There is a fiction trope I don't care for. It was driven home while watching Event Horizon with folks last night. I'm sure this is a matter of opinion but I have issues with the horror/fantasy premise of "things man was not meant to know."

One issue is it isn't really very scary. Vampires are scary because they play on fears of contamination and ( Read more... )

( In which I stretch my descriptive capacities and ramble. )

( Books and book-making )

Kinda. Anyways, I'm trying to think of something clever to say. I've settled on talking about beer.

I was talking to my younger sister today, the high school and not the first-grader, passing on some fragments of wisdom wrapped in enough sarcasm to make sure she'll pay attention. Dad walked by and began to make fun of the beer (which... he had ( Read more... )

...Yes, this constitutes a problem when they won't solidify into something freaking usable. I'm still excited about the air-train I'm adding to my established world with the werehyenas and room-sized arrays of musical machines and half-mechanical critters and important things like that, but I've been rereading (or having read to me, thanks to ( Read more... )

My dream last night was deeply confounding. It shifted about a lot, seemed to contain all sorts of "where is my life going" anxiety, blinked around from location to location... It was random firing of my subconscious, in short, and about what you'd expect. But I seem to have dredged an idea out of it. One thing that was pretty constant ( Read more... )

( This is pretty much entirely about zombies. Really. )

Playing Fallout endlessly is definitely me slacking off all kinds of important things. Video games are not useful for life plans, as a rule, unless you're doing game design, and as I understand it, that's the lame part. However, all the gunshots and scrounging and mutants have put me in a mood, and I think I have a concept for a... setting, at ( Read more... )

I've been reading "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." I haven't picked it up in years, though I remembered liking it. My current state of mind (bitchy, feverish, and perpetually tired) seems to be pretty much perfect for appreciating the poem. It's some parts pure madness, all sorts of raw feeling, strangely radical social sentiment, religious ( Read more... )

Things I have researched in the last few hours, on a Friday night, while making no writing progress at all: Chinese immigration to America, Italian immigration to the same, Charles R. Night, New York's Chinatown, Henry Fairfield Osborn, anthopological racism, Permian fossil beds, Columbia University, Charles Doolittle Wallcott (abandoned), ( Read more... )