Penny Dreadfuls

Other things I've been doing:

2009-05-13T22:59:00.002-05:00

Working. Working all the time.

Writing book reviews and editing Kobold Quarterly.

Reading novels. I'm trying to finish book two of Brian Ruckley's Godless World trilogy, Bloodheir, so that I can review book three later this summer. I just finished a review of the nonfiction book Things We Think About Games, and am writing a review of Andrzej Sapkowski's Blood of Elves (it's steampunk without the steam). Next up, I'm reading Jim Butcher's Turn Coat to review it, reading Alan Campbell's Scar Night for fun, and then probably China Mieville's The City and the City for review. At some point, I have to read the last two Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman books because Wizards of the Coast sent me an advance review copy/author's uncorrected proof of the new Dragonlance book which I can't talk about or else WotC will send ninjas to kill me.

Running a 4e Dungeons and Dragons game for Jon Cogburn, Billy Bryan, Chris Ray and Skylar Gremillion. We're also writing a blog together detailing our game world: we're creating it from the ground up, with me serving as editor in chief and chief writer of the project. You can read it here. I'm happiest with the posts and flavor I've written on elves and eladrin, which we've renamed Sidhe. You can read those here.

In video games, I've mostly been playing Valkyria Chronicles for Playstation 3.

In terms of things I'm doing for personal growth, I'm teaching myself to do cartography using Profantasy Software's Campaign Cartographer 3. Thus far, I suck.

So that's why I'm not around so much. I tweet a lot more than I blog, because 140 characters is easier to fit into my day than blog posts. But I do still read news, still have opinions on politics and still have a social life.

Hopefully, if LSU Theatre's budget cuts aren't that bad I'll be a student again and post more. But with working full-time and reviewing books I'm stretched thin right now.

Catch you in the comments!

While I was gone:

2009-05-12T21:02:00.002-05:00

The following things happened:

I was in the hospital with a flu that may or may not have been swine flu (they thought it was appendicitis at first).

I've been accepted to LSU's PhD program in Theatre with full funding contingent on budget cuts not exceeding 6 percent.

A column I edited just won the Society of Professional Journalists' National Mark of Excellence award.

And that's about it.

-neal

Auto-Tune the News #2: pirates. drugs. gay marriage.

2009-04-23T23:30:00.001-05:00

This is the sort of thing I can get behind.

Video from Neal's Thesis defense now available!

2009-04-18T16:54:00.002-05:00

Though it's been a few months, I remember this like it was yesterday.

Susan Boyle - Singer - Britains Got Talent 2009 (With Lyrics)

2009-04-14T22:18:00.001-05:00

Everyone's talking about this extraordinary clip. It absolutely made me cry. There's something inspiring about watching this person who doesn't look like she should be on stage prove everyone wrong.

If I saw her on the street, I'd think she wasn't anyone special. And I'd be wrong.

I recognize that there isn't much difference between posting this and posting cute pictures of animals. I accept any scorn thrown my way.

Science I can believe in:

2009-04-06T22:20:00.004-05:00

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

One of these things is not like the other.

2009-04-05T01:44:00.001-05:00

A roundtable discussion on Al Qaeda and fundamentalist Islam:

Salman Rushdie. Bill Maher. Christopher Hitchens. Mos Def.

Draw your own conclusion.

Cartoons and the American Dream

2009-04-03T21:03:00.003-05:00

The Onion's A.V. Club has a terrific interview up with Jackson Publick, one of the co-creators of the cartoon The Venture Bros. It's pretty interesting to hear how Publick approaches writing and comedy, and how he understands the greater themes the show explores.

For me, The Venture Bros. works because it's a show about nostalgia and failure - the characters are trapped inside an idealized, non-existent past's vision of how the future ought to be, and all fail to meet their obligation to that future. There are superheroes and supervillains, super scientists and government hitmen, but they're all pushed and pulled by their memory of the way things used to be and how thoroughly they've missed the mark.

I think it's pretty essential reading if you're a fan of the show, and pretty enlightening even if you aren't (though it is heavy on the spoilers, so you might want to avoid it until you see the show).

