Category: Shame

Still playing catchup on my 2009 material

February 28, 2010 /

On the plane to Kentucky for Christmas last year, I read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. For the first half of this reading, I was under the vague impression that it had been published in 2008. I found it tremendously enjoyable, and contemporary–a gay protagonist of color and strong female characters, China as the sole world superpower, a mundane and difficult life on a lunar colony–but with some irksome anachronisms, like the way the characters used their wrist-implant cyberjacks to make calls from pay phones.

Eventually I flipped back to check the copyright page. It came out in 1992.

Jesus Christ, Maureen McHugh, you were on top of this shit while the rest of the field was just starting to get boners for steampunk? I will be reading more of your books.

This is an easy test for determining premillennial science fiction from the postmillennial, by the way: the ubiquity of cell phones (and how big a deal the author makes about them).

The dark side of self-exposure

January 20, 2010 /

Sumana called me out on my 2007 goal-announcement entry and asked what the follow-up was for 2010-2012. First, HOW IS IT 2010 ALREADY. Second, I thought I’d already done an update on how those goals went, but I can’t find it if I did, so here we go:

Accomplished

  • Get driver’s license

Failed

  • Everything else

Okay, so at 28 I have managed to just reach a 16-year-old’s level of basic competence. Right on track! I got accepted to Clarion but couldn’t afford it, and GSP gently declined my teaching application: this indicates an unsurprising trend of nonprofit programs being happier to take my money than to give me more. I stopped running not long after I posted that entry in 2007, but I struggled into reasonable shape last summer and might be able to get there again now that I own an inhaler.

So. Let’s try this again.

My goals for 2010 are to script a graphic novel and run a half-marathon.

My goals for 2011 are to write a novel and publish a computer game.

My goal for 2012 is to be out of non-student-loan debt.

Stunningly delayed revelation #498,832

January 19, 2010 /

I can play hand percussion, in a sloppy autodidactic fashion, but I’ve never learned to play a normal drum set–I can’t handle a foot pedal or do fills or anything. I’d like to learn, but of course I don’t have anywhere to put a real kit, much less money to blow on a good one, and the noise would get me evicted. I’ve thought about getting an electronic one that I could plug headphones into, just to learn, but those cost even more and even a collapsible one would take up too much space.

The other night, squeezing into the living room, I finally realized that of course I do have an electronic drum kit. It’s the big, awkward drum-kit-shaped object plugged into my Xbox for Rock Band.

No, it’s not pressure-sensitive or anything, but it does have a practice mode and software designed specifically to help me play along to songs I like. I am an idiot. I need to buy a lesson book.

We Return You Now to Masterpiece Chatlog

December 7, 2009 /

Holly and I were discussing the inevitable self-recrimination that comes of owning a computer with anything one has ever written on it.

Brendan: I am not sure if there is a way to mature that does not involve violent, sickened hatred toward all one’s own past incarnations, but–hang on, I think I just reinvented Buddhism.
Holly: But Buddhism was invented by someone who didn’t have computer logs of half the things he’d ever said or written.
Brendan: Well, he WAS a lot cleverer than you or me, Holly.
Holly: And ha, yes, teachings “transmitted orally” for ages, says wikipedia, so maybe that is indeed the solution.
Holly: I bet he invented the computer and then saw what self-recriminations and nausea it would scatter on the path to enlightenment and self-improvement, and hid it at the bottom of a pond or something.
Holly: (This is the plot of the next Dan Brown novel.)

Skip this one, Mom

November 10, 2009 /

In mid-writing session:

Brendan: It’s a pretty old joke structure, but as Tina Fey has pointed out, if you get to a certain gag density people don’t notice that kind of thing. Many of the jokes in Arrested Development are groaningly old, but nobody notices because they come so thick and fast.
Brendan: … This is the part where you make a joke about coming thick and fast.
Stephen: I WOULD TOTALLY COME THICK AND FAST WITH TINA FEY
Brendan: There you go.
Stephen: BOYOYOYNG

I am not a fast reader

August 15, 2009 /

Time it took me to read A Deepness in the Sky: about a year.

Time it took me to realize that the plot is an endorsement of free-market capitalism to an almost Randian degree (minus the class issues): about six months more.

Time it took me to grasp that the localizers in the book are a pretty clear metaphor for the actors in an idealized anarcho-capitalist society: eight months after that.

At this rate, I should be really catching on to some of the subtler symbolism ten years after I’m dead.

Sumana, you should probably stop reading here

May 14, 2008 /

What you have to understand about the Burger King Loaded Steakburger is that I had no choice in the matter. The moment I spied it billboardwise, during the long drive west, I was gripped by the same potent mixture of revulsion and lust that came upon me once in college, when Jon and I first saw the commercial for the Bacon Club Chalupa. We turned to each other, then, eyes wide and desperate, like two men drowning who each believe the other can swim.

Neither could.

So it was only a matter of time before I ran out of excuses for not planting this particular meatbomb in my face. Leaving the drive-thru not ten minutes ago, I left steering to my nervous left hand while my right fumbled through wrappers. The first thing I saw was the edge of the patty, protruding a full inch beyond the hapless bun like a beckoning pseudopod; the second was the utter absence of traditional dressing. There is no pickle here, no tomato. The bastards have delivered a sullen daub of gray potato and onion shards instead, and they have somehow transmuted lettuce to bacon. The rites involved are none I care to imagine.

The sandwich is not good. I stress this even in the full knowledge that it will accomplish nothing; those who weren’t going to eat it won’t, and the rest of you will have no more agency than I did. But like any Lovecraftian narrator, I am bound to commit these desperate words by sheer force of narrative. I must write of its taste, like barbecue Spam fried in motor oil. I must write of its texture, which is also like barbecue Spam fried in motor oil. I must tell you how it sits in my stomach e’en now, heavily roiled, plotting its course downward with the slow cunning of a brain-damaged tiger on spelunk.

Taco Bell recently reintroduced the Bacon Club Chalupa. Should I even have time to post this missive, I cannot imagine that I will outlive it long. The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some crispy flatbread, sliding deep-fried fingers up to caress the latch.