Martin Freeman, who is so damned charming as Bilbo that he carries the movie past a lot of faults.  Richard Armitage is awesome as Thorin, and he'll go far in Hollywood if he can keep brooding like that.

A lot of the other performances are just blah.  Ian McKellan is frankly phoning it in, none of the other dwarves really pop, and while it's good to see Galadriel and Elrond and Saruman again (and super-cool for Tolkien geeks to see the actual White Council) none of them have great material to work with.  There's a lot of goofy shit in the original book, as it was a children's story, and that vibe fights with the more adult approach carried over from the LotR movies.  Having the trolls from the LotR be these looming, bellowing monsters and now these trolls be wisecracking comic relief is just jarring, and there's no way around that.

The movie looks amazing, especially the opening sequence that shows off the designs of Erebor and Laketown, which we have to wait until later films to see more of.  The warg redesign is kickass, and really the whole film has amazing design and a glossy, golden sheen to it.  It looks fake as hell, but it sure is pretty.  It lacks the more gritty feel of the other movies, but this is a different kind of story, so that works ok.  I loved the music, especially the "dwarven theme", and the way the old LotR themes were worked into the music.

It's essentially porn for fans - either fans of the Tolkien universe or the first set of films, because a lot of this is just like a victory lap for the original trilogy.  I'm a fan of both, so I enjoyed it, but it's too long and the pacing drags.  Things have been added to make the whole long enough for three films and it is obvious that's what has been done.  The movie as a whole has little shape, and it remains lumpy and without any real narrative snap.  The script is baggy and a lot of the dialogue is just dull and not that well-written.  It's clear having more money and more freedom has not brought out Jackson's best.  It happened in King Kong and here it's happening again.

Zero Dark Thirty got a lot of critical accolades, including Oscar nods, that I really don't think it deserved.  I was quite keen to see it, as I have always been a fan of Bigelow's work - from Strange Days to Near Dark, Point Break, all the way up to The Hurt Locker which won her a long-deserved Academy Award and made Jeremy Renner a star.  She's able to do action movies that are about something beyond just blowing stuff up, that have real characters and deeper significance than what's on the surface.

This is basically an attempt to recapture the meditative approach of The Hurt Locker and use it to tell the story of America's quest to kill it's modern Bogeyman Osama Bin Laden.  It works only in places.  Bigelow is great at tension, and there are riveting, tense scenes of people just driving along, or walking down the street, but she makes the scenes absolutely nail-biting with careful build and excellent editing.  The performances are first-rate, with up-and-coming actors like Mark Strong and Kyle Chandler delivering good supporting roles, and delightful little surprises here and there like the blink-and-you'll-miss-him appearance of John Barrowman.  Jessica Chastain, however, owns the movie, and her Oscar nom for the part is completely justified.

The other noms maybe are not.  As a whole the film is too slow, and lacks drama because we have a complex, layered protagonist with only the shadow of a cardboard villain to work against.  The movie doesn't waste time establishing a bad guy we already know, but it is weakened by the fact that the antagonist has no presence in the story.  Characters come and go without comment, and many of them we never know who they are or why we should give a shit.  The much-ballyhooed torture scenes are largely dull, and don't excite the repugnance they should simply because they are not visceral or scary.  The movie takes a distance from its subject, aiming for a flat, more documentary feel that ends up making the whole thing seem distant and flat.  Chastain makes it compelling as much as can be done, but really this movie is kind of blah.  I'd go with The Hurt Locker or Black Hawk Down instead.

Finally, after interminable delays, The Fox's Tale ebook is available! With a retooled cover by our resident Short-Armed Art Elf, the story of Shayrin and her adventures in Avalon comes to you in mind-melting IMAGINOVISION!  Where everything is in 3-D and looks awesome.  Remember: reading a book means never groaning at crappy CGI effects.

Here's a link to the new cover art because it is HUGE.

If there's one thing the mainstream media loves it's a rags-to-riches story, these kinds of narratives are always popular during periods of heavy economic disparity between rich and poor - witness the dominant influence of the Horatio Alger Myth in the late 1800s - a period referred to as "The Gilded Age" for a very good reason.  It looked good on the surface, but it was rotten underneath.  Alger wrote over 100 books detailing how young men (always men) triumphed over adversity and poverty to become wealthy and respected.  It was a myth then, and it's a myth now..

Any time you see a 'rags to riches' story, look closely for the seams and the zipper running up the back of the rubber suit, because you are being sold a big, fat lie.  The rags are never as raggy as they want you to think.  People do not, by and large, become fabulously wealthy by dint of hard (and virtuous!) labor.  People almost always inherit wealth - over 60% - of people who are rich were born that way.  We hate to admit this, and it is almost as durable a myth as the 'welfare queen' - who is similarly nonexistent - but the story of the plucky young genius who 'Makes Good" is sold to us as a panacea, as a sop, as a way to keep the underclasses in line.

