Mormon whines about having the civil rights to act as a voting bloc and suffering political fallout from their behavior

There, I fixed the article title for them.

Maybe we’re looking at an altogether different problem than what’s being presented in this article and no amount of playing to bogus emotional appeals is going to slide these eyes away from recognizing it. Feast eyes on this AP article about the backlash against Mormons over the passage of California Prop 8, which banned gay marriage in the state: “Mormon leader: religious freedom at risk.”

“The anti-Mormon backlash after California voters overturned gay marriage last fall is similar to the intimidation of Southern blacks during the civil rights movement, a high-ranking Mormon says in a speech to be delivered Tuesday.” Really? Mormons are actually a group of people unaccepted by society due to their reduced social class and abused by the scions of those who benefited from the division of power and labor. Mormons, after demonstrably perpetrating civil rights abuses are in fact those abused of their civil rights. Sure they are.

When, exactly, during the civil rights movement did blacks (as some sort of organized group, I mean, religion) get together to block the civil rights of another social class? They didn’t? Silly me.

The backlash that Mormons are looking at right now isn’t about religion—certainly religion plays a part—it’s about politics. Politics such as political groupings and identity. The Mormon Church, that entity which is the Mormons gathering together in an organized fashion, decided to take a political position on a matter of civil rights. By doing so they placed themselves as an enemy of everyone who would work towards enlightening society to those civil rights and now are in the crosshairs of angry people. They could have been the Snuffupagus Society and the exact same thing would happen.

In an interview Monday before the speech, Oaks said he did not consider it provocative to compare the treatment of Mormons in the election's aftermath to that of blacks in the civil rights era, and said he stands by the analogy.

"It may be offensive to some — maybe because it hadn't occurred to them that they were putting themselves in the same category as people we deplore from that bygone era," he said.

Mormons vs. gay rights isn’t “Mormons as black people” vs. “gay rights activists as Southern segregationists.” It’s the exact reverse. And yes, I suspect people will find this analogy offensive—Oaks may have just managed to piss off not just gay rights activists but anyone who saw the plight of people with a different skin color as a necessity for civil rights activism. Insulting? No kidding.

District 9, when it takes the alien to be more human than human

After the emotional firebomb that happened to be Surrogates, starring one of my favorite action-hero actors—Bruce Willis—I didn’t quite know what to expect from District 9.

One thing that I must absolutely say is that I am thoroughly pleased with that movie.

Shot a little bit gonzo, rogue documentary style in the beginning, it manages to weave a narrative out of the videography and into pure storytelling with seamless ease. It tells a story of a not-so-empathetic main character who exhibits numerous, severe character flaws in the romantic-hero department, but is still very much a person. Albeit an otherwise callous and naive person at the beginning trying to cope with extraordinary circumstances.

The movie does an excellent job of not preaching or shoving ideas in the face of the audience while portraying scenes of what could best be described as racial violence, racism, classism, and population clashes. Displayed especially prominently because instead of setting the scene over a well-known, large US City (like Alien Nation with Los Angeles) it instead uses Johannesburg.

The aliens themselves, aka Prawns, happen to be both cardboard cutout ideological stand-ins for every minority; but have a compelling, and extremely evocative protagonist who comes across as a much better, more emotionally capable human being than the main character.

In the time allotted, the movie doesn’t manage to explore some of the problems as deeply as it could—especially noting the secret-government parts of the story. The fact that it’s not set in the US resolves a lot of cultural issues with government and racial divides (the use of mercenaries in lieu of military and civilian oversight) and it also provides a backdrop to juxtapose the treatment of the prawns vs. the external community, without actually invoking the outside community as a preaching point.

The action scenes are active, heart pounding, and I found myself caring what happened to both prawn and human—worried not just for the humanity of the human characters, but for the very life and love of the alien characters.

I’d love to see this again.

Perhaps it just resonates too much on the tuning fork of the dark side of human behavior.

There’s a zombie on the lawn

So, I’ve been neigh addicted to this wonderful casual game by Popcap games. It’s a good way to burn some time when there’s nothing to do. Plants vs. Zombies. And a couple weeks ago I found a live action video of the credits on Boing Boing. For anyone who hasn’t seen this yet, it’s a must see; for anyone who hasn’t played the game yet, get the trial.

 

 

Zombies…are coming.

…for brains!

Surrogates, a case for missing the point

One corporation to rule them all…

Sure. Only Apple makes the iPhone, but they don’t make every cellular phone in existence and never would be able to. Wouldn’t there be the i-surrogate and every other surrogate made by other companies? Somehow all surrogates are made by one corporation and one alone in an extremely unlikely coup d’etat.

Ignoring anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, the existence of this technology, the networks that must run it, the technology, software, and components to them a great deal of how the capitalist world works would have to be swept away for it to function in this manner in the first place.

Where are the accessories and software upgrades written by other companies anyway?

And in one network bind them!

While the networks that drove the surrogates seem to have some sort of wireless technology, apparently it’s all together on exactly one interpolated system. Even in modern day with technologies like cellular this is not just difficult, it’s near impossible. Multiple carriers would be vying with each other for customers, they’d be paying each other to run time on each other’s lines. But this isn’t the worst part about the scenario.

Jurisdiction.

Why exactly would a single computer in a remote city ever be permitted the ability to subject its will outside of its own bounds, and what sort of software would be required to allow it to do that in a physical sense anyway? This refers to the ability for one computer, in a remote city, to affect every surrogate everywhere without even hand waving to explain why.

Why wouldn’t other networks require some sort of negotiation? Other cities, other states, other countries. The information traveling over those wires could be considered subject to different laws, espionage would become a huge issue, Passports and Visas would mean something else altogether. (Or, as the movie suggested, this only occurs in the United States?)

Everyone runs the same Operating System?

Even with the presence of antiquated surrogates, lorries, loaders, pleasure models, soldier models, from mark one to mark fifteen (or whatever) every surrogate runs exactly the same way, on the same software, and connects to the network in the same way. No popular modern technology works in this way and never has.

Where are the DIY hackers? The people who get their kit out of the box and hack it to their own specifications. Sure, there might be laws that make modifying their surrogates a felony—but why would this stop the most staunch technologists? Apparently they didn’t exist in this society for no given reason. I’d be one of the first people to turn automatic updates off on my surrogate. See: experience with Windows OS. A world without Linux geeks to say the least.

Being without a surrogate makes you a bad person.

People on the street treated people out of their surrogates as if they’re making a political statement. They have a derogatory nickname for them: Meatbags.

This ignores the possibility that a person is out on the street without a surrogate because of some other reason. Maybe their surrogate is in the shop and they don’t feel like running an antiquated, stuffy model that they’re not used to. Perhaps they’re going to court and cannot be in a surrogate at the time (see below.) What if they have a disability based on brain physiology that makes it impossible for them to use surrogate technology.

What about the judicial process?

Keying into the fact that people as themselves on the street are “meatbags” and treated as if they’re making some sort of political statement: what about judicial proceedings? Why would anyone except perhaps bailiffs and officers who protect the court (but aren’t part of the proceeding) be permitted to wear a surrogate? Certainly the judge, lawyers, defendant, plaintiff, and witnesses must be physically present as people.

What exactly happens to habeas corpus in a surrogate society? How can a witness work if it’s not the actual person on the stand? Sure, it’s a felony to run in a surrogate that’s not registered to you; it’s also a felony to perjure yourself on the stand—but in the case of perjury in our society there’s no weird concern about identity. We have you, in body, on the stand making comments. What complex, weird, and otherwise highly fallible mechanisms would be introduced to have surrogates go to court and reliably make certain that corrupt non-persons attended instead?

People going to and from court would be walking on the street out of their surrogates.

Violent crime almost totally eliminated… Really?

What precisely caused people to suddenly ignore the fact that while running a surrogate a human is essentially a helpless lump of flesh, laying on a couch, in an easily entered room somewhere. Sure, it’s harder to kill someone in a passion when people look at the other form in front of them—another surrogate—and fights don’t end in death. But how many cold-blooded murders, or otherwise passion-to-cold-blood over a jilted lover would go away?

Steal someone’s wife and they show up in your room with a gun, not aiming the lethal bullet at your surrogate—but at your fleshy brain. It happened in the movie, after all.

Conclusion

I just couldn’t be impressed by how far the movie Surrogates made it down the rabbit-hole of identity with this antiseptic premise. It got one foot in, and then got stuck. That screaming is the sound of it spraining its ankle. Surrogates could have gone a lot further, done a lot better, and told a much better story if it had let the world be a bit more messy than it presented. The premise is too clean, ignores too many parts of the human condition, and promotes a foolish outcome.

