Well, it’s sort of a comic post…
I’ve once again found myself reading a book that was obviously intended for the under-thirteen crowd. And I feel no shame! None whatsoever…well, maybe a little.
First, I want to be perfectly clear that I did not read this book because the main character reminds me of Wednesday, the character played by Christina Ricci in The Addams Family. I actually did read Emily the Strange, the Lost Days…a novel because:
A) somebody else bought it, so it was there
and
B) the cover and interior illustrations piqued my interest.
It’s a pretty goofy story and obviously directed to readers much younger than me, but it’s not without its charms. Especially for a diehard Hitchhiker’s fan (I’ve tried to make it apparent where this observation comes from with the following quotes).
I’m finally back in my lean-to. And man, things may be tough right now, but in a way, I got it good. I got cats everywhere, a sandwich, a black cherry soda, my notebook. I got a skylight I can see the stars through, and the night air is perfect.
Belgium, I just realized I call soda soda and not pop. And haven’t I heard the Blackrock locals asking Raven for pop? I could be way off – but I think people usually say one OR the other, depending on where they’re from. And it definitely sounds hilarious to me to hear Blackrock folk asking for pop.
Man, I must be desperate for clues. But still.
…or…
JAKEY: I don’t know what he’s planning. I haven’t seen him in days. ME: Why, what’s he doing? J: Take it easy. I heard he’s been having lunch with the mayor, paying off the police, stuff like that. ME: Oh Belgium! He’s going to kill me! J: Don’t be stupid. He might pay someone to kill you, but he would never do it himself. ME: OH…BRICKING..BELGIUM!!
If you still don’t see the HHG reference, then you’re obviously not a true believe and you need to repent. There’s nothing more I can do to help you.
Oh, and if you’re interested, there’s a lot of hubub about who the real creator of the “Emily the Strange” character is. And there might be an Emily the Strange movie coming out sometime this year. Neither factoid is particularly interesting to me – unless they get Zooey Deschanel or Christina Ricci to play Emily in the film version.
*ahem*
I still deny that Wednesday made me do it!!
Read MorePosted by Bart | 0 Comments
Comic posts are taking over Smashy.net! Hooray!!
I occasionally get a San Diego Comiccon update magazine in the mail and flip through it with little interest in the superhero-focused articles. But as I was flipping past the various Watchmen related fanboy crap in the most recent one, I found an Interview with one of the scheduled guests that actually piqued my interest.
I’ve been reading Stephan Pastis’s comic strip, Pearls Before Swine, in the local newspaper for a few years now, but I’d never heard of Richard Thompson or read his strip, Cul De Sac. And to be honest, Pearls Before Swine is a clever and often satirically funny strip, but it’s not really one of my top ten favorites. But I’ve read it with a new eye since reading the above article and I actually find it a lot more entertaining now, for some reason. I wish I had the opportunity to read Cul De Sac in the local paper because it looks like a strip that would easily be in my top five favorites, but…well, it’s not there.
So what’s so great? For those of you who refuse to read the six pages above, just read these strips (from the article) and tell me you don’t find them brilliant.
Maybe they’re not as great as I think…but even if you’re not impressed, I am. And I’m looking forward to seeing both of these guys in about four months.
Read MorePosted by Bart | 0 Comments
The Wizard of Geeks
With a tagline like “reviews for geeks,” one would expect more than just rambling about movies, tv shows, books and video games. While those things can be pretty geeky, there’s nothing more clearly associated with pimply-faced, overweight, socially maladjusted misfit geekboys than comic books. So I think it’s about time that the uber-geekness of the comic world invade Smashy.net and bring this bitch to all-new lows of geekdom.
Sadly, even my geekiness knows limits. I not really a fan of the ambiguously gay, spandex-clad, super-powered style of comics, so if that’s your geek-passion…you’ll need to look elsewhere. What I do love is a good adaptation of a favorite novel (or series of novels) to the sequential art format. Tolkien, Pratchett, Gaiman (though as a comic writer, I don’t know if his books count), Douglas Adams…I love having that alternate look at characters/locations from stories I love.
Which brings me to a Marvel production that has been out there since the end of 2008: the adaptation of L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Funnily enough, I’ve never read any of the Oz books – I’ve only seen the old Judy Garland movie. And while it did cause brief nightmares populated with flying monkeys, it was never a life-altering experience or anything cheesey like that. It’s just one of those “classic” stories that I’m happy to see being given another shot with a new generation of readers. And who knew there were further adventures of Dorothy in Oz (at least 14 of them)? I only discovered this fact upon picking up the Sketchbook issue of the new series.
