"Of all things I have loved and lost, I miss my mind the most."

I started blogging in 2005 as it seemed the next interesting step from having a homepage.
I thought it would be cool to show off what I was doing, brag about my accomplishments and interact with strangers. This was, of course, back when meeting strangers was interesting, and not a masochist exercise in dodging shitheads and rage monkeys. (Parenthetically now, I have a new respect for women on dating apps having to deal with dick pics)
And the thing about constantly dodging a barrage of feces and dicks?  Makes it difficult to think about anything else: now all I ever want to do is complain.

Up until then, the Internet had been a continuous stream of meeting interesting people! People all over the world! Describing the things I do, and talking about the things I thought about seemed like fun!

That is not the case now.

Some of the things I might have talked about became self-censored. As anonymity evaporated, posts became increasingly PR oriented.  Bland, flavorless pap.

Think about it! 

Do you want your boss reading about how you blew all the windows out of a 1980 Pinto using a device made from electrical junk and a wading pool?
Do you want your dating pool to shrink because you wrote ten thousand words on your comfort food activity of watching 'William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet' and 'The Crow' back to back while eating popcorn soaked with maple syrup?
Do you want your mother's hoity-toity friend to get bent IRL because you verbally crushed her son in a IRC argument over Gillain Anderson Nude fakes?

Well, no.

I have argued before that networks- and information - is more valuable when scarce. I don't have the chops to chase that intuition down and quantify it, but while I think the early Internet had better, sparser, links, the new tightly webbed one is less desirable in a lot of ways.*

Analytics.
I don't care if Zuckerberg knows I have a poor regard for him** , but I do care if Youtube thinks its a good idea to suggest a constant stream of anti-feminist, gun-worship or pro-bigot videos. Something in my patchwork of interests provokes this. I don't know what: amateur chemistry, watching 'Forgotten Weapons', researching UFOs.***

But I am tired of it.
The world is full of poorly made, over-hyped 'algorithms', and the more in their databases the worse they seem to get. Show me videos that a well-read middle aged guy with a interest in science and weird tales would like, and I'd be happy.
So presenting lots of data isn't improving my experience, and the Net just seems like a more horrible and toxic thing every day.

I understand there is a lot of things that can be done to rebuild anonymity. But there is a lot of really well paid or really well motivated people hammering away at that. Criminals. Dictators. Corporations. We are plankton to those Leviathans**** , and how much of my life and time do I want to burn trying to become unpalatable?

Its easier just to dodge the baleen by growing legs and crawling up on the shore.

Today I looked at my bannerhead and realized I wasn't writing about any of the above.
I realized every time I started to write something, (and there are many aborted drafts) it was just a whiny screed about how things were all shite, and that is what even this post is becoming too.

So on occasion, if I want to write and publish something, I will do it with a one-time, throw-away blog or forum post. I will tag it under 'Radiopsychedelica' which still seems to be a rare enough search term to be useful. I won't delete this blog because I have a natural archivists abhorrence of words vanishing, even poor words.

 "And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates:"  is not my style, thanks. 

 

So after much consideration,

This blog is closed.

*Marshall Mcluhan remarked on the institution of a Global Village, but never carried on to point out that in a village everyone knows everything about everyone, and only conformity is possible.


**Whereas I think Elon Musk wants to be Tony Stark, but is at best Justin Hammer.*****

***I really can't imagine what I did to get the constant stream of 'X but every time Y it speeds up' and 'White guy speaks Chinese' videos.

****Yes, that is a Hobbes reference.

*****You want to argue this? Really? Why don't we just fact-check what Musk has actually done himself and not just paid somebody to do and compare that to a fictional character.  And then, get a life. Both of us. This is EXACTLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE INTERNET.

Tarzan - I mean Jason Gridley - versus madness

I'd never call Edgar Rice Burroughs 'visionary'.
Like George Lucas, he assembled wildly popular works out of wildly disparate elements, and like Lucas, I never expected an original idea.  (Let us let 'The Monster Men' to stand as the holotype for my complaints, shall we?)
But while listlessly paging through 'Tarzan at the Earth's Core', I ran into a scene which I nominate for the best idea ERB ever had:

!~Gliding Stegasauri~!

 I wish to god blogger had manicule symbols for this one. I suppose it makes as much sence as any other idea vis-a-vis stegasaurus spine plates, really.

