Veteran’s Day

All right, I want to take a break from snarkiness and sarcasm to give my earnest thanks to all the world’s veterans whose sacrifices kept me free, and to those brave souls on the front lines, wherever and whoever they may be.

Stranger Than Truth

Not long ago, I decided to merge my fiction blog with my regular blog. Well now, in the interest of preventing confusion, I’ve un-merged them and moved all of my stories to a new blog called “Stranger Than Truth”. I hope to update it regularly (and get back to updating this blog regularly, too). For now, though, you can find a few hitherto-unpublished stories there. Enjoy!

So Bad I Couldn’t Finish It: “Slither”

So I once again feel the need to convince myself that I’m not just yet another hobby blogger spewing random opinions out into cyberspace. And thus, another pithily-named recurring segment that will probably never recur. I present to you: So Bad I Couldn’t Finish It, a (possible) review series in which I vomit bile all over a movie or book or videogame that was so truly awful that I couldn’t sit through the whole thing.

I’m an avid reader, and I don’t like the feeling of putting a book down unfinished. I plowed through Gerald Edelman’s dense and almost unreadable neurology book Wider Than The Sky back when I was a high school student with a laughable attention span. So, it says something about Edward Lee’s novel Slither that I just couldn’t force myself to finish it.

The novel’s plot runs something like this: a pair of scientists is sent to a tiny island off the coast of Florida to gather samples and escort a ditzy photographer from National Geographic. The island houses an “abandoned” military installation, so the group has a military escort. After a while, they discover some very odd things: giant trichinoid worms, reproductive cells that should be microscopic but are the size of ladybugs, and a profusion of weird cameras and equipment. Some pot farmers have been using abandoned missile sheds as grow-houses, and they get chucked into the action.

The thing is, I’m not sure what that action is, because, although the plot is complex and well-thought-out, the writing is so dry and lifeless that I couldn’t make it to the climax.

I say “climax” for a reason, because Slither is dripping with what I can only assume is sexual frustration. Nora, one of the scientists, is a thirty-year-old virgin who spends an anomalous fraction of her time being jealous of the National Geographic woman’s good looks. There are a couple of sex scenes, but those are far outweighed by scenes of people talking about sex and thinking about sex and admiring or despising their perfect or hideous bodies, respectively. The aforementioned trichinoid worms take a strange interest in female genitalia, but I’ll hand that one off to Dr. Freud.

Oversexedness aside, Slither is simply a lousy read. Edward Lee has the same problem Richard Preston did when writing his novel The Cobra Event: the technical bits overwhelm the narrative. But Richard Preston has two distinct advantages over Edward Lee: he’s made his career writing about technical subjects, and so has developed a talent for it and he has actual technical knowledge. Lee, on the other hand, seems more or less to be making shit up. And even if he’s not, the execution is so horrendous that it doesn’t matter. I cannot imagine any normal person who would throw technical jargon into idle chit-chat; or worse than that, in the case of one male character, act like a complete geek one moment and then like a stud the next.

Of course, somebody will no doubt argue that, since I didn’t read the book all the way to the end that I have no right to comlain about nonsensical plot points. To that I respond: yes I do. I’m a fan of Stephen King, so obviously, I don’t have a problem waiting for nonsnesical plot points to be resolved. The difference between Stephen King and Edward Lee, though, is that Stephen King is a good writer, while Edward Lee reads like a hybrid between a fourth-grade science book, a pulp novel, and a sexually-frustrated twentysomething’s lurid, sweaty fantasy. Slither’s few virtues–well-thought-out plot, mildly interesting characters, semi-inventive ideas–are simply not enough to compensate for its insipidness and its dry, uninspiring prose.

How I Beat Writer’s Block

Ah yes, the famous writer’s affliction strikes again. But this time, instead of grovelling at Writer’s Block’s knees, whimpering for it to please go away and let me write, I kicked it in the ass, hurled it off my porch, and threatened to pull off its gonads if it ever came ’round here again. This isn’t some sort of guide, and this solution will probably only work for me, but here it is, how I beat writer’s block.

First, the backstory. I’ve just recovered from a week of semi-insomnia and maybe a month or two of lousy writing. Now that I spend the bulk of my time shoveling different kinds of composted shit, writing has become just about the only useful thing I do (unless you count honing my Fallout skills and learning how to cook lentils), so it was pretty damn distressing when the old WB left me with nothing but Fallout and beans.

