Bum Scoop

As usual, right around Christmas (and just after) I wind up with iTunes gift cards and such and pick up some new music. Here’s what’s new to the playlist:

Nursery Cryme & Foxtrot by Genesis — Actually, I got these as part of the big 1970-1975 Genesis box set that my wife gave me for Christmas, and it’s the first time I’ve owned these albums. I’ll probably write more about the whole box set, but I’ll say these are a couple of really good 70s prog albums.

The Muppets Soundtrack — I loved seeing the movie with my kids just after Thanksgiving, and the soundtrack is one of the best parts of the movie. I’m still having trouble with the idea that they covered Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” with a bunch of Muppet chickens (titled “Forget You” in keeping with the single release, of course) and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with a barbershop quartet… of sorts. But all the music is great. Especially “Man or Muppet?” which has been nominated for an Oscar. Not sure how much I like these recordings of “Rainbow Connection,” but they’re about all there is these days.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Greatest Hits — When I was in high school, I had a tape version of Blood Sugar Sex Magik that I wore out pretty good driving back and forth to school, but haven’t bought anything from them since, for some reason (other than the individual track “Especially in Michigan” from Stadium Arcadium). So I figured I’d at least catch up on all the songs I love from them, even if I’m taking the wimpy “Greatest Hits” route.

Maybe You Should Drive by Barenaked Ladies — This was BNL’s second album, and I heard a lot of “Jane” and “Alternative Girlfriend” on the radio when I was in high school, so it’s another sort of nostalgia-trip for me. I haven’t heard much else on the album, though, so it’s a little like rediscovering them for the first time. And I think I preferred this earlier, quirkier sound on this album and Gordon to much of the later stuff (though I liked that, too). This album also gets bonus points for having been in our college radio station’s CD library, so I would play a couple of tracks off it every week on my college radio show freshman year. (Especially “Alternative Girlfriend” since I had, at the time, a girlfriend not much unlike the one the song describes.)

Fallen Empires by Snow Patrol — Just got this the other day, so I’m not 100% sure what I think of it yet, but so far, so good. It’s the same band doing the same (but just enough different) sort of things they did on the other two albums of theirs that I have (Eyes Open and A Hundred Million Suns). We’ll see if it grows on me like the others did.

The King Is Dead by The Decemberists — Likewise just got this the other day, but it’s growing on me fast. I’ve heard them mentioned quite a bit, here and there, and decided to give them a chance now. Pretty glad, so far, that I did. They remind me a lot of other folksy/bluesy sort of music that I have enjoyed over the years (especially by Canadians), and this seems lodged right in that wheelhouse. I understand their backlist might be a little different from this album, but it’s certainly worth exploring.

“Everything At Once” by Lenka — The only single I’ve bought so far, and it came to me by way of a commercial trying to sell me some Disney online product or another at the beginning of a couple of the kids’ new Blu-Rays. No idea what they’re selling, but the song was damn catchy, so I picked it up. Only downside is that when the kids hear it in the car now, they expect it to be followed up shortly by a movie.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

One of the other things I got up to during the con weekend, but wasn’t properly part of the con, as such, was a trip to the shooting range.

The idea for the trip started, innocently enough, in this tweet back in December, and as discussions evolved, it quickly became apparent that the Friday morning before the con would be a good time for me, Yanni, Josh, and Bill to be available. Of course, the thing I forgot about when we discussed it was that they might have authors to cart around and entertain, so ultimately it was decided to just bring them along.

And it was a hell of a good time.

We found an indoor range not far from the hotel, and there we rented a nice selection of pistols and long guns of various calibers. My favorite, perhaps to the disgust of the gun nuts, was shooting the AR-15, a clone of the M-16 I carried for so long in the Corps. I dunno what it is about the .223 rifle, maybe just that it was the first thing I ever shot (back when I was 22 and a fresh-faced boot), but there was something about it that was both fun and strangely comforting. I took a turn on everything else but the M-1A1 (so they said) carbine we rented. (Pictured below in the capable hands of Joe Abercrombie.)

