Speculative Fiction

Sometimes I happen to catch the beginning of what's cool. Since I don't have the luxury of cable TV to keep me up-to-date about these things, I prefer to think I am just gifted with Divine Knowledge of the Awesome from time to time.

Other trends I miss completely. Mostly, I remain unbothered by these things. I don't dress trendy. I've had the same haircut for years. I can avoid conversations about popular TV shows since I've been doing that about sports forever.
I do feel bad missing out on the important things, the things I should know, the life's blood of the geek community. When I miss the new awesome there, I feel helplessly clueless. A noob. An outsider to the outsiders. Like a person with a job shopping at a comic book store.
I picked up Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind within the past few months. I enjoyed the hell out of it and gave it to a friend before starting on the other twenty-odd books in the series. I'd missed out on the release of a severely geeky book by decades, the start of a series, and read it entirely before realizing that the second season of the TV show based on it just started. Damn.
I follow Jim Butcher on Twitter. He is an author who tweets late at night about how long he has been writing and how awesome the book will be, and I liked him enough to pick up the first book in his Dresden Files series.
How did I miss the gritty pulp fiction detective series where the main character is a wizard?
A whole series of books!
And it was already made into a TV series on SyFy and canceled.
Is there no geek mailing list I can join? Where is the "Hey, Geek! Read this!" newsletter?
It isn't like our kind strikes up conversations in book stores, you know. Any discussion in a comic book store invariably becomes a debate about pre- vs post-crisis Batman and whether Wolverine could kill Superman.
For the record: It would be a draw.
Tired of missing out on stuff, I picked up a new Star Wars novel and just started reading it. Death Troopers is the story of the crew and inmates of an Imperial prison barge who happen upon a derelict Star Destroyer filled with dead, yet still animate, Stormtroopers. Stormtrooper zombies, if you will. And I, for one, will.
Now, for those millions and millions of people who only know the Star Wars story told in the trilogy, it may seem odd. Even to those who admit to having seen six theatrically released Star Wars films may call it a sacrilege. For those eleven-hundred dedicated fans who happened to see six live action films and The Clone Wars CG movie, it would be quite a stretch to wedge zombies into Star Wars mythology.
Even for the 200 or so who have seen seven films, bought the DVDs, read the comics, read the novels and celebrated with custom body art, Stormtrooper zombies chasing convicts through the darkened corridors of a Star Destroyer with not a single Jedi in sight might seem. . . . oh I don't know. . . . not freaking Star Wars at all.
But I don't think anyone would hesitate to call it awesome. How can it not be?

Megashark Vs Giant Octopus

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:42:39 PM To Shana
Come watch megashark and ultraoctopus with me

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:44:15 PM From Shana
Are you freaking joking?

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:44:16 PM To Shana
Because listen: megashark vs superoctopus

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:45:19 PM From Shana
You said you were putting your phone on the charger and never came back. I don't need this shit. (Image of a winky face)

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:45:46 PM To Shana
I said I'd be in here charging my phone

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:46:00 PM To Shana
Jane wants you to see this nature film

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:46:09 PM To Shana
About the ocean

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:46:33 PM To Shana
Shana, I watched the preview

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:46:46 PM From Shana
So?

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:46:56 PM To Shana
Shana, megashark bites a plane. In flight.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:47:31 PM To Shana
I'm not playing around. Megashark fucking bites a plane.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:47:46 PM To Shana
Come in here and watch this instant queue style

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:49:33 PM To Shana
Did you see my text about the plane and what megashark does?