But like I said, this time I didn’t curl up on the floor and whimper. This time, I kept fighting it, trying to beat it. So, the first key thing when it comes to beating writer’s block is PERSISTENCE.

Of course, no amount of persistence could fix the fact that I was subconsciously pretending to be Stephen King. The solution to that little problem came when I made an effort to RE-DISCOVER MY VOICE. Which didn’t do me any good as long as I had no stories I felt passionate about writing, so I WROTE OUT MY FRUSTRATION. The result was this: A tiny story called Writer’s Block, and the solution to my problem. Enjoy!

*          *          *

WRITER’S BLOCK

I was scowling at the computer screen when she came in. She was the last person I wanted to see, and I couldn’t get rid of her. As I heard Andrea sitting down next to me, I let out a small sigh.

“You’re looking rough,” she said. I shot her a frown and turned back to the computer.

“Writer’s block.” She took a sharp breath.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah…don’t worry, I’ve got it under control.” She leaned forward and read what little there was to read over my shoulder. When she slumped hard back into the chair, I knew what was coming. When I looked over at her, she was rolling her eyes.

“Wow….read enough Stephen King lately?” I glanced to the computer, and then back to her, turning in the chair and eliciting that mousey squeak from its poorly-oiled bearings.

“What?” She smiled up at the ceiling with mock innocence.

“Nothing. Just a familiar style, that’s all.” Now, I turned the scowl I’d reserved for the computer on Andrea. Her mocking sarcasm was hard enough to take on a good day, and it was not a good day.

“You’re saying it’s unoriginal.” She looked up at the ceiling again.

“’I stole one last glance at the old pocketwatch as it tumbled down into the sewer drain. The light of the setting sun flashed off its face for a moment, and then it was gone. Hopefully, forever.’” She looked at me with those scalpel-sharp eyes of hers, and gave a similarly sharp smile.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, if you’re writing for Hollywood.” I felt my face flush immediately, and put up a noble battle against the urge to stand up and shout at her.

“That’s not Hollywood!” I barked. She rolled her eyes again.

“Wow…nice to meet you, Mr. I-Can’t-Take-Criticism. New in town? No, I think you must’ve been here a while.” I realized my nails were digging into the arms of the chair, and I tried to slow my breathing and calm down. With her still smiling that goofy, incisive smile, it was difficult.

“I can take criticism.”

“Clearly not.”

“I can!”

“You can’t. If I told you what I wanted to tell you, you’d hit the roof and then yell at me to leave.” The fact that she was right was infuriating, as it often is.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Stop playing games!” Andrea’s smile broadened.

“You really don’t want to hear it.” I sighed, my anger finally exhausted.

“No, but I probably need to hear it.” Some of the sharpness went out of her eyes, and her smile grew softer.

“Now there’s the right way to ask. But you have to promise me you won’t yell.”

“What do you care if I yell.”

“Promise me.”

“What does it matter if I get angry?”

“Well, we can’t have you getting your blood pressure up, can we?” she mocked. I almost wanted to shove her out of the chair.

“Fine. I promise.”

“Good.” She folded her hands and leaned forward. “First of all, I have a suspicion that I know where this story is going. Let me guess: main character buys weird pocketwatch from old gypsy, discovers it has supernatural powers, uses them, pays dearly, finally decides to get rid of it.” Her rightness continued to irk me.

“I wasn’t sure where I was going with it,” I lied.

“Fine, I’ll pretend that’s true for the sake of argument. But what the hell’s the deal with the style?”

“What’s wrong with the style?” My face was getting hot again, and I was leaning forward, trying to bore into her skull with my eyes.

“It’s forced, and like I said, it’s pretty Stephen King-ish.”

“Stephen King’s a good writer.”

“Right. Stephen King is. But Brad Gorham pretending to be Stephen King is something of a hack.” I could feel my carotid artery pulsing against my shirt collar.

Nothing came out of my mouth but a long, drawn-out Hhhhhhh. I couldn’t bring myself to say the H-word. I stood up (the chair squeaking like a rat), and balled up my fists. Andrea, as always, did not look concerned.

