Dear CIA and Fearstream Media,
I am a wacko and an idiot and I have a lot of weapons training. You should be relieved that I am no longer in a position of influence within the military, but you should probably start watching me very closely anyway because I might snap at any moment and guns and other murderous equipment are very easy to get in our wonderful country.
Sincerely,
Crazy Eye Dude
There’s a lot of grumpiness these days about books, book selling, book publishing, the “proper” format of books, Amazon’s assault on books by publishing and selling lots and lots of books, and how nobody reads books no more.
Did you know that if you’re reading my blog on a screen of some type, it’s not literature (and you’re probably a subliterate ignoramus who DOES. NOT. LOVE. BOOKS.), but if I print it out on paper it is suddenly transformed and worthwhile? Apparently that’s the case.
Yep. Lots going on. I’ve written about it a bit before (like when I posted about the “Ebook Apocalypse“), and I’m active on the battlefield as an author who used to be with one of the Big 6 publishers but has now gone entirely independent (see my “Astonishing Adventures of Doc Wilde” Kickstarter project, live until April 28th, 2012, please take a look and help a strugglin’ wordsmith out).
Are things really all that bad? Or are they just different? Could they even be better?
I saw some reports recently that indicate that the doom and gloom may be uncalled for. Continue reading
So I lost another friend on Facebook.
He’s a writer, and a fellow pulp fan, and I’d enjoyed knowing and occasionally interacting with him. I liked seeing what he had to say, and what he had going on.
I knew he was a conservative, while I am not. The fact that he holds to certain ideas didn’t make me think less of him as a person, it just made me wonder how he could reconcile those ideas with observable reality. But we all have our filters and our failings and our blindnesses, and I hoped that he, and the many other right-wing friends I have, wouldn’t allow disagreement with ideas to lead to discord between us as people. That has happened, of course, and people have fled my friends list over such issues, and even issues more trivial. The game writer S. John Ross unfriended me and actually blocked me on Facebook for a single polite comment disagreeing with his opinion of Johnny Cash. Talk about the courage of your convictions.
My attitude is usually that a friend lost in this way is no friend worth having, and I tend to operate on the principle of “If I offend you, that probably just makes us even.”
But anyway, I hadn’t seen anything from this friend for a while, and I grew concerned that maybe he was having health problems or something. So I visited his page, where I found that we were no longer friends. I naturally suspected the reasons for this, but I sent him a message and asked why he’d unfriended me, telling him that if I had offended him it hadn’t been because I intended to.
This was his response: Continue reading
I just read “The problem with slut-bashing (or: I was a teenage dinner whore. kidding.),” a wonderful blog post by Justine Musk on sexual politics and language. You should check it out.
Here’s a piece:
In her book THE ART OF WAR FOR WOMEN, Chin-ning Chu writes:
“Women seem to have fallen prey to something I call the crabs-in-the-pot syndrome. When you cook crabs, you don’t have to place the lid on the boiling pot because the crabs keep one another from getting out. As one crab gets near the top and attempts to climb over the edge, another crab will naturally put it down in its own attempt to escape. As a result, all the crabs go to their collective doom.”
This is the problem whenever a woman defends herself by saying “I am not a slut.”
By declaring that you are not a slut, you are saying that some women are sluts; you are drawing a line between yourself and them. Except it’s a line that can’t actually exist, because all it does is reinforce the very idea that you’re trying to fight.
As soon as you buy into a reality that brands any woman a ‘slut’, you buy into a belief system that attacks femalehood itself. This includes you. You sacrifice someone else in your effort to escape the boiling water, but you can’t get out of the pot.
See that picture up there? That’s representative of the good that the organization PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) does in the world. When it comes to providing cleverly staged fap-material of celebrities, they’re very good.
Know what they’re also good at? Picking ridiculous battles, like trumpeting that Fishkill, New York should change the name of its town because the name was mean to fish. They are extremists, raging at humans for killing animals, eating animals, using animal products, training animals, exhibiting animals, even keeping animals for pets. They make a hell of a lot of money from people who contribute to their coffers because they simply equate PETA with, well, ethical treatment of animals. You know, kindness. Saving animal lives. That sort of thing.