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:49:46 PM From Shana
That is dumber than Heidi Klum.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:49:56 PM To Shana
Because I'm not sure why you aren't in here

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:50:05 PM From Shana
Garrick, this worries me.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:50:22 PM To Shana
We live miles from the ocean

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:50:23 PM From Shana
I don't want to see it and I'm not coming in.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:50:32 PM To Shana
And rarely fly

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:50:40 PM To Shana
In a plane

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:50:40 PM From Shana
As a matter of fact, I'm going outside.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:50:53 PM To Shana
Which megashark totally would bite

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:50:56 PM From Shana
Then I might sleep on the couch.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:51:05 PM To Shana
(Image of a squid)

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:51:17 PM To Shana
(Image of a fish)

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:51:19 PM From Shana
You can't make me watch bad films.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:51:26 PM To Shana
(Images of a wave, a fish, a plane, and an octopus)

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:51:30 PM From Shana
I won't enjoy it.

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:51:40 PM From Shana
I'll just resent you.

Sent Nov 7, 2009 9:52:02 PM To Shana
(Images of a heart, a wave, a fish, a plane, and an octopus, plus another heart)

Received Nov 7, 2009 9:52:05 PM From Shana
Resenting you.... Starting.....now.

10/15

The official government story says there was no boy in that balloon. But a growing number of Americans are demanding the truth about what really happened on 10/15.

If you accept the CIA’s version of events, the whole incident was merely a misunderstanding. A joke, really. The kid was in the attic all along and everybody got worked up over nothing. After all, what parent hasn't created a fake media frenzy by pretending they have an endangered child, right? Well, I know what I felt was real. The terror and confusion of that terrible afternoon were too vivid to be wished away by the Big Lie Machine and its profusion of Smaller But Still Pretty Good Sized Lie Machines.

Just look at the facts. As I saw on the spare computer I keep in my taxidermy studio, the “balloon” in question spiralled lazily through the crisp autumn sky, its silver foil glistening in the Colorado air. But I’ve watched enough Road Runner cartoons to know how a balloon behaves when punctured in flight, especially in the American West. A real balloon would’ve either zig-zagged quickly and crazily around, slamming into various rock outcroppings along the way, or simply fallen straight down like an anvil. So that begs the following question: This so-called “balloon” wasn’t even a balloon at all, was it?

Now, let’s look at the landing. The world saw – or thought they saw – the “balloon” bump gently to Earth in a freshly plowed dirt field. It looked realistic enough to me, thanks to NASA’s experienced team of special-effects experts. But I bet I could find a Professor of Balloon Physics (let’s call him Dr. Herschel McGee of College Academy University State Tech) who would say that such a landing could only be executed by a trained balloon pilot. Why is the so-called “scientific” world so terrified of what Dr. McGee has to say?

Also, that field looked suspiciously flat to me. Have we forgotten that Colorado is known as the Rocky Mountain State? I guess whoever mocked up this hoax missed that day in 6th-grade geography class.

But here’s the most damning piece of evidence. Remember when everybody crowded around the fallen “balloon”, and a nation waited breathlessly to see if the boy would emerge okay, only to be told that there was nobody inside? Thanks to the simple fact that I have paused and rewound the footage of the original broadcast hundreds of times and watched the whole scene in hi-def frame-by-frame QuickTime magic while making my tribute music video, I was able to see that, on the contrary, there were actually hundreds of children being briskly spirited away from the crash site into an underground passageway located directly under the so-called “balloon”. Skeptical? Come over and watch it. Or buy yourself a copy of Hot Air: Puncturing The 10/15 Conspiracy, my fearless, eye-opening DVD documentary that will forever change the way you view fearless, eye-opening DVD documentaries.

They say there was no kid in that “balloon”; I say there were hundreds of kids. They say the kid was actually hiding at home in his attic; I say the kids were led down into the bowels of the Earth to toil in the FBI’s underground LSD mines. Examine the evidence on a neutral, objective DVD documentary and you can only reach one conclusion. And no, wiseguy, that conclusion is not that I need to go back on my meds. Whatever my lying fraud of a doctor says, I feel just fine this way.

Edit: Hello, Internet.

I've reviewed the comments which are queued for moderated posting. This post seems to have struck a nerve with certain online communities.

It may be best, for the sake of all parties involved, if we keep this stuff to ourselves for now, okay? I mean, no sense tipping off the lizard people in the black helicopters, amirite?