“Sit down. You’re not going to hit a girl, and even if I was a guy, you wouldn’t hit me because you know that I’m right and you’d feel terrible afterwards.” After standing there for a moment drowning in bile and breathing my own hot exhaust, my fists loosened and I sat back down. “Besides, I didn’t actually call you a hack. I called Brad-as-Stephen-King a hack.”

“You know how easily other writers influence me.”

“Stop making excuses. Like it or not, you’re trying to be Stephen King.”

“I’m not!”

“Oh, shut up,” she said playfully, “You are, and you really ought to stop lying to yourself. You’re trying to be Stephen King, because you like his style. But I can tell from the expression you had on your face that you don’t enjoy his style. You don’t like trying to write in his style. It’s too hard, and it’s no fun.” She was right, and my anger had been replaced by rueful concession.

“Okay. So what do I do, then?”

“It’s obvious.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is. Get back in the groove. Find your style again.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, you’re the writer.” That made me smile a little, and Andrea caught my smile and magnified it. “Try writing from your own perspective.”

“What about, though? I lose interest in everything I try to write.”

“Well, write what you know. Write about writer’s block.”

At the front of the house, a key rattled, and the knob made a clunk sound. The door squeaked (sounding nothing like a mouse), and heavy footsteps thumped down the hallway.

“Sounds like George,” said Andrea, getting up from the chair and turning to leave.

“Wait a second!” I protested, swiveling to face her as she paused in the doorway. She looked down at me.

“What?”

“We’re not finished yet!”

“Well, you’ve got something to write about now, so hop to it!” She smiled and walked out into the hallway. A second later, George walked in, sweaty from his run and breathing hard.

“Who were you talking to?” he rasped, wiping beads of sweat from his huge forehead. I almost said Andrea, but I stopped. George wouldn’t really understand. But I said something fairly close to the truth.

“Myself.”

Movie Review: “Crank 2: High Voltage”

A few years ago, I saw Crank, and think of it now (as I did then) as the cinematic equivalent of chugging three Red Bulls and staying up all night playing Grand Theft Auto: a hell of a lot of fun, but high-calorie, dangerous, and bad for you. At the risk of overextending an already-flimsy analogy, this is how I see the sequel Crank 2: High Voltage: like snorting an ounce of cocaine cut with meth and then sprinting across the highway. That is to say: insane, stupid, but ridiculously thrilling.

In this paragraph, I usually talk about the plot. Not this time, though, for one simple reason: I’m not exactly sure what happened. High Voltage has that same insanely fast-paced, no-holds-barred, in-your-face action that C rank had, only magnified by a factor of several million. Enough bloody gunfights, sex scenes, and wild characters flit past to fill two or three full-length movies, all crammed into your brain in an hour and a half. Here’s the “plot” in a nutshell: insane hitman Chev Chelios did not, as rational people might think, die after falling from a helicopter onto a Cadillac. Oh no, he lived on to have his heart removed by surgeons-turned-gangsters (or gangsters-turned-surgeons), and replaced by an artificial pump. Now, he must keep it charged while he runs around kicking ass and doing wild, bizarre things and killing a lot of folks. Here’s the kicker: he charges it by getting shocked. That’s not the only massive suspension of belief heaped on the viewer, but it sets a sort of weird tone for the rest of the movie. Crank, at least, could pretend to some kind of plausibility, but High Voltage has stumbled several yards over the line separating “well, it could happen” from “utter bullshit.”

That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the sequel. What little of it I could integrate, that is. If you don’t want to spend the fifteen bucks to see it in theaters, you can replicate its effect rather easily: stare at a rapid strobe light for half an hour with death-metal (I suggest Rammstein) turned up to full blast in the background, and that’s pretty much what it’s like to watch High Voltage. In all seriousness, I would warn all epileptics not to even consider watching this film. The cuts are fast and jittery, and the whole thing is very in-your-face. It has taken me (no joke) almost an hour and a half to even begin to recover from the sensory overload High Voltage caused. Here is where the director lapsed into insanity. High Voltage is so frighteningly intense that, after about half an hour, I couldn’t even make sense of it anymore. My brain could no longer integrate the lightning-quick scenes and surreal segues, and I saw everything through a sort of dizzy tunnel vision. It is not an exaggeration when I say that High Voltage is not a movie meant to be watched by normal humans. If you watched it through twice in succession, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell. Your brain would probably also liquefy, so don’t try it.

