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Showing posts from 2017

Muso Soseki

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Einstein and the Universe

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The Problem with "Atheists"

It was really bright the other day so my wife needed my help reading her Facebook notifications. A friend of hers with lots of Facebook friends and followers posted a status asking people to post their religion because she wanted to see how diverse her friends and followers were. Everyone who practiced a religion, just said their religion (pagan, Christian, Buddhist, spiritualist, etc). Nothing else. No tirades. No proselytizing. At most maybe something like “reformed” whatever or maybe something like “secular Buddhist”. However, everyone who said atheist felt the need to write a paragraph explaining why and go on a big aggressive and insulting tirade...Maybe they don’t need some form of spiritually to “teach them to a good person” but they need something to teach them not to be a smug and aggressive asshole. I think a lot of it has to do with an entire generation being brought up on Dawkins' aggressive self-promotion and the Bill Maher's habit of proclaiming himself t

Valerian and the City of 1,000 Planets

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Watched Valerian and The City of 1,000 Planets . Visually, I absolutely positively loved it. Stunning and imaginative. Absolutely adore that sort of fantastical SF. However, the script needed a polish or three because there was not a whole lot holding it all together--which threw the pacing off and meant there were times I felt every bit of its 2 hour and 17 minute run-time. And the actors playing Valerian and Laureline were totally miscast.

I Watch People In The World

"I watch people in the world   Throw away their lives lusting after things,   Never able to satisfy their desires, Falling into deeper despair  And torturing themselves. Even if they get what they want How long will they be able to enjoy it?  For one heavenly pleasure They suffer ten torments of hell,  Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.  Such people are like monkeys  Frantically grasping for the moon in the water  And then falling into a whirlpool.  How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.  Despite myself, I fret over them all night  And cannot staunch my flow of tears."  Ryōkan Taigu (良寛大愚) (1758–1831)

Thank you, Comrade Arkhipov

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I'm back at Disinformation . This time I'm talking about Vasili Arkhipov who saved the world 55 years ago today.

Allan Bennett

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My first original article is now up at Disinformation...

Think of Timespace

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Ramses The Two Little Too Late

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Just saw Anne Rice finally wrote a sequel to The Mummy or Ramses The Damned . Got excited for a minute until I remembered I haven't liked anything she's written in years. Then I saw she co-wrote it with her son and immediately found the whole thing immensely off-putting.

Mars Attacks

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Watched Mars Attacks for the first time in years. Still kinda fun but not high on the rewatch value (probably be another decade before I get around to it again). Effects are very dated. Pacing is off. The number of big name stars in throwaway parts is distracting. Mostly the whole thing feels indulgent and gimmicky and kinda...standoffish.

Into Your Head Alone

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Disinformation

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Happy to announce that I'll be writing content for Disinfo . It'll be a mix of reblogs and original content. Stay tuned for magic and mysticism and jailbreaking your consciousness and other bits of weirdness...

Cosmic Aggressions

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My next story (fourth written, second accepted) featuring Miskatonic University's The Dunwich Committee on Student Safety will be in the Walpurgisnacht 2018 Issue of Lovecraftiana: the Magazine of Eldritch Horror . "Cosmic Aggressions" is my play on the higher ed concern surrounding the concept of: microagressions .

Le Secret Du Roi

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Been a while since I could make an announcement like this: I'm pleased to say that I'll have a story in an upcoming issue of Broadswords and Blasters . It's an action-packed spy tale of Le Secret Du Roi .