SPOILER

My final observation: At the end, Bruce Willis’s character decides that while the surrogate operators are now safe the surrogates could be then destroyed to create a human revolution back to the norm society before their introduction. A radio message while every person on the street fell down “deactivated” their surrogates destroyed, claimed there were no reports of casualties. Sure, it would not mean the deaths of millions—probably just tens of thousands.

What happens to people currently in surgery under the care of surrogates? How about all the roads now clogged with crashed and deactivated cars: emergency vehicles certainly cannot reach them—that’s assuming that the hospitals have been brought back online already because everyone in them also fell over “dead.” How about the surrogates currently doing extremely dangerous work on buildings with fleshy people in them? Or, surrogates piloting vehicles in the air (planes crash!) and driving trucks filled with dangerous chemicals colliding in the middle of cities, or near population centers as their drivers are suddenly taken offline.

No. This decision may have been less horrible than killing everyone with a surrogate but it’s equally reckless endangerment and mass murder through reckless disregard for human life.

Big things on the horizon

Well, at least it looks that way.

I have Vexations volumes 13 and 14 written and in editing right now. The artwork for the insides is being commissioned and there’s a cover for 13 being commissioned also. So I’ll have some pretty stuff to show off soon!

It’s almost October, so it might be time again to start speaking up about the wrong messages about Halloween/Samhain/Concost that will be flooding Mill Ave. And also, my return to the place that I love the most.

Case for encryption about the MCSO raid of jointly held data center by Elaine Mercer

Just posted over at Black Hat Magick.

http://www.blackhatmagick.com/articles/a-case-for-encryption-sheriff-joe-arpaios-raid-on-jointly-held-data-center/

Recently, the sheriff’s office agreed to release the passwords that they changed—the consequences of refusal would have been jail time for contempt of court. However, this entire situation would have been softened a great deal if everyone involved had been using some form of encryption on those sensitive records and privileged communications.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s office vs. Maricopa County ongoing

I haven’t heard much since last week about the armed raid promoted my the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office against a County held IT facility. I know about this because it actually managed to make it onto Slashdot, a news site for the IT and computer oriented. Basically making a laughingstock out of Maricopa County and our sheriff’s office.

I am not sure if Joe Arpaio happened a direct hand in this, but the actions of his subordinates in this case does not reflect well upon him.

Last week, a judge cited a restraining order against the MCSO and possible contempt charges coming down for an MCSO lieutenant if he did not turn over the new password of the systems. The officers who raided the facility did so in order to take control of the computers for the time necessary to change the password and lock the civilian operators out of the system.

The sheriff’s office claims this was done because they felt an intrusion as imminent. However, this either displays a gross ignorance of exactly how computer security works or is a cover for another action. Changing the password does nothing to defend the servers from civilian operators who already have physical access to the machines in question—in fact, nobody needs a password when they can physically remove the hard drive from a computer if they want to read or tamper with data.

Political ramifications aside for the sheriffmen’s actions; the excuse they’ve given themselves for what basically amounts to a powerplay coup doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny.

Elaine Mercer from Black Hat Magick Detective Agency is currently writing up her own thoughts on the mater, but insofar news on the subject is extremely sparse.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/08/13/20090813computer0813.html

YouTUBE Series: The History of VenomFangX

Our understanding of VenomFangX has changed since we became aware of him. He has gone from just some ignorant kid, to a censorship happy prick and a habitual liar, to a crazy nut job, to a lying selfish ass. He has been one of the biggest preverbal train wrecks I have ever seen.

This video touches on the history of VenomFangX on YouTube. I have left out a few things such as his temporary suspension or his spats with TheAmazingAtheist.

This short video series (3 videos in all) is a bit biting, but it does timeline and dissect a great deal of the milestones of the career of VenomFangX. He has since left YouTUBE, but not so totally that he hasn’t given his successor videos to post from him (in fact his channel is not gone, it’s just been handed over to another person.)

Since the VenomGate scandal he has only poked his head out once to make snarky comments at Thunderf00t for having an on camera informal interview/conversation with Ray Comfort.

Link, via YouTUBE JRChadwick and djarm67.

Video game procurement

So, since Better Than Faith has become something of a ghost town when it comes to updates, I’ve stopped working on content that would otherwise be useful to Kazz. Instead, I am working on elements for Nelson Williams and Vox ex Machina.

Mostly, since this does involve playing and reviewing video games. I have bought some from Bookmans. Two games at $12 total. Nelson calls them shovelware.

Restricted Area. This isometric Diablo-clone wannabe takes place in a dystopian cyberpunk and doesn’t offer much in the way of general compensation for actual gameplay. The isometric design gives a certain amount of character control, Gauntlet-like waves of enemies to mow through, and a lot of very stiff voice acting. I picked a girl with a both who can run through cyberspace, but really the tactics seem to have fallen back to running away from everything and blowing up those ubiquitous exploding barrels.

Culpa Innata. A point-and-click adventure game with a few interesting additions, like a computer system that allows researching certain clues into useable data—although, it suffers from everywhere-at-once syndrome that a lot of adventure games do. Thus meaning that I have to look at the walkthrough a lot to get even simple plot elements out of the way. It also has a daylight issue, by this I mean that every task takes a certain amount of time and you can only do a certain amount during day before triggering nightlife events (or being forced to go to bed.)

Oh, but here I am longing to play another game of Bookworm Adventures.

Wordpress and Twitter Tools 2.0

Well, it’s that time again. I am getting used to using Wordpress and all the wonderful things that come with it – for example: Twitter Tools.

Twitter, like any other social media concept, provides a method for promotion like nothing else. It also creates a huge time sync, watching people, waiting for responses, re-tweeting, and actually tweeting content that I want my followers to know. But, with the advent of this Wordpress plugin, we can see less difficulty for tweeting—a great deal less.

As it will automatically tweet blog posts for me.

I’ve already tested it out with Vox Ex Machina (@voxexmachmedia) and I have also installed it on the Pets 911 blog (@pets911com). These are setups that already get a lot of visitors to the blog (Vox especially gets almost 2k visitors a day now—granted, that’s mostly because of nude and sexy mods for things like Fallout 3.) Pets 911 not so many, but we do have 57 followers now, and that’s only two days after setting up our Twitter account.

Now if only we had a working Facebook account.

The last thing that I did was also set up Twitter for Black Hat Magick via my normal account; it will be tweeting posts as they go live with the Twitter Tools 2.0 (by the way, it’s an excellent upgrade, adding lots of excellent changes. I wholeheartedly suggest it even over the previous version and over TweetSuite.) This way I can pre-load a set of chapters, and then just have it update for my various readers—and my Facebook account—even while I’m away being sucked into book signings.

Be sure to check me out, and take a gander at all of my upcoming work.

I’m going to be out of touch for a while after Friday, but there’ll still be updates…

Follow me on twitter!

Horizon Realty puts foot in mouth, then swallows leg

In a snafu that only the RIAA and MPAA could have topped, Horizon Realty of Chicago have managed to stir up a tweetstorm of negative sentiment in a PR disaster where they took a single tweet by a disgruntled ex-tenant and threatened to sue her.

I am here not only to add my 2¢, but to glom my blog post into the snowball.

This from the best blog post on the subject:

The Chicago Sun-Times reported yesterday that Horizon Group Management LLC, an apartment leasing and management company, has filed a libel suit against former tenant Amanda Bonnen.

Apparently Ms. Bonnen sent out a Tweet on May 12 that read in part:

“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

Horizon Realty Group didn’t like that, and has filed suit.

And then, in the most brilliant glaring PR error ever, Chicago’s Horizon Realty Group make a statement to the effect of, “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”

Is that a whoops or a WTF?

Link, via The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, and article, via the Chicago Sun-Times.

(Did I actually say “tweetstorm” above?)

Project Wonderful fun

Well, my registration for publishing ad space on my newest webserial, Black Hat Magick, went through. So things are looking good. Certainly, it may take some time to get enough notice to make even a few cents a day—but, hell, anything is going to be helpful to pay for hosting and other things.

I just started into Chapter 8: Vote Early this week; this is where things get a little bit fun, I’m playing around with the concept of student elections. I even got a kind and wonderful comment!

Think the story is ghostbuster-esque?

I just realized that, in fact, I don’t have any jokes in the story from Ghost Busters! What am I doing ignoring such an important icon of geekdom? I must rectify this situation.

