Mood:  bright

Inasmuch as I like to assign my writing projects a specific 'theme song' (and I do), I've come to find that the "Reign of Eden's" theme song is Fastball's 'The Way'.

I know you've all heard this one about a trillion times before... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:47 AM ADT

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Mood:  not sure

It's coming...

Let me say that I have EXTREMELY mixed feelings about this Pullman yarn; I read the books when I was younger (and have yet to even get to the third one, I confess... so I left off with the li'l male protagonist approached by Angels lookin' to kill their mean 'ol bastard of a God...)

But I did read the synopsis, so there.

So Philip Pullman, no surprise here, is a rabidly anti-Christian (and other religions I suppose, though the cross has a special place in his antipathic heart) and he sees himself as the children's version of atheist gadfly Christopher Hitchins. The mantra espoused in each of the 'His Dark Materials' books is simple: 'God's NOT in his heaven, and all is WRONG with the world' (for those that got my Tess of the d'Urbervilles reference, I thank you...)

Alright: simple enough. But there's also another problem: anti-religious, rabid and insipid hatred-spouter that he is (and he IS...) Philip Pullman is also an immensely talented writer and I count 'The Golden Compass' book as a fantastical and extremely satisfying adventure story despite the rank anti-Christian (and I'll say in particular anti-Catholic) spiel that is evident throughout. The man's prose FLOWS, for God's sake (and but for His sake...) and the story's absolutely gripping.

The whole 'daemon' thing? Lord, sheer brilliance...

'The Subtle Knife' was slightly less entertaining to me (enough so that I didn't go on, obviously) but I was rather affected by this storyline. So much so that, in fact, you can trace the name of my second TYPERS book, 'His Moral Antipathy', to a ripoff of his series title: 'His Dark Materials'.

They say that the anti-religious fervor will be toned down in the upcoming film, and I believe that. I'm not saying I'm in favor of the movie, and I'm not gonna picket it either. One problem some people note is that kiddies who see the flick will be tempted to start readin' the books and, thus, more li'l kids will be indoctrinated into the Church of the Anti-Christians.

Whatever. More salvation for me, I suppose. Pullman's anti-religious themes within the HDM books are actually most juvenile and weak: if C.S. Lewis made his readers think with some of the tropes in his 'Narnia' books then Pullman makes readers see how petty he really is as a debater: of COURSE God is a twitty prawn if you create a whole universe around the fact that he is and simply cast the opposing side as more evil and stupid twits (C.S. Lewis, you'll remember, at least had the Good Calormen soldier in 'The Last Battle'...)

The books're the cheapest of shots, and don't constitute satire as much as laughable parody. The subtext within them reads not as a clever analysis and critique of religion, but more as a window into the empty heart of one very, very, very talented man.

My Justin Storm is a religious, marginally, and that mirrors myself somewhat, but guess what? Instead of painting atheism and agnosticism as EVIL and DISGUSTING from the outset I'm bein' realistic: so far in my writing I've shown that religion is somewhat less than a healthy force in my main character's life at the moment. The fact that, ultimately, it becomes a MOST crucial plot point due to the fact that something theoretical is shown to probably exist isn't until later, and even then I'd never assault the opposing side so much as Pullman derisively chooses to do (my main female character is a rank atheist, for example, and I happen to adore her, so I've built myself a complicated platform from which I must proceed...)

However, some people don't seem to do well with 'complicated' arguments. It's all just black and white to them. Good and bad, smart and dumb...

Gods, and devils... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:31 AM ADT

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Mood:  caffeinated

Can we please make these twits at the energy drink companies admit that this whole "Taurine-infusion" crap is just a moronic conspiracy to make their products sound cool?

Taurine is an essential amino acid in animals like cat (in that they can't make it on their own) but humans are able to synthesize it just fine, thank you very much. Now, beverages like Red Bull (who's name is taken from Taurine's history and nomenclatural (that's a word, isn't it?...) association with bulls) contain upwards of 300 percent of your body's own daily allotment of the stuff.

So why would your body need to triple its available reserves of an AA that it is able to produce, but only makes sparingly?

It doesn't...

The energy drink twits need to come clean and admit that there's only ONE INGREDIENT in their beverages that's a meaningful contributor to mood elevation and fatigue reduction (I'd like to see Red Bull come out with a drink sporting 1000 mg caffeine in place of 1000 mg Taurine).