Political Post: Roter Frontkämpferbund

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The two branches of the corporate party that hold office here in the States are champions of the status quo. Why? Because the status quo keeps them in power, best serves their paymasters, and keeps us living paycheck to paycheck, laboring for a pittance under the looming fear of getting sick and going broke. The two branches of the corporate party are masters at constructing an alternate and mythic American history that services their status quo where the angels of the free market watch over reasonably-minded men practicing “pragmatic” solutions and the kind of “civilized politics” that keeps all change and progress moving slowly and incrementally, inch by inch, onward. This fiction allows them to ignore how change really occurs; the mechanisms of progress; undercut anything actually radical and prevent it from ever happening again by co-opting and commodifying it into something generic, saleable, lacking of legitimate change or rebellion; and paint everything else as illegiti

Jeff Bridges & Buddhism

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The interview is old but absolutely worth reading: "Right now you’re in my sangha. We’ve touched in that way. Everyone I meet is in my sangha. I don’t know if that’s the proper definition, but that’s the way I’m going to hold it in my mind."

Political Post: More Fighting Fascists & Group 43

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Group 43 were a band of Jewish men who came back from WWII, saw Oswald Mosley organizing fascists in the U.K. and said, not on our watch.

Weird Thrift Store Finds

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Political Post: More Fighting Fascists

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Political Post: Fighting Fascists

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However you may feel about it, answering the call of fascists with your fists is nothing new. Here are Londoners responding to notorious British fascist Oswald Mosley in 1962:

Death Wish? Ugh...

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The trailer for Eli Roth’s new Death Wish remake with Bruce Willis looks awful. no wonder it's being labelled as racist and an alt-right-violence fantasy. Someday it would sure be nice to see a close adaptation of Brian Garfield’s slow-burn novel about how a terrible but random trauma buries an average man under a mountain of grief and rage until he feels like he has no choice but construct an alternate morality that’s contrary to everything he's ever believed in simply to cope. The bulk of the novel is Paul trying to wrap his brain around what's happened and deal with his trauma; he doesn't actually kill anyone until like the last 50 pages.

Random Thoughts, Post-Charlottesville

Thoughts following Charlottesville: Free speech —your right to free speech is about what the government can and can’t do to inhibit your speech. It has zero to do with your job, your friends, someone else’s Facebook page, or even your community getting together and saying you’re a dickbag and should just go away. And it does not now, nor has it ever protected you from consequences like getting arrested, getting sued, getting fired, getting unfriended, or getting punched in the face. Quick to judge/A mile in someone’s shoes —you are shaped by your experiences, your circumstances, and your thoughts. Compassion comes from being able to put all that aside and really think about what someone else has gone through so you can acknowledge the truth of their experience. If you can’t do that, if you can’t put you aside, then you can’t contribute anything really meaningful to the conversation, because all you’re doing is engaging in an intellectual exercise with you as the star. And you

Homeland

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Currently on the 5th season of Homeland . Honestly not really sure why I’m still watching it or even if I’ll make it through to the 6th. Yeah, sometimes when it’s cooking it’s great drama, but ugh… I feel like first season the show at least tried to deal objectively with the problems of the US trying to police the world and our shitty foreign policy causing the terror we’re supposedly trying to stop. However, I feel like that all falls by the wayside in favor of Frankenstein logic—“Muslims bad!”—and boy, drone strikes sure are awesome! And, man, each successive season my dislike for Carrie Mathison has gone up. So, two episodes into this season, I'm having a hard time buying Carrie as working at a philanthropic organization.

Political Post: Our Plan? The Same as Our Opposition!

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The Democrats big plan is to offer more tax cuts to businesses. It's no surprise the Democrats have learned nothing. They fail and they fail epically and consistently because they offer ZERO meaningful alternatives and no real actual dissident to the other side. When's the last time the Democrats questioned the magic of the free market? Or tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy? When's the last time Democrats were like, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't bomb this country and start another war?" When's the last time the Democrats championed Single Payer Health Care? I mean, is Obamacare better than Trumpcare? Absolutely, but ultimately Obamacare is most successful at making sure insurance companies get a whole lot of money. The differences between the two parties are all purely cosmetic to create the illusion of choice and reinforce branding. Why do the Democrats spend so much time talking about social issues? Because those issues offer no real chal