But PETA are huge fucking hypocrites.
And they’re responsible for the cold-blooded slaughter of thousands of animals entrusted to them by people who don’t know any better.
A few weeks ago, the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom reported that PETA slaughtered 96% of the stray dogs and cats it, ahem, rescued last year. Since 2005, PETA has killed over 90% of the animals delivered into its care. Since 1998, PETA has killed nearly 28,000 animals. As reported in the New York Post:
In 2010, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services discovered that fully 84 percent of the strays taken in by PETA were killed within 24 hours.
No wonder: The report concluded that PETA’s headquarters “does not contain sufficient animal enclosures to routinely house the number of animals annually reported as taken into custody.”
So, off they go to the gas chamber.
See? PETA sucks. Don’t give them any money. You can get a lot more info at the website www.petakillsanimals.com.
My pulp brother Barry Reese (author of The Rook series, among other things) has started a conversation at his blog on the subject of sex (and romance) in the pulps…
In the classic hero pulps, there wasn’t a whole lot of sex. You’d have the occasional lurid cover, with some scantily clad woman (usually with stockings showing) in distress while our hero moved to protect her but for the most part, guys like Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger were not very interested in knocking boots. Doc occasionally in later years would display a kind of boyish interest in the fairer sex and The Avenger’s love for his wife was constantly being referenced but even in the first book where you see The Avenger alongside his wife and daughter, you didn’t exactly get the image that they were passionate lovers. They were partners, friends and spouses, yes, but there was no sign of “heat” in the relationship.
There were some exceptions, of course. Jim Anthony was basically Doc Savage with a sex drive but by today’s standards, he was still a bit tame. In fact, the idea of Anthony was racier than the truth — he liked to lounge around at home in a speedo while working in the lab. Hell, what guy doesn’t?
The fantasy pulps (like Conan) got a lot of mileage out of ladies whipping one another and there was no doubt that Conan and others got into lusty embraces. But I’m focusing on the hero pulps because those were my favorites and that’s where most of the New Pulp writings out today fall into place.
So…
Now we’re in the age of New Pulp. Writers are now bringing in more modern ideas about race, gender relations, etc. into their pulp-inspired writings.
But we still don’t have much in the way of S-E-X. I’m not saying we *need* it, I’m just surprised there’s not more variety out there.
Sex and pulp fiction (in that order) are two topics I spend quite a bit of time thinking about, and I’ve given some thought to their interaction too. I commented on Barry’s post:
I’m with you 100%.
One of the things I enjoy about The Spider is the fact that you get the sense that not only are Dick and Nina rabidly loyal and utterly romantically enraptured with each other, they’re fucking like bunnies. I was bugged by Doc Savage’s apparent pre-adolescent state even when I was reading the books as a kid, and it bugs me even more now.
In my Doc Wilde series, Doc is a widower, but over the course of the stories he will start to develop romantic connections again (indeed, we’ll see some of it in the second book). But he’s already a warmer, in every way more emotional, hero than his literary ancestor. And his parents are very old but still quite youthful, and enjoying each other just as much as The Spider and his lady. (And I’ve already made reference to the fact that the elder Wilde, the “original” Doc Wilde from the pulp era, used to be very stoic and humorless, but his wife opened him up emotionally, making him more loving and playful, and, frankly, human).
Making my characters as human as possible is very important to me, and the stolid sexlessness of heroes like Doc Savage (and even the skirt-chasing antics of his sidekicks, who acted like horny thirteen year olds) is, to me, one of the unfortunate failings of those tales I love so much. (It reached its nadir in the terrible seventies Doc Savage movie, in which the most romantic thing Doc says to the gorgeous jungle princess is “Monja, you’re a brick.”) Sex, romance, emotion in general, are all very interesting to readers because they’re human themselves. And it’s hard to take a hero completely seriously if he’s unable to function fully as a grown-up in the emotional world.
Granted, with Doc Savage’s background as essentially a cloistered lab experiment, it does make sense that he may not be emotionally mature, though it would have been nice to see him undergo an emotional puberty through the years and become more fully adult.