Now, I just need to convince people to review the story on Web Fiction Guide…

VenomFangX and his triumphant not-return to YouTUBE

So, the whole Ray Comfort vs. Thunderf00t discussion was posted on YouTUBE. Thunderf00t spends a great deal of time speaking against Creationists, and anyone else who misrepresents empirical scientific knowledge about the world and our universe. As such he runs afoul of people like VenomFangX who from day one regurgitated the well-debunked lectures of Kent Hovind (convicted fraud, felon serving time in prison for his crime.)

He posts videos revealing the bad arguments, propaganda, and intellectual dishonesty of the Creationist movement and its proponents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwEr_Eo8I9E

Shortly into the video, I saw this:

Uni = One

Verse = A spoken sentence

VFX has his etymological background messed up, verse in universe is from vertere, which is “to rotate or turn.” This sort of poor scholarship is indicative of VFX’s dishonest presentation—not because he gets things wrong, but because he gets them wrong, gets corrected (over and over), and never chooses to learn from it.

Thunderf00t doesn’t ridicule people about their delivery; but he does shine light on the ridiculousness of the content. Making fun of Tf00t for stuttering while having a cordial discussion with Comfort and then using that as a segue to claim that Tf00t is a hypocrite for showing people to be ridiculous is pure asshattery.

Tf00t has never claimed he has an absolute understanding of everything and he doesn’t claim to know things he doesn’t—in fact, this is the point that VFX harped on all through the first five minutes of the video. But then around 5:54 VFX says, “…you claim that you have an absolute understanding of everything.” How transparent is that?

6:25 VFX looks to an exchange where Comfort plays a game of equivocation with Tf00t. In a friendly discussion everybody doesn’t force everyone else to define everything, but according to Comfort’s context he basically tried to say “life = soul.” And Tf00t is thinking that Comfort is referring to an untestable, uncorroboratable supernatural force and is arguing against that.

I recognize the “your dog and your horrible neighbor are drowning which one would you save?” question, and I’m puzzled why Tf00t even answered it—although, he does seem to be Aspergers to a bit, which means that this honesty is going to be very pointed. Why he didn’t just turn it around to: “A white man and a black man are drowning, who would you save?” or even “A man and a woman are drowning, who would you save?” to Comfort. The positive effect of this hypothetical situation is designed to provide values for lives, and it’s intrinsically true that as social creatures we do automatically apply value to life when in life or death situations. Come to think of it, the pointed question back to Comfort would have been to take away the “dog” (inhuman) status from the friend.

So VFX: “Your sister (or how about best friend) and your horrible neighbor are drowning, you can only save one—who would you save?” By the way, we’ll flash “Love your enemy as yourself,” on a billboard as you’re deciding. Using this sort of question is really uncalled for in any sort of cordial debate.

VFX’s not-return video is poor criticism and in the vein of his usual disingenuous presentation.

Symptoms may include hypersalivation

Today we applied some Flea & Tick medication to Pullo.

The stuff was really liquid, dribbled all down his back, wouldn’t stay in place and as a result, he could lick at it. And this is exactly what he did. And then he started foaming.

Grglglgleaglh, said Pullo.

Thankfully, we were informed by the veterinarian that hypersalivation—henceforth known as attack foam—is a common side effect of when the cat licks up the medication. It would pass with time. And it did. I exploited the fact that he loves ice-water to get him to drink a bunch and dilute the stuff.

So we had a fun day.

Starting late, but not ending early

Volume 13

Been having a bit of writer’s angst lately. I only just recently finished polishing up the first chapter of Mill Avenue Vexations Vol 13. And it’s been something of a bear. I think maybe that I’ve fallen into a rut like Cory Doctorow tweeted about earlier this week—I am beginning to really hate my current writing projects, which suggests that I’m almost done with them

Vexations Vol 13 is only 3 volumes away from the end; and I really need to start thinking about how I need to resolve and otherwise bring things to a head. It’s slow going but … I think that I can do it.

I am aiming for 36k words in less than the next two months so we’ll see how well I do.

Just my general run-of-the-mill update.

I slung that chapter off to one of my beta readers and I’ll get to work on the next one tomorrow. At this rate—assuming I cannot up the rate—I’ll have this volume polished up by Friday. I won’t start really editing the hell out of it until I’m done with Volume 16. Which, well, may take me a bit longer than the end of this month.

And then the artwork commissions start.

So much work, so little time to do it in.

Project Wonderful

So I registered for advertisements on Project Wonderful on Black Hat Magick. I know that I don’t have thirty (30) posts quite yet, but I’ll have twenty-three (23) tomorrow, and as the weeks go by, thirty will appear. Hopefully they don’t hold this against me and see that I’ve been a pretty good publisher and advertiser insofar and keep that in mind.

I could use the extra tiny amount of trickle money to help pay for the hosting.

Sketches: Black Hat Magick, Elaine, Hadaly, and Frog

Rebecca Gunter from SOAP has been working on some new character portraits from some of my work, and here are the preliminaries that we’ve been working with. It may be a week or so before we have color versions, but those will be posted slowly onto the Black Hat Magick website.

Elaine is the main character, geek extreme; the next girl is Hadaly, an Artificial Intelligence seen in her android body; and finally is Frog—yes, that’s just a nickname—with her fencing foil and Dungeon & Dragons nerd t-shirt, “Yes, they’re natural” d20s.

Thunder over Michigan, no kidding

Yesterday our house was buzzed multiple times by extremely loud, low flying jets. At least they looked like fighter jets. Not complaining, exactly, it’s not like they were doing these maneuvers during the early morning (afternoon really.) I just figured I’d like everyone know what I discovered about what might have been going on.

One of my flatemates figured that it involved Willow Run Airport, an airstrip within jet distance, showing off their wares. Then, today, I started looking into more things happening there and I discovered an airshow happening soon called Thunder Over Michigan.

You can check out the air museum's four-engine B-17 and twin-engine B-25 -- along with many other aircraft -- during Thunder over Michigan at Willow Run Airport.

The highlight of the event will be demonstrations by the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels. The precision flight team will be making its only Michigan appearance of the summer. There also will be a salute to Vietnam War veterans and re-enactments of events from World War II and Vietnam.

Now, as to why articles like the above refuse to put dates (it does say Saturday and Sunday, but it would be nice if there was something like July 17, 2009.) And I don’t understand why a lot of online newspapers simply refuse to link their sources. Sure, the URL is on there, but it’s not hot linked. Deliberate? Very likely.

Why don’t they just get over themselves, hot link in articles, just activate “open in new window” with target=“_blank” or something and stop annoying users with bad Internet etiquette? Please.

Link, via the Free Press about the upcoming Thunder Over Michigan Airshow.

Bookworms, chuzzles, and – RPGs?

Well, I’ve been working slowly on Crime Scene Unit Obscura for my wonderful kaywng and also on the next season of Mill Avenue Vexations. That’s the writing front. However, other things have been going down.

Such as my very own review of Chuzzle Deluxe by Popcap Games for Vox ex Machina. Now, I’ve also been playing Fate II, another tiny game downloadable and playable—but really, the one that is catching my attention right now is one about a Bookworm.

Apparently, over at Popcap there is an RPG that involves spelling and a role playing game. I’ll update everyone on how that goes.

In between collecting delicious chuzzle eyeballs and beating down waves of enemies Gauntlet style in Fate II.

For Sale: Hell, and Step On It

You can own a copy of Hell and Step On It right now for just $1.00.

This story originally published in the Twilight and Thorns horror anthology by Circle Dark Press—an anthology that has gone out of print—is not available again in e-book format. Instead of trying to find something that is no longer in print, you can buy it here.

Here’s a piece of Mill Ave Vexations canon and you will also be helping continue the writing tradition of these stories.

Formats exist for the Amazon Kindle and others that can be read in Stanza on the Apple iPhone!

The Deal: Mill Avenue Vexations comic book

Been playing around with my graphics skills, trying to set up advertisements for this upcoming comic book. I just finished lettering the pages and it's about time to get this to the printers.

Here's hoping all of that goes well.

Now available for sale!

Link, via Mill Avenue Vexations

BLOOD: Vampires at last…?

Oh, Saya, as if we didn’t have enough vampire animés to go around—but still. Who else is with me in that BLOOD+ and BLOOD: The Last Vampire had a certain strange Nipponese school girl trope going for it.

Now they’re going live action with it.

And I gotta say, the costume certainly made me snicker the moment I saw it on the screen. I suppose we’ll have no small part of blood flinging from katanas this Friday.

Web Fiction Guide listing for Black Hat Magick

Black Hat Magick has gotten a listing and a review on Web Fiction Guide! This website is the premier website for all online fiction and the webserial community.