But just because a classic story is rendered in sequential art panels, it isn’t automatically rendered worthy of praise (or my hard-earned cash). This incarnation is, though – because, in addition to being very closely based on the novel’s narrative, it’s also illustrated to perfection. The characters are cartoonish, but emotive and seem perfect (much more so than their live-counterparts in the film – very similar-looking art can be found in the Alice in Wonderland comic adaptation by SLG entitled Wonderland). The settings are surreal and vibrantly colored (or not, as need be). And the scenes/dialogue flows well. As I said, I’ve never read the book, so I can’t really say how closely anything in this adaptation follows the original, but it feels authentic. And it ’s not quite the mad dash to the Wizard that I remember from the film. It’s more like the Sci-Fi channel’s slower-paced character-developing attempt to recreate the story with Tin Man (just without the sci-fi elements or Zooey Deschanel).
Here are covers and a few interior pages from the sketchbook and the first three issues of the series (issue #4 should be out next week).
If you’re a fan of sequential art or even just classic stories, you should check this comic out (buy it, don’t be a dirty pirate). Being a Marvel publication, it’s probably available at most book stores, though their comic racks are generally battered and the books are usually pretty worked over. It will undoubtedly be collected as a trader paperback soon, too – if you want to wait and save a little dough.
Read MoreLittle brother
I seem to be reading a lot of books targeted for “young adults” or even children lately. I’m not sure if this is due to those being the types of books my favorite authors are writing or if it’s because I’m just a juvenile putz. Either way….
Neil Gaiman mentioned a book on his blog several months ago, so I picked it up and did eventually (after abandoning it on my “reading shelf” for a few months) get around to reading it.
But I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart thirteen-year-olds, male and female, as I can.
Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.
It is a “young adult” novel and, even though it tends to exaggerate a little here and there, it is frighteningly realistic and does make a good case about the dangers of sidestepping the US Constitution in the name of national security (or for any other reason).
This scene, the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco that actually occurred a few miles from these events, is frightening in its completely accurate portrayal of most people being no better than frightened sheep when push comes to shove.
“Don’t mace him!” I shouted over the din. “You’ll get us all, too.”
At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind of melted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, I saw someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. She screamed as she went down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but she couldn’t, the crowd’s pressure was too strong. As I neared her, I bent to help her up, and was nearly knocked over her. I ended up stepping on her stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, but by then I don’t think she was feeling anything.
I was as scared as I’d ever been. There was screaming everywhere now, and more bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as relentless as a bulldozer. It was all I could do to keep on my feet.
We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It was hardly any better here——the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia I’d never known I was prone to.
People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezing past the turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it was clear to me that this wasn’t going to have a happy ending.
How many times has this same scene played out whenever massed groups of people are swarming for an exit in the face of some danger? Be watching for more of this in the coming year or two as panic begins to grip the world with diminishing food supplies, shrinking incomes and soaring inflation.
One major annoyance I had with the book was the author’s worship of the liberal San Francisco mindset and the literature that helped spawn it.
I’ve always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. just to be smarter about the world around me. I could do that just by walking around the city. I decided I’d do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lights books had a great library in an upstairs room where Allen Ginsberg and his buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we’d read in English class was Howl and I would never forget the opening lines, they gave me shivers down my back:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night. . . .
I liked the way he ran those words all together, “starving hysterical naked.” I knew how that felt. And “best minds of my generation” made me think hard, too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gas falling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl——all about a line about gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. It made me happy somehow, knowing that we’d made some progress. That things had been even more restrictive than this before.
I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of the books. I got lost in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a novel I’d been meaning to read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me nodded approvingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.
I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles with hot sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but which would never seem anything like hot ever again, now that I’d had an Ange special.
As the day wore on toward afternoon, I got on the BART and switched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring around to the East Bay. I read my copy of On the Road and the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semiautobiograpical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard—drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad—faced hobos, con men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There’s not really a plot——Kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind——only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. He makes friends with self—destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what I mean.
There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff.
I read On the Road a book or two before reading this novel.
I was not impressed. Hippie nonsense and at times this books strays a little too close.
Here’s one last passage to explain the book’s title.
But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio.
“Abuses of Authority——it’s the latest craze on San Francisco’s notorious Xnet, and it’s captured the world’s attention. Called A—oh—A, the movement is composed of “Little Brothers”who watch back against the Department of Homeland Security’s antiterrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses. The rallying cry is a popular viral video clip of a General Claude Geist, a retired three—star general, being tackled by DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. Geist hasn’t made a statement on the incident, but commentary from young people who are upset with their own treatment has been fast and furious.
“Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime—time news. The issue came to a head last night, when the British Broadcasting Corporation’s National News Evening program ran a special report on the fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered this story. Commenters on the BBC’s website noted that BBC America’s version of the news did not carry the report.”
They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, a Swedish Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America’s corrupt press, a retired American newscaster living in Tokyo; then they aired a short clip from Al—Jazeera, comparing the American press record and the record of the national news media in Syria.
Little Brother may not be “high literature,” but it is worth reading on many levels. Even if you are a little more right-leaning than the author.
Read MorePosted by AngelBaby | 5 Comments
Can you hear me now?
Pause a moment the next time you are in
a public place, be it campus, mall, arena, highway, etc., and take
notice of the number of people with cell phones pressed to their ears.