The 13th Doctor

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So the new Doctor Who is finally going to be played by a woman . Ignore the people who are going to complain. Ignore the people who are already complaining. Don't let them make this moment about them. Don't let them win by hijacking the conversation into either arguing or justifying when it should be about excitement and wonder for what's to come. Don't let them ruin you finally getting to throw your hands up in triumph. Remember: Doctor Who is about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism . You see that's the problem we still have with the internet. As human beings, we have this tendency to default into thinking everyone thinks like we do. In our real lives the people we chose to spend time with have lots of things in common with us and, chances are, tend to share our opinions. On the internet, we're confronted constantly with people who don't think like we do and who don't share our opinions. Those people have alway

Elementary Season 5

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When it’s not functioning as simply another CBS police procedural and allows for character and bigger plot, Elementary is my favorite modern take on Sherlock Holmes.  Sherlock’s struggle with sobriety, his attempts at relationships both professional and personal, Watson being a woman who isn’t there just to sleep with Sherlock, her backstory as surgeon and her introduction as sober companion, and their ongoing relationship are all bright spots that far outshine the visceral pulp-action of the Robert Downey films. That brightness certainly works better than Sherlock.  The BBC show about the "high-fuctioning sociopath" suffocated under the full weight of every-single-one of the worst flaws found in the writing of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Unappealing and impossible-to-relate-to characters acting smug in ridiculous plots that are badly paced and fizzle out in arrogant and unsatisfying endings. Hulu recently added Season 5 of Elementary and so far it’s been

Entertainment & Economic Power

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I don’t understand the thing people have with “live tv”. Hulu for example is blowing a ton of money on a stupid Hulu Live TV option. Who cares? There is literally nothing I want to watch badly enough that I HAVE to watch it when it airs. And who wants to sit through commercials? (Those are the two things I actually hate about Hulu--paying extra to avoid commercials and having to wait for new episodes). Plus, I have yet to see any live tv app or any app that includes a “live” stream that runs well across a variety of internet connections (that’s why we don’t have the WWE Network—their live channel broadcast portion of the app will not run reliably on our internet connection). All “live tv” apps are is an attempt by the networks and companies to continue business as usual. Repackaging the same old TV experience you were sick of in a fancy enough package to trick you. (This is the same reason AT&T—literally—spent a billion dollars buying the failing DirecTV instead of sp

American Pretense

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What I'm Doing Over Vacation

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Cats Are Libertarians

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CIA Programmers Are Fans of Archer

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Are CIA hacker-tool programmers fans of Archer ? Outlaw Country Project

Squad Goals

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The Adventures of the Rocketeer

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I don't know if they still have the rights, but if they do, Disney should totally do a Netflix-style show featuring The Adventures of the Rocketeer . Wouldn't even have to be live action. Imagine The Rocketeer as an animated seris scripted by the team behind Avatar: The Last Airbende r and The Legend of Korra. Would also love to work on a classic pulp/Rocketeer-esque style thing with a couple other writers.

On the Powers of the Sphinx

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To know, to dare, to will, to keep silent...

Action Adventure During the Tokugawa Shogunate

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Taking a break from the fourth Dunwich Committee on Student Safety story and trying to make a submission deadline with an action-adventure tale set in Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate: After two young children witness a brutal murder by a powerful gang, a komusō (wandering mendicate Zen monks known for wearing reed hoods and playing bamboo flutes) tries to see them safely through a dangerous forest to the Shrine at Nakazama for a secret rendezvous with the local magistrate and his men.

Third Dunwich Committee On Student Safety Story

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Just your average day in Dunwich... Finished the third Dunwich Committee on Student Safety story and sent it off to the first round readers. One more of these to knock out, then I'm going to take a short break from my version of Lovecraft Country.

Santa Clarita Diet

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Last night, I finally gave Santa Clarita Diet a watch. I loved it. It's so good. It's funny. It's clever. It's a little absurd. It also manages to be sweet and accurately portray what it's like to be married for a long time and still like each other...well, except for the zombie thing...