Plus, Chris, the main administrator of the page has given me a fairly good review--although he does have a solid criticism of my writing style. Perhaps I should work on the overall wordiness; a flaw reflected in that I started writing this one for geeks.

Visit the listing, and, if thou may be wont to do so, please leave me a review.

Link, via Web Fiction Guide.

Black Hat Magick: Chapter 2 – Barbarians

Just got to the point where chapter 2 is now fully published: chapter 2 part i and part ii.

I am still fighting with the Wordpress Hemingway theme. I’ve enlarged the font on text posts and made it a little bit lighter to assist readers. But, does anyone know about a plugin that permits me to put in some sort of a CSS modification widget that will allow people to increase/decrease font size overall?

I suppose I could write one myself.

We’ll see.

“Dread Vote” the first novel of Black Hat Magick by Kyt Dotson

Has just finished it’s first week, and thus it’s first chapter!

http://www.blackhatmagick.com/dread-vote/chapter-1-chime-you-got-case-part-i/

The first chapter is up, I will be delivering the story weekly; split up into two parts per chapter Monday, Thursday.

For those who missed it, there’s also my miniseries comic Do AIs Dream that is now complete (for now.) I am looking for feedback, so if you visit, please be sure to drop a line on any chapter. Once I’ve gotten chapter two in place I will be submitting to the Web Fiction guide!

Buckle up everyone, Dread Vote should prove to be one wild ride.

Do AIs Dream: 5 – HELO

Wednesday, and the week that Black Hat Magick will officially release coming up soon, and we’re already on the sixth strip of Do AIs Dream. Go read Do AIs Dream: #3 – Texture and #4 – HELO.

As anyone who has played with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) will remember that HELO is one of the response codes for talking to the server. I used it as the title of that particular strip because this is the point in the miniseries that Elaine starts talking to newborn Hadaly.

The last strip comes out tomorrow.

Next week, the story begins.

Karissa Niehoff and Paula Schwartz are douche bags

Still.

So there’s a bit of a titter going on right now about President Barack Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. I recently read an article about how she was part of a panel that dismissed an appeal by a student blogger against the principal and school superintendant for disqualifying her from student government because of dark words she’d posted in an opinion about them.

I’m not here to comment on the nomination. But I am here to call this principal and superintendant what they are:

Asshat douche bags.

The exception here is that neither of these cretins are actually able to readily injure me by misusing their granted authority. Just like Avery Doninger, I am posting on my blog, which is not connected to their school and I’m publishing my opinion about their self-righteous, bad behavior. The difference here is that I am not in a position to be wrongfully scorned by these sniffy creeps who misused their authority as school officials to snub Doninger.

Now, these two jerks could have done the right thing and backed off after they thought about how petty and asinine their behavior was; but no, they wanted to take a mule’s stand on the subject and went straight-backed into a court battle over the issue. Of course, if the qualifications for student government include such vagaries as “this student is qualified or not because I say so,” it makes it a legally indefensible position to suggest that they did something wrong by the law; but if they had any other sort of standards, instead it makes these two look less like stand-up adults doing their jobs and more like whiney butt-hurt ninnies who looked at the blog post and said, “She’s disqualified because she said something mean about us! WAAAAAH!”

No wait, even if it is legally defensible they’re still juvenile asshats.

Karissa Niehoff and Paula Schwartz grow up.

Link, via NBC.

Do AIs Dream: 2 - Imperfect

Monday, being Memorial Day, suffered from a significant lack of visitors when the newest strip of Do AIs Dream: #2 - Imperfect.

Working my way into the narrative of the strips. Pretty much, this is a way for me to introduce the story to people by talking about one of the characters. It's almost half-way done.

Go check it out.

Do AIs Dream: Second Strip

Friday, I posted the second strip to Do AIs Dream, #1 - The Edge.

Already elicited some pondering comments about how epilepsy could be similar to a computer reboot and random interest. So thou could come along also and take a look!

Do AIs Dream?

About a year ago I envisioned a spin-off for Mill Avenue Vexations in the form of a spunky, geeky college student story and now it’s coming. Introducing the beginning strokes of Black Hat Magick.

Black Hat Magick is a series of occult noir detective fiction webserial novels written by Kyt Dotson. The stories follow the exploits and adventures of college student, computer geek, and occult detective Elaine Hadaly Mercer. She begins her career as an undergrad at Arizona State University majoring in Computer Science and Engineering; but comes from a long blood line of dabblers in the arcane arts with a strong bent for the scientific—hitherto that strange alchemy of genius courses through her veins and neurons.

It is going to start off with a miniseries webcomic called “Do AIs Dream.” The very first strip published this morning.

Wander on over there, let me know what you think, subscribe to the RSS. Let’s make an event of this new webserial!

Also, I think it would be interesting if people would like to write messages to the individual characters. I might even run a tiny contest (where people could win signed back-copies of Vexations.) So, during future posts, feel free to write commentary to characters in the story. We’ll have to see how that might run.

Do AIs Dream? a miniseries webcomic for Kyt Dotson’s Black Hat Magick occult detective noir webserial.

Vex Harrow Cosplay Images

This is a repost of a news item that I recently put onto Mill Avenue Vexations. The reason is that I’d like to get this one far and wide. At the recent Anizona 2009 during April, an absolutely amazing friend of mine came dressed as Vex Harrow based on the cover of Something Funny Happened at Matsuri.

There’s another picture in the news post, but this is probably the best one that I’ve received. There’s a few more from the con itself, hither and thither. It was rather a fun surprise.

The VenomfangX Scandal: Venomgate

...is over?

YouTUBE is a place rife with drama of every sort, however, few times are quite as dramatic as today when I logged in to discover numerous people from across different communities talking about the same thing: VenomFangX has left YouTUBE.

For those who aren’t savvy to this particular part of the Internet, or even this little tribe of thought, I’ll give a little bit of background. VenomFangX is a YouTUBE user who uses his evangelical creationist Christian message to basically run his channel. I mention it because it is the sole and primary purpose of his presence on the site, he makes no pretence about it, and it represents his eminence everywhere he goes. VenomFangX is the worst representation any religion could ever have—he's charismatic, smarmy, insipidly drippy, condescending, and borrows most of his material from fraudsters and asshats. He is, for lack of a better term, a popular villain.

He has left YouTUBE in the past; and now he’s doing it again. (Last time to no effect, obviously, as he didn’t leave.)

And he’s doing it on the heels of a huge donation scandal perpetrated by him. It started out in April when he posted a video about how he couldn’t keep a job because he simply couldn’t keep from proselytizing to customers; and he even proudly strutted his lack of work ethic when he displayed spools of DVDs he had burned at his current employment, using their equipment for his own gain. It is unsurprising that such antisocial behavior got him canned from so many jobs.

Thus, he came to his avid and adoring fan base and asked them for money.

Initially he asked for $500 a month—or, as he put it, for 500 people to give him $1 a month. In the video where he asked for this he intimated that he would give any amount over $500 a month to charity and named Sick Kids Hospital in Canada as the recipient. A misspeak on his end, perhaps, but he did little to then actually offer this money to them; instead he repeatedly attempted to renege on this by pretending that he’d said no such thing when soliciting donations.

Numerous tubers rose up to document, dissect, and point out the flaws of his behavior. His previous behavior certainly did not work in his favor in this as few people outside of his cult following find this to be on par with his previous actions. April ended and he probably collected far, far more than $500 but there’s no indication that he delivered even a cent of it to Sick Kids Hospital.

Numerous complaints rained down on his PayPal account, contacts to the Canadian revenue service, and even Sick Kids Hospital. His PayPal was shut down twice due to fraud. And now, his YouTUBE channel and website are gone.

The reason given is that he’s been receiving death threats from Muslims. A claim yet totally unsubstantiated. However, a message on his website states that his parents took it down, that they don’t support his actions, and they apologize if he offended anyone.

Links to two series on YouTUBE that help elaborate what happened, and who VenomFangX is. These are mostly cultural critiques by people who don’t like him very much, but they will probably give a good example of one side of the story. The other side is accessible via related videos and searches if you want to expand the depth of your net into this seedy event.

Goodbye Venom. Although, I doubt he’ll be gone for long. Here’s hoping this was the community nipping the next Peter Popoff in the bud.

Links:

VenomFangX Fraudster Exposed! by LordHathor

Dprjones examination of VenomFangX

So, I’ve been hearing more about suspected cases of H1N1 A flu virus near me in Michigan. I have also heard that another nearby county is closing down public schools for the week for it.