The other favorite was the .45 pistol, which was my first time firing anything like that, though at $25 for a box of 50 rounds, it seems like it could be a really expensive hobby. If I started shooting for fun, I might have to stick with a 9mm or something. Or start selling more writing. Bottom line, though, it was a great time and I had a lot of fun with my friends and a handful of unsavory author-types.

And here’s a picture of some of the participants in the shooting lanes. Obviously it would be rather tough to get more photogenic pictures from the front, so you’ll just have to trust me that, from left to right, we have Myke Cole (with a Glock 17), Yanni Kuznia (.38 revolver), Joe Abercrombie (the aforementioned M-1), and Brent Weeks (the AR-15). Brent, incidentally, was the high-shooter of the morning, so dubbed after shooting a smile (three upper and three lower teeth) into a target with the revolver. So I guess I have to be careful about who I’m calling “unsavory.”

Next time (if there is one), I’m thinking summer months, open air, and maybe with a bit longer of a range so I can remind myself how to shoot at real distances, not just the 20 meters or so we had indoors.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

So hey, I’m home from Epic ConFusion, which this year I helped plan and organize, and I could hardly be more happy with how it went. But I could also hardly be more tired, so I’ll do a proper wrap-up tomorrow-ish. In the meantime, gaze up on this and despair.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Going to read more this year, and it starts with being a little bit behind right away, naturally. But here’s the first two books-of-the-week.

1. Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Another Vimes story from Pratchett’s Discworld universe, this one involving questions of who the law applies to and how it gets applied. I’m generally taken with Pratchett’s approach to law and crime and law enforcement, though I sometimes wonder how many different ways he can tackleit with Vimes, et al. This is a pretty decent addition to the oeuvre, though not quite as affecting, I think, as Thud!, for instance.

2. Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

I reread this periodically, mostly because I’m curious as to how Clancy did it, back in the day, before character and plot bloat took over his books. It was also kind of interesting, juxtaposed against Snuff which also tackled some of the questions of extralegal “justice” that are one of the major throughlines of Patriot Games. I’m still…bemused with how detached and analytical Clancy could be in addressing the response to terrorism from his pre-9/11 position in this book; at the end of the book he’s holding his newborn son in his hands, telling him that his father is not a murderer… and in the most recent books, that very son would grow up to be just the sort of extralegal murderer that Clancy seemed to be weighing against in Patriot Games. I think the irony would be more heartbreaking if Clancy himself seemed more conscious of it.

Either way, though, Patriot Games is a well-crafted (and, I suspect, well-edited) book that I’m continually trying to learn from.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

I saw a bit of this going around, you know, last year, and I thought I’d get into it. Might be a little early, but that’s my New Year’s Resolution: stay ahead of the game. Early is on time, on time is late.

So here you go, my top ten blog posts of 2012:

1. One Of My Blood Relations Reproduced!
2. Election Reflections 2012: Well, That Was A Surprise
3. I Still Don’t Like Sitcoms, But…
4. Down with Bacon
5. Goal Weight
6. Detroit Has a Skyline, Too
7. Top Ten Posts of 2012
8. Agent Hunt
9. Shootout
10. I’ve Become an Audiophile. Sort Of.

And if past performance is any indication, these might well be the only ten blog posts of 2012.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Yesterday, I mentioned 750Words, a website that encourages quick writing and pushing your internal editor into a steamer trunk and sitting on him/her. What’s interesting to me is how well it’s worked so far. I haven’t written every day since I started using it, but I’ve written more and more consistently and with less feeling of burnout than I have in the past, and I think it’s for a couple of reasons.

The first, and most obvious for me is that it gives you a massive pile of data to go with every day’s writing, including a minute-by-minute breakdown of your wpm, and how often you pause in the writing for longer than three minutes. If you rack up 10 straight days of zero distractions greater than three minutes, you get a little “hamster on a wheel” badge. Which is stone-cold awesome. Not because I like little digital merit badges (I do) but because it’s given me just enough of a carrot to encourage me to write without the internal editor. To just draft and draft and draft until I’m done for the day. As a result? I’m knocking out those 750 words in about 20-25 minutes, and in an hour I can usually cram in 1500-2000 or so.