Of course, this literary neutering of the heroes resulted from an attempt to pander to young readers, just as through editorial edict Doc Savage very early on stopped killing bad guys on his adventures. In his earliest exploits, he was a lot more pragmatic, taking down mooks when he had to, but very quickly they made it so that he never killed anyone, relying heavily on non-lethal methods and gear, though many a villain did bring on their own demise and Doc didn’t shed a tear for them. They did this for the kids. But in those early stories, there is a jagged vibrancy that goes away when Doc gets too pacifistic, and as a horny thirteen year old (and as a horny much older year old) I missed that.
Just as I kept wishing Doc would actually bed one of these perky beauties who threw themselves at him all the time. Didn’t have to see it in detail. Coulda happened off-screen. But it would have been nice to know, for instance, that he was getting his ashes hauled by Princess Monja every time he got down to Hidalgo…
Far as I’m concerned, maybe he didn’t let Lester Dent know, but that’s exactly what was happening.
Need a little perspective today? Want to get a sense of where you really are in the fullness of reality? Interested in learning all kinds of cool things?
The app I link to below, which allows you to zoom in to the teeny tiniest bit of quantum foam or out to the fullness of the entire universe is one of the most astonishingly elegant scientific gizmos I’ve ever seen. It’s worth spending some time with.
A great bit of political reportage from novelist Lucius Shepard:
Watching the GOP debate yesterday I had the idea that I was watching a Nostradamus prophecy coming true, these four evil fucks blithely discussing the ripping away of entitlements, like the four heads of some Hydra-esque creature, the subject of a quatrain that begins, When the four-headed beast rises in the west, pus will burst from the eyes of the populace. It was an amazing scene. John King lobbing questions like gobbets of fat and these monstrosities lazily plucking them out of the air and swallowing them, then regurgitating a processed answer…all except the dimwitted Ron Paul, who seemed constantly on the verge of cackling and bursting into flames, an itchy little demon whose mouth outsped his brain. And the audience…tanned, corpulent lesser imps and imp-ettes. Jesus. Like a scene from the Middle Ages.
Brilliant.
Newt Gingrich.
Newt. Fucking. Gingrich.
This is how bad things have gotten.
I think it’s time to revisit a post I did a while back. It’s primarily about lies in politics, but has a good amount of information about Gingrich specifically that most people aren’t aware of. I’m pretty proud of this piece:
Happy Holidays to everyone, whatever their faith or lack thereof. Let’s be nice to each other out there, okay?
I’ve been having a bit of fun, joking around about the wave of Veterans’ Day posts that we see every year on this day, and I know not everyone appreciates the humor. I get that, and I’m sympathetic. But I don’t apologize.
I’m a veteran. I’ve had blood on my hands. I’ve lost friends. And to me, though I realize how sincere most people are, Veterans’ Day is a day of jingoism and platitudes, particularly in a time when we send our soldiers to die in wars we do not need to fight, and when we don’t take care of them when they come home.
Yes, we should honor the soldiers who are fighting and dying in our name, but we should do that by making sure they are doing so ONLY when necessary, otherwise we are wasting their efforts and their lives. Honor them by doing all you can to bring them home. Let their spouses curl up with them every night, their parents be able to sleep in peace, and their children grow up with fathers and mothers.
Yes, we should honor the veterans who have fought in our name when ordered, whether misused by their leaders or not. And to do that best, we should make sure they are given the medical and psychological attention they need when they’re back home, and we should make sure they’re given the benefits they’ve been promised (the VA screwed me out of over 80% of my College Fund, and I’m not alone), we should make sure their homes haven’t been stolen by bankers, and we should do all we can to help them find security in our lousy economy.
So yeah, wave the flag if you want to, tell everyone how important it is to honor our warriors, but if that’s the extent of it, it’s meaningless. If you want to thank me for my service, do something that’s going to help those who need help because they volunteered.
Hey! Stupid!
Just because you’re making ends meet, just because you haven’t stumbled because of a terrible illness, just because the culture we live in is so awash in products produced from petroleum and by corporations with no loyalty to our country or to you that it’s impossible to avoid their use, does NOT mean that there aren’t huge things wrong and does not mean people should just fold their tents and go home like compliant little sheep.
