Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: shocked
Current Music: Boxcar Preachers - Auto-Body Experience - Don't Kneel At My Grave Site And Cry (

You’re Animal Farm!
by George Orwell
You are living proof that power corrupts and whoever leads you will become just as bad as the past leaders. You’re quite conflicted about this emotionally and waver from hopelessly idealistic to tragically jaded. Ultimately, you know you can’t trust pigs. Your best moments are when you’re down on all fours.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Of all the phrases I ever needed to not hear about me …

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Various Artists - Milla / Rocket Collecting (Squid's Redoubt)

Thanks to some discussion on various blogs about the relative rarity of conservative SF and SF writers, I chased a link to the free copy of Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn.

High over the northern hemisphere the scoopship's hull began to sing. The cabin was a sounding box for vibrations far below the threshold of hearing. Alex MacLeod could feel his bones singing in sympathy.

Piranha was kissing high atmosphere.

Planet Earth was shrouded in pearl white. There was no break anywhere. There were mountain ranges of fluff, looming cliffs, vast plains that stretched to a far distant convex horizon, a cloud cover that looked firm enough to walk on. An illusion; a geography of vapors as insubstantial as the dreams of youth. If he were to set foot upon them . . . The clouds did not float in free fall, as was proper, but in an acceleration frame that could hurl the scoopship headlong into an enormous ball of rock and iron and smash it like any dream.

Falling, they called it.

Yes, I'm a late-comer to the book. The geeks in the audience probably know why, the fen certainly do, and the rest of you should probably read it, anyway.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Richard Cheese - Baby Got Back/Sir Mix-A-Lot (Squid's Redoubt)

And so, at Morgasm's repeated insistence, I finish A Clash of Kings.

There are some interesting implicative undercurrents in the setting, which I don't think it's spoilerish to note.

• The prettier you are, the more useless you are.
• The less you want power, the more you should be given.
• Incest truly is best.
• Violence is not only the question, it's the answer and the most aggressive affirmative available.
• Civilization has a corruptive influence.
• The proximity of nature is a good indicator of the randomness of your behaviour.
• The gods are not only subtle, they're bastards.
• The most loyal and faithful women are whores.
• Wives are a dangerous weakness and active disadvantage.
• Being physically impaired demands you be royal-born, or else not born at all.
• Missing the coherent and very obvious upsurge in magical phenomenology when you have an entire academy studying the long-term weather patterns of your multi-year seasonal progressive cycle is not only possible, but strangely akin to global warming in that they can't see the forest for the trees.

Interestingly, the number of co-tenets found in RE Howard's Conan series is significant, even though they were challenged stylistically by Moorcock's Elric and other writers of the time.

I can see how Morgasm could confuse me for Tyrion, though. Short, cunning, mouth digs holes his ass has to fill, more comfortable in a nice warm stone castle than out in the ass-end of the kingdoms. Oh yes.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Helloween / Dark Ride, The / I Live For Your Pain

I can blame nyxsis for making me reinstall Homeworld 2 and get back into commanding my fleet of starships in their perverse meander across the galaxy.

Alright, not nyxsis per se, but the fact that we listened to Ender's Game on the way to NC. Books-on-disc are great travel fare, and EG is a piece that keeps you engaged the whole way. It was inevitable that I'd want my crack at Command College rather than Battle School, and had the tools to do so.

The degree by which Card's EG is prescient about the field of modern RTS design is rather eerie, though only Homeworld's series really captures the ideas by which the book describes with any real faithfulness. Other games, like ORB, obsess too much on old-school RTS mechanics like varying resources for harvesting and not enough variation in ship designs and the difference in scale between fightercraft and capital ships.