All in all, though, High Voltage is a juiced-up high-calorie mind-blowing sexually-charged insanely-intense adrenaline-fueled amphetamine-shot of a movie, and if you’re looking for cheap thrills, you’d probably have to take actual drugs to top the angry spasticity of this movie.

Final Judgment: * * * * * * * * – - (8 / 10)

Idea: The Un-Game

Once again, an idea came to me while I was in the la-la land between waking and sleeping, and I thought I’d share it with you, dear reader(s): the Un-Game. Basically, the Un-Game is a piece of software that looks and behaves more or less like a video game (in most cases a first-person shooter), but isn’t. It has the same sort of graphics and controls, but no plot or real objectives. The idea came to me while I was being generally disappointed by both movie versions of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. The 1972 version was long and depressing and strange, and the 2002 version missed the spectacle of the planet entirely. I realized that it wasn’t likely that anybody would do a re-make any time soon. But the only other venue with special effects to do justice to Solaris is the video game industry. And thus, the idea of the Un-Game was born. Here are a few examples:

Solaris: The player wanders around Solaris Station, maybe interacting with the crew, but they also have the option to go out and just look at the scenery, watch the suns rise and set, and observe the ocean’s strange transformations. That would be the main focus of the game: trying to visually re-create the symmetriads and agiluses that Lem described so vividly in the book.

Schizophrenia: Something like this already exists in Second Life, but I’d be interested to see a more thorough, first-person treatment that lets non-schizophrenics like me get an idea of what the symptoms are like. This could also be applied to other dieseases like epilepsy or autism: the player could have goals like go to the grocery store or drop the mail in the mailbox, and try to do them in spite of the symptoms.

Hallucinogens: Many moons ago, I played an interesting modified version of Tetris. The rules were exactly the same, but the player had to combat drug-induced hallucinations while slotting the blocks into place. Once again, I think a first-person-shooter-type perspective could be interesting here, giving people an idea what it’s like. This one has the most potential for development into a traditional FPS.

Training: I know that simulations like this already exist in huge numbers, but as I keep saying, I think the FPS perspective has a lot to offer here, allowing people to experience the dangers and intricacies of a new job or a new task.

What I’ve Been Doing Lately

• Occasionally wallowing in blog-related guilt, mostly brought on the fact that I haven’t been posting anything because I’ve been…
• …working a lot, and spending most of my spare time…
• …writing because I’ve finally recovered from another spell of writer’s block, and because I’m suddenly feeling a matehmatician-like “pressure to publish”. Fortunately, I’ve still had time to do things like…
• …see movies. For example, Knowing (starring Nicholas Cage, directed by Alex Proyas), which I thought was pretty decent until around two thirds of the way through when it basically became religious propaganda. Still, it was nice to have a movie to watch since…
• …bugger-all’s been coming out lately. Here is my ultimatum to the movie directors of the world: can the stupid remakes, the stupider sequels, and the even stupider (God, how did we sink so low?) romantic comedies and various other slush. Pretty much all the movies I’ve seen (in theaters and through Netflix) lately have been more or less unwatchable…
• …like the 1972 Russian version of Solaris, which, although it was more faithful to the actual plot of the novel, was so drawn-out and depressing and awful that I just gave up watching it and sent it back. It switches from black-and-white to color at random, there are long boring segments that serve no purpose (after all, who wants to watch traffic for fifteen damned minutes?), and it’s three fucking hours long. Now, it wins big points in the carnality department, but only because the Rheya of the 1972 movie is so much hotter than in the 2002 version with George Clooney (don’t get me wrong, though, I have no problem with Natascha McElhone…ahem…right). Apart from the previous bullet points there…
• …hasn’t been much to talk about, which explains the lack of updates. As for why I decided that this would be a good format for a post, well, I guess you can just…
• …chalk it up to sleep deprivation, which always makes me think very highly of my stupider ideas.

Happy Pi Day!

That’s right, 3-14 has come around yet again! So, happy pi day! And happy birthday, Albert. In celebration, I present to you all of the digits of pi that I’ve memorized so far:

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286…

And now I’m off to eat some pie.

The Weekly Update #13

What I’m Reading Now: I finished Invisible Monsters. Fairly great book, but the ending was a little weak.

What I’m Writing Now: I’m working on a bunch of different short stories, but most of my writing time is taken up doing research.

What I’m Playing Now: Still Fallout 3. I’m re-discovering the joys of having an unapologetically evil character.

