Monthly Archives: November 2008

Have fun in Funny Town

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti is an anthology of existential dread. Horror should disturb you, but all I feel from reading these short stories is mild fascination. Even the best of them are fashionably nonsensical, ending before the reader realizes how stupid the premise is. There’s this boy who has a strange father and a strange mother and sister, and he goes out to a strange neighbour and does strange things, and then it’s over. What?

Other stories combine Lovecraft with Kafka, proving that this is a bad idea. A factory gets as a temporary supervisor a shapeless, evil presence who hides in his unlit office. Suddenly the workers become more and more efficient, so efficient that they hardly ever leave the factory at all, and you can’t quit, because dark evil forces controls everything, and you can’t retire, you can only work and work and work until death frees you from this horrible burden that is life. Okay, okay, I get it. Jeez.

Ligotti is praised as an unjustly ignored master of horror, and he writes well, but I gave up half-way.

Btw, here’s how to do Lovecraft fan fiction: A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman.

The end of the world, as we know it

The world just ended again. Twice. First with the new mini-series Dead Set, where the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are participants in Big Brother, unaware throughout the first episode that zombies are eating their audience. Nice spin.

Second with Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic RPG. I’m an impatient gamer. If a game doesn’t constantly reward me with points, happy sounds and shiny colors, I lose interest, and go back to something more exciting, like reading a book. But for now I’m having fun exploring the nuclear wasteland of the D.C. area. Based on the game engine from Oblivion, Fallout 3‘s lush and detailed graphics cover the full range of colors from brown to gray. Broken buildings and roads litter the landscape. Mutants and hopeless people roam about, waiting for you to save, exploit and/or eat them.

I always play the hero in these type of games, even when they give you a choice. “Why, of course I’ll save your village from the mutant army without asking anything in return, even though I’m sick, starving, and short on ammo. Don’t mention it!” I don’t want to explore my inner sociopath. I just don’t. Well, maybe I should try it just once. Just for a little while. To see what it’s like. Surely that won’t make me a .. BAD PERSON?!!

Silent movie marathon – part 3


The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, Germany) – Arabian Nights-based fairy tale. Animated with silhouettes, which looks amazing. Look! Watched it all.

The Bat (1926, USA) – Jewel thief dressed as a bat (if a bat looked like a mouse) baffles the police. Reminds me of a kid telling a story with action figures. Watched: 10 minutes.

Ménilmontant (1926, France) – Drama from the bleak and menacing school of film-making. Life in Paris really, really sucks. Watched it all, not because I liked it, but because it’s compelling and doesn’t feel old.

The Blue Bird (1918, USA) – Probably a morality tale. There’s a bird of happiness which only some people can see, and then there’s a rich family and a poor family and one that is normal. They all live on the same street, just waiting to bump into each other for valuable life lesson purposes. Watched: 11 minutes. (Having checked IMDB, I see there’s also a fairy involved.)

Oktyabr (1928, Soviet Union) – Mm .. Soviet propaganda, where hysterical mobs of rich ladies beat up workers in the streets. Fairly truthful account, in the sense that, yes, the October revolution took place in October. (Well, it was actually November). The version I saw was with sound effects, which is silly, but it was set to music by Shostakovich, whose ’1917′ symphony is my favourite of the few positive outcomes of communism. Watched it all, but it lacks focus.

Bringing the light of consciousness

The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld could be one of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. One of the better ones. In Banks’s socialist utopia, computer minds and humans live in happy symbiosis. AI runs society, people play. Here, AI is more ambigous: The Rix cult believes that humans must create their own gods, by bringing consciousness to entire planets. They seed computer networks with AI, then worship them as gods. Humans are to these compound minds as bacteria are to a human: Necessary for the whole to function, but valueless as individuals. Against the Rix stands an ossified empire ruled by a class of living dead. They don’t value individuals much either. The Risen Empire is concept-heavy space opera, but it still has a soul – a nerdy soul. There’s a touching love story based on relativistic time dilation (yes!) One side character is a self-built house that has rebelled against its own architects. Much of the fighting takes place among microscopic military crafts controlled by remote. You get the idea. Not great, but strange and likeable, and tightly focused. I’ll continue with the second book in the series, and I’ve heard people rave about the Young Adult novels Westerfeld turned to writing when he discovered that it pays better and that teenagers send more fan mail.