Now imagine for a second what would happen if some sort of signal could
be transmitted through all those phones that would instantly turn the
user into a ravenous, bloodthirsty animal akin to the zombies from a
George Romero film. Not a pleasant thought, huh?
This is precisely the scenario that Stephen King lays out in his most recent novel, Cell. After hinting that he might be retiring following the completion of his magnum opus, The Dark Tower
saga, King returns with a horror story that harkens back to some of his
earlier work when he wrote riveting tales of common things (car,
dog, clown) that took on unexpectedly horrifying qualities. The book
grabs the reader by the throat in the riveting first chapter as the
Apocalypse begins in a way we could never have expected, and the Master
weaves a tale of terror which asks, what might happen if the veneer of
thousands of years of human civilization were stripped away from the
majority of our population in a single moment?
I bought this book on Wednesday, and just like The Da Vinci Code, finished it in two nights of reading…it was that hard to put down. I highly recommend it.
Read MorePosted by Bdegenaro | 2 Comments
Wyrm
Written by: Mark Fabi
Published by: Bantam Spectra
Genre: Science Fiction
Synopsis
As the new millenium approaches, cults, sects, and crackpot prophets
flood the worldwide media. But for Michael Arcangelo none of their
catastrophe theories are more frightening
than the Goodknight virus. Michael suspects it is the work of a
mysterious programming genious, who designed it to create a computer
role-playing game so real it can kill. Now Michael and his team of
techno-wizards must descend into a harrowing and convoluted world of
reality and fantasy. But what they discover is even worse than they
could have ever imagined. For the so-called game is already out of
hand, the virus has taken over the internet, harnessing the power of
the millennial frenzy already sweeping the world. And if they don’t
find and defeat the twisted mastermind responsible, humanity will wake
from its worst nightmare to find the end of the world is truly here.
"Wyrm is a hugely enjoyable book. All hackers should have this book; so
should anyone intersted in artificial intelligence, the Internet,
computer viruses, role-playing games, mythology, science fiction, Lewis
Carroll, or Monty Python. Anyone not in this group has my sympathies."– Charles Sheffield, author of Tommorow and Tommorow
"A plot so wicked and intricate it should be illegal…Very, very cool."
– Sci-Fi Universe
"The real thing, [a] straight-bracing science fiction of ideas…[that]
has the feel and delivers the jolt of a good fantasy quest."– The Orlando Sentinel
My Review
I read this book a long time ago, but figured I would review for smashy.net.
I’m not exactly what one could classify as a "hacker", but my roots are
in the oldskool scene. I’m what you could call an "enthusiast".
None-the-less, I’ve learned alot from reading this book. That said, you
know the review is coming from someone who may not be part of the
intended target audience. Fabi does an
excellent job of introducing new terms and theories while providing
proof and explainations as to keep the reader informed.
The book starts out rather dry, with very little background on the
books main character — "Michael Arcangelo". The plot unfolds when
M.A. is brought in to rid a virus from a
chess computer, called GoodKnight. With his friend George, one of the
people who coded the AI engine for GoodKnight, M.A. realizes that he’s
not up against a normal virus.
There is a sarcastic tone throughout the book towards Macrobyte, the
dominating company with the best operating system, which turns out has
a worm out of the box when it’s installed on a new system. Mabus-2K
their current OS turns out to have the same virus that GoodKnight has,
M.A. makes the realization after isolating the virii’s self-id code
"666". From here on in, the book begins to rock. M.A. later goes to a
hacker seminar, which the author must have attended because the terms
he uses and the underground things
hackers do at these conventions are described in detail. Like i said,
i’m not a hacker, but reading this book made me want to be one.
It should be noted that this book came out long before real worms were
released and rampaged on the internet, and long before microsoft
operating systems were found to be susceptible to any number of threats
and compromises. In this manner, this book is incredible for it’s
accuracy. A tell tale sign that the author is indeed a geek like us. I
should also note that "hacker" in this context implies anarchistic
genius with computer super powers 
M.A.’s arch-rival, a virus-programmer who calls himself Belzebub makes
an appearance here and there beyond this point. Eventually M.A.
accumulates a handful of friends and they discover the the worm/virus
they are up against is some sort of rogue-ai. It can remove anything
harmful to it, while learning from the anti-virus software that M.A.
codes.
I’m not going to go into detail about this, it may ruin it. The
review is hard to write because I dont want to spoil
anything for people who have not read it. Anyway, on the
side, Marlon Oz, a revolutionary AI genius is brought into the picture
by M.A. This is one of the elements that i found most entertaining. Eventually they all group together, the M.A. crew,
Oz and his crew, and even some guys that used to work for the DoD and
take on this worm.
The ending is rewarding and the concept is cool.
Well worth reading by anyone that is remotely interested in hacking/AI/RPG’s, etc.
On a side note, elusion, a member of Smashes ka’tet, ran a BBS
called the Wyrmhole, which was the original reason I even picked this
book up and looked at it in the bookstore. His BBS was cooler than the
book.