The Free State of Jones

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Watched The Free State of Jones last night. Sometimes it was a little stiff and plodding. And it probably should have been a miniseries instead of trying to compress years of people, events, and material in 2 hours and 20 minutes. But I liked it a whole lot. Even if exact reasons and circumstances of " The Free State of Jones " are still up for debate among historians, the film was incredibly fascinating. Anymore, I’m constantly struck by all the little bits of history that never come up in school and how what we are taught about history tends to be a contrived narrative with a very particular purpose.

Dunwich Committee on Student Safety

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Just finished another story featuring my Dunwich Committee on Student Safety. It's with my beta readers now, then it hits the submission rounds. Now we move on to the next story...

Thoughts On Wraith: The Oblivion

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Talking about World of Darkness Games from White Wolf always eventually leads me to Wraith . I loved Wraith: The Oblivion —LOVED it! I have nearly all of the books released for that line. I think I might have been the only one because that game line never sold particularly well. Most of my friends either never played it or just didn’t like it. I think I only ever managed to play it three times (always had to run it) and never for very long because the players found it depressing. As much as I loved it, here are the problems I saw with W:tO : It can be relentless depressing and most people play a role-playing game for some kind of escape and to have fun. The players also playing each other’s shadow was a great idea, but hard to do well and often lead to player-versus-player drama. So much about Wraith is character-centered and character-driven that group play was very difficult to pull off or explain. The whole flavor of the game with the Kingdom of Stygia, the Death

New World of Darkness Editions

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There’s going to be new editions of the World of Darkness tabletop RPGs, or at least for right now a 5th Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade and a 5th Edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse . (The anniversary editions from Onyx Path are the 4th editions)! I played a ridiculous amount of WoD games—a ridiculous amount. And while I came to like other games from White Wolf more and discovered other games outside of White Wolf I probably like better overall, V:tM is what got me into tabletop RPGS. And a vampire LARP is even how I met the lovely wife. So here are my main hopes and dreams for the new WoD lines as a whole: Decide whether the meta-plot matters or not and stick to the decision Decide whether the different game lines mesh or not and stick to the decision If they do mesh, adjust the cosmology so the different worlds make sense together. If they do mesh, publish rules for how the different powers interact and affect the different supernatural creatures F

Political Post: As Cherry Pie

One of my writing goals has been to try to focus my political thoughts into essays that I submit elsewhere. My first piece is up at https://riserevolt.org/ . And before you go read it, because I have a good feeling it's gonna anger a lot of people, here’s what I’m trying to get at it with it—I'm not advocating violence, what I'm trying to point out to you is that wishing something isn’t so, doesn’t make it so. The elites want you locked into a mode of thinking, right? About everything. It’s only when you’ve acknowledged the truth, that you can deal with something meaningful--in this case, that's having a conversation about how to get around violence effectively. Because what most people do when they "protest" is mimic a fictional construct, so it’s utterly meaningless and mostly accomplishes nothing other than maybe making them feel better. Read my thoughts here:  As Cherry Pie

Marvel Flavored Dreams

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When I daydream about writing comics, if the dream is Marvel flavored, it's either this:  Or this:

The Mummy and the Universal Monsters Universe

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The Mummy ? Hmmm… I get it. I do. These sorts of “creative” decisions about properties come down to simply what the suits think will make them the most money, right? What you as fan think will make a good story doesn’t matter. What you as a fan think about the integrity of the characters doesn’t matter. Kill your internal monologue—it’s always what the execs think is going to pull in the most money. Universal looks around, they see all these connected film franchises that regularly pull in around a billion dollars, and so they naturally want their cut and their monsters movies seem like a good place to start. Once they start looking, what do they see? Del Toro’s Crimson Peak was a complete failure, Dracula Untold with Luke Evans fizzled at the Box Office, The Benicio Del Toro attempt at The Wolfman was another flop, all their big plans for Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing (including a TV show called Transylvania) were shelved after those box office returns, and finally they come to