These are not great words.

Some of them probably are, and I’ve probably at least once or twice hit upon an accidentally awesome development that I would not have had I stopped to think about it and mull it over and so on. But that is kind of the fun here, and I’ve sort of decided that what I’m doing at this stage is writing the most detailed outline imaginable. I already know that I’m going to take it when it’s all done and have a good, critical look at the structure, probably shake some things up, find a nice flow of story elements, then link it all back together and move on from there.

And I think that this might be the compromise between discovery writing and outlining that I’ve been searching for for a while now. And, you know, maybe not. Maybe this is only going to work, or not, for this particular novel. And I’ll move on to something else for the next project. But, I also actively enjoy experimenting with process, so even if it fails, I can hardly call it a waste, since then I’ll know that it doesn’t work. As Adam Savage says, any result is good, because it’s a result. It means something, whether it’s what I wanted it to mean or not.

That to me, like the community, is another one of the things I absolutely love about writing.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

I thought about putting a lengthy diatribe here, but I decided to skip it. Here’s the summation of that post, instead.

I used to love college football. There’s a lot of good memories watching it on Saturday afternoons in the fall with my Dad, shelling peanuts and relishing the crisp fall air (a unique pleasure in my un-air-conditioned childhood home).

But it’s time for it, in it’s current form, to go. Chances are, you’ve heard about the Penn State thing, and yes, that is the ton of bricks that broke the camel’s back. But the past twenty years or more, it’s been brick after brick after brick on that poor camel. Program after program after program getting caught cheating–almost always getting punished for trying to hide the rule breaking and cheating and violations more than the violations themselves. And more stories still filter out of college towns of football players excused from this, that, and the other thing. Ten stories, maybe a hundred for every one that makes it out to the media.

Time to pack it in, big college football. Dismantle it. Take it down, brick by brick. The culture–and the money–around big football programs has contributed to a toxic environment in which, let’s be honest, a graduate assistant and a head coach and an athletic director and a university vice president and a university president did not call the cops because they did not want to hurt the Program, and were willing to sacrifice the child. Scalzi called it “Omelas State University” as though it was Penn State alone guilty of such things, but really, it’s all of them, in matters large or small, it’s all of them. And they’re sacrificing children, and women, and grades, and the bodies of athletes, and education, and on and on and on at this altar of greed, servicing a hundred little cults all over the country.

I know this won’t do anything but push the Sanduskys of the world into other, perhaps darker corners, but you know? We need to stop enabling them, we need to stop giving them so much money and power in the name of “collegiate athletics.” It’s time to stop pretending, sports fans.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

I think we’re about halfway through the first season of Homeland, so it seems like a fine time to offer some impressions.

I was really excited about this show. It had Damien Lewis, an awesome actor who I think does not get nearly enough work, and he was playing a Marine and a veteran of Iraq, which certainly touches close to home, so to speak. It also had a premise that I felt held a lot of promise: you have this Marine who was a presumed-dead prisoner of Al Qaeda following his capture in the Iraq invasion. He’s found in Afghanistan, of all places, shortly after a CIA agent of dubious mental stability (played by Claire Danes) receives a warning that an American POW has been converted to the cause and made a terrorist. Naturally, she twigs to Brody, Damien Lewis’s character, after he’s rescued and starts a dangerous, quasi-official investigation into him starting from the moment he returns home.

I figured they could play this three ways, two of them being more interesting than the third. The first, was that Brody has not been turned at all. Yeah, he’s damaged. Sure, he’s rather angry at the Marine Corps and the government for seemingly giving him up for dead. But he’s no terrorist, and the real terrorists are using him as a pawn/stalking horse in their attempt to pull one over on the CIA and perpetrate a really nasty attack. All they intended to do was mess him up but good and plant the seed through Claire Danes and make the CIA chase their tails, distracting them from their real plans.

The second possibility is that Brody is sort of faking it as a turned terrorist. He can’t tell the truth to the CIA because they’ll only knock out a small part of the operation, and he thinks they could score a much bigger victory if he’s working as a sort of independent double agent–being a good mole/plant/whatever, but trying to work to undo the bad guys’ efforts from sorta-within. In there, there’s also the possibility that Damien Lewis suspects the CIA themselves of having a mole or a plant, so he can’t trust them with what he knows because the bad guys will just take him out and go on without him.

