News You Can Bruise

Commissar Joe

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:28:33 GMT

Shopping at Trader Joe's is like living under a really good planned economy. You can get all sorts of exotic food at pretty decent prices, but there's only one brand of everything: the store brand. The few exceptions (soy milk, energy bars) feel like imports from another country. Some of the packaging hasn't been changed in thirty years. The products come and go at the whim of unseen "experts", seemingly unconnected to consumer demand. There's an in-house propaganda publication full of over-the-top writing about how good you have it.

I made this connection on Sunday when I spent twenty minutes standing in the twelve-item checkout line.

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:11:05 GMT

"You're a pigeon, my friend."

Reviews of Not That Old Science Fiction Magazines: Apex Volume 1 Issue 11 (2007)

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:53:23 GMT

Not to be confused with Abyss and Apex. I believe Sumana got this magazine from a friend in 2008 and gave it to me so I could study the market. I studied it enough to see "Science Fiction & Horror" at the top of the cover, and then put it in with the rest of my unread magazines. I do not like horror. I realize that this says more about me than about the genre, so I will spare you my half-baked opinions and nickel psychoanalyses of the horror writers profiled in this issue of Apex. Suffice to say that I am suspicious of any genre named after an emotion. Like if comedy was just called "laughing".

That said, there was one story in this issue I really liked. Sara King's "The Moldy Dead" is one of my favorite types of story: a first contact story with no humans in it, just alien-on-alien action. The horror element is surprisingly understated, and I appreciated it on an intellectual level when it came into play in the ending. It was kind of Star Trek-ish, though (if I may damn with faint praise) more interesting than any time Star Trek ever tried to do horror. (PS: Helpful hint to space explorers. If you go to a planet looking for intelligent life, and you find only one form of life on the planet, that might be it!)

I also enjoyed the title of one of the pieces: "Cain XP11 (Part 3): Sorry About All The Blood". That was the third part of a four-part novella about a government plan to clone history's great serial killers and train them as super-soldiers, a well-thought-out plan which surprisingly goes awry.

And that's the kind of thing found in the rest of the magazine. The ads are uniformly interesting: small-press stuff with the distinctive small-press art style, and because I don't believe in the reading conventions of horror the copy just makes me laugh. ("Resurrected against his will in an unholy deal with Hell, he must now use his surgical skills to harvest the living to feed an ever-growing army of the undead.")

However, I would like to give a special shout-out to David Wong, editor of Cracked.com and author of John Dies At The End, which in 2007 was advertised as available online for free, but which since then has been trapped in a paper book. Great title! I'm getting most of my entertainment here from the titles. ("Where Evil Lurks: Special Edition") Also Alethea Kontis had an editorial about curses that was pretty interesting.

Finally a note about the cover. I don't have my camera handy but it's a brownish painting of the face of some dude who looks like an octopus (or maybe it's the whole body, if dude really looks like an octopus). Tentacles, mottled skin, big round eye, etc. I looked at this cover and thought "Man, this is why I hate horror. I'm supposed to be prejudiced against this creature just because it looks like a tentacle monster. There's probably some Lovecraft ripoff story in this magazine, instead of a cool story about aliens." But no, the cover illustration was just a picture of one of the aliens from "The Moldy Dead", a cool story about aliens.

So that was a pleasant surprise. But then I started wondering how Apex readers distinguish between a horror tentacle monster and a science fiction tentacle monster. Then while looking at the ads I figured it out: teeth. The single most reliable indicator of horror art is exposed teeth (runner-up: an open mouth without exposed teeth).

Octopus-dude's teeth, if any, are not depicted on the cover. Its most prominent feature is the eye, which you'd think would be creepier (I'd rather see a tooth lying on the sidewalk than an eyeball), but in fact it creates empathy, letting you know that this other thing is a person. In the ads in this magazine, creepy things tend to have their eyes closed, or else their eyes lack pupils.

This teeth thing is also largely a matter of prejudice (there's a funny scene in Old Man's War that makes fun of this), but I think that's how the signalling works.

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:51:03 GMT

I haven't been writing NYCB or the novel because I've been trying to write a paper for the First International Workshop on RESTful Design. I made a great breakthrough today when I decided to just cut a third of the paper and talk about that stuff later after I fully understand the problem, rather than to improvise something and get it in before Tuesday...

Except looking at the web page, I noticed that the deadline has been pushed a week into the future. I haven't gathered enough data to be sure, but it seems like conference paper deadlines always get extended. How come they never did that in college? A week is probably not enough time to do justice to that third part of the paper, but it gives me enough of a buffer that I can take it easy tomorrow and finish the novel chapter that's effectively already finished except for little details like the words not being on the page.