For those who know that I’m out here in Michigan right now, I just wanted to assure everyone that my chances of being exposed to Swine flu, or any variant of flu in general, is actually fairly low. Also, although I am a “young person” by definition of the words, the very fact that I have a weakened immune system possibly puts me at less risk than most.

Although, five years ago I had to go into the hospital for normal flu.

Stuff is keen out here. Everyone should understand the H1N1 epidemic is at phase 5 (confirmed human to human contagion, in multiple countries. Link to phases.) So the closures of schools and attempts at reducing overall coverage is an elemental first step into helping control the spread.

Stay clean. Wash your hands. Avoid touching your face while in public. You can do your part to help slow this thing down.

On Gothic Literature

The word goth has come to mean many things in our Post Industrial complex world: the Modernists have painted its name with black; the Post Modernists have draped it in the strange scrim of subculture anthropology and music; and the everyday scoffs at the word as if it holds little more meaning. The Goths were a tribe of Germany who hollered at the Romans, shaking spears and shields—they were the barbarians. And so the modern usage of the word goth still retains some of its old meaning: the gothic is that which is barbaric, viscerally atmospheric—truthful of the sublime but horrible depths of the unkempt mind.

When I say Goth, most people will have fluttering thoughts of bands such as The Crüxshadows, Marilyn Manson, and Type O Negative; of black clad individuals wearing dark eye shadow over bleak and pale faces; of vampires, werewolves, and all manner of horrible monsters from the night—but all of these things owe the origins of the atmosphere they so vainly stretch for from the annals of gothic literature.

Often gothic literature will pedestal things such as mystery, ghost stories, strange and archaic architecture, sleepy villages, family secrets, and castles. The striking prose of these novels often follows a hero who is of rarified constitution and often flawed beyond repair being swept up into circumstances designed of his own curiosity. Gothic literature has run a great gamut of authors from Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley – and have grown through that great tradition to the modern times through the work of H.P. Lovecraft and other weird horror writers.

A great deal of the focus of gothic literature is less on the fleeting inequities of life, human drama, or anything so trite; but usually rests in the subconscious fear and revulsion of things outside of perception and steeped in superstition and mystery. The unexplained, weird behaviors and customs of local townsfolk of quiet, pastoral towns, the fading memories of ancient and near-forgotten lore—all of these things make the delirious draw of gothic literature what it is.

The term gothic has taken a great deal of abuse over the years, mostly from the ignorant and wanting who think they are lashing out at juvenile subcultures; but it has a vaster, deeper, and more magnificently unfathomable history to it than all those modern-day pretenders. To any writer who wants to join into this grand tradition I say: go back to the roots first. Even a tremendous tree must be grown from a seed and a great deal of cultural unconscious exists in every writer and piece from Walpole to Lovecraft. The essence of things that have scared people have existed in the same nascent jots since the origins of the mind.

Know your literary grandparents and do not fear their influence; as much as they knew what they were doing for the eras in which they wrote their knowledge and craft may give you the buoy needed to place your own writing within the reach of all those would-be fans who are trembling somewhere in the darkness, a flashlight in one hand, a book in the other—and waiting for the next terrible truth to raise the hairs on the back of their neck.

Bram Stoker revitalized ancient mythologies and strange architectures with Dracula, keying into the latent worries of surrounding British peoples about the risen dead, returned to feast on the blood of the living. Frakenstein reflected terrific dreams brought on about electrical galvanism bringing dead flesh back to life, and the horrible ostracism and mistreatment of parents and children. Edgar Allen Poe walked the treacherous and twisted hallways of the disintegrating mind and the murderous impulse; flaying them out and shining that brutal attentive light through them.

The desire and want to be scared and terrified makes up the best bookworm’s adrenaline draw, and there are few things more terrifying than the truly weird—elements such as ancient and decrepit castles from bygone gothick eras, decaying over strange aeons under their weight of their own mold-cracked stones, and housing deep, lost-recollected secrets. They are all there, somewhere in the low rumble of the prose of many the classic gothic novel author and twinkling in the eyes of the new. Every family has a dark past somewhere, every white-picket fence and stately house has a ghost story in their neighborhood—and for each one, there is a reader: waiting, ready, and willing to be chilled to the bone by the bizarre truth of it.

A suggested bibliography:

· The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (Full text at Project Gutenberg)

· Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (Full text at Wikisource)

· The Vampyre; a Tale (1819) by John William Polidori (Full text at Project Gutenberg)

· The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe (Full text at Wikisource)

· Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (Full text at Wikisource)

· The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (1997)

A safe return to Michigan

I am now safely back in Michigan.

My room is a lot like how I left it. A disarray of things scattered against the walls, empty floor beckoning me constantly to curl up and stare at the ceiling, boxes lurking in corners, and my bed gently purring...

Wait a sec. Purring?

On closer inspection my bed appears to have an extra entity not originally placed there by me upon my exit to Arizona. As I've been out, my roommates have gotten themselves a cat! The feline appears to be black in coloration, making him perfectly camouflaged to sleep on my bed.

They're calling him Cat for now--there is a name but I haven't fully heard it yet. The reason is because they're still deciding wether or not we're going to be keeping him or sending him onto a new home. He's a rescue kitten, from what I understand, although now a full year old; the person who got him for my family works for a local humane shelter and paid for his neutering and microchipping. He's healthy and happy.

I spend almost all of my day indoors at home, so he'll have plenty of company while I'm here.

I am also told that he has a harness. Although I am not sure what kind of energy he produces that we might harness him for it... Alright, so it's so that we can him outside on walks. This has only been done once. I might try it myself sometime.

I remember when Djenna was joking that she had gotten me a surprise.

I had asked if I was getting a pony.

A cat will do.

Some fanart from one of my artists

One of my artists (Rebecca Gunter) just came back with some fan artwork for Vexations. It's a cartoony Vex Harrow. Absolutely adorable. I am so thankful I have these wonderful artists to work with.

My return to the north

Looks like my return to Michigan is upcoming. Just got Volume 12 released, so that was excellent. It's the end of my year.

There are so many amazing people that I'm going to miss. And some that I'm going to try to take with me.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful time while I was here.

I think that I will be posting some book reviews for what I read over my town down here in Hades; but as its time to return to Olympus...

Okay, so my friends back in Michigan seem to suggest that I have a Demeiter complex. The seasons change, I move between Michigan and Arizona -- unless, my moving changes the seasons? Hmm? Has anyone else noticed that it always rains when I leave?

YouTUBE and the murder/suicide of Tony48219

This guy has been little known on YouTUBE for some time—he was berserk, crazy, and barely audible in his vociferous screaming when he shouted people down, cackling with barely withheld crazy. At the time, he was just a fringe idiot, the sort of babbling drunken crazy that pukes in the town well; only seen by some time-to-time when someone decided to use clips of his insanity to frame other messages.

Nobody expected him to fly apart.

This tragedy has been bringing together a lot of different people on YouTUBE especially in the communities that Tony48219 moved in. It is … a shock to the system, a reason to cry, to laugh, to hold serious conversations, and to rant mindlessly. DonEdoxus2, The Amazing Atheist, JezuzFreek777 and many others have been throwing in their 2¢ on the issue.

We’ve lost someone. He certainly wasn’t a cornerstone of sanity—he wasn’t even that popular—but he went out by murdering another person, snuffing out her life along with his, and we might yet remember him hoping not to discover the fragility of the human condition in his descent into madness.

It’ll be solemn to see where we go from here. We've seen a loss...

This horror will fade, it will soothe with time, but the echoes of it will still shape the community we build.

Anizona 2009: Lasting Impressions

To wit, I have only had one experience with a convention before—and I spent the entire time under a table (more on this later)—so I cannot say that I have much of an idea for exactly what a convention should be like. This said, I am still going to be a little bit hypercritical of some of the more major faults that fell out; but I am overall pleased with Anizona ’09 and I really hope to see them again.

The schedule and programming were hell to find especially on the web pages. None of the navigation took us anywhere we expected to go, and no information was forthcoming. In fact, this became quite a bear and possibly wrecked a lot of the events at the con due to people being unable to find them…but it gets worse…

The schedule and programming booklets were alphabetically sorted! In the immortal words of our ferret, “Because we encounter events in alphabetical order in real life rather than chronological, I like all of my schedules to be alphabetized.” This rendered the booklets pretty much useless to the con-goers except as amusing distractions whist looking up events we might want to see, but quickly discovered we either missed or had to miss to see something else (which we only barely discovered later by flipping to another letter.)

As for organizing and actual programming that was wonderful. There were a number of excellent panels, events, and random nonsense going on that managed to fill out the days with good cheer. I didn’t get a chance to go to most of them, but instead rather enjoyed mingling with all the other characters.