You will hear stories about Bill Gates starting Microsoft in his garage - yeah, he dropped out of Harvard to start the business with seed money from his father, who was a high-powered attorney, and his mother, who was on the board of First Interstate Bank and came from old money.  Bill Gates was not a scrappy underdog - he was born to a level of wealth most of us will never know.  We hear about J K Rowling, and how she was on 'welfare' when she wrote the first Harry Potter book as a single mother.  In fact she went to good schools, attended Exeter, had a well-off family, and was not on 'welfare', so much as receiving benefits the UK government allots to artists so they can work on their chosen form - it is not the same as food stamps.

And in fact women are often the focus of these narratives in the modern era - we see all over the myths about 'single mom figures out the big secret' -  the implication being that if a woman can do it, then nobody else has any excuse.  It's the equivalent of yelling at football players "am I working you ladies too hard?"  Shaming by depicting success of the presumed least able.

Which brings me to this piece of shit right here, and if you are wondering whether I mean the article or the person it's about, I mean both.  This is a piece so puffy it borders on hagiography, filled with so many bullshit tear-jerk details and things that don't make any sense that it is almost comical that anyone would believe it.  This mendacious and horrible woman is nothing more than a preening self-promoting Multilevel Marketer who uses her tailor-made backstory and a zealous evangelistic style to hook more people into her scam.

Now let's be clear - MLM is usually not prosecutable as an actual con, but it skirts the edges so closely that if you blink you will miss the point when it slides over the edge and ends up down there on the ice with the crystalisks.  In a multilevel marketing setup, the recruits are pumped up with stories of wealth - flashy cars, big houses, rolls of cash - in a display designed to prey on the most desperate people that can be found.  They are put through a torturous 'interview' process which is nothing more than a sham intended to make the whole thing feel exclusive.  People who have been unable to find honest work are so unused to being chosen for anything that just being "hired" is intoxicating, especially when the "position" comes with a title like "supervisor" or "sales manager" when it is really nothing of the sort.  Candidates are inexperienced and unqualified for any kind of sales, and they are pressured to buy 'startup' packages of worthless and overpriced products as well as recruit new suckers into their fold with promises of big payouts when they do.

Does it sound like a Ponzi Scheme?  That's because it is so close that it only matters to another pyramid scam.  And this woman, this blister, this boil on the ass of the world, is not only depicting herself as just a 'regular gal' who made millions, but as a mover and a shaker, as a legitimate businesswoman who 'bootstrapped' her way up.  Well, if by that you mean lied and cheated and borderline swindled to make whatever she could, then yeah, I'm sure she did.

Are we really meant to believe that a waitress with no sales background suddenly became a one-woman sales tornado?  Are we meant to buy that she could talk people into giving her an address and a phone number just because she was so darn spunky and adorable?  The entire thing is so transparent it's laughable.

And the worst, the absolutely worst thing is that bullshit like this gets waved in our faces and we are told "See?  See?  If SHE can do it, then anyone can do it!" Forgetting of course that "ANYONE can do it" does not equate to "EVERYONE can do it", and in fact it cannot possibly mean that.  Surprise success is noteworthy precisely because it is RARE, and it is one thing to buy a lottery ticket just in case and quite another to spend all your spare money on lottery tickets and relying on hope for big luck to replace a decent chance for some kind of life worth living.

The strength of this country has always been that anyone is allowed to succeed, and that's not completely been stamped out just yet - at least if you mean "succeed" as in "have a decent standard of living" rather than "become super-rich" because that is not really going to happen.  It is a lie, believing it will damage your life.  And that woman up there?  She is not a role model, she is a fucking grifter.

We have reached our goal, and while we are still coming in at over $1000 less than last time, we hit what we were aiming at.  I knew running a campaign this time of year was going to be rougher, but our fans have come through for us again.  There are still 22 hours remaining to grab perks if you want one, and anything we get from here on out will be a gift.  In retrospect, I clearly should have made this a 31 day campaign so we could hit another Friday, and next time I will look more closely and take that sort of thing into account.  This is only our third campaign, so we are still learning.

As with last time, I am utterly wrung out by this, and will take a few days off to recharge.  We have a pile of print editions of Pride & Prostitutes to send out, and those go out next week.  Then we'll get on the formatting of The Golden Mask into ebook and then print forms.  The cool thing about this job is being our own boss, the sucky thing is as bosses we have to keep making ourselves do stuff when we are really tired out.

So thanks to everyone who donated, and everyone who will before deadline at Midnight PST.  We're staying on the air a bit longer because of you.

Sorry, but we are currently just $223 from making goal and we have just 46 hours as of right now to do it.  If everyone reading this sent in even $1 we would be better than halfway there.  If everyone sent in $2 we'd be over the line.  Please help if you can, and don't think every little bit does not matter, because it does.

Go here so we can liiiiivvve!

Indiegogo was apparently down for part of the day, but it seems to be back up and running now.  We are at 91% funding, with only $268 to go.  It would be absolutely criminal for us to get this close and still miss it.  59 hours left before deadline.  We've brought in $75 so far today, but I know we can find some more.  Please, just 59 more hours and I can stop harping about this all the time.