What I’m Watching Now: Apart from a little Red Dwarf on DVD, nothing.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “There are 6.7 billion people on Earth. This greatly increases the odds that, someone else is facing the exact same problem as you and wondering what the hell they’re going to do about it.”

Coming Soon…

Once again, I apologize that I’ve been so quiet lately, but my new job is taking more energy than I expected, and now I caught a nasty cold from one of my coworkers. To make it up to you, I promise (at some point in the near future) a nice post about yet another NetLogo model I’ve been working on.

The Weekly Update #12

What I’m Reading Now: Chuck Palaniuhk’s Invisible Monsters. Palaniuhk’s sense of humor is dark and twisted, kind of like Kurt Vonnegut and Karl Hiaasen having a fistfight.

What I’m Writing Now: Various shot stories.

What I’m Playing Now: A little Fallout 3.

What I’m Watching Now: The somewhat bizarre YouTube series “Is It A Good Idea to Microwave This?” Also, Firefly.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “Existentialists are fond of saying that we’re born alone and we die alone. That’s not true if you talk to yourself.”

The Weekly Update #11

What I’m Reading Now: A book called Death From the Skies! written by Philip Plait, the author of Bad Astronomy. So far, it’s pretty interesting.

What I’m Writing Now: Still a lot of very short stories.

What I’m Playing Now: Nothing.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “Sometimes, bad days come before really good days.”

The Weekly Update #10

If this series was a witty running gag, then right about now would be when it started to wear thin.

…damn…

What I’m Reading Now: I recently finished Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. I wasn’t impressed. Actually (forgive me for saying this), I thought the movie was better. I also read Chuck Palanihuk’s Fight Club, which I liked better than the movie. So the universe is in balance.

What I’m Writing Now: A lot of very short stories. More on that later.

What I’m Playing Now: Not much.

A Random Fact About Me: My memory is terrible. The only thing I can remember with any great clarity is movie quotes, which always annoyed me.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “When you’re feeling really down, go to sleep. Things usually look better in the morning.”

Cell Music / Brain Music

Ever since I discovered it a few years ago, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of algorithmically-generated music, but I’ve lacked the programming skill to experiment with it myself. Well, the other day, I was sitting around and John Conway’s “Game of Life” cellular automaton came into my head. Somehow or other (I’m never quite sure how my ideas get started) that connected to my interest in generative music, and using NetLogo’s awesome sound-generation extension, I wrote a NetLogo program to run the Game of Life and turn the pattern of cells into musical notes.

That worked fairly well, but the Game of Life isn’t great for this application because the patterns tend to become less and less dense over time, and because of the way the model “plays” the cells (which I’ll explain in a moment), that means the music gets less and less interesting over time, until it’s basically just an endless loop with little variation.

Fortunately, there are other cellular automata out there, and the one I settled on for my next model was Brian’s Brain. The Brian’s Brain rules produce more active and interesting patterns, and the overall density tends to remain higher for longer. Also, the patterns that form have a structure that my intuition told me would be better-suited for conversion into music. The results, while not earth-shattering, were a lot more impressive than I’d been expecting:

Here’s how it works: at the beginning of each simulation step, the program selects the first vertical column of cells (that is, the one on the far left). It then asks those cells that are in the “blue” or “yellow” state (that is, state 2 or state 1) to play a note, with the pitch of the note based on the cell’s vertical height. Yellow cells generate a square-wave tone, and blue cells generate a sawtooth-wave tone. Then, the program waits for a fraction of a second before moving one column to the right and playing that colum in the same way. It continues like this until it’s played every column and reached the right edge of the world. Then, the cells evolve one step (according to the Brian’s Brain ruleset), and the process begins again. Although the “music” starts out a little rough (since the cells’ values are set randomly at setup), eventually, there’s enough order and structure in the patterns that the noises sound almost musical.

As usual, I’ll go about uploading this to the NetLogo site, and I’ll keep you posted on any interesting developments.

The Weekly Update #9

If this series was Lost, then right about now, right about now would be the point where it stopped making sense and I stopped watching it.

What I’m Reading Now: I’m about to re-read the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I’m also pecking away at the stories in Gardner Dozois’s The Year in Science Fiction for 2008.

What I’m Writing Now: I’m working on a few short stories as part of an ultra-secret, clandestine, and very secret project.