Now, they can come back at me and claim that Taurine plays a minor role in reducing muscle fatigue. That WOULD mean that someone involved in strenuous workout MIGHT benefit from the junk, but you wouldn't want to do that with these trash energy drinks anyway because the caffeine co-mingling (that's a word, isn't it?...) in the drinks is a diuretic and those energy drinks all make one pee like a racehorse. It doesn't matter HOW stimulated your muscles are if you're as dehydrated as a fish out of water.

This Taurine-infusion argument is as specious as the old wive's tale about carrots helping you to see better in the dark: sure, Beta-carotene is converted into Vitamin A by the liver, and Vitamin A is necessary for proper eye function, but the body makes no more of it than what it needs because EXCESS Vitamin A tends to shear one's liver apart at the seams (if you DO consume way too much Beta-carotene in your diet for a long time the unused molecule piles up in fatty tissue deposits, especially the skin, and something most wonderously strange begins to happen to you...)

...'Red Bull'... 'Monster'... 'Rockstar'... you can have 'em, for all I care (Rockstar should stick to cosponsoring all those trashy 'Girls Gone Wild' videos... at least those things are more honest about their content...)

As for me: there's really only one 'energy drink' I can't go without. I'm having one right now, matter of fact, and if a regular energy drink puts your average schmo in Seventh Heaven, then I'm in an even Seventher Heaven (that's a word, isn't it?...): 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 10:17 AM ADT

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Mood:  caffeinated

The old debate about modern man's pesky habit of surviving outside the Earth's means continues...

Hey, this much is true: the human population SHOULD be much lower than it is, but thanks to post-indistrial society we've got a nast habit of overextending our lifespans and reproducing at alarmingly successful rates (again, things like pesky neonatal wards and advanced medical care have put infant mortality numbers in the toilet throughout the civilized world.)

The short answer to the question at hand (in my honest opinion) is that humans are unique in that we can personally determine our own carrying capacity number: if we're total slobs that number should be a little under a billion, and if we become more 'self-actualized' as a species psychologically and environmentally the number's probably closer to several hundred billion (and I am not joking about that...)

The story caught my eye because it features quotes from the VHEMT whackos. Like PETA (who I denounced previously), these guys are your garden-variety secularist/anti-human wankers who find the idea of the human animal reprehensible, and an abomination in itself (don't wanna put words into their mouths, but it is true).

More tie ins with my current work-in-progress, coincidentally. One of the main villians in the book, a general named Asha Brie, leads up the sinister group Logo's most advanced military unit: Adamant Squad.

For one thing I really like the word 'Adamant' (if you've read my Typers drafts, you'd understand my cheeky wordplay, too...) but for another I include groups like VHEMT in my all-time haters list, and they're the kind of wankers I want to call out in this forthcoming book. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:26 PM ADT

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Mood:  energetic

I'm no big fan of the Gundam series in general (what little I've seen of its incarnations seems slightly derivative...) but I always wondered why its Wikipedia page was always so laden with ridiculously in-depth factoids...

...and now I know. 

More evidence that Wikipedia may bring about the end of civilization. Of course, I'll be an addict myself until the last tower falls. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 7:45 PM ADT

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Mood:  a-ok

We're comin' around to 'Oscar season' in the film industry which means (in a nutshell) that all the ultra-violent pics coming out for the rest of the year are gonna be drenched with artistic 'worthiness'.

Whatever. 

In any event, my personal verdict's in on Eastern Promises: I've gotta go with four-stars, actually.

This is the second pic combining Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg, and I must say that some tension is evident in the production... 

Seriously, though, I gotta say that Cronenberg's approach in these pictures (the first of which was, naturally, A History of Violence) is friggin' brutal to the point of sickening. I believe that Cronenberg's film-techniques are something of a product of the success of 2004's Passion of the Christ, which raised the bar for violence in American cinema (something that would otherwise be hard-core torture porn was made almost completely justified by the unreproachable religious subjectmatter; less spiritually-inclined splatterfests that followed were ushered in simply because the floodgates were opened).

But let me say that I greatly admire Gibson's 'Passion', and while it may have provided Hollywood with a questionable legacy of allowing insane gore to dominate the screen even more than before it was a bridge that would've been crossed anyway. A film like 'The Passion' merely accelerated this process (Unfortunately, I predict this trend will contine to its logical conclusion, too...)