No one, of course, really hinges play on the idea "the enemy gate is down." In my play tonight, the real statement is "the enemy gate is mine!" after I actually jack its control rig and repoint it wherever I want it to be going. Between the last time I played this game and now, apparently my skill in 3d space tactics and strategy has greatly improved. In the fourth scenario, midway through, I have a fleet of frigates and fightercraft that looks at targets the way sharks look at blonde skinny-dippers, just before I split off specific pieces to go deal with particular targets. The flak frigates act as a core around which the rest are built, turning enemy fighter groups into kibble in deeply scary ways.

Plus, the clouds of exploding flak look damn cool.

The torpedo frigates flank the flaks, and pop out heavy seeking missiles at range to thwap the heavy cruisers and such with payloads of great degree.

The Marine frigates flank those, and are my tactical reserve to send in and capture enemy ships worth taking. Why destroy something when you can steal it?

In front, there's an umbrella-like shield of interceptors, bombers, plasma corvettes, and other high-speed light-weight craft which cut things apart, bit by bit. Its actually really cool to watch the furball start as they swarm over and through enemy positions, whipping from side to side to acquire targets. The hard part is often watching a fleet's content and sending units that're damaged back to dock before they get wholly destroyed, with squadrons going zip-zip-zip. I often wish I could assign control of a battle group to another human to look after and marshal.

Not a perfect reproduction of Ender's Command College game, but it certainly could be. If, you know, they added the strangelet cannon ...

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Tragically Hip, The / Hipeponymous / It's A Good Life if You Don't

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,
As someone who has purchased books by Alex Williams, you might like to know that The Best Sex Positions Ever will be released on July 3, 2006. You can pre-order your copy for just GBP 9.89 ( 34% off the RRP) by following the link below.

The Best Sex Positions Ever
by Alex Williams
List Price: £14.99
Our Price: £9.89
You Save: £5.10(34%)

And, hey, if you want the US edition of The Best Sex Positions Ever, its certainly possible.

Well, I suppose I'd know.

Current Mood: thankful
Current Music: Kill Hannah - Sick Boy

Or one of them. Alright, technically three of them.

Thanks to Eric the .5b, I've had the three TPB's of the Courtney Crumrin comic series ... and I must admit, I actually enjoyed them, despite the fact that they're technically "children's lit." If, of course, your children terrify others with sorcerously bound goblins, casually summon thunderstorms, and have a great uncle who's a terrifyingly competent warlock. Which, of course, pretty much sums up any children I'd have, so it rather pleased me.

Disturbing that the young lad has my tastes pegged so tightly.

If you've ever watched and enjoyed The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, you'll like Courtney Crumrin. I, myself, hold a deep and abiding lust in my heart for Mandy, who's destined to rule the Earth in perpetuity and who shares a similar taste in hair bangles with Courtney. Besides, Mandy is voiced by Tara Strong, who likewise does the voice for Raven of the Teen Titans, so the miasma of 2d wantonness exceeds sane bounds.

Ahem. Sorry about that.

Anyway, thank you Eric the .5b for giving me more things to fuel my perverse pseudo-pederastic tentacle-wielding evil. They blame you, you know.

Current Mood: embarrassed
Current Music: Rammstein - Alter Mann (Squid's Redoubt)

Well, it was worth a shot.

Earlier today, I dropped a line to Anime Weekend Atlanta, to see if they had any more Guest slots available for this year. Hey, I'm fairly well-studied on the subject, right? I co-wrote the book on shoujo, in any case; figured it might be fun to try and slip on to a couple panels on the subject.

I just received a pleasantly polite response that says they booked their Guest limit three months ago, but would be happy to have me at next year's show. Classy, if denied, but the part that struck me is that they finalized their Guest list three months ago, and have stuck to it even in the face of local talent willing to attend for a badge and a sammich.

Someone else might be annoyed by that, but I'm impressed. If Dragon*coN had that kind of spinal fortitude, I might not be trying to suggest an entirely new Directorate.

(Incidently, is anyone else vaguely creeped-out to see that a book I've had input into can be bought through Wal-Mart? Its one thing to be in your Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks, but Wal-Mart? I'm not sure what to think.)