Mood:  cheeky

After nearly a month of toil, I've churned out another chapter in Typers...

If Emily Bronte worked as fast as I did, we'd never have the second-half of Wuthering Heights... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:22 PM ADT

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Mood:  quizzical

We could be flying to Jupiter, curing cancer or unlocking the mysteries of life right now...

Eh, this'll do, I suppose... 

What they aren't telling you is that 'Chinook', like its faulty helicopter namesake, had a few bugs in its program, initially:

Scientific progress goes 'hop, hop, hop'... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:21 AM ADT

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Mood:  chatty

Introducing TYPER'S 'unholy trinity'...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:01 AM ADT

Updated: Thursday, 2 August 2007 3:29 AM ADT

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Mood:  bright

Tsk, tsk. Somebody at a Scholastic subsidiary has "some 'splaining to do"!

Now, this is a problem, ain't it? But the reaction from fans has been kinda strange. Several people have gone on record as saying that there would be "no point whatsoever" in reading this last Potter book if they knew the  identities of the two characters that get offed, and how the book ends.

...riiiiiight...

I'm all for this whole 'turning a generation of kids onto reading' business that Rowling's managed, and the lady has one hell of an imagination (her overreliance on getting out of jams by having a 'Wizard do it' does kinda speak to a weakness in creating coherent plots, though....) but the fact that a large number of Harry Potter fans share this 'no point in reading if I know' sentiment is troubling (you can be justifiably pissed, but don't tell me you won't read something you keep yammering non-stop about...)

Two years ago I read the Count of Monte Christo- which is a kinda large book- even though I had knowledge of the whole plot and knew how it was likely to end for most of the cast.

Good literature can be read no matter one's knowledge of the plot. A friend of mine watched the Sixth Sense knowing that Dr. Crowe was a ghost, but he still says that its one of the best films he's ever seen.

 Seems to me that most of the Potter fans would be appeased by the movies, alone. The books, I guess, are merely so many scripts churned out for their benefit.

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 1:06 AM ADT

Updated: Thursday, 19 July 2007 1:14 AM ADT

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Mood:  blue

In the aftermath of their little earthquake it seems that Japan is suffering from some nuclear woes. Seems a bit of radioactive water escaped in the quake, and the people weren't informed properly...

Hopefully this won't be a death-knell against nuclear power in Japan. Japanese are pretty sharp people, and I can't see them going all anti-nuclear apeshit like we idiot Americans did after Three Mile Island.

Nuclear power possesses the highest efficiency-to-cost ratio and efficiency-to-accident ratio of any power system (go over that again and you'll get it...) until we see some more success in our ability to confine fusile material, nuclear is as good as it gets.

It's funny that TMI killed nuclear power in the US even though it was actually a success story: there was a reactor problem, it was contained, evacuations worked, and the clean-up was successful. I'm shocked whenever I talk about this incident to people who rant about the 'meltdown' at TMI. No, no, no: what happened there was the compotent, successful prevention of a meltdown.

You only run into problems with nuclear power when an incompotent nation-state is running the show...

I'll admit: those results can be spectacular...

But TMI? Nah: it's a non-issue taken up by demagogues to make us live the 'green' dream: with a wind turbine in every yard, and a yard for every turbine... 

Let's hope that, in Japan, scientific progress doesn't get boinked...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:09 PM ADT

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Mood:  happy

A Garland, Texas woman really took a  'chunk' out of crime, if not a bite.

My only criticism of her actions is that she stuck him on his posterior instead of in his 'amorous' region: it would save the state the cost of incarcerating him for 20 years if she'd have castrated the gentleman in question.

I'm not sadistic, mind you. At least I don't think so. However, one of the very few perks of military law that I like is the ability to sentence a rapist to death, if a jury so chooses. Personally, I think such a punishment is fairly equitable in the case of 'aggrivated sexual assault', as some 'lawmakers' demand this act be called... 

MY 'Allied Miliary' meets out such a punishment against offenders, and while I don't condone a worldwide totalitarian military empire (we can agree that this is a bad thing... despite what the geniuses currently editing the Wikipedia page for my genre in question have to say, people like me don't exactly envy the distopias we create...) I do enjoy the thought of putting 'caps' in the 'asses' of scum like these.

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 1:43 PM ADT

Updated: Tuesday, 17 July 2007 1:46 PM ADT

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Mood:  caffeinated

At long last, it appears that the 'tortue-porn' genre is going the way of bellbottoms and acid-tees.

Now, from what I've seen, this 'Captivity' stuff is possibly the dumbest thing to hit the big screen since 'Yippeeeeee! Skywalker' came a tromping to a theater near you. But still, I'm hoping that this puts another nail into the coffin of movies such as 'Hostel' and your 'Hills Have Eyes' banalities.

These AREN'T horror movies!

 Wanna see the face of real horror?

THEEEEEEERE'S JACK-Y!

Kick-ass HORROR films like the Shining often kept their body counts very, very low: that's the sign of a real talent for horror. If you scare the shit out of your audience with tension and good old-fashioned creepy atmosphere before anything even happens then you don't NEED the bevy of bound, gagged, naked, decapitated co-eds flailing around...

Honestly, Silent Hill taught us to fear the unknown much more than the known: the scariest parts of those games were the times when NOTHING REALLY HAPPENED, but one walked down through the darkness like a prisoner condemned. (I'm talking about the video game and NOT the terrible movie it was adapted into: ironically the producers eschewed all the great atmospheric trappings of the game to make a 'torture-porn-lite' movie.)

Honestly, I'd rather have American filmmakers keep ripping-off Japanese horror flicks if this kind of trash is the best they can do...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:51 PM ADT

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Mood:  lazy

Vegas vacation's winding to a close. I went for some light kayaking the other day on sunny Lake Mead. It was nice...

...the temperature hit 108 degrees by noon, and the surface water temperature was sitting just shy of 80 degrees when I was done.

Right now I'm a little busy applying my fifth tube of Aloe Vera to my shoulders.

But still: it's a 'dry heat'... ha-ha-ha... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:41 AM ADT

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Mood:  a-ok

Another giant squid has washed-up on our fair shores...

Was a time this occurrence was rare, to say the least, and now it seems that every other beer-addled, speedo-wearing pot-bellied beachgoer is finding his own lovely Giant Squid to take home as a souvenir.

(That's a little bit of an exaggeration, to be sure, but still...)

Eh: these little boys don't even come close to the Antarctic grandeur that is the hook-bearing Colossal Squid: the real maritime sea monster.

When I was very little I read about Venus's harsh atmosphere and its beautiful lava seas. I imagined that a very strange (and very large) pod of creatures might swim through that hellish land (perhaps remnants of better times on 'Earth's Twin Sister').

Wierd- isn't it- that the mega-large squids of our world bear such a similarity to my imagined Venusian critters? 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 1:51 PM ADT

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Mood:  special

Updates aren't exactly one-a-day lately, huh? Part of that's 'cause I've been vacationing in fabulous Las Vegas for the past several days (this also explains why I haven't yet polished up my latest chapter of TYPERS, 'Spiders and Sharks', but I am still working on it... somewhat...)

Speaking of 'working', isn't it amazing the work a little stream of water can do, given a couple billion years?

I took a little trip into the Grand Canyon today (...and not exactly on a burrow...) The scenery is fantastic: a good mix of extreme beauty coupled with a sense of quiet isolation. That's kinda the idea I have in mind for a region in the world of 'Typers' that I call the 'Dead Lands': the vast desert lands left broken and sterile after the humans' anti-BYDO nuclear strike of 2069.

My main character, Justin Storm, is gonna have something of an intellectual 'come to Jesus' moment in that region, where he meets some of the natives (the technologically-regressive 'Dead Landers'). Around the same time my main female character, Chenine Chovert, is gonna have a similar experience out in deep space, in a place called 'Hansha-Furste'.

Their experiences will affect and be affected by facets of each's personality: Justin's feelings of isolation and disconnectedness from the flesh-and-blood humans all around him mirrors the condition of the land around him, but at the same time he is taught that the desert also springs forth with abundant life...

The only question is: just what kind of fruit is born of that situation, and how bitter are the seeds?

(He also learns about an old tribal legend dealing with mysterious, angelic beings they call the 'NOVANJO'...)  

Eh: this talk is all academic, as the chapters are a ways away. They'll undergo three revisions in my head tonight alone...

But, still:  the desert sands hold untold beauty, just as they also hold incomparable ugliness.

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:30 AM ADT

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