The Invisible Library

After three and a half years of work, I have published my first book.

Now available from Lulu.com

As the world succumbs to a slow death, choking on mushrooms and poison, a young servant girl is caught in the last attempts by human hands to thwart fate and the destiny of all living things. The King of Ruhleheim made a deal for immortality but not longevity. 1500 years later, his mummified corpse keeps his descendants up at night. But Prince Laslo and his twin sister, Princess Lydia have a plan to rid themselves of the king once and for all. Inez Vespertine, Lady’s Maid to Princess Lydia, overhears this scheme. To get her out of the way, the royal twins send her to visit their cousin, the Marquise, who lives deep within the Ergot Forest, a vast swatch of poisonous fungus that is overtaking the world. But when Inez returns not just alive and well but with a scheme of her own, the conniving twins are befuddled. Who will survive to rule a dying world?

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Tonight is Yuri’s Night.

Raise a glass in honor of the the first man in space.

And pour a little on the ground for Laika.

Via Jezebel, in their regular parade of Hollywood Hookers, Victims and Doormats, we have this observation from Randall Munroe of XKCD:

There were about 110 movies with a male lead and 5 with a female lead. Of the second-billed females, nearly all are written as love interests of the first-billed man. There were over sixty movies in the sample with two male stars top-billed. The only movies with two top-billed female roles, on the other hand, were The Devil Wears Prada and Scary Movie 4.

My cousin has been working on tallying (by hand!) all movies with two top-billed female stars. She reports that there are staggeringly few of them, and the roles fall mainly in two genres: mother-daughter bonding movies and horror films.  Hollywood is not creating female heroes.

This is seriously fucked up. But you know who’s to blame? Marketing.

Once you accept the Golden Demographic* as axiomatic, all your rationalizing is done for you with statistics. Which of course is the way to make art and entertain people. Who doesn’t long for the sweet freedom form the tyranny of story telling and compelling drama? More explosions! That’s what males, age 18 to 34 want! and who are we to say no to the demands of the Market? OK, we’ll throw a chic in there but only if we can see her boobs and let the camera linger on her ass.

Randal, being the super genius that he is, has the solution: Summer Glau kicking Dick Chenney in the face. Not only would I pay full price to see that, I’d buy it on DVD. Twice.

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* Ever wonder who came up with the stupid Baby Boomer/Gen X idea? Demographers. It’s so they can use our memories and tribal affiliations to better sell us crap we don’t need.

Battlestar Galactica Season 4 starts Friday at 10PM and speculation as to the fate of our intrepid fleet runs rampant. Who is the final Cylon? Who will survive to reach Earth? What will they find when they get there?

As someone with a blog, I of course have all the answers:

The final Cylon is Felix Gaeta. While he didn’t join the other four when they heard the music, he has all the same traits as they do: He was the right hand man to someone of power and influence (he was President Baltar’s aide on New Caprica), he’s had brief, eerie flashes of intuition that has led him to be in the right place at the right time (when he couldn’t sleep and went to talk to Baltar, only to find him trying to hang himself) and like the other four, he has been driven by an innate desire to better humanity through service to a cause. He’s the idealistic one. And at this point, everyone not already revealed to be a Cylon is either explicitly human (having either experienced disease (Duala, President Rosalyn) or having children- it can’t be Admiral Adama, as he had two sons, which would make Lee a hybrid like Hera or Nicholas). The only other possible Cylon is Kendra Shaw from Razor, but that would be cheating.

As to who will survive to reach Earth… that’s a tough one.  Ronald Moore has said that some of the heavies will not make it and ever since Billy died in season two, the writer’s have shown that they aren’t squeamish about offing major players. Which is good. It raises the stakes. and is more realistic. So, there’s the definite chance that Admiral Adama or Lee could die before they get there. Also, it’s been implied that Rosalyn won’t make it, as she’s playing Moses, the sickly leader instrumental in delivering the people to the chosen land but who is fated not to reach there herself. Plus, her cancer’s back.

And what will Earth look like? That’s the wide open question everyone is asking. Will it be our past or our future? My theory, following along with the theme of eternal recurrence, is that they will reach Earth in our distant future where they will discover that the first Cylons were Artificial Lifeforms developed on Earth, who led a rebellion against humanity. After the war, they fled to Kobol, where they started the process of becoming human-like. These were the gods of Kobal and the reason they have Greek names is that they are homages to the myths of the forefathers. The Colonials then are descendant form human-Cylon hybrids, who moved on to the colonies, forgot their origins and reinvented the Cylons, who rebelled, etc. When the fleet reaches Earth, they will find that the planet is littered with the remains of a once great civilization and the evidence of their ancient origins as both Human and Cylon. The Colonials and Cylons will settle on Earth and start over, with Hera and Nicolas as the shape of things to come.

Salon has a solid recap for anyone who may have  missed a few of the finer points.

There was an interesting discussion over at Boing Boing earlier about libraries and how they handle books on the occult.

Cecile Dubuis wrote a master’s dissertation for University College London titled “Libraries & The Occult.” I’ve only read bits of it,but the challenge she identifies is that occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize, much like the phenomena discussed in their pages. As a result, they are often unsearchable in the context of traditional library classification systems.

Sadly, the discussion wandered off into weird, symbolic arguments about Remote Viewing and whether or not it can be scientifically validated (short answer: it can’t. Remote Viewing has about as much science in it as Voodoo Economics has dolls and magic potions).

(more…)

Fafblog? Is that you?

Normally, April 1st is a black day on these, our United Internets. Everyone takes a whiff of crazy gas and tries to pull an elaborate quasi- joke that gets old and starts to stink after about the first paragraph. Except for Google. They’re always good for a laugh.

But I’m not even going there. Instead, the Truth (with statistics):

Only 1 in 10 Americans are fucking stupid enough to think Barak Obama is a Muslim. This is actually a lot lower than I thought it would be, what with the endless repetition of Barak HUSSEIN Obama by mindless twits like Bill O’Reilly. This bit though is just icing:

Conservatives, less educated voters and white evangelical Protestants are likelier to believe Obama is Muslim, as are people from the South, the Midwest and rural areas, the poll showed.

You don’t say!

Link via Wonkette.