04:24 pm - Jeopardy Answer is: "The King of Pop, and Spelling"
"What are... Things That Are Dead?"
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For consideration: not feelin' it; Google says: Results 1 - 10 of about 9,370,000 for micheal
We were looking at houses. This one seemed just about right - good size, nice yard, nearby shopping - and we were starting to talk price when C looked out the window. "Is that... a zombie?" She pointed: a shambling form had emerged onto the street from a yard on the other side, draped in torn clothes, twitching and grunting in an all-too-familiar way.
The realtor made a horrified face. "Oh... no! Certainly not. This is a nice neighborhood. There's no..." but just then, one of the neighbors came down the street in their car, striking the lurching form in the side and scattering it into pieces all over the place. The realtor put her face in her hands. "The city will have that cleaned up in no time, I promise," she tried hopefully. C shook her head and I nodded in agreement. "We're going to keep looking."
Call us livists if you want to, but you know it's true: once a neighborhood starts getting one or two of the Dead, it's just a matter of time before the whole place is overrun. Humanity - living humanity, I mean - had been forced into a perpetual, irritated nomadic existence, always having to sell at a loss and buying somewhere else every time the Dead ruined another nice place.
The last place we'd lived, it had gotten so that you couldn't even go out to your car to leave for work without mussing up your clothes and stumbling down your own driveway, groaning and spitting, pretending to be one of them so that they wouldn't rise from where they were all lying around - on your porch, in your flowerbed, draped over the hood of the car, in the gutter - and make a sudden lunge for your throat.
Sure, you could shoot them in the head. But their putrescent remains were like a beacon for more of their kind. And there were sometimes unfortunate social side-effects of that solution. Once, at a Mardi Gras street party, two hideous, reeking figures had shambled out of the dark at me. "Are you alive?" I asked, repeatedly, but all they could do was mumble and shake. When one reached for me, I drew and put a pair of .45s into each of their heads. All the fresh red blood had been a tremendous shock and the crowd began to scream. They weren't Dead, they were just too drunk to make any sense. Manslaughter. That had been a pretty bad time, but at least there was a valuable lesson demonstrated: don't get so incapacitated in public that people can't distinguish you from a walking corpse.
Anyway, as C and I got back in our car, I looked around and saw, yeah, the Dead were already here: in the dark shade of that tree, underneath that SUV, tucked in among those bushes. They were craftier, here, hiding themselves more effectively. You might not see them until you were right next to them and then they'd be right on top of you. Were we losing this war? Were they going to keep getting better and better at blending in until we could no longer spot them? I tried not to think about. We'd keep looking. We'd keep looking until we'd found a place where the Dead could never go. That's all we wanted.
Really, I think, that's all anyone wants anymore.
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For consideration: sub-conscious metaphors for the economy
It (Ep.4) was showing on Spike TV over the holiday weekend and even though it was the Special Edition, I was unable to stop myself from watching all the way to the end when we stumbled upon it.
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For consideration: bonus SSC - I had to fast forward past Greedo shooting first
This should have been ready to post a few weeks ago - this was all around the time of our Barcelona trip - but I forgot about it until I went back to add notes for the most recent batch of viewings. So the next one will be along shortly as well.
( SOLARIS: * * * )
( SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE: * * * * )
( QUANTUM OF SOLACE: * * * * )
( THE WRESTLER: * * * )
( JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES: * * * )
( TORN CURTAIN: * * * * )
( VERTIGO: * * * * )
( RATATOUILLE: * * * * )
( TOPAZ: * * * * )
( VALLEY GIRL: * * * * )
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For consideration: coming up, a mixed bag of SF and humor
"What are... Things That Are Dead?"
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For consideration: not feelin' it; Google says: Results 1 - 10 of about 9,370,000 for micheal
Between Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, Johnny Carson is going to have an *amazing* episode tonight.
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For consideration: these things always happen in prime numbers
Believe in angels?
I mean Charlie's kind, of course.
Now a Demi-God?
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For consideration: the kind of woman every headless murder-bot dreams of
Today, I accomplished all of the following:
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For consideration: "Rocky Raccoon" remains unchallenged; Go-Go's and Weird Al both fast-moving up-and-comers though
Decades of content
Whizzing around through the air.
Nothing left but bits.
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For consideration: only just realized that the explanation of how TV works in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is actually a digital solution
I always wondered what living in The Future would be like. Would it be flying cars and psionic powers, or endless war against the robots? Would we wear formless grey muumuus or colorful spandex or nothing at all? Would we teem in the tens of billions, or would some holocaust decimate our ranks?