This entry got longer than I expected because I discovered the deadline got changed, but here's the link I was going to appease you with: weird Chinese fake Lego. (You can tell it's fake because it's not LEGO.)

PS: If my paper is not accepted, I'll post it on Crummy for you to read. I haven't written much about web services due to novel work, but the paper should give a little insight into what's been happening at my job.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:39:22 GMT

Random link of excellence, I don't remember where I found it and it's seven years old, but check it out: Cartridge covers from Thai Atari 2600 games.

KJ Kabza

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:38:52 GMT

A few weeks ago when we went to Boston, we attended a dinner party with people from Julia's writing group. It's difficult for me to imagine setting up a dinner party for my writing group; we have enough trouble all getting together for the writing group itself. Anyway, one of the people I met, KJ Kabza, turned out to be a fan of mine! (Well, a fan of "Awesome Dinosaurs".) I had a great conversation with him, and this weblog entry gives me a reason to link to his webpage so you can check out his writing.

Neti Pot

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:27:13 GMT

I've been subsceptible to sinus problems since I was a teenager, and many's the time I've wished I could just flush that system out with salt water. The neti pot is designed to do just that, but I didn't use it until recently, probably because I also have a deep fear of having water in my skull cavities. But it works great. Sumana got me one the last time I was sick, and it relieved the pain better than useless non-pseudoephedrine-containing medicine. Since then I think it's prevented an onset of sinus sickness, and even when I'm not sick, I've found it useful for generally not feeling miserable in dry weather.

So, at the risk of having told you more than you want to know about my sinuses, I recommend checking out the neti pot. Part of me wishes I'd had one when I was a kid, and part of me knows that me-as-a-kid would never have been able to use it correctly. I couldn't even swallow pills until I was about nineteen--too squeamish.

You gained "cows" and "hate"!

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:45:47 GMT

Hey, check out the Global Game Jam entry of Adam Parrish et al, Humans Hanging Out. A matching game in which you must pass the Turing test against opponents who can't pass the Turing test. Some luck is involved, but once you figure out the underlying rules you can win pretty consistently. (It helps to sniff the Flash application's Ajax requests to the web service.) Unfortunately, when you win the game you get a screen that's much more disturbing than what you get when you lose.

PS: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the game includes another sweet Adam P. chiptune.

HP Sauce

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:00:11 GMT

Possibly the greatest Lovecraft sentence ever (from "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward"):

To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones.

Reminds me of a night when Kris and I were doing everything in Lovecraft style, like the "My most embarrassing moment" column in Seventeen magazine.

At once I felt a hideous upwelling of blood from within my bowels, a red stream of ichor that flowed without measure into the white trousers I had just purchased at this dying town's dusty Mercantile.

Kris also came up with the ultimate dinner-table line: "If you'll excuse me, I have to go give vent to certain measured sounds."

On a related note, does anyone else find it uncanny that the spokesman for Nintendo of America in the 1980s was named Howard Phillips?

Underrepresented in Wargames #2

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:22:04 GMT

I'm not a big player of wargames[0] but I like the idea of dramatizing interesting historical situations and/or exploring their tactical aspects. Especially the tactical aspects of non-military conflicts like protests, standoffs, and political struggles. After posting about UATWM! I mentioned this to Sumana, and spent a couple hours searching BoardGameGeek for wargames on such topics.

By the standard of interesting wargame topics, Ted Torgerson is our favorite game designer. He created Dawn of Freedom, a Twilight Struggle mod (?) that includes a Tiananmen Square track (not really tactical, but oh well), and Free At Last, a wargame about the civil rights movement. ("If the Non-violence track reaches Non-Violence Abandoned at the end of any game turn, the segregationist player wins the game.")

There are two games about the 1999 WTO protests: Battle Of Seattle and the longer-named N30: We Are Winning: The Battle of Seattle. Steve Jackson Games also published a tactical game about the 1980 attempt to free the American hostages in Iran.

In my experience a BoardGameGeek list is a fractal timesink as bad as TV Tropes, so instead of linking to "Wargames with Odd or Special Units" and "Overlooked but Important Battles" I'll just mention their names. If you go look at them, it's your own fault.

[0] But my current not-a-big-player state includes contingent factors like a lack of space to store games and a lack of friends who want to play them. In 2008 I played some Memoir '44 with Brendan and had a good time.

She-Hulk Tie-In

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:11:41 GMT

When I was in Boston Kirk showed me a few of his favorite games of the 2000s, including the Gamecube tie-in game for the Incredible Hulk movie. Kirk mentioned how he liked the game's dreamlike atmosphere of running up the sides of buildings, throwing helicopters, etc.