What I’m Playing Now: A little Burnout: Paradise, but not much else.

A Random Fact About Me: I completely lack binocular vision. When I was a kid, those little red-green “3D” glasses were a huge disappointment because I can only see out of one eye at a time.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “Whenever you’re in a boring or unpleasant place, imagine it’s being attacked by zombies. That’ll brighten your day right up.”

My Other Inspirational Thought of the Week: “If you’re not happy with your life, remember: every decision is a chance to do things differently.”

The Weekly Update #8

If the Weekly Update was House, then right about now would be when I’d bring in the pain-in-the-ass detective that derailed the whole series and annoyed the hell out of me.

What I’m Reading Now: Nothing much.

What I’m Writing Now: Nothing much. I’m researching publishers, if that counts.

What I’m Playing Now: A stupid and poorly-designed game called work. The puzzles are too hard and even when I beat the last boss, he still comes back the next day.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “Some day, each of us will die. The good news is that, whatever might or might not be on the other side, none of your enemies can follow you.”

Absence Yet Again: This Time, I Have an Excuse

Once again, I’ve been failing to post much of anything. Yesterday, it finally struck me that my readers might want to know why. The long and the short of it (actually, just the short of it; I’m too tired to write anything longwinded) is that I got tired of being a little pale remora on the underbelly of the global economy and get a job. Now, you might think that a person like me would end up in a cushy air-conditioned office job reading Dilbert six hours a day and secretly plotting to poison my boss. But no, I’m doing real work. That is to say, making fertilizer. That is to say, shoveling ten different kinds of shit for forty hours a week. It’s fairly exhausting work, and leaves me little time to do anything interesting during the day. I promise I’ll try to post something on the weekends, but I make no guarantees.

Just thought you should know.

The Weekly Update #7

Once again, I bring you the weekly update. If it was a TV series, right about now, it would have built up a small but loyal fanbase that would go apeshit if the series went off the air.

What I’m Reading Now: Neuromancer, but very slowly.

What I’m Writing Now: Still working on my newest novel and toying with the idea of eventually maybe perhaps someday (if the weather is right) revising Sirens.

What I’m Playing Now: The only thing of note is SimCity, the old, old, old original version from the early ’90s.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “Hard work is sometimes its own reward. And even when it’s not, the ability to lounge around and do absolutely nothing after your hard work is pretty rewarding, too.”

This Post Was Too Long for Twitter

Like many creative people, I’m mildly insane: When I find that someone had an idea that’s very similar to an idea I’ve had, and the person happens to look a little like me, I often wonder if the person in question is a future version of me who traveled back in time.

The Weekly Update #6

The weekly update returns! If it was a movie series, right about now the former fans would be wondering how the hell I keep finding studios willing to produce this crap.

What I’m Reading Now: Still technically Neuromancer, I suppose, although I’ve mostly lost interest for the time being.

What I’m Writing Now: I may or may not be preparing to send the first chapter of a new novel to a few publishers to see if there’s any interest out there. And I may or may not keep you updated (depending on whether or not anything interesting happens).

What I’m Playing Now: An assortment of random crap. Mostly Burnout, and a couple of old-school games like Theme Hospital and SimTower. Also a little bit of Moonbase Commander, because I am apparently a masochist.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “Your parents and your teachers were wrong: by and large, the punishment for every mistake is not suffering, misery, and homelessness.”

The Writings Page is Back Up

As far as this site goes, this was a pretty excellent turnaround time. I’ve removed a few of the stories I thought were crap or at least in need of revision, and added two new ones. Enjoy! (Note: I may very well be posting the first chapter of my novel Sirens as soon as I get it revised, although I don’t know if I’ll post the whole thing).

AdSpace — The Internet had finally become the great electronic universe it was always expected to be, a place where great minds could come together and do great things. Then, in a flash, the evolution of advertising wiped it all out, and Shiva spends his days zealously hunting spam in the ruins of cyberspace.

Bugs — Josh and Sandy Richter were enjoying their generic domestic life together until the old man downstairs killed himself. Rumors spread that a battle with bedbugs drove him to suicide, and soon, the super is ailing, too, and anything that crawls becomes a horrific menace.

The Writings Page is Down

The title says it all. It’ll be back after I get around to editing out the links to all the stories I’ve now decided are rubbish. Just thought you should know.

