Subconscious Theater Presents:

Post-con dreaming doom. First one is from Monday, second is from last night.
( Sorting the Seeds )

( Not those Aztecs. The *other* Aztecs. )

Subconscious Theater Presents:

Post-con dreaming doom. First one is from Monday, second is from last night.
( Sorting the Seeds )

( Not those Aztecs. The *other* Aztecs. )

Random book recommendation

I've just started reading China Mieville's The Scar, and it's utterly brilliant. It's like all the grime and weird and fantastic immersive perverse worldbuilding stuff of Perdido Street Station, except with pirates. And the plot seems to start in a lot sooner. So far, I'm only about eight chapters in and already there's been inter-city intrigue, pirates, a monster, monster hunters, disgraced nuns, a secret project sure to go Horribly Wrong, and the liberation of the Remade. Very exciting. Also, very er... gritty. Which I like.

And which is a horrid contrast with the annotations. You see, there are many things in my life which I prefer to buy used, and books are certainly one of them. So I was pleased to pick up The Scar in trade paperback at the local Half-Price Books. And usually HPB is pretty good about checking the condition of the books, so I didn't really look that hard at it before buying it. As it turns out, the person who owned it before me was perhaps a thirteen-year-old girl, who didn't understand a lot of the big words, and so set to making notes about what they meant in sparkly purple and turquoise pen, mostly, but not always, in the margin. This would be okay (after all, it's not as if I've never made notes in a book), except that the notes she's made about the words and events in the text are almost completely incorrect. She seems to have chosen definitions to note based on which was the shortest, rather than which was most accurate in context, so that it's evident that in large blocks of the text, she's constructing sentences that don't make any damned sense. Also, next to gritty descriptions of the tortured scabby Remade prisoners who have had indignity upon indignity heaped upon them, there's happy bubbly sparkly handwriting. On the plus side, she seems to have given up somewhere around chapter five. I think it had something to do with looking up words she didn't understand in the sentence "Fuck off, Remade cunt!", but I can't be sure.

Also, I blame the book for some of the events in my dreams last night. Mieville seems to have a particular gift for sinking his weird hooks into my brain and not letting go.

Random book recommendation

I've just started reading China Mieville's The Scar, and it's utterly brilliant. It's like all the grime and weird and fantastic immersive perverse worldbuilding stuff of Perdido Street Station, except with pirates. And the plot seems to start in a lot sooner. So far, I'm only about eight chapters in and already there's been inter-city intrigue, pirates, a monster, monster hunters, disgraced nuns, a secret project sure to go Horribly Wrong, and the liberation of the Remade. Very exciting. Also, very er... gritty. Which I like.

And which is a horrid contrast with the annotations. You see, there are many things in my life which I prefer to buy used, and books are certainly one of them. So I was pleased to pick up The Scar in trade paperback at the local Half-Price Books. And usually HPB is pretty good about checking the condition of the books, so I didn't really look that hard at it before buying it. As it turns out, the person who owned it before me was perhaps a thirteen-year-old girl, who didn't understand a lot of the big words, and so set to making notes about what they meant in sparkly purple and turquoise pen, mostly, but not always, in the margin. This would be okay (after all, it's not as if I've never made notes in a book), except that the notes she's made about the words and events in the text are almost completely incorrect. She seems to have chosen definitions to note based on which was the shortest, rather than which was most accurate in context, so that it's evident that in large blocks of the text, she's constructing sentences that don't make any damned sense. Also, next to gritty descriptions of the tortured scabby Remade prisoners who have had indignity upon indignity heaped upon them, there's happy bubbly sparkly handwriting. On the plus side, she seems to have given up somewhere around chapter five. I think it had something to do with looking up words she didn't understand in the sentence "Fuck off, Remade cunt!", but I can't be sure.

Also, I blame the book for some of the events in my dreams last night. Mieville seems to have a particular gift for sinking his weird hooks into my brain and not letting go.

I almost forgot

On the way to Dragon*Con, about 2:00 a.m., we had a brief interlude of being on the wrong road and having to switch to some pretty scary Kentucky backroads to get the Minivan Galactica pointed in the correct direction. I mean like small town roads, covered in mist and darkness, with fantastic curves with way more road signs than are strictly necessary. At one point, we were forced to stop and wait while a large truck came across a long narrow bridge that had been reduced to one lane. In Kentucky. Did I mention Kentucky? Later at Con, we saw a guy with a shirt that said "Paddle faster -- I hear banjos", and it was a little like that.

This little setback was not without its opportunities, though. We got to listen to a fair amount of talk radio, and if you've ever thought about what sort of things they probably put on talk radio at 2 a.m. in Kentucky, you're probably right about them. We heard a person identified with words like "doctor" and "scientist" give a long, soft-spoken assessment of the state of the world, in which he talked about how the "zero-population-growth people" wanted to kill off all the people in the world. He later identified them also as the "environmentalists". As an environmentalist and a zero population growth advocate, I was shocked to discover that we had invented AIDS and cancer. "You see, the abortion and the birth control weren't enough, so They invented all these diseases... They want to get rid of all the people on the earth."

This of course led to a fair amount of snarking and carrying on.
"They hate babies. You can't trust a baby-hater."
"Wait, we're them."
"OK, we hate babies, then."
"Can I have some peanuts?"
"Do you hate babies?"
"Yes, I hate babies. Give me some peanuts."

It probably saved us from falling asleep at the wheel or going insane on the road, so that's all okay. But seriously, this guy was just coming out with this stuff like it made sense. Not good.

Also, I do not hate this baby. Her mother was at con last year like fifteen months pregnant, with Cthulhu painted on her belly. And lo, it did turn out to be an Elder God. What a cute little Elder God!

I almost forgot

On the way to Dragon*Con, about 2:00 a.m., we had a brief interlude of being on the wrong road and having to switch to some pretty scary Kentucky backroads to get the Minivan Galactica pointed in the correct direction. I mean like small town roads, covered in mist and darkness, with fantastic curves with way more road signs than are strictly necessary. At one point, we were forced to stop and wait while a large truck came across a long narrow bridge that had been reduced to one lane. In Kentucky. Did I mention Kentucky? Later at Con, we saw a guy with a shirt that said "Paddle faster -- I hear banjos", and it was a little like that.

This little setback was not without its opportunities, though. We got to listen to a fair amount of talk radio, and if you've ever thought about what sort of things they probably put on talk radio at 2 a.m. in Kentucky, you're probably right about them. We heard a person identified with words like "doctor" and "scientist" give a long, soft-spoken assessment of the state of the world, in which he talked about how the "zero-population-growth people" wanted to kill off all the people in the world. He later identified them also as the "environmentalists". As an environmentalist and a zero population growth advocate, I was shocked to discover that we had invented AIDS and cancer. "You see, the abortion and the birth control weren't enough, so They invented all these diseases... They want to get rid of all the people on the earth."

This of course led to a fair amount of snarking and carrying on.
"They hate babies. You can't trust a baby-hater."
"Wait, we're them."
"OK, we hate babies, then."
"Can I have some peanuts?"
"Do you hate babies?"
"Yes, I hate babies. Give me some peanuts."

It probably saved us from falling asleep at the wheel or going insane on the road, so that's all okay. But seriously, this guy was just coming out with this stuff like it made sense. Not good.

Also, I do not hate this baby. Her mother was at con last year like fifteen months pregnant, with Cthulhu painted on her belly. And lo, it did turn out to be an Elder God. What a cute little Elder God!