The registration fee ($20) was amazingly acceptable and absolutely wonderful, and in fact rather makes up for the programming issues. This particular cheap cost made it a lot more permissible to actually show up, and be part of the con culture.

All this said. There is no Anizona next year.

According to many of my friends this event was much better organized and run than any before it—even with all its faults—and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. (If for no other reason than someone, whom I adore for this, decided to come and cosplay as Vex Harrow. She made the con one of the best events I’ve ever been to in my life.)

Volume 12 Cover Artwork

Here's the cover artwork for Volume 12. I am going to try to get prints of both these covers. It might make this particular run a little bit more collectable.

 

 
(c) 2009 Lise-Lotte Tjernstrom

http://tjernstrom.deviantart.com/

 

(c) 2009 Zak Hennessey

http://lrcommissions.deviantart.com/

This upcoming volume is named Waking the Stones and I'm trying to juxtapose the two separate worlds that are described in it. It's about time that we get a better understanding of what's going down in Phoenix, and Darlene is going to be our guide. She was stolen away in Volume 3 and now she's being given back to us in Volume 12 to deliver a message...

I hope everyone enjoys this last installment of Vexations for this year. It's been an excellent, however tiring, run!

Anizona 2009

I just spent the entire weekend at Anizona 2009. An event which Arizona really needs badly, which everyone who attended the closing ceremonies has heard is going to be on hiatus for at least a year. So there will be no Anizona 2010.

I have collected a certain number of notes from the experience—including some observations on how many Naruto headbands vs. Urahara hats appeared (Friday, Naruto won; Saturday, it was definitely Urahara.) We saw zombies, mercenaries, a giant moogle, Yoshi, and many excellent cosplayers. We even experienced the Gong Show which was an amusing jaunt—at least Friday and Sunday, the Saturday Gong judges treated the thing like the worst of American Idol and fairly much made the experience a bit of a letdown. If I had it in me, I might have actually tried to sing at the second one. Except that judges didn’t want singing, and I’d already caught some form of con crud.

Yes, there really is a word for it: Con Crud. Whenever you put that many people together, for that long of a time, some form of epidemic is going to spread—in this case it’s an evil sort of phlegmy sore throat. Knocked out the upper-register of my voice. Try singing with no upper register.

Geeks are also not well known for their hygiene and cosplay outfits quickly pick up dinge and funk even in a matter of 24 hours worn.

In the news of the neato and sweet, a friend of mine even came on Friday, cosplaying as Vex Harrow.

I will work out some of the other stories from the event as the week wears on.

No Mill Avenue Nights this week—it was all animé convention.

And there are indeed photographs.

Small update that isn't so small

Hails everyone, I just wanted to let everyone know that Volume 11: The Shattered Violin is now available for reading online at Mill Avenue Vexations. Ssh.

Nah, I'm kidding on the hush part -- go tell anyone thou damn well please -- tell a lot of people. I just haven't had a chance to write up my full release and post and everything to bring cheer and joy to everyone. Everyone let me know what they think.

The actual, highfalutin notice will come shortly. I just wanted to let everyone know.

Link.

Vampires, vampires everywhere but not a drop of blood

I just came across this little web gem of an article on boston.com: Vampire rumors spur alert at Boston Latin School.

"The headmaster believes that the outrageous rumors had reached a point where she had to say something to families to ensure that all students felt safe and respected," said Chris Horan, School Department spokesman.

While the episode sounds like something out of "Twilight," last year's hit film about a high school girl who falls in love with a vampire, it may be closer to the movie "Mean Girls."

Two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the incident said a group of girls at the school had been bullying at least one other student who likes to dress in Goth-style, a vampirish look popularized by musician Marilyn Manson. The officials said the girls began spreading a rumor that the student was a vampire who had cut someone's neck and sucked the blood.

As a Goth—and oft mistaken or asked if I’m a vampire—I’d like to assure everyone that this is actually a rare event. I haven’t met any vampires in the supernatural sense, even if I do write about them; but I have met sanginarians. It’s a fetish where couples drink each other’s blood. Certainly this girl could have been exploring being a sanguinarian, but I find it highly doubtful.

High school, like most other venues, is full of blatant stupid. There are multiple power struggles and total disconnects happening within the student body itself and even moreso the rift between the students and the faculty. High schools are a sociologist’s nightmare. We’ve become a society of overactive cowards who don’t spend a moment to examine the hysteria over high-damage, extremely-low occurrence events.

OMG vampires! So much less likely than Oh My Goth.

So cheers to all us black-clads out there, don’t forget to smile in the rain. I hope the girl in question bears her reputation as the vampire-rumor-center as a blood red badge of courage.

Sanguis est vim!

JamesRandiFoundation YouTUBE Account Suspended

I don’t know how to respond to this – primarily because I have no clue why it happened – but all I can say right now is that this is stupid on the face of it. James Randi is an amazing illusionist (it’s right there in his stage name) and he’s also an excellent resource for looking into the false claims of psychics, scam artists, con artists, and televangelists who claim faith healing and other unproven and grossly bogus activities.

And now his channel has been suspended by YouTUBE. It is not uncommon for people like the above to run false flagging campaigns, to misuse the DMCA, and to otherwise abuse the law and other resources to attack venues like YouTUBE in order to suspend their detractors. And YouTUBE, following the DMCA law and their own policy in a fashion bereft of actual wisdom—suspend on whim.

Mill Avenue Nights Saturday, March 28th 2009

Art Fair always has a weird calming effect on the crowds that visit the Ave, but it also reconstructs the pathways that people can carry themselves along the bricks—primarily so that they can get out into the road, and twirl and stand in the middle of intersections. A rare event.

Papa Soul set up in his usual spot, this time hidden by the tent of a food vendor and an ATM machine. Still, the sound of his music dominated the near-empty intersection even with the tents standing in the way. Blues echoing through the crossways and byways.

Amanda, Heather, and her steampunk-dressed crew made it out to the Ave again. Rolling like a gang of extremely well dressed visitors. Which amused me greatly. I am especially in favor of anything that increases the overall Victorian steampunk, or gothic aesthetic of the Avenue—especially since the loss of Rocky Horror Picture show caused a casual decrease in such things.

There was a physical assault incident involving one of the buskers on the Ave who has been around for about a month. A member of the Mill Avenue Resistance had a sign reading, “BUTTSEX 4 JESUS” which was torn in half by the busker and he struck her across the face with it. I didn’t get a chance to interview him about the event because other members of the Mill Avenue Resistance decided that they wanted to confront him about it—namely Kazz wanted to.

Little He-Man, Ben, came out as well to see everyone wearing his kilt and white-eye contacts. We spent a little with discussing events while various people wandered around the Ave. The crowds were far less thick than they were Friday evening, but still present, music played loudly from different venues.

I didn’t get as much of a chance to see much of anything, especially friends, due to an extreme headache.

The long silence, coming to an end

I apologize for the long, strange quiet. I have been rather busy with several things going on between my continued work on editing the first book of Black Hat Magick, finding a Canadian publisher/distributor for Mill Avenue Vexations, and getting my hands sunburnt...

Yes, yes, I know. I should carry a parasol when I’m in the sun or something. Either that or I'm just going to have to wear gloves when I intend to spend such a long time out during daylight hours. At least I don't bloody sparkle like some vampires I know (no, I am not a vampire.)

The experience with Brother Jed on ASU campus was nothing short of sublime. We had a visitation by Normal Bob Smith—who even dressed up in the contemporary image of the Christian mythological deity Satan. Then got to talk to many lovely people, found at least two who are now fast fans of Vexations. Good start. Jed has always been excellent for that. I also had a chance to read through a review of his book—with variously unfortunate results: Who Will Rise Up by George Smock, a review.

It'll take me some time to get a lot of my work down for Mill Avenue anthropology and my ready readers. Also there’s lots of things going on in the fiction department as many may guess. Volume 12 is preparing for release next month—and I’m still trying to get Volume 11 out on the web ASAP.

Much to come.

Something Funny Happened at Matsuri

Mill Avenue Vexations Something Funny Happened at Matsuri by Kyt Dotson is available online for everyone to enjoy!

Vex Harrow takes a day off to visit the Arizona Matsuri festival with her friend Megan. However, a weird Japanophile and otaku, decides to crash her party by summoning a tentacled monstrosity to help him steal some artifacts from ancient Japan.

Things continue to go wrong from there. Follow Vex's adventure from festival onwards to reclaim the day.

