The Desert Mermaid

I think the problem with Grave Encounters 2--you know, aside from the hyperdimensional feedback loop of meta self-congratulatory nonsense--was the genre-savviness. You can totally make genre-savvy horror characters work. I mean, I'm genre-savvy, but I don't go around following horror-movie rules because, as far as I know, I'm not actually in a horror movie. If your characters don't know they're in a horror movie until it's too late, they can be as familiar with the tropes as they want and it won't matter.

Not so much here. The whole premise of Grave Encounters 2 is that the first one is a movie, and then the sequel's main character becomes convinced that it's real. And if you become convinced that time-manipulating ghostmonsters who can trap your ass forever in an asylum of gibbering ghouls and hands growing out of ceilings and ectoplasmic sucker punches are REAL, you STAY AWAY FROM THAT ASYLUM. If you're working on the assumption that it's real, the movie shows you a primer of all the various ways you are irrevocably doomed if you get anywhere near that place. So you don't go near it. That's logic.

Still love the first one, though. Gotta give me my love of good solid silly horror.

Although the main character looked enough like Robert Pattinson that I spent most of the time entertaining myself imagining Edward Cullen gibbering and screaming as demonghosts chase him around. That would've been a fun addition to Twilight.

I believe the phrase "Blitzkrieg of Bullshit" sums up my fatigue with politics over the last few years. I've been advancing my own political theory that the immensely stupid statements that seem to be streaming from Tea Partiers are part of a strategy designed to leave sane people so completely speechless at their ignorance and nastiness that they have no idea how to respond, allowing the crazies to step in and TAKE OVER THE TRI-STATE AREA!!! GOVERNMENT!!!*

Come on, guys. It's really hard to talk to you like grownups when I'm still trying to figure out if I'm on Team Evil or Team Stupid when it comes to figuring out your motives. Give me another option.


*Which would make it a far more coherent plan than Paul Ryan's Secret Plan to fix the deficit. He seems to have the same gift for strategy as the Underpants Gnomes.

Oh, Utah.

I really wish I’d kept the pamphlets we got in eighth grade sex ed. The cover alone was priceless: it was a closeup of the fly of a pair of jeans. A giant chain ran through the belt loops, and right in front of the zipper it was secured by a GIANT PADLOCK. It’s a good thing my mom was the kind of crazy hippie who felt that it’s totally fine for kids to know about how bodies work,* because I’d never have learned it from school.

Well, I say good luck, Utah, in your quest to let hormone-crazed adolescents learn about sex from their parents, unless their parents are as squeamish as the politicians they vote for, in which case the teenagers will learn about it from those completely reliable sources of TV, magazines, the internet, and each other. Let me know how that works out for ya.


*We never had a big formal The Sex Talk. Mom mostly answered our questions when they came up. Interestingly, while I remember her explaining things from the time I was three, so from then on I could explain mechanics of acquiring a little sister, I distinctly recall that it was much later—at maybe age nine—that it actually sank in how the sperm got into the vagina. My brain had glossed over it before that. And I remember it clearly because suddenly, whole new aspects of the culture were now opened up to me. I still can recall the first time I understood that two sitcom characters were joking about THE SEX. Yes, I was kind of slow on the uptake in some respects. Still am.

Wow. The more I read about this Lowe's debacle, the more disgusted I get. It's yet another of those times when my SIWOTI complex slams headlong into the fact that tackling everything wrong with what people are saying would take weeks and likely just piss off the idiots who hold those opinions anyway.

I mean, look at this--according to a marketing executive, the first mistake was advertising during the show at all: "For a big national brand like Lowe's, they've always got to be incredibly careful when advertising during any show that could be deemed controversial." Because a) ordinary Muslim people are CONTROVERSIAL, and b) it's all about money.

And don't get me started on the rest of the Florida Family Association's bullshit. I can't even bring myself to link to it; you'll just have to google it.

This kind of controversy really pisses me off. It's a sign of sloppy thinking, to assume that all Muslims are like the ones you see on the news blowing shit up. I know we're wired to think anecdotally, and that causes a lot of misconceptions. That's something we can work to get past, though.

Trouble is, a lot of people don't. All-American Muslim seems to be trying to fight psychology with psychology--if we're going to go by anecdotes anyway, they present us with some new anecdotes about Muslims doing their everyday stuff. Admirable, cool, and apparently too late for the Florida Family Association people, who haven't got room for any more anecdotes.

Which is a crying shame. I am not a Muslim, but the ones I have met have all seemed like, y'know, normal people to me. In my