Well, I guess I have my answer now. I wander the empty streets, tend my garden, slaughter the occasional pig, and mostly do nothing else. Write these little memoirs to myself in notebooks that will never be read. The human race is gone, and it didn't take a disaster at all. All it took was success.
Time travel turned out to be easy. Trivially easy. DIY-easy. But it only went into the past. Of course, that's mostly what people wanted - to jump into the past and tinker, with foresight, to make themselves millionaires or whatever. Totally works, so far as we could tell. You just create an alternate timeline and vanish from this one.
And so, one by one, everyone got around to deciding that they wanted to totally rule some alternate timeline, made a portal, and went through it. Disappeared. Except me, because I still don't think those things actually relocate you to an "alternate timeline". Parallel universe, my ass. Those things just disintegrate you.
It hasn't been easy, learning everything from scratch to survive, but there's plenty of data still around even after all the electricity went out. And I can get around a fair amount; plenty of cars still full of gas. Lots of good shelter; buildings won't start falling down for decades, probably. I'll be fine.
So that's the Future, I guess. Everyone went and disintegrated themselves trying to go back in time, and only the skeptics are left. And it turned out I'm just about the only one of those. Though I do confess, sometimes I get a little lonely, and I look at the time portal that I made for kicks, and think about stepping in.
But not right now. Right now, I'm still enjoying the Future.
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For consideration: not so much the end of the world as it is a much-needed vacation
Nothing ever lasted anymore.
Sure, people banded together here and there, for a bit, and made something that worked for a while. Call it a town, a village, a camp, whatever. But it never lasted. The world was not for lasting anymore. The winds were too fast, too hot, too dry. The raiders viewed success and failure as the same outcome and this made them bold. Every day, there was less untarnished metal, less unburnt wood, less undiseased meat, and there was never anything new that was good. New was only bad; new was only horror: a new illness nobody knew how to treat, a new tribe looking to fall upon you and yours, a new creature spit up from the desert to kill and maim in some new way you never imagined possible. And then the village or town or camp or whatever would be gone and those who survived would make their own way, again.
We were making our own way, again.
This time, at least, we had a car of sorts. A Volkswagen Beetle, I think it was called when it was still being made. The tank was more gas than sand and so we were able to coax it along what remained of a road, away from the last horror as it was winding down, towards the next thing we would try - whatever that might be.
But cars, like everything else in the broken world, cannot last, and so ours did not. We had just passed through a little town before the breakdown. It was still visible in the shimmering heat - some other group of folks bravely trying to make and hold onto something. They were too close to the recent horror for us to feel comfortable throwing in our lot with them but more power to 'em - at least, so we felt when we had the car. Now, we were repacking our supplies on the side of the road, arranging everything for foot travel. Heading back and seeing what the little shithole town had to offer for a bit wasn't looking so bad now.
Then a decision of sorts was forced upon us, because the wind changed, and with it came the unmistakable whisper of a distant sound: the pulsing, echoing shrieks of an approaching flock of banshees. Sure enough: the dark mass peeking over the horizon was no cloud. In their teeming thousands, the flock would be here all too soon, bombarding everything with their overwhelming din, setting our brains to resonance within our skulls no matter how tightly we plugged our ears. The effect would render us unconscious within minutes. In the open, this was the same thing as death.
As always, with these things, there was no time for rational consideration or the formulation of a plan. That we could hear them at all might mean it was too late. We ran for the town. If we could get into a secure building, we'd be safe - unconscious, sure, but locked away from their talons and beaks until the flock moved on. We couldn't bring the supplies. They'd probably be long gone by the time we woke up, carried away by someone else who awoke sooner. The way of things, now.
The town never seemed to get any closer. The sand pounded, pounded, pounded under our feet forever and the shrill, throbbing noise grew louder and louder. I couldn't look up, just down at my feet, running and running, feeling tunnel vision close in as my head began to beat like a drum. The flock was over us, around us, encircling us, waiting for us to fall, but we ran and ran - and then suddenly my hand was on a door handle.
Opened, we were inside, pull it shut, throw down the bar. Just enough time to look around once - before the tone became unbearable and we fell into darkness - to make sure we were all inside, that there was a roof over our head and no holes in the walls. Not safe, exactly, but safe enough. Hopefully it would last, in this time and place where nothing ever lasted anymore.
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For consideration: documenting the apocalypse one dream at a time
While we were in Spain (pictures) recently, we needed a local number - both for any local reservations and such that we needed to make, and also to call periodically home. We have a little Samsung phone that we bought and used in Turkey (pictures), and just needed to get a SIM with a Spanish number.