In a time when our country, and the world, are still bleeding out economically because of the ongoing excesses and corruption of Wall Street and large corporations in general, it amazes me that otherwise reasonable people are dedicating their energy and their bile to trying to tear down the people who are trying to change things.
Really? You stand for the banks? You stand for BP? You stand for all the companies who won’t give jobs here because it’s cheaper to pretty much enslave people in foreign countries? You stand for the insurance companies that will let you die if it saves them a few dollars? Really?
You are the 53% because you can’t count all the way to 99.
So the cops have started brutalizing the Wall Street protesters again today. I hope this pisses you off as much as it does me. If it doesn’t, there’s something fucking wrong with you.
Live. Love. Breathe. Dance. Sing. Create. Follow your heart. And be there for people.
It’s too easy to lose each other. And time is always short.
Anyone who has ever waited tables will recognize the dynamics of the following conversation. This is why I’m glad I don’t work in customer service any more:
J.A. KonrathKonrath & Crouch discuss the future of ebooks, and a new sales idea for authors. http://t.co/nqX8cXo
Tim Byrd Actually the Kindle apps will open any file in the proper format.
Tim Byrd Additionally, if you’re using an iPod/iPhone/iPad, you can use other apps like Stanza or iBooks.
Tim Byrd All I know is I have books on my iPad that I didn’t get from Amazon but are in Kindle format, I read them using the Kindle app, and they show up in my Kindle menu.
Tim Byrd OK, I see.
I think the way i do it is to email the file to myself, or put it in my Dropbox, then click on it on the iPad. It gives you the option of opening it in Kindle, and once you have, it’s in the menu.
Let me make sure that’s the way…I’ll post an update.
Tim Byrd
Okay, I just sent a mobi file (the Kindle format) to myself, then clicked to open it on my iPad. I got a pop-up menu that gave me the option of opening it in Kindle. I clicked, it downloaded it in a few seconds, and opened properly. Now it’s in my Kindle library.
I’d say you’re being unfair to the authors, who are in this scenario simply trying to make a living with their work as well as they can, except many people won’t want to be bothered with taking an extra step or two, or using a different app, so your concern isn’t one to dismiss.
Also, it remains true that the Kindle will only read its dedicated format, not one of the open formats like epub that can be used more broadly. Hopefully Amazon will stop being so stridently controlling and shift to epub down the line.
Tim Byrd Anyway, if the author makes the book available on his website in mobi format, you can put it on your device.
Tim Byrd I hope she manages to sell a few anyway. Hate to see her have to go back on the dole.
Tim Byrd It took me less effort to transfer and open that file in Kindle than it has to type my comments here.
Tim Byrd
My point wasn’t that your opinion isn’t valid. My point was that the amount of effort it takes to actually perform the vexing task of getting a book you presumably want to read onto your device is negligible. Making a sandwich is a more taxing task. If that slight effort is enough to keep you from reading a book, then you didn’t really want to read that book.
Also, though it should be obvious, I’m not speaking in any way for Mr. Konrath. I was trying to help you.
Tim Byrd You may not be lazy, but you’re certainly possessed of a highly developed sense of entitlement. Would you like Joe to come turn the pages for you?
In this video, an 18 year old woman tells us her story, and it is a very moving story indeed.
What is the heart and soul of Christianity in America?
If you pay attention to most of the news related to Christianity, what you see is hatred and intolerance, militarism and fascism, a lockjawed embrace of ignorance, and a blind adherence to principles which seem to actually fly in the face of those presented by Christ himself.
Last week I was fortunate (blessed?) to have the opportunity to see the two extremes of Christian behavior, and while the first was disheartening, the second was wonderful.
First, the suck. Continue reading
The boat is sinking.
Supporting the Democrats is bailing water with a bucket with a hole in it.
Supporting Republicans is shooting more holes in the boat’s bottom with an automatic shotgun, hoping the water will drain out.
Supporting third party candidates is hoping a playmate-laden sailboat will come by and save us.
What do we do?
If you need a bit of perspective on life…
Under An Outlaw Moon 