...I think that's the second time I've referenced that movie. Huh...

Anyway, Cronenberg's a veteran of the B-movie horror scene, where he first made his mark, and these days he's seen fit to splatter a few Stephen King-grade horror scenes into stories that are otherwise Oscar-calibur.

Well, not quite. If he did that then his movies would suck, and they don't. Eastern Promises takes a serious 'no flinch' approach to its gore. There are three bloody scenes (four, if you count a frozen corpse... and five if you count a fainting pregnant minor slipping and falling over her own 'bloody show'...) and these scenes are, indeed, incidental and instrumental to the drama surrounding them.

Yeah: guys having their throats slit with straight-razors is bloody stuff, and downright horrifying, but is showing the act from start to finish without stylizing it or cutting away really that vulgar?

Yes, it is. And that's kinda the point of the film. One of them, anyway. If you don't accept this as a valid part of the film's message then it's not going to work for you (and, conversely, if you're a young teenage boy who gets-off on as much carnage and gore as possible, you'd be even less happy with the other 97-percent of the film that lacks said atrocities). 

Roger Ebert's review alludes to the fact that the bathhouse fighting scene will set a new standard in the field of movie fights. He's probably right. I don't normally squirm in my seat during a movie, especially if I'm so engrossed in the flick as to be in that transient state of out-of-body bliss that is the weakening of the fourth wall. But during this scene I was snapped around like a rubber band: one minute entranced by the dramatic turns of the story, soaking up the characters' nebulous facial expressions, and the next I'm literally clutching at body parts in sudden, nearly psychosomatic pain and terror.

From granite-like mental immersion to terrified panic in under ten seconds?

And to still have the desire to 'wade back into the pool' afterwards? 

Yeah, that's a good film alright. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 1:16 AM ADT

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I'll keep this one brief, 'cause I'm half-trashed at the moment (not on Grolsch, mind you, but something else that I should've had the good sense not to imbibe of on an empty stomach...)

Got an interesting news item here. Now, you gotta admit: they were really asking for it, weren't they?

Gotta love that S&M stuff, though. I've always been interested in the psychology involved in something like bondage. As a matter of fact, it's gonna play something of a background role in TYPERS, too (though only on the periphery...) For one thing, Chenine Chovert's 'demon' form brought on by her Raiden's transformation is called the Bound Angel (which reflects her very conscious desire to overpower her own... well, 'personal deficits'...)

Two characters also hook up (quite soon, too...) and share this very kink together (though the relationship is distinctly F/M...)

I'm gonna stop talking about this 'cause it's creeping me out, but I think it's good for me to keep TYPERS on my mind like this, whatever the vein of discussion be...

...or how creepy it be... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:56 AM ADT

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Mood:  rushed

Studies show that there's nothing more boring than listening to an aquarist prattle on about his tank.

The studies are duly noted. Now back to the regular-scheduled posting: 

 

...sheeeeeesh...

Well, I'm covered in algae again, and dead tired, but it looks like the mission to de-gunk my aquarium is coming to a close...

...kinda. One can tell from the panorama shot that it's sort of a work in progress...

Ugh. I've been battling a funky black algae colony in my saltwater tank. Most algae is transient and fleeting (and gets eaten up by the 200+ members of my in-tank cleaner crew, thank you very much...) But this new stuff is death incarnate: if the gunk gets onto my corals it's nearly impossible to get off, even when I use a toothbrush. The battle's been raging for a week, now, and I think things are on the mend (they'd better be, what with all the cash I've spent on water changes: saltwater doesn't just spring-up naturally in the ocean, you know...)

uh... well, wait...

Eh, nevermind. The scrubbing isn't done yet, by a long shot, but for now I've got some fairly happy li'l denizens...

Anyway, there's still about a two pounds of algae secreted about the tank, but for the mome nt I can focus on hunting for those pesky little tube worms for without this friggin' bubonic plague-like algae leering over my shoulder. Tube worms are a far easier problem to deal with, after all, and I can't see them giving me a run for my money...

...unless I leave my metal halides on all night and serious bump-up the tank's temperature. That could cause a problem, or two... 