There are four pages of Japanese manga in this work, the first two and the last two; so if you buy this you will receive some graphic art not displayed on the cover (although you can also read it all online.) It was a bit more expensive to make these than the usual publication, but it was certainly worth it. I hope that everyone who receives one enjoys it thoroughly.

It's also available for people to purchase from the online store.

Mill Avenue News Day

Too much was going out on Mill Ave this week, especially concerning the ever developing disaster that is, well, development on Mill Ave.

To an extent that a long post was written up over at Mill Avenue Vexations. Aptly entitled about the vacant windows and vacant heads. As with the Mill Avenue the Beautiful series a lot of what happened to hit AzCentral recently reflects the economic blight and bad planning that are stifling culture on my favorite street.

It's never too late, however, to actually turn this around by changing the face of Mill to something more like it is meant to be: a Towne Square.

A place for not just a meeting of products and people, but of minds and ideas. There is a lot of space to actually hold and cherish.

The revolution is us.

http://www.millvexations.com/forum/mill-avenue-news-day-vacant-stores-and-vacant-heads-t284

Mill Avenue Nights Addendum: February 20-21, 2009

The fracas on Saturday got me a little bit amused. I posted about the evangelical quality of this on Better Than Faith, but I’m wondering aloud now about the coming together of community and the perception of crowds.

For those who aren’t aware of what happened on Saturday. An evangelical street preacher named Jonathan decided to set up his amplification on the corner of 6^th and Mill next to where the Hippie Gypsy and Bun Devils are situated. This is because the corner that houses Urban Outfitters had been taken over by Bruce, a spray-paint artist. After Jonathan set up, people began to crowd around in a manner similar to what generally happens around these forming debates.

James, the owner of Bun Devils, did not take this well—he and one of his workers saw the brimming crowd as a direct threat to his business. Together they presented a heated harassment to both Jonathan and people who came to crowd and argue back against the evangelicals and their amps. The result was a little interesting with Jonathan telling people to go buy hotdogs—but the worker from the hotdog stand, flustered, demanded that he wanted Jonathan to buy a hotdog (but Jonathan didn’t have any money.)

Tension ran a little high with James and he felt like attempting to chase them away by setting off his car alarm. For thirteen minutes. A blaring noise event that was annoying but not at all dissuading to the crowd near the evangelicals amp—it didn’t even manage to register as more than an irritation as it didn’t drown out speech, or provide anything more than, “Oh someone’s car alarm is still going off.” That ended when a trio of bike police rode up.

It took Jonathan and his crew almost an hour before they finally moved across the street to Coffee Plantation.

There is a great deal of contention about the use of public spaces between vendors, evangelicals, and the general passersby. The United States prides itself in enabling people to make their own social contracts to live by in public spaces, especially when it comes to speech and presentation. James and his workers may have felt marginalized by having a crowd on their corner, but they were incorrect in asserting that the evangelical and the crowd didn’t have a “right” to be on the corner. If the crowd didn’t have a right to be there…then neither would any customers who may have decided to buy hotdogs.

This also came up on Friday with the True Vine Baptist Church visitors. About whom I have discussed the concept of a forum in the past. Years ago when Pastor Ed was out on our Ave, he faced an angry black man selling hiphop CDs who shouted loudly at people who got in his way in order to preach at him. He managed to tie the TVB evangelicals up for several hours by shouting over them. The concept of the forum came up again, Friday, when Kazz—the leader of the Mill Ave Resistance—mentioned that the TVB are particularly hostile to anyone else setting up near them to present alternate viewpoints.

The TVB, of course, does not control the public corner—they manage to do so only because they have numbers (ten to twelve people) and hopefully unlike The Door, they would not be outright violent if people who disagreed with them chose to use the corner as the forum it is and to respond to them. With equal amplification if necessary, as the Resistance does. Kazz fears that in order to actually create a debate, or at least a reply, he will have to act against the wishes of the TVB to totally control a given corner.

A great deal of people like to pipe up and use the freedom of speech as a cudgel to beat down critics, as if invoking freedom of speech only acts in their favor. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism—in fact, exercising thy freedom of speech invites criticism. It is a real, necessary, and sufficient practice in response to speech is to add, develop, and produce contrary opinion.

Right now the TVB present only a saccharine claim to being reasonable, “leave us alone, please be polite, you can get your turn,” but really this is a flimsy respect. They have chosen to speak out to the street using the same rights that the street would speak back out to them and when that happens I expect that they will do the right thing and respect the law.

We’ve seen the evangelical preachers on Mill Ave repeatedly attempt to use the very law that protects them in order to censor or stifle contrary opinions. Such as David from the Way of the Master evangelicals stopping the police to ask them if they could do anything about the nay-sayers who brought out amplification just like the evangelicals did; the group also got restraining orders against other evangelicals who were handing out tracts and information “too close to them”; Jeff and John from earlier attempting to talk to the police about separating the groups by forcing one to go to another corner; The Door committing assault, calling the police, and then demanding that the police remove their detractors.

I have studied numerous groups on Mill Ave and the evangelical preachers insofar are the only groups who have chosen to wield such heavy-handed tactics to stifle organized retort—and, equally so, sometimes people who oppose them (local businesses mostly) attempt the same.

As an outgrowth the actions and reactions on the parts of the police have been positive—with the gross exception of the violent intimidation by The Door, who are dangerous and malignant—and they have hopefully repeatedly educated the public and business owners that the law is blind to the polite. That if the evangelical preachers are permitted to use amplification so too are their opposition; that if a group is permitted to stand on a street corner, so too are their opposition. That all debate, talk, discussion, however animated, falls within the ability of all parties to make their own social contracts until the point the law is broken.

The evolution of these various groups has been interesting.

And perhaps not unhealthy for Mill Ave.

I and the rest of the Mill rambling public look forward to when their growing pains begin to settle and the various sides manage to find some truce, however uneasy, about their use of everyone’s public corners.

Mill Avenue Nights Friday, February 13th 2009

Friday the 13^th!

I didn’t get much research done today, mostly I just had fun and frolicked. After straying through the annals of the Ave, and I got a lot of copies of Mill Avenue Vexations: Something Funny Happened at Matsuri handed out.

By the way, it’s being released tomorrow, February 15^th 2009.

I stopped by Graffiti Shop, handed a copy to Lawrence (signed of course), and trawled the Ave for other people who might be interested. Met with some of the street rats whom I enjoy and love to hang out with. Talked to Bunny and Nightshade; met with Crazy and even went to a poetry slam.

The poetry slam was pretty interesting. Lots of artsy folks were hanging around, but I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to many of them, however, I did use it as an excuse to hand out more copies of Vexations.

That rocked.

For anyone who didn’t get out to see me, there are copies of Vexations in Graffiti Shop. Only 4 copies. So…get burning when the burning is hot.

I will put 4 more there tonight.

Mill Avenue Nights Saturday, February 7th 2009

Spikebravo

Tonight, I met Spikebravo from YouTUBE on Mill Ave. He’s a bald headed, spectacle wearing actor who has a penchant for teaching. When I came across him he was talking to Suzanne (one of the Way of the Master preachers) and had a strange depth discussion about Gnosticism.

I took him in a circuit around the Ave, talked about about HappyCabbie, and the total slump that the economy is in. With the way that things are going, people are being laid off on a fairly regular basis. In the past two weeks, three of my friends have lost their jobs to lay offs, downsizing, or other economic woes.

Susan

I re-met Susan (and go her conact info) on Mill Ave tonight. She’s a petite brunette, con-goer who I have seen on Mill Ave for many years now. She recently broke up with her boyfriend (lucky for her he did not take her copies of Vexations.) Although, I have not seen her in almost two years.

She says she hasn’t been to many Cons in the interim but is hoping to change that. I have been pondering changing that myself, having not a chance to go to many myself at all.

Break up with your SO, lose your Vexations

This one is a common litany I keep hearing! Sometimes when people are together they don’t ask for two copies of Mill Avenue Vexations—so, when it comes time to break up…well, one or the other ends up taking them!

Just tonight, I heard another story about how someone lost heir bookets. “But they were given to me!” “Wait a sec, some of those books are from before we even got together.”

As much as I’d like to advocate an idea of mixing certain property when together with a kaywng, people might want to think about stuff like this just out of respect for the fact that people do eventually go their separate ways.

Losing your stuff

A young lady at drum circle, with a hula hoop lost her canvas bags tonight. She described them as two large canvas bags, one black, one white, both with long spotted loops. They vanished around 11:15pm and although Susan and I scanned the area of the Tempe Government building, they were not seen again that night.

I hope that they get returned to her.

