I bought Neil Gaiman’s “Fragile Things” recently, which I am quite enjoying. Neil Gaiman is one of those authors who handles both short stories and novels equally well, which is damn hard to do. While at the bookstore, I also found and leafed through
the first issue of Battle Pope.
...Why didn’t anyone ever tell me there was such thing as a comic
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However since this didn't stop me from pimping Invincible to Twig I still need to apologise profusely.
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So Invincible is good? Bad? Meh? Worth looking at? On scans_daily? Will Twig start screeching and throwing things if I ask her about it? Did you take my pants?
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Oh, speaking of which, are you familiar with the concept of hell money?
Also, your pants are safe. For now. If you want them to stay that way you'd better send the money like I told you.
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Are we talking about the fake money you burn or throw around at Chinese funerals to make sure the dead person is rich and not stuck in a bad afterlife? If so, yes. If not, nope. I remember having to buy it when my grandmother died. Por que?
First, send me a picture of my pants holding a copy of today's newspaper so I know they're alive.
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No wait, it gets better.
Are we talking about the fake money you burn or throw around at Chinese funerals to make sure the dead person is rich and not stuck in a bad afterlife? If so, yes. If not, nope. I remember having to buy it when my grandmother died. Por que?
See it recently occured to me, "Hey, can you do that in reverse? Like, what if you really hated someone? Like your perfectly innocent ex with whom you had a nasty breakup that was mostly your fault? Can you burn enough hell money to bribe someone to bump them down to one of the really nasty afterlifes?".
So basically now I have a new character.
He pointed out lots of trivia and historical bits about the buildings and towns we passed, which was terribly impressive; I know I couldn’t be half as knowledgeable while taking someone through DC. I just resort to making shit up.Your faith that he was not also totally making shit up is touching. I mean, we're ( ... )
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Damn, that's cool. Tell me more about your character! Actually, I wonder if you can jerk a lot of the traditions around. Can you sneak into someone's house and slop some vinegar on the mouth of their kitchen god so he'll talk smack about them when he reports at the end of the year?
Your faith that he was not also totally making shit up is touching. I mean, we're talking about a country where they put bears in their moats and have to specify when they don't want goats in their castles. If he decided to make something up, how would you ever know?That's true, but trust me, this guy was too earnest and too proud of his country. I lived with him for about four months; I could tell when he was messing around and when he was actually ( ... )
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Like I have any idea? I don't actually create characters, I just have abstract thought-experiments on what is the absolutely most screwed-over scenario I can think of that hasn't been done before.
But I think he was bumped down so far he's wound-up as a demon for 10,000 years. This is unfortunate, as he's a really nice guy and hence really bad at it.
Actually, I wonder if you can jerk a lot of the traditions around. Can you sneak into someone's house and slop some vinegar on the mouth of their kitchen god so he'll talk smack about them when he reports at the end of the year?
The potential is really limitless, isn't it?
Which is why I'm drawing a blank trying to come up with other ideas. All I can think of is arrange jack-o-lanterns into repulsion fields to channel the dead to your neighbours or changing the New Years Countdown to something other than base 10 mathematics.
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This is unfortunate, as he's a really nice guy and hence really bad at it.
Cool. I kinda like the idea, this sort of karma-spiritual warfare being slung all over the place by people who really shouldn't be allowed to have it in their hands in the first place. Maybe you could do something so your neighbor gets reincarnated as a much lower life form or something... Not sure how. Throw stuff on his funeral pyre? The Egyptians did this, which was why grave robbing was such a big deal, I guess-- you were fucking up someone's afterlife when you swiped their stuff and smashed their statues.
Only an hour more until I can go home and throw the finger at all the clients from today. God.
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I always wondered about that, because as far as your mummy went I was under the impression that you needed to keep all your bits intact for a certain amount of time and then your ka sorted itself out and stopped making needy visits to your dead body and then everything, I assumed, was okay at least as far as your corpse went.
As for your other stuff - if you had to make do with the stuff you got buried then what happened to all those commoners who got buried with things like weaving suplies or carpentry tools. Was there no market for their skills in the afterlife? Should they have been buried with an interesting book or two instead?
Only an hour more until I can go home and throw the finger at all the clients from today. God.It's a pity your clients tend to be so international, it rules out risking things like 'the fig' which you could have otherwise ( ... )
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When you are buried (presumably that there is enough of you left to bury, and presuming I don't die at the same time as or before you as a result of something we were doing) I will slip all the DVDs of movies and shows that I want you to watch in the afterlife, since you never bothered to catch them while you were alive.
Well, I communicate with most of them through the phone or email, so I can get away with a a lot of silent obscene gestures. But I do appreciate the pants. You are lovely.
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