Well, not really, but wouldn't that be cooler than the other side of the pillow? (or should I say, hotter than the foxtrot?) I think so, at least... 

 

In other news, I think I'm on the right track in my quest to make TYPERS a trilogy and keep the looming shadow of a fourth book out of the way. As it turns out, my main problem is finding an appropriate cut-off point between the books (the natural place to have a cut-off, wherein the pilots' worlds are turned to shit, Justin is left without a ride* and Antithesis' power reaches its zenith, seems to be too far away to use as a bridge between the books...)

If you want any more hints about plot points, all I can say is that I'm whistling a certain song as I type all this out. 

(*temporarily...) 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:51 PM ADT

Updated: Tuesday, 2 October 2007 4:38 PM ADT

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Mood:  chatty

Ever wonder what life would be like if you lived on a gigantic bar magnet?

...well, you do...

We've known for quite awhile now that most animals (li'l birdies, in particular) develop at least some kind of relationship with the Earth's freakishly hyperactive magnetic field, but it turns out that we may not know the half of it.

Apparently, birds don't just feel the Earth's magnetic field: some of 'em can even see it. And, according to the reports, we're not talkin' metaphorically, either...

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me. The magnetic field around the Blue Marble is tops on my list of 'Natural Wonders' (and, need I remind you, is the only reason you're reading this now and not boiling away under a sea of solar fire...). 

Interestingly, when CNN ventured to make their own list of 'Natural Wonders' they didn't quite select Magnetic Earth as one (though they did give passing mention to the Auroras, which are technically a physical manifestation of the magnetosphere... but still: citing the 'Auroras' as a Natural Wonder in lieu of the whole magnetic field in general is kinda like talking about Courtney Love's career without mentioning Kurt Cobain.)

You heard me, Courtney...

Also, those idiots at CNN don't seem to realize that we've got TWO sets of 'lights', not just one (for some reason, they only cited the 'Northern Lights' as a wonder...twits)

When you think about it, it's kinda odd that any animal would patter around without the ability to somehow 'see' the show going on all around them. Sure, we've got GPS now, but wouldn't it have been nice for ancient mariners to have a little more magnetite in their heads than we humans typically have?

Thank God our frontal lobes happened to start growing over our eyeballs, or we'd have no hope at all (after all, I'll settle for a good GPS system any day). Eh, 'animal instincts'... very interesting to see what's our there, and what we don't even have a prayer of ever posessing ourselves. Evolution's full of give and take, after all, and I suppose we just didn't 'migrate' enough to warrant a powerful internal compass. Oh, well...

However, this study brings up an interesting point: granted that birds can actually see the magnetic field, how would a slightly nearsighted birdie manage to get around, then? 

 ...you never know...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:26 AM ADT

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Mood:  not sure

The common cold bug is a real pisser: it's a virus with the potential to turn a healthy adult into a sniveling wreck for a few days.

Do not put that f**ker into space, though: it might come back with the strength to put you in a pine box.

Alright, so we're not quite talking about the worst, worst-case scenario yet (though that might not be too far off, either) but it's still enough to give one pause: germs exposed to spacecraft conditions coming back with a little extra pep (not as much extra pep as if we'd intentially screwed around with them, but still, it's almost as bad a Tripp-up when you think about it...)

...sorry...

Also of note is that the affected germ, Salmonella, appears to have only coincidentally been altered as a response to weightless conditions; the change in its turgid structure just happened to make it a little more suited to environments like mammalian intestines. That is to say, this is probably just an isolated coincidence, and it doesn't necessarily mean that a test tube filled with Herpes Simplex Virus 1 (the one that gives you mouth sores, not the other one...) would come back from space as a vial of Weaponized Bubonic Plague.

Still, when you think about the fact that we've been struggling against these diseases for the past 3 billion years, it doesn't seem smart to intentionally muck-up the natural back and forth arms race we've got going: you've gotta 'keep running to stay in place', sure, but what the hell happens when you intentionally pick up one of your opponents and literally toss them out ahead of you? (as a caveat, I am totally fine with the concept of genetic engineering, as long as the people involved know what the f*ck they're doing at each locus...)

After all: if we're not careful in how we alter our microbial enemies (or how we allow them to be altered) the eventual 'Strain' could see us plagued with problems that are sure to 'Tripp' us up in the future...

again, sorry... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:27 PM ADT

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