The truth is out there, friends.

Way, way out there.

I Have Become Carver . . .

. . . Destroyer of Gourds.

I light a candle in each one for you.

Every Halloween, it is the same.
I wait for the black of night to fall. I make my way to the Old Murphy pumpkin patch just outside of town. Once inside the fences, I look out over the field, admiring the crop.
It is then that I reveal the blades inside my bag. One by one, I remove each of the terrible implements from their wooden display block, admiring their fine stainless steel and full-tang construction that not only offer me confidence, but comfort for the awful task at hand.
And then my dark work begins.
The pulp and the seeds spray and splatter. The ease at which the flesh of each pumpkin separates under the edge of my steely friends causes a manic grin to crawl across my face. And as I carve and slice my way through the madness, I think of you, killed by that truck of pumpkins so many years ago. That horrible horn, the squishity-squish-squish of that awful murder under the pulpy mass of the Orange Menace, they haunt me still. Only this yearly ritualized squash-icide can halt that horrid scene from playing in the theater of my mind night after night.
It ends when every last gourd in the field has felt my wrath. There, among the muck and the slime of the patch, I sit among the carved pumpkins, all glaring at me with your face, tears streaming down my pulp-stained cheeks. Their maddening song has been silenced.
I then gather my tools and return home, satiated for another year.
Now, we are at the end of another October. The horrible yearning for pumpkiny death begins anew.
I hope you can hear the screams of the Cucurbita, and that they please you as much as I.

The Next Batman

Also, if you ever feel the need to start a fight on the internet, posting the image above will do it no matter the audience.
Since Gwynyth has been enjoying our Superhero movie collection again recently, I've been giving them a lot of thought.
Well, not Daredevil. But the other ones.
The Dark Knight was a fairly perfect Batman movie, and making a good Batman movie without churning up all the muck and history of the source material is pretty much impossible.
One also has to consider the prospect of making a movie which will sell action figures, which means both kids and geeks must be interested.
And we can't forget the Batman's arch nemesis is short an actor now, so future movies will need to do without the Joker attempting to communicate his crazy to Batman's crazy.
Plus, Christian Bale is off ruining other franchises at the moment.

Isn't there a Machinist 2 in pre-production somewhere?
What I thought I wanted at first was a return to the very early days of Batman, where he wasn't trying to save the whole city. He was just stopping bank robberies and beating up pimps.
This concept lends itself more to a return to Batman on television.
Or maybe not, on closer review.
Adam West is a busy guy.
So I started to think about a Batman TV series without Batman. It's been done, after all.
But Birds of Prey was bogged down by having someone besides Batman fight Batman's enemies. Also, the ratings sucked. What a Batman show without Batman needs is solid freaking ratings.
Back in the pre-Robin days, Batman was always swinging into crime scenes, punching bad guys, and swinging off. Sometimes a good punching was all a classic thug needed to clean up his act.
The other thing the good old Batman would do is hand out business cards to the less hardcore criminals who responded to the punching (or even just the threat of a punching) especially well.
These business cards could apparently be redeemed at Wayne Industries for one (1) career change and meaningful employment, signed Bruce Wayne.
He gave cards out to muggers, shoplifters, and hookers mostly, but it would be awesome if they were also given to people who were crazy beneath the level diagnosable in a quick swing-punch-lifechangecard kind of way.
And that is the basis of the best possible Batman-free Batman TV show.
Wayne Enterprises Human Resources.
You've got Gotham City as a backdrop, Batman swinging and punching and leaving, and the poor slobs at Waynetech placing the ex-criminals into cubicles and assigning tasks.
Think of it like a highly-rated office comedy, but with serial killers and hookers.
So The Office, meets Dexter, meets Desperate Housewives.
It is the perfect storm of can't-miss televised awesome.
Also, the Mad Hatter could totally work in the Mail Room.