This proved harder than it should have. Acquiring a local number in Istanbul took all of 20 minutes. The same task in Barcelona ate up the better part of our first afternoon, as various mobile phone stores acted as though they had never heard of SIMs, or had heard of them but did not believe such things were actually sold, or knew such things could be sold but not at any store they knew of, or were sometimes sold at this store but were currently out of stock. We finally ended up on the top floor of the big El Corte Ingles near Placa de Catalunya, where we waited an ungodly amount of time for the customers ahead of us to ask every possible question there is before finally settling on whatever it was they bought (a process which has since entered our private lexicon in the form of using "buying a cell phone" to mean "taking an hour to accomplish some trivial decision"). Eventually, however, we paid too much money for more time than we needed on a Spanish phone number that we could use for the rest of our trip as much as we wanted.
Within the hour, our phone rang.
The lady who was calling spoke only Spanish. I could not even remotely guess what she was saying, except that she seemed to be repeating the word "Augustino" a lot. I tried to explain that I habla'd no español a few times before hanging up. She called back a few minutes later. And half an hour after that. Augustino was apparently who she wanted to talk to. She did not seem to understand that nobody was going to speak Spanish back to her, but at least she stopped calling by bed time.
Carmel and I began to wonder what had happened. Had Augustino given this number to some crazy girl who was trying to find him again? Had he given her a fake number? Had he broken her heart? What if it was his mother, desperate for news of a son she hasn't been able to contact for months, maybe longer?
Well, we had our chance to find out, I suppose, because she started calling again in the morning. After several more calls, C. tried talking to her; took a pretty fair shot at imparting to the lady that this was not Augustino's phone anymore, it was our phone, and that there was no Augustino here any more. By our second night in Barcelona, we thought maybe we'd gotten the wrong number sorted.
We were totally wrong.
The calls started again around 8:30 in the morning, and would come periodically. We continued to imagine ever more elaborate tales for Augustino and the desperate woman on the other end of the line. How sorry should we feel for her? We also mostly stopped answering the phone when it rang, but at one point I made another attempt to express the complete lack of Spanish on our end of the line, and got put on hold - and picked back up by a man who had a small amount of English. Could he speak to Augustino Santana? No, no such person is here. I explained to the guy that the phone number they were calling had not belonged to this guy in quite some time, if it had ever been his number to begin with, because we had just purchased it sealed in plastic from a Vodaphone store. He seemed to understand this.
It was at this point that I realized, duh, that the calls were coming from a collection agency.
Not long after this, the first text messages began arriving as well, which really clarified things. Augustino owes several hundred euros for this, for that, his mortgage is in receivership, "they" can help him clear these things up if he'll just get in contact with them. We stopped feeling bad for the lady who was calling, and settled for merely hoping that they'd flag something in the system to indicate that this was a dead lead.
They did not.
Clearly, there was some sort of robo-caller doing the dialing and only connecting to the collection agent if we answered and spoke aloud into the phone. It didn't leave voicemails and it wouldn't connect an agent if I just answered the phone and left it lying on the table; exactly 30 seconds later it would drop. If I answered with the one word "hello" and *then* left it lying on the table, an agent would come on and make inquiring sounds a bit in the tinny little speaker voice and eventually, they'd give up and hang up on their own.
Incoming calls were not counted against our minutes, so I could answer and leave the phone just sitting there all I wanted with impunity. I didn't do this much, however; it didn't actually seem to do anything to halt them. So we merely turned the ringer off and pretended that the phone's periodic vibro-spasms were just a mechanical malfunction. We also continued to speculate about Augustino's fate; he began to turn into a lovable scamp figure with a heart of gold but an inability to stay out of trouble.
The calls continued through our trip, even after we'd left Barcelona for Seville and Cordoba. It was in Cordoba, on our next to last day, that C. finally came to the conclusion that we were missing out on a marvelous entertainment opportunity - a fully righteous license from God and all the Saints to act like juvenile "Crank Yankers"-style prank-calling Jerky Boys as much as we wanted, because these people were calling *us* and it wasn't costing us any time.
So when the first call of the day happened in Cordoba, that's what she did.
The first time, she was merely suggestive. The second time was a marvelous mix of filth and inability to keep in character; she finally just busted up laughing midway through a question-slash-suggestion involving a vegetable and an orifice, and they hung up.
And there was no third time, because they didn't call back the rest of the day.