Good quote:

We all feel like failures, I guess, and we all are failures. And finding the beauty in that, instead of just pointing a finger at something and mocking it, maybe that’s the difference. That we try and find the beauty in it. The show is riding such a wave of nostalgia all the time, whether it’s for records or movies or whatever we loved when we were kids. All the retro, space-age design that surrounds these guys, the houses they live in, and all these ghosts of great men that came before them… It’s really the sunset on the American Dream. [Laughs.] There’s a poignancy to it that doesn’t belong in a comedy show, and we like trying to strike that nerve.

Yeah, what he said.

Quoted for Truth:

2009-03-22T00:20:00.002-05:00

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - Rogers, Kung Fu Monkey

Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Musical

2009-03-03T23:59:00.001-06:00

Things I've said in print that I don't remember saying:

2009-02-18T21:05:00.004-06:00

This will be a regular feature on this blog from now on.

While discussing the perils of posting advice online using your real name when everyone else on the forum is hiding behind anonymity, Jon Cogburn and I got into a discussion about popular music in the comments of his blog post on the subject.

Everyone who knows me in real life knows I have what amounts to an ambien problem. I used to take the pills and then sit at the computer until they take effect.

This has resulted in numerous mishaps and hijinks: purchasing every Pete Droge, Gigolo Aunts and Matthew Sweet album off of Amazon while sleeping; passing out in bed while eating ice cream, which made me have to borrow friends' washers and driers and explain how I woke up covered in fudge not once but twice; driving to Circle K in my sleep to buy ten bags of chips and ice cream; and so on.

Jon Cogburn's blog boasts the dubious honor of being a living chronicle of numerous weird things I've typed on ambien if you just look through the comments archive. Typically, ambien comments start off really strong, begin to ramble and then resolve themselves in an aporia of incoherence. Often, they are funny. But sometimes if I look back in Jon's blog archives, I find things I've said that I don't remember saying. This is one of those comments; I edited it slightly to make it make a bit more sense.

The problem with writing off Prog Rock completely as a valid and potentially worthwhile aesthetic experience is that it yields absurd results. [There's no denying that] one does need to exclude the entirety of the Mars Volta's oeuvre - as well as everything written by Yngwie J. Malmsteen between 1992 & 1996, Coheed & Cambria's entire catalogue and W.A.S.P.'s 1996 prog/gloom metal gem "Kill, Fuck, Die" - from the canon of good rock and roll. [But] ruling out prog rock entirely doesn't get us where we need to be.

I stand by most of this. I would probably like to revise my assessment of Yngwie Malmsteen's music between 1992 and 1996; For all Yngwie's faults, I'm not sure he's actually had fugue years and to suggest as much is to profane unto Yngwie. For all of the Swedish Shredder's lyrical shortcomings, his work is stronger and more vital than I gave him credit for.

This brought the lolz

2009-02-17T23:11:00.003-06:00

Chip Zdarsky's essay about why he loves comics is one of the most fucked-up things I've read in the past week. Needless to say, I encourage everyone to read it unless they're easily offended.

I just finished K. J. Parker's 'Engineer Trilogy'

2009-02-14T00:32:00.004-06:00

And I have to say it was pretty remarkable on a number of levels. The books weren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination - the end of book one, in particularly, struck me as treading perilously close to deus ex machina - but the neatness and perfection of the twists struck me as metaphorically appropriate given the theme and subject of the books.

The books' plot is actually fairly simple: an Engineer named Ziani Vaatzes is sentenced to death for attempting to improve upon specification. This is considered an Abomination in the city of Mezentia - specification is definitionally perfect and cannot be improved upon. This sentence and its justice are in no way controversial, though it proves problematic: Vaatzes loves his wife and child too much to accept the death sentence, so he escapes the city and begins teaching the city's enemies how to build siege weapons. It seems he will do anything - including smashing the city's walls and murdering every man, woman and child within it - if it lets him see his family again.

Only it's not that simple; It never is, because otherwise there wouldn't be a book worth reading.

I'm not going to go into too much detail, because I know some of the people who read this blog actually look to it for book recommendations. But I'll say a few general things about why I'm up past midnight writing about the series after just finishing the last book.

On a purely literary level, Parker understands how to build upon theme; Every character is in some way related to engineers or their tools. Some characters act upon the world and create their own designs according to exacting specifications, some are acted upon; the thing that unifies both the engineers and the tools is love, and love's a bitch. Because of this sharp division between characters, Parker manages to create textbook examples of literary foils.