I was not as impressed. But this entry is not about how difficult it is to impress me. Instead I wanted to share my awesome idea for a She-Hulk tie-in game. It would be a courtroom adventure game like Phoenix Wright, except funnier and with the occasional fit of smashing. I can almost taste it--the only thing preventing me is the fact that video games generally have no flavor. It's such a great idea it would almost be worth having a terrible She-Hulk movie made so that this game could be the tie-in.

Nethack Where You Don't Expect It

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:41:02 GMT

I decided to do something similar to my adventure to find the first known mention of the ARPAnet in popular culture. I'd find books that mentioned Nethack but were not books on computers or game design.

This adventure was fun but noticeably less successful. There were a number of government documents and books about oil mentioning "nethack agreements", but this was just an OCR error for "netback". I also saw one "setback" become "nethack".

There was a collection of User Friendly comics and one of BBspot news stories. I found only one work of prose fiction that mentioned the game Nethack: "Dyl", a self-published piece of French SF by Mirko Vidovic. Here's my machine-aided English translation of part of the section called "Rogue":

The system, which had seemed to boot normally, was suddenly seized with hiccups. The screen was going mad. Instead of presenting the expected prompt, Dyl found himself in the middle of a game of Hack, the successor to Rogue, itself the originator of Nethack.
"The system has managed to intercept the launching of Sarge [the Debian release?], and substituted the utility routines which it considers best suited to a strategic confrontation. Something tells me that in these dungeons are two antagonists which expect me," whistled Dyl. "I will play the game, go down there and beat them both."

Michael P. Kube-McDowell's "Vectors" contains the string "nethack", but it's a cyberpunk nonsense word ("covered with nethack gear"), possibly used as an in-joke.

Marylin Schrock's "Wake Up, Church! The Enemy Is Within Your Gates!: Astral Projection and The Church" tries to bring 80s-style Bible-thumping fantasy buzzkill into the Internet era by, near as I can tell, taking claims of astral projection at face value and blaming it all on Satan. Its big section on "Astral Projection in Our Culture" (hey, Wikipedia didn't want it[0]) says: "The astral plane is the final level of the computer game Nethack. The player must sacrifice the Amulet of Yendor to a deity in order to win." Otherkin, mentioned on the same page, are apparently an even bigger problem than Nethack.

On the other end of the spectrum, a Christian nerd with the ominous nom de plume of "Anakin Niceguy" has self-published "Rethinking 'Getting Serious about Getting Married' : A Biblical Response to Debbie Maken's Book and to the Assault on Unmarried Men by Religious Leaders". I know that religious leaders were always mounting assaults on me until I got married. Here's the Nethack graf:

A bachelor may indeed have his "golf or other hobbies" but married people have their weddings, receptions, honeymoons, McMansions, oversized SUVs [several other stereotypical status symbols elided], and piano lessons for Junior to make the parents proud. As a lawful [sic] as these things are, I fail to see how they bring a soul any closer to God than the time a single man spends in front of the computer playing NetHack.

I'm not really sure what is up with Benjamin Rowe's "The 91 Parts of the Earth", but I doubt Marilyn Shrock would approve of its "Enochian magick". The Nethack graf makes Rowe (?) sound like H.P. Lovecraft's most milquetoast narrator:

Possibly in reaction to this, I now find myself slightly reluctant to try entering the Part again. I've put off starting several times already today, on the faintest excuse, and a couple of times with no excuse at all. (In fact, I'm going to do so again as soon as I save this file, and play Nethack for a few minutes.)

Dishonorable mention to Ralph Roberts' "REBOL for Dummies", which implies that Nethack is a text adventure, and to Timothy Albee's "CGI Filmmaking: The Creation of Ghost Warrior" which implies that Nethack is a MUD. Frankly, I expected better from you.

[0] But seriously, folks: the section is largely plagiarized from Wikipedia.

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:59:12 GMT

I was watching Computer Networks: Heralds of Resource Sharing, the excellent 1972 documentary about the ARPAnet, and one statement jumped out at me: "the large superfiles, the 10¹¹-bit weather files which we're putting on the Illiac". That's about 13 gigabytes, which will fit on a couple DVDs today but which was damn impressive in 1972.

Some Moore's Law style inflation shows just how impressive: an equivalent amount of data today might be 370 petabytes. They must have had a whole tape library devoted to that weather data.

Little Joke

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:28:17 GMT

via Lucian.

Have you heard about the new corduroy pillows? They're making headlines!

The end.

Game Time

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:45:04 GMT

Apples to Apples variant fever! Now Zack's got it!
I was hoping that Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! would be the 1960s-student-riot tactical wargame I've been looking for. It's not, though, just a pretty simple boardgame in which Sumana's alma mater (no, the other one) is the board. Maybe Chicago, Chicago! is what I want? There's also Battle of Seattle.