The Weekly Update #5

The saga continues to continue, although a day late this time. Sorry about that.

What I’m Reading Now: William Gibson’s Neuromancer. I think it’s supposed to be what jump-started science fiction’s cyberpunk phase, and where we got the term cyberspace. It’s decent enoug, although I’m only halfway through and it’s gotten a little tiresome.

What I’m Writing Now: Mostly, I’m just fiddling around with different ideas. If any of the stories based on said ideas ever get finished, I may or may not post some of them to the writings page. Also, I’m still technically revising Sirens, although the revisions have stalled for the moment.

What I’m Playing Now: Waaay too many games. I am, of course, still playing Burnout and Fallout, but I’ve also been fiddling around in SimAnt and a dumpy little strategy game called Moonbase Commander that I got at a discount store a few years ago.

My Inspirational Thought of the Week: “If you can’t stop worrying about something you can’t do anything about, then the next best solution is to tell yourself that, somehow, it’ll be taken care of.” Perhaps not the psychologically soundest solution, but I find it gets me through those dark days.

Game Review: “Burnout: Paradise”

As I mentioned in my most recent Weekly Update, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360. Since the games and the console were both ridiculously expensive, I was only able to buy two games. One of them was Burnout: Paradise.

The game is visually stunning. Compared to some of my previous racing game experiences, playing Burnout is like having undiagnosed myopia for ten years and then suddenly getting glasses. Everything is pretty and bright and shiny. But that’s not the reason I bought Burnout. I am and have always been a fanatic for racing games with an awesome damage model, and in that regard, Burnout is the game I’ve been looking for since I first played Rush on the Nintendo 64 back in the late ’90s. If you run into an obstacle with sufficient force, the game cuts to slow-motion and places the cameral optimally while you watch your car crumple and twist (dynamically! That’s right, the impact determines the damage, and no impact is the same as any other. Like I said, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time) and eventually crunch to a halt in a shower of wheels and metal fragments. And since every street is lined with pylons and buildings and populated by slow-driving idiots, you’ll experience a lot of these beautiful, cinematic crashes. At times, it does wear a little thin, but that doesn’t happen as often as you might think.

The game has a few different kinds of event you can participate in. There’s the standard race — which (and Yahtzee, curmudgeonly bastard though he is, got it completely right in his review) is rendered almost intolerable by having to plan your own route using your minimap — and then there are other events like Marked Man (escape from the cars that are trying to kill you) and Stunt (do a bunch of random tricks to build up points), and my personal favorite, Road Rage, which demands that you do what I’m best at: make other people crash before they crash you.

All in all, Burnout is a very amusing game, and good when you just want to be viscerally entertained. However, it has problems. For one thing, although the crash physics is incredible, the actual driving physics is clunky and feels unrealistic. And speaking of crashes, you have the cinematic ones so often that your little physics-inaccurate fender-benders are yawnworthy and annoying by comparison. And, speaking of annoying (I promise I won’t stick another “and speaking of” on the end of this one), the music is largely rubbish, and there’s a yappy, snide prick of a DJ called Atomica (who you have to imagine walks around wearing a pop-collared pink polo shirt) who only occasionally says anything even mildly useful.

Aside from that, though, Burnout is fairly awesome. If you’re not a complete simulation freak (or if you’re like me, and can turn off that part of your brain when needed) and can tolerate some inaccuracy and clumsiness, it’s a fun game, and the cinematics alone might be worth it (may I be struck down if I ever say that again).

Visual Numbers #3

It’s been nine months since Visual Numbers #1 and #2, and now, thanks to one sleep-deprived evening of daydreaming at my parents’ house, I bring you #3. Sorry about the images’ weird dimensions, but the reason for those dimensions will become clear.

Binary Progression: The numbers from 1 to 500, converted into binary and drawn as black and white squares. Each number is a series of 1s and 0s, and the 1s are drawn as black squares and the 0s as white squares.

Binary Primes: The prime numbers between 1 and 5000 (I think), graphed in the same way as above. I was kind of disappointed by this, honestly. I was kind of hoping all the squares would spell out “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU FOUND A PATTERN IN THE PRIMES” or something.

Binary Squares: The squares of every number between 1 and 500. Note the interesting fractal pattern.

Binary Cubes: The numbers from 1 to 500, cubed and displayed in binary. Notice how this one looks a lot more chaotic than did the last one.