The Engineer is contrasted with a nobleman named Miel Ducas; Vaatzes shapes the world around him, while Ducas is shaped by feudal obligation and social demands to such an extent that he seems to be devoid of free will. This is complicated by the Dukes of the two backwater provinces near Mezentia: Duke Valens of the Duchy of Vadani is a perfect ruler who shapes the land and the lives of his people for the better, while Duke Orsea of the Duchy of Eremia is a fop who married into the title and who, despite his attempts to do the right thing, always fails. Back in Mezentia a clerk named Lucao Psellus is charged with investigating Vaatzes' crime; a cog in the administrative wheel, Psellus is about as far from the Engineer he's investigating as one can get.

What amazed me about the books is how skillfully Parker managed to enact the theme of mechanization in the story and the characters; As the books progress, characters gradually shift between engineers and tools. Every aspect of the narrative - be it tedious accounts of feudal obligations, how to work a bellows at a forge, hunting etiquette - is employed to building on this theme, on demonstrating the ways the world is just a mechanism waiting to be manipulated. Everyone plays their part - because of love, because of fear, because that's the way the machine is supposed to work - and the book's events seem necessary, even when they're contrived.

Scratch that - especially when they're contrived.

But what I found most compelling was that this is a novel that boasts a main character who is explicitly planning out genocide. For Vaatzes to return to the city, he has to build a machine that will get him where he needs to be: a machine of innumerable and imprecise human parts. The only thing that can keep such a machine's wheels greased is blood on a massive, unimaginable scale. It's hard to imagine that someone who is planning genocide could be a compelling and sympathetic character; But Vaatzes is a compelling and sympathetic character because in some ways he's a sociopath.

Most people who design weapons and directly cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people feel bad. Vaatzes insists he can't be responsible for the deaths because his actions are justified. He wants to see his wife and child again; ergo, he has to build a machine that will let him do that. The machine's specification calls for death on a massive scale - to do otherwise would be to commit an Abomination.

There's a lot more going on in the novels than the above. But I'd think the above is a pretty compelling reason to consider reading the books. I don't think most people would like the books - you can sum them up by saying horrible things happen to horrible people, and no one's happy by the end - but I'm not like most people, and that was an absolute joy for me to see play out.

Sorry for radio silence

2009-02-14T00:31:00.001-06:00

I got massively sick. Again.

I seem to be doing mostly better now, though. Regardless, it's hard to keep up with a blog when you can't think straight enough to write.

Sorry for the radio silence

2009-02-05T18:57:00.003-06:00

I got sick. Again.

Before the weekend's out, I'll post a few thoughts about the D&D game I ran last weekend - I had a blast, and I think a short narrative about it might be interesting for people to look through. I don't play the game like a lot of people, and my players didn't play the game like it was a game; It was more like an interactive fantasy novel, and I got to have a lot of fun experimenting with some of the tools I learned in my Advanced Improvisation classes ten years ago.

Expect to hear more from me soon.

Yeah, that's the ticket

2009-02-03T20:33:00.000-06:00

Hope for us all:

Immortal jellyfish taking over the oceans.

Unlike us, these jellyfish don't have to die.

What I'm doing this week end:

2009-01-22T22:56:00.003-06:00

This weekend I will:

1. Start reading K. J. Parker's novel Devices and Desires, book one of the Engineer's Trilogy. It's gotten good reviews, and if you scroll down a bit you'll see I liked Parker's novel The Company a great deal.

2. Finish some creative writing in preparation for the Dungeons and Dragons game I'm going to be running for Jon Cogburn, Skylar Gremillion, Billy Bryant and Chris Ray. This will probably involve me manfully pressing onwards as I type, ignoring - as I do now - the persistent slight pain in my left pinky that comes from biting my fingernail too deeply.

3. Go to Champps Saturday to eat lunch with my mom and dad.

4. Go back to Champps Saturday night to watch the Affliction Mixed Martial Arts PPV. Fedor "The Last Emperor" Emelianenko is defending his WAMMA Heavyweight Title against Andre "The Pit Bull" Arlovski. That fight should be good; Fedor hasn't lost a fight since Bill Clinton was U.S. President, and he strikes fear into his opponents by looking like a pudgy, pasty Russian peasant/yeoman farmer.