The third, and most boring possibility is that he really is a terrorist. The only way I think this could be redeemed is if they were setting him up to be a kind of Manchurian candidate, and there are powerful Americans behind the whole thing, using him through Al Qaeda, or whatever. Still, I think that’s still rather boring because it’s almost too straightforward. And the thing that makes me worry that they’re on this track is that they’ve portrayed certain moments which I think are ambiguous, but seem to be intended as shocking reveals of his true terroristic nature, such as an apparent conversion to Islam. I’m hoping it’s more nuanced than that, but for some reason I just don’t have that much faith in them.

Overall, the rest of the series has been pretty well done, and Damien Lewis, Claire Danes, and Mandy Patinkin (who has been offering up about a dozen reasons per episode for him to bail out at the end of this season or the next) have knocked out their respective roles. And the various subplots revolving around Brody reintegrating with his family and dealing with all the things he missed during the 8 years he was gone have been pretty engaging and well done (if a little obvious).

Ah well. We’ll see what the rest of the season brings. Good things, I hope.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

I love this comic. This is pretty much exactly how I was for a long time, going back to my discovery of the internet. Well, my discovery of USENET, anyway. And I argued about everything: religion, science, computers, art, history, science fiction, tv, movies, whatever. I even had a hobby for a while of finding this habitual (compulsive?) fabulist on our university newsgroup and trying to systematically expose his inventions at every step. (And, truth be told, that still makes a funny story, even today.)

And then, for reasons of blood pressure or sanity or just coming to a generally more zen-like place in the world, I scaled way back and really started to pick and choose who I argued with, and over what. And mostly it got to be about stuff that’s actually important, stuff that kind of matters. Unfortunately, that kind of raises the stakes, but it’s also a good sorting function. It means I think about everything I engage with before I do.

The other thing I did, the other thing I think everyone who’s arguing should do, is that I grew to be willing to be wrong.

Not so way back when, I was wrong on the internet a lot, but had that natural human shame of being wrong. When my 19 year old self, suffused with the delight at discovering all that deep crunchy meaning in the epic tomes of Russian literature, argued on an author’s fan mailing list that you couldn’t possibly ignore the greatness of Crime & Punishment… well, not only was I wrong, but I found it extremely hard to deal gracefully with folks who told me I was wrong, and I couldn’t really admit that I was wrong. And, the funny thing was, it took me a long time to really learn from that.

And I went on to be wrong a lot more. There’s a chance that I’m still being wrong, even as I type this. But, that’s the thing. You do have to learn to be willing to be wrong. One of the things that always got me fired up, and still can tempt me to join arguments, is to see echo chambers develop. Where people don’t have to be wrong, where all of the responses are merely going to affirm their viewpoint; usually with more words than a simple “Me too!” but… plenty that are just as devoid of content or engagement. I’m not opposed to like-minded people getting together to share their like-mindedness, but there’s something about it, when it’s done in a mixed audience, that almost seems to dare those with opposing viewpoints to be silent. More often than not, it is, in fact, a dare that I can dismiss. But sometimes I just do have to engage.

And you know… Munroe’s spot-on snark aside, I also think it’s critical that we do engage. That we don’t shy away from discussing and disagreeing about the really important stuff, the stuff that affects people where they live. Even on the internet, maybe especially on the internet, where we can reach into people’s isolation (especially when they’re displaying it to the world) and try to engage them. But keep in the mind the key: the most important element is having the willingness, yourself, to be convinced, to be wrong.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

As promised the other day, here’s the link for Clarkesworld Magazine #62, in which appears “A Militant Peace,” written by Tobias Buckell and yours truly. It’s a darn good story, if I do say so myself, and you should totally go check it out. (Click on the cover to go to the magazine.)

Also, at my collaborators’ suggestion, I’ve added a (meager) bibliography section to the website. I’ll try to “punch it up,” as they say, with some cover images and stuff. You know. Soonish.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.