Suzanne’s daughter, mirror-speech and huggable gods

I had a bit of a talk with Suzanne’s wheelchair bound daughter—whose name still escapes me—mostly because she’s a writer and, being an author, other writers interest me. However, our discussion rapidly descended into mirror-speech after she asked me if my cane was purely ornamental. It’s not, exactly. It’s ornamental in that I don’t precisely need it (I can just sit down and rest more often) but it’s extremely useful in that it allows me therefore to stay standing for longer periods of time.

My legs weaken more quickly due to my congestive heart failure.

She took this as an opportunity to start talking about the afterlife and how this must mean that I’ve thought a lot about what happens after I die. Which is true, I came to terms with that a long time ago. She went on about her Christianity and how she thinks that my conscience should tell me that Christianity is true—can we say, “Culture Shock?”

“What you’re experiencing right now is something out of pop anthropology: culture shock. It happens because as people we have trouble separating ourselves from our own peer groups to realize that other people actually have different worldviews and cultures than we do.”

In fact, when I was younger it took me a while to realize that most Christians don’t get a chance to actually meet their gods like I do. Christians live their lives talking about how they know Jesus, and how they talk to God, or have experienced Satan, or other elements of their religion—but they’ve never physically met them. Not actually. Press them long enough and they’ll admit to sensations and feelings and not visitations.

My people? Our heroes are actually out there and we get to see them sometimes. Personal revelation in the grand scheme of empirical evidence of the Universe is inherently not compelling for anyone but the person who actually experienced it. And then, of course, we can readily elaborate that our experience with our gods and heroes involve hallucinations—with the intent to discover them. The experiences my people have may be very palpable and real, but these experiences are still trivially illusions of the mind—exactly like the experience of any Christian of one of their gods.

Wouldn't you rather have huggable gods? Rather than gods that only come through musty, aging books...

It consistently amuses me that the Way of the Master preachers like to use visual tricks as part of their tracts. As if to say, “the senses can be fooled!” suggests that there is indeed something supernatural and true. Yet, they don’t seem to follow therefore that their very own tests, the optical illusions, the linguistic trickery, all suggest that in fact their experiences themselves are suspect. That when they cannot corroborate them with other people or even with reality itself, suggests maybe that there’s a high chance that their experience is also illusion.

Instead, it become a reason to present a profound disrespect for everyone else, for their own cultures. A special pleading comes into play, “But we have the truth, ours is true, and yours is wrong,” making it a shadowplay of words and mistreatment. Where their illusion is more important, more true, and more proper than anyone else’s—say something about their illusion and they’re up in arms; they say something about mine and they stick their nose up at it.

Yet neither of us can readily deny the force of gravity. An empirically demonstrable phenomena—which they attempt, however idiotically, to equate their own non-demonstrable personal experiences with, ignoring that my personal experiences hold exactly the same weight compared to gravity. None. Chuchulain, the Morrigan, Bridgette, all of these gods are equally likely as YHVH and Jesus and Satan.

The difference is. I’ve actually met the Morrigan. I have never met Jesus. He’s invited, certainly, but he’s not once appeared at Concost. Anyone think that’s strange? It’s an open invitation for my ancestors, my gods, and my friends—yet the only gods that appear happen to be those that I expect to see, those that I’ve grown up with, those whom I know. And not a single one that I don’t expect to see. I’ve never met Zeus, Shiva, the Buddha, Amaterasu, or Quetzecoatal.

The saddest thing about all of this is that when people descend into this mirror-speech they’re not even talking about themselves anymore. It’s not even the witnessing type where people generate bad experiences that they have saved themselves from; it’s entirely an enculting meme attempting to encase another person. There’s no personality there—no person.

Nobody will ever experience a connexion with another human being with this sort of behavior, they will only build divisions and demands. When this mirror-speech is being employed there is a great deal of disinterest being shown as to the very person that they’re speaking. Sure, the speaker feels passionate or even concerned that someone else is going to Hell, or a lake of fire, or wheresoever, but that concern has hijacked their ability to connect with other people.

I may be dying, but I’m not about to dismiss the one best thing that I have this world:

Other people.

Friends of Mill Ave - Jim Coleman: More than 8 years on Mill

Jim Coleman is an elderly man, frail of feature, but strong with character and warmth who I see on Mill Avenue often. The first time I noticed him was many, many years ago; sitting on the corner, offering tracts, with a gentle smile and a good joke for anyone who cares to listen. This is a write-up from an interview with him December 13^th 2008.

Paralyzed totally, two months later he could drive and started to come down to Mill Ave, visiting almost every week for a long time in '99. The reason for his paralysis is Guillain-Barré Syndrome—an autoimmune disorder where the body attacks the nervous system. Jim has recovered a lot of his original motor control, but unfortunately any direct damage to nerves will never recover. As a result, when we see Jim, he’s usually in his wheelchair.

He recounts his experience in the hospital as a catalyst to his eventual repeat visitations to Mill. “My legs don’t work, what’ll I do, what’ll I do. Well, I figured—nothing’s wrong with this motor-mouth.”

With this in mind, he visited another patient in the hospital and spoke with him about his Christianity. When he was out doing physical therapy at a pool, he met a black man who mentioned to Jim that he might as well take it down to Mill Ave. So here he came. He says that when he first started coming out to Mill, he came every night for a while. His wife also came out with him every night in those early stages.

Ever since I first started seeing him, he’s always sat there quietly with a buffet of pamphlets that he gives out to people. He doesn’t use the amplification or shout really, but he will talk to anyone who talks to him.

One thing that I’ve always appreciated about him is that he actually made an in with the street rat population—joking that he is in fact a Mill rat, since he lives right off of Mill Ave. I have seen him getting people warmer clothing, and sometimes taking kids off to eat slices of pizza.

He still tries to visit three times a week—Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday—but he can’t always do it all week; since he uses his income to help pay for what he does. And it does run out. But he tries as much as he can with what he has to help out the street rats and the homeless population.

He is careful to point out that he avoids being belligerent or “in your face” and thus feels that he can get a better connection with people. He used to hang out on 6^th street and Mill for about the first six years he’d been coming out to Mill Ave and when the other Christian groups started to appear, he flocked with them for a while. Certainly he’s seen several come and gone already since over the past decade there have been six different groups of street preachers.

Refuge of Delayed Souls

I am reading this new online serial, The Refuge of Delayed Souls by Miladysa and it's bloody damn good. I am only up to chapter 30, but I highly recommend it. (This is partially untrue, I am actually much further ahead, but I started reading late in the story and now I'm making up the difference.) The story is oh-so-British to my ears (Irish as they are) and it produces a lovely Arthur Conan Doyle style lilt to the narrative. The chunks are bite sized, the characters are highly emotive and engaging.

Her style is something that I'd really love to learn to mimic, and possibly I will use it to help me determine how to write a little bit more emotively.

A lot of my supernatural writing does involve ghosts and hauntings; but more in a horror sense, rarely in the romantic heartbroken distance of the celestial bureaucracy—this work does that in spades. I especially like how it jumps back and forth between time periods to frame the narrative. It develops its story between past and present to compose the development of the characters.

It's a framing technique that I think deserves some experimentation.

Go check it out.

Prologue link, The Refuge of Delayed Souls by Miladysa

Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 10: The Girl in the Mirror

Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 10: The Girl in the Mirror by Kyt Dotson is available online for readers to enjoy! And, as usual, there are free copies available to people who can get out to Mill Ave in Tempe.

Strange stuff is really brewing in Tempe now that Vex has run into her potential adversary at the Bash on Ash, and in her usual terms, punched her in the jaw.

This doesn't mean that the threat has ended, of course, as while she's taken away an item of some significant power, she doesn't know what it means. Disappearances continue. The city is agitated. And for one of the newer characters, Megan, things are definitely getting hairy: she's started seeing things in mirrors.

Not just any things, but a particular dead girl.

This volume displays art from a considerable number of sources. The cover is by one of my new favorite artists, Del Borovic (*exileddelusion) who did the front cover. And Katie de Sousa (=yumedust), whose brilliant and majestic portrait of Vex is the back cover. Internal artwork and chapter headings are done by Alan Gallo.

You can see the full cover on Mill Avenue Vexations.

So, don't miss Volume 10: The Girl in The Mirror.

Reports late this week

My observation reports from Mill Ave are late this week because I've been too tired to get them fully written up.

Highlights:

Kristina was back on the Ave, and she hasn't been broken in half. Hopefully the bluster and irritation at/about her will die down sooner rather than later.

Borders closed this Saturday, never to open again.

Westboro Baptist Church came to Phoenix on Friday and raised income for various gay venues and a play about a gay boy.