My love of Fedor is well recorded on the Internets, and those who look back through this blog's archives can find it for yourself. But wait! Maybe you want to learn to love Fedor as I do - as a man must!

For those of you only passively interesting in seeing a pasty Russian cyborg beat people up, here's a three minute highlight video for you (WARNING: Must mute sound or listen to Rob Zombie music accompanying highlight). For the pasty Russian cyborg connoisseurs, however, I give you the "Emelianenko Fedor Superb Highlight" - a twenty minute masterpiece of Internet fandom, featuring clips of Fedor beating people the fuck up. It also shows Fedor's training regiment: it includes beating a giant tractor tire with a totally slick fucking sledgehammer and living in Russia.

Go ahead - you had twenty minutes to kill, right?

Just finished reading Scott Lynch's 'The Lies of Locke Lamora'

2009-01-22T22:44:00.005-06:00

I really enjoyed this novel, though I did find a few spots easy to put down (and subsequently did so, stretching out my time reading it).

It was just a lot of fun - vulgar, clever, sassy (yeah, sassy), action packed and very funny. If I had to sum it up as a summer blockbuster movie trailer, I'd probably say:

"It's Ocean's Eleven meets Lord of the Rings in a tale of confidence men, thieves, revenge and betrayal."

In real life, I'd just say it's a fantasy version of Ocean's Eleven - only with way more cursing, less attractive people and some horrific, violent action towards the end when it shifts gears and becomes a fairly compelling revenge story.

I'd recommend it. Definitely.

As if I needed another reason to distrust vegetables

2009-01-22T22:41:00.002-06:00

h/t Chris Bodenner guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish.

I'm about to crash for the night...

2009-01-19T00:56:00.005-06:00

But I can't stop listening to Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." Sometimes I forget just how rock and roll the sixties and fifties were - the passion, the fun, the melodies, and the song craft.

I could die a happy man with nothing but MoTown records on my iPod. Seriously.

And if you don't believe me, download Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" and wait til the chorus. You can't tell me that you don't lose your shit when Valli cuts loose and sings

"I love you, baby,
And if it's quite alright,
I need you, baby,
To warm a lonely night.
I love you, baby.
Trust in me when I say:
Oh, pretty baby,
Don't bring me down, I pray.
Oh, pretty baby, now that I found you, stay
And let me love you, baby.
Let me love you."

Passion and power, baby. That's all I ask for - that, and an unforgettable melody.

Review: K. J. Parker's 'The Company'

2009-01-16T21:27:00.007-06:00

K. J. Parker: The Company

Orbit Books, Oct. 2008
432 pages

Six young men from the town of Faralia went off to war. Only five came back, and they are about to learn leaving the army is easier than escaping the war.

Kudei Gaeon, Thouridos “Fly” Alces, Muri Achaios, Aidi Proiapsen, Teuche Kunessin and Nuctos Di’Ambrosies needed to get away. So they left town as teenagers to attend the War College, graduated, joined the army, became the "A Company" line-breakers—kamikazes who charge enemy pikemen to break their formation—got paid and went home. Nuctos died, and Teuche stayed on after everyone else left and became General Kunessin.

Fast forward ten years. Alces runs a fencing school, barely scraping by. Muri's broke. Kudei's watching his family farm fall to ruin year after year. Aidi became a successful businessman.

Nuctos is still dead, and Teuche has come back to Faralia with his pension and a plan.

Before retiring, Teuche found an island abandoned during the war, took it for himself and decided it would be the ideal place for "A Company" to retire. With servants, wives and supplies the island could be a perfect colony—and Teuche retired rich enough to get everything the company needs to create their own private paradise.

Fans of dark fantasy and military fantasy will be more than satisfied with Parker's (im)morality tale. The Company's plot is fast-paced, with memorable dialogue and vivid, flawed characters.

The story is well told: Flashbacks of the veterans' past heroics frame their present struggles against the island and help characterize the men. Though Kudei, Teuche, Alces, Muri and Aidi are center stage in past and present, these glimpses of long-dead deeds show the company as they were when they were young and alive – and suggests their past survival was the cosmic oversight that is the source of the present's unrelenting darkness.