Or at all the next day, or in the few hours of our final morning before our flight home. We kept the phone on, literally, until we were buckling our seats on the plane, just in case they called one more time. Just in case they came back for one more round of smutty abuse.
But they did not. Not anger nor rational explanation nor neglect could dissuade them, but being mocked by my honey's dirty words had apparently driven us off their list. And this is one of the many reasons why I love my honey so.
So if you ever find yourself assigned a number that's getting collection calls in a language you don't speak, where you don't pay for incoming time... have at. You now know what to do.
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For consideration: all in all, 46 calls from them in a span of about 120 hours
Dreamt I was raising a bunch of mushrooms (not drug mushrooms or food mushrooms, they were some sort of decorative mushrooms on long stalks) but they got too big for the little pot I had them in, so I transferred them to a bigger pot in which I'd been growing some sort of algae. No, I don't know why I was growing the algae.
Unfortunately, the combination of the transplanted mushrooms into the algae produced some super-fecund biological hybrid. The algae grew within seconds to fully encompass the mushrooms, and the whole cluster quickly became mobile. It lunged out of the pot and began rooting around for more to eat, looking for all the world like a bright green juicy sock stuff with rubber. It was fast, though, and it quickly began consuming other organic material nearby, getting bigger and faster.
I made one abortive attempt to stick it with a long skewer, to get it back into some sort of sealable container, but it was too fast and very nearly grabbed my arm. Had it succeeded in attaching to my arm, I have no doubt it would have quickly consumed me. As it was, I jumped back and it began to roll/lunge/slither/ooze away.
I thought, hm, so this is how all those D&D slimes and oozes get created.
Then it slipped down a sewer grate to freedom, the water supply, and the rest of the world and I thought, hm, now we're probably all going to die.
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For consideration: green slime black ooze yellow mold ochre jelly; support diversity among mycoforms!
So, as I just posted, I watched VIDEODROME about a month ago and tweeted a bit about it at the time (as well as musing privately to friends in a couple other places). So, of course, having realized that it doesn't need to be remade after all, I apparently tempted the Remake Demons. Large-scale action thriller? Possibilities of nano-technology? Oh, christ, no. Even worse than I would have feared.
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For consideration: speak of the devil and he will appear
Mixed bag of old and new this time.
( THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM: * * * * )
( VIDEODROME: * * * * )
( VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA: * * * )
( MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II: * * * )
( ROBOCOP: * * * * * )
( THE OFFICE SEASON 4: * * * * * )
( CASHBACK: * * * * )
( EKSTASE: * * * )
( EXISTENZ: * * * )
( CRANK: * * * * )
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For consideration: more movies watched on airplanes; recent stuff
The first truly great application of fully Turing-test-capable AI will be an answering machine that can simulate you, the owner, well enough to keep a telemarketer fully occupied for hours on end.
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For consideration: bonus points if it can argue with family about the same old mishigas for you as well
I somehow suspect that every single person who played Revolutionary War Terrorist today with their teabagging antics would much rather be an excessively overtaxed millionaire than a completely untaxed poverty victim.
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For consideration: if you are one of these folks and I am wrong, please feel free to unload all that tax-burdened wealth of yours onto my shoulders; I will somehow find the strength to endure the terrible toll it will bring
Yeah, mostly Cold War intrigue and TV series.
( THE GOOD SHEPHERD: * * * * )
( THE LIVES OF OTHERS: * * * * )
( THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD: * * * * )
( PRIMER: * * * * )
( THE OFFICE SEASON 3: * * * * * )
( BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SEASON 4.0: * * * * )
( MAMMA MIA!: * * )
( 30 ROCK SEASON 1: * * * * )
( THE FALL: * * * * * )
( ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE: * * * )
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For consideration: next time - Spies! Dirtiness! More TV!
I dreamt that I had managed to infiltrate the Power Elite, a white male who had successfully convinced other White Males that he was worthy to be one of them in ruling the rest of the world. I wasn't trying to rule the world, mind you; I just wanted to understand what these people were doing, how and why. So I was transported to their secret ceremonial lodge in the woods, where I would go through the investiture ritual or ordination or whatever they called it. The ceremony was melodramatic but forgettable; I cared only about picking apart their process to understand what made them tick.
"So," I ventured into conversation with one of them, a young financier behind the next generation of brilliant-weapon arms contractors, "are we deliberately encouraging the unrestrained growth of population in the third world and in countries like India so that there is a ready-made supply of disposable fodder to fuel our profit engines with?"
He looked at me, blinked a couple of times, and I wasn't sure he'd heard me.