I've been working from home a lot, lately, though I hear there is a desk somewhere which actually has a nameplate. And the nameplate actually has my name.
But I haven't tracked down the building yet. Maybe Thursday?
Anyway, major stuff is going down this week as we ramp up for Saturday.
My costume is mostly ready.
A pumpkin is sweating nervously on the kitchen floor.
And I've put up a fake Sex Offender sign in the yard to deter trick-or-treaters (the neighbors will thank me later for lower property taxes). I don't hand out candy. Halloween isn't about tooth decay and childhood obesity.
Halloween is about acting like an idiot and freaking out the normals.

Except somehow less like my job.

In Memorium

Let us take a moment to pay our respects to a fallen giant.
Long before your favorite Parent Teacher Organization configured the RSS feed on their blog to keep you up to date on the meetings you would rather skip, before you were forced to abandon whole email addresses to purge an Instant Messenger contact list, and before your mom started following you on Twitter, a service existed and was embraced by the semi-technical.
GeoCities allowed anyone to make a website, and people did.
Almost 28 Million users were active per month in 2002, which isn't bad considering Yahoo had purchased the service in 1999 for a mere $4 billion. In 2002, that was a substantial percentage of total Internet traffic.
And without the brave features pioneered by GeoCities, I have no doubt that the current face of social networking would be a bleak and desolate place, devoid of embedded music files, tiled backgrounds, and spinning animated images.
In the course of allowing everyone to design their own webpage for free, GeoCities also amassed what is arguably the largest collection of awful color combinations and "Under Construction" images with little working guys, all backed up nightly and served up to meet the high-traffic demands of the day.
GeoCities bravely told the growing throng of internet users,"Come here, you! There is room for whatever the hell it is you think looks good right here on our servers!"

"Whatever your technical ability, design certification or taste, we've got a place for you." And people came, making GeoCites the third most visited domain in 1999, right after AOL and Yahoo.

Apparently, 1999 was an extremely dark time for the internet.
15MB of free storage online was a pretty sweet deal in 1999, though. You could cram dozens of images into that.
Fortunately, InternetArchaeology.org is stepping up to save what it can for posterity.
My daughter has grown up in an Adobe Flash world. It is comforting to know that she will still be able to visit an animated Gif in an online museum in the event some school project requires it.
AOL and Yahoo, huh?
It's amazing anyone stayed online at all.

Job Responsibilities

When I was told I'd be working with a "special needs" business unit, I assumed the definition was the standard.
I expected that sometimes they would blow up their equipment.
From experience, I thought they would overwrite vital data with crap and then fling blame.
I entertained the possibility that written instructions should, perhaps, be read in reverse for the purposes of functionality.
All of these things I have seen.
What I had not seen, and did not expect, was that they would not be nice about it.
I've worked with difficult people. If elaboration is needed I suggest hitting and archived post at random and running with it.
I am not what one would describe as "thick skinned", and I tend to take a lot of stuff personally which maybe I should not.
At the same time, repeated where-the-hell-are-you-i-needed-this-thing-done-twenty-minutes-ago instant messages while I'm on the phone with my manager are not the key to wringing a response from me.
In fact, since I was on the phone with my manager specifically about how obnoxious they were, I felt it was a more valid use of my time, overall.
The key in this case is the proper re-direction of fault. Geek Fu is less about technical ability than it is about using a user's mass and momentum against them.
"Why don't you answer your desk phone?" when I don't actually have a desk was not a question I could answer in any way except, "Given that I've gotten so little documentation from your developers I'd prefer all contact from you to be written and not verbal so that I can create my own documentation by copying and pasting."
Of course, it also helps to find the place in their code where a file is sought in half a dozen non-existent locations in the half second before the server blue screened.
I'm still quite often driving 90 miles to work and 90 miles home.
I also have not located a place in my part of South Carolina which has decent coffee before 6am.
This is the price of having a job in finance, I suppose.
Or, perhaps in a past life I burned down an orphanage and karma has chosen to catch up with me here, in the southeastern United States.
Stupid karma. There's nothing to do here north of Orlando.