Parker's story isn't for everyone. It's a fantasy novel set in a world without magic. Gold is god, while war and betrayal are more prevalent than love and hope. Readers looking for epic fantasy will be sorely disappointed. The Company is less like Lord of the Rings and more like Lord of the Flies.

But - for better or for worse - it's a story you won't soon forget.

The American presidency in chart form

2009-01-16T21:10:00.009-06:00

This week marked President Bush's last address to the American people as president, and during it he said numerous momentous things.

The most striking - to me, at least - was when President Bush noted America suffered only one mass-casualty terrorist attack during his administration, and that this was a great point in his administration's favor.

Fair enough, right? Every president should be expected to deal with one massive instance of civilian death because of international terrorism.

But wait! Matt Yglesias disagrees, and provides us with a helpful chart to prove his point.

As Yglesias notes, it is actually quite unusual for an American president to have massive civilian casualties because of international terrorism - at least in America. And, though Yglesias is too much of a gentleman to say this outright, I think that maybe it reflects poorly on the Bush administration that lots of Americans died in a terrorist attack when information to thwart said attack was available and ignored.

But what do I know? Maybe presidents do get a freebie when it comes to thousands of preventable civilian deaths - I'm pretty young, so it's possible this - like the ability to plan to firebomb liberal organizations' headquarters - is just another Republican executive privilege wrongly thrown on the scrap heap after Watergate.

Yes I Can!

2009-01-14T17:49:00.000-06:00

Just finished Patrick Rothfuss' "The Name of the Wind"

2009-01-11T21:57:00.005-06:00

It was a knockout. Seriously. I can't wait for the sequel to come out in April. Just a magnificent story, written very well.

What surprised me most were the mechanical aspects of the writing that just sung on the page: because the main character is an actor and musician, his dialogue reads lyrically. A concrete example of the writing that blew me away: one of the characters - a wizard, because this is a fantasy novel - asks the main character if he knows the seven words that will make a woman fall in love. He doesn't, of course; but in the dialogue the main character has with the woman he falls in love with, the most moving sentences are all sentences of seven words. I didn't notice this (it's subtle) until the woman towards the end of the novel remarks on this.

Is it hokey? I guess, once I write it down and remark upon it. But it's something Patrick Rothfuss does in The Name of the Win" that works, and works well, because it doesn't feel false.

The musical quality of the writing is also fairly neat - I began to notice subtle internal rhymes in dialogue as well, generally when the high fantasy stuff gets going. It wasn't obvious, it didn't read false at all, it just added to the feel that this is a story that deserves to be read aloud as much as it deserves to be read.

I don't know, it's kind of trivial stuff and seems kind of mundane writing about it. But it added up to a fantastically written novel, with a story that I got into filled with characters that I liked.

Next up, I'm reading K.J. Parker's The Company, which I have to review for next issue of Kobold Quarterly.

Bad blogger. Bad.

2009-01-11T00:31:00.003-06:00

So it's been a week since my last post? Really?

God, I fucking suck.

I need to make an effort to post at least once a day. I hesitate to make this promise because, well, I'm basically a shit-head who breaks promises all the time. I'd pledge to make an effort but that's awfully like work, and work's for motherfuckers who want a job.

I already have a job, last time I checked. It kind of sucks. And for those of you tempted to say "Life sucks and then you die," I urge you to consider working in the funeral industry like me; Sometimes people dying makes the lives of others suck.

Lest I risk being overly whiny now that I'm well, here's three things in my life that I think are pretty awesome.

1. My cats are very affectionate creatures, and don't care about how I look when I wake up as long as I rub their bellies. This is rewarding, because most mornings I look like hell.

2. I'm creating a fictional pantheon for a fantasy world complete with myth cycles and flavor text, and I'm almost halfway done. The people who've looked at it and engaged with the text are really impressed so far, and that validates my creativity.

3. I finished book three of Joe Abercrombie's "The First Law" trilogy, and it was a barnburner of a novel; a cross between detective noir and sword and sorcery. I'm now reading Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind and am thus far blown away; The universal critical rapture over the novel seems to have significantly understated how good the book is, which is no mean feat considering that The Onion A.V. Club asserted it "is one of the best stories told in any medium in a decade." Vibrant pose, assured craft and masterful storytelling thus far - sort of like Harry Potter, only written by a writer capable of writing good books in addition to telling good stories.

Blog out. Catch you tomorrow.