I pressed on: "Are we deliberately enforcing their brutal poverty so that even our shittiest alternative - to die in a factory, or in our mercenary armies, or from a drug overdose from something we need tested before deploying domestically - seems like a golden ray of opportunity by comparison?"
He cocked his head, brow knit in bafflement: "Man, you've really been thinking about this stuff a lot, haven't you? " He hefted a mug, looking a little worried. "Don't you want a beer or something?"
In that moment, I realized it really is true: Nobody is at the helm. And only then did a real Fear for the future set upon my heart.
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For consideration: the planet is ruled by a shadowy cabal of six billion completely clueless idiots
I am going to assume that you haven't been encased in a solid block of ice for the last year and have therefore heard that there is a pretty significant global economic crisis in full swing at the moment. And probably for a great many future moments as well.
If you've been reading up on the whole mess instead of hiding your face from the news in shock and horror - and I'm not judging you if you've taken the latter route because frankly I don't think it's any less valid a response - you may have also heard about Iceland and how it's sort of turned out to be a poster child for the whole financial catastrophe. You may have read somewhere that the country more or less reinvented itself a few years ago as an investment banking juggernaut; unrestrained by rules and regulations and economic theories of history, they were the shining example of just how fast and far the Totally Free Market could take people who were ambitious, smart, and unafraid of risk. You may have known that Icelanders were making themselves insanely wealthy engaging in a sort of spiraling money-speculation trade involving their own currency, the ISK (Icelandic króna), and foreign currencies. If so, you are probably also aware that on the 10th of October last year, the ISK collapsed so completely (as the last of the Icelandic banks was put under government control) that it was suspended from world currency trade and effectively ceased to be recognized as valid money anymore. The country now owes something like nine times as much money as it - the whole population and government and all the nation's resources - are capable of producing, and it has nothing to pay that debt with except fish.
Unless you are a computer nerd type, you may not have heard of a thing called EVE Online. It is, to be perfectly blunt, an internet spaceship game. You have a spaceship. You fight other people's spaceships and take their stuff. You team up with other players so that you can all beat up other people's spaceships more effectively and take more stuff. Or you can try to legitimately accumulate valuable resources and sell them for a profit in other parts of the universe that need them... so long as nobody comes along and beats you up and takes your stuff. In most of the game's universe, the only laws are those that the players make and enforce for themselves and each other. There is nothing preventing a very powerful group of players with very powerful spaceships from taking and controlling the entire supply of a vital in-game resource and driving its price into the ceiling (or the floor) except other players. It is the ultimate expression of the Totally Free Market as a computer game.
It probably won't surprise you to learn, at this point, that the software company that developed EVE Online is Icelandic. That company, CCP hf, continues to draw in revenue of several tens of millions of dollars annually from a subscriber base that is almost entirely outside of Iceland. Which means they are paying to play the game in almost any and every currency on the planet that is not the ISK. It would not surprise me if CCP hf, at this point, is the single largest influx of actual hard, usable currency into the Icelandic economy.
EVE Online has its own in-game currency. Virtually all such games do. And with in-game currency comes real-world speculation - because if there's one thing every multiplayer internet game develops, it's a market in which people with real-world money can acquire whatever they want in the game by simply paying someone else for it. Warcraft has "gold farmers", players who play the game for no other reason than to amass wealth that is then sold in huge batches for cash through eBay-like channels. It's their job - quite literally in many cases, especially in China, where entire facilities are staffed around the clock with game-players who play all day and all night to earn the rare items and mountains of money, so that their boss can then sell it all to Westerners who just want to win without actually playing first.
The in-game currency of EVE Online is the ISK. That's right, the Icelandic króna. And where most multiplayer games have attempted to ban the translation of in-game assets to and from real-world money, EVE Online has not only permitted it but actively embraced it - so much so that daily speculation on world/game financial leverage is conducted openly on the official game web boards. As a result, the EVE Online ISK has remained fairly stable against virtually all the real currencies of the world for a few years now, fluctuating but not spiking, not crashing. There are people out there making an income, a real-life income, just handling the trades on the "floor".
All of which is to say: Iceland has collapsed so thoroughly that at this point, its only economically viable export may very well be an internet spaceship game, and that internet spaceship game's króna is for all intents and purposes a more real and valid and valuable currency than the actual country's actual money.
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For consideration: You may have also heard of Second Life, a multiplayer game that lets people turn themselves into a six-breasted moose and build their own private dungeon where hairy flying penises shoot fire at them all day and all night. Second Life's in-game currency is, of course, the dollar.
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