"AS Jason Gridley leaped down the canyon side toward the lone warrior who stood facing the attack of the tremendous reptile gliding swiftly through the air from the top of the opposite cliff side, there flashed upon the screen of his recollection the picture of a restoration of a similar extinct reptile and he recognized the creature as a stegosaurus of the Jurassic, but how inadequately had the picture that he had seen carried to his mind the colossal proportions of the creature, or but remotely suggested its terrifying aspect."

"... the reptile, using its tail as a rudder and tilting its spine plates up on one side, veered in the direction of the American..."

"... From the instant that the stegosaurus had leaped from the summit of the cliff, it had hurtled through the air with a speed which seemed entirely out of proportion to its tremendous bulk, so that all that had transpired in the meantime had occupied but a few moments of time, and Jason Gridley found himself facing this onrushing death almost before he had had time to speculate upon the possible results of his venturesome interference.

With wide distended jaws and uttering piercing shrieks, the terrifying creature shot toward him..."

" Still shrieking with rage and pain it glided to the ground beyond him.

Almost immediately it turned to renew the attack. This time it came upon its four feet, and Jason saw that it was likely to prove fully as formidable upon the ground as it had been in the air, for considering its tremendous bulk it moved with great agility and speed..."

This calls for a dramatic reconstruction!  As a exercise for the reader, I leave the calculations of how light a stegasaurus would have to be in order to be able to glide upon its plates... 

.

 

Bad Art as a Mental Vaccine

 I was trying to explain to a friend why I wasn't too interested in watching Ender's Game.
I've read the book three or four times over the years and didn't really care for it, not to mention that the shock value of the ending, like all surprise endings, only works the once. I thought Ender's Shadow was a better book, but I probably wouldn't watch it in movie form either.
"Its a really good movie", he assured me "You shouldn't miss a movie this good."
I made some rebuttal along the lines of 'lacking time', but he wasn't going to accept that.
He felt that since I would make the time to watch really bad movies,  that I should place really good movies at an even higher priority. But I'm not too interested in a 'good' movie. There is lots of those, and I haven't even taken the time to watch Citizen Kane yet.
I watch bad movies the same reason I read bad books; to learn from them. So I was somewhat amused to discover the footsteps of an explorer ahead of me:

 "In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind.”  -- G.K.Chesterton

There is more than that, of course: reading the bad sharpens the mind; it trains by the example of failure; it exposes the reader to a thousand tricks and cons.

Because the Reader is tested by the experience, his mental immune systems improve*. Show me someone impressed by Mein Kampf, and I'll show you someone that has never read more than a dozen books  in their life**. 

This too, is the danger of censorship. Weak paradigms fear books because they immunize. If you've waded though, say The Book of Mormon, The Silmarillian, The Prophet, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, you're going to have a hard time to take seriously anything said by Paul of Tarsus or John the Divine. This,I suppose, is the lasting value of actually reading the articles in Playboy.***

So this is why I will not take the time to watch Ender's Shadow or Schindler's List or The Shawshank Redemption , but I will watch The Terrornauts or The Hooded Mummy Versus the Other Alien, or anything that promises Godzilla.

Because I have more to learn from the quirk of his scaly lips than from a thousand serious films.

*For instance, I could have phrased this as 'hers' or even as 'their'. I learned about gender phrasing problems by reading. I also learned the meaning of 'cissexual', which someday I will work into a complex 'Narcissisexual' joke.

** I'd like to make a similar remark about The Wealth of Nations, but that book's failure is too subtle for a fair comparison.

***Although it was Penthouse that infected me with the phrase "...contrasting with her hearty English labia." Which to this day I cannot decide if it was the product of a porn movie reviewer slowly losing his mind, or a massively overqualified journalist.

"We who have died to make the Machine have reached out to you..."

John Bloodstone was a bad writer.
Despite this, one of his books is worth reading, if one has the mental fortitude to wade through the abuse of reading a Burroughs pastiche.
Its not  God-Man which is actually worse than its title; and  the semi-mythical Tarzan on Barsoom is probably only of interest to the rabid slash-fic fan.
The book worth the read is Thundar - Man of Two Worlds.

Its an interesting and vivid tale. Michael Storm traverses a Time Vortex hidden in the Andes; he suffers multiple head injuries and amnesia; he becomes a savage man-beast in a jungle full of man-apes; he is tormented by nightmares and visions, especially of a Spanish longsword that had passed through his hands; he is returned to sanity by a beautiful young woman, who cannot love him physically because she is convinced he is their missing god, Thundar; he is captured by Thundar's enemies; he triumphs...

And then he doesn't. His lady-love still thinks he is an untouchable god, and she vanishes with the holy relics of the nation; the sun shines and nighttime will not come, the world starts to bake, dry out and die, the strange super-computer that controls the Time Vortex keeps transmitting messages into his brain: the book rushes over major adventures, and finally refuses to explain how he re-traverses the Vortex, and is found as a raving and fur-clad savage stowaway on a merchant vessel in San Francisco's harbor.
By this point, Micheal Storm is convinced he might very well be the missing god, and that he could re-enter the Vortex to find his beautiful Cylayne...

Questions abound. Micheal Storm is a orphan child, adopted by a rich archaeologist at the age of 14, so he could not possibly be the immortal Thundar, who disappeared in his prime of adulthood. Thundar's sword is found in the clutches of a weathered skeleton on the current-day side of the Vortex, a skeleton wearing Spanish armor of the 15th century. Thundar's ring, which controls the Supercomputer, is found  in the pouch of a dead man on the far side of the Vortex. Chunks of exposition are simply not provided; the text reads like a realistic narrative in the sense that the narrator rarely has any idea why things are happening to him, or around him.

Why should there be ape-cavemen in the future? Why should the main enemy be first mentioned on page 136 of 192, brought on stage on page 158, and than escapes unharmed from the story on page 185?
Why does this villain command strange super-sciences?

The best of bad art raises endless questions: that is its value.

The writing itself is not the worse I have ever read. Burroughs or Howard have pumped out weaker dreck on occasion. But still, phrases like:

"By the the obvious young breasts of this latter creature in the chair, I knew it was female and could only conclude it was Imkuth, captured by means of some sort of scientific witchcraft that lay beyond my knowledge to define."

"If I had sensed a spell upon me before, now this vision of her--approaching me helplessly yet bravely, her hazel eyes locked on mine in full trusting and confidence--served to galvanize a psychic force which I can only describe as witchcraft. The warlock charisma fell upon my muscles and loins and heart. Where mundane rationalism would have submerged me in a sweatbath of anxiety and frustration, I was now unaccountably wizarded into a semblance of madman or godling after all."

Despite all this, the imagery is top-notch. This book screams to be a epic movie. The fights with the monsters, the nightmarish jungle life with its off-again-on-again passage of day and night, the Pellucidar meets Barsoom peoples...its as if John Bloodstone read Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner, fertilized it with A Princess of Mars, incubated it in the Land of Awful Night, and unencumbered by rational thought, wrote the book in one dynamic rush, possibly at the age of 14, and definitely in need of a good lay:
 "Unable to analyze my feelings for her, I held her to me in one flaming moment of blinded ecstasy."

 
The book provides its own epigraph for this article: "Where mundane rationalism would have..."

When I watched the movie Avatar, I was irritated by many things: cardboard cutout characterization(the Scientist, the Angry General), the re-hashing of other SF works(Harry Harrison's 'Deathworld', Fredrick Pohl's 'Jem', et al).
But one thing stood out the most: the feeling that I'd seen it before. At first I thought I was just channeling the 'First Encounter with Hostile Wildlife' sequence into A.E. van Vogt's jungle sequence in 'War With the Rull', but today I figured it out.
I've been sorting all my SF novels into two stacks 'Re-readable's' and 'Not Worth Reading'. I suppose I am going to have around 1500* N.W.R. novels all told, and I imagine they will end up on eBay. ("Bad SF and Fantasy! Box lots! (in)Famous authors!).
I ran into 'Symbiote's Crown' by Scott Baker.
The human-alien metamorphosis, the self-aware and hostile jungle, the handicapped hero becoming whole and hale after transmogrification...

And yeah, the book's going into the N.W.R. pile, along with 'Way-Farer' by Dennis Schmidt and "Steelheart' by William C. Dietz.
(In all fairness, at least 'Steelheart' shows imagination and adventure: charges that cannot be laid on 'Way-Farer')

*EDIT 10/2015: Ended up with 947 N.W.R. books. About two hundred were in rough  shape, too rough to honestly sell. Of the 700+ left, I gave away around 40. Unable to sell the rest at any price.
They all went to the Salvation Army in the end, and I hope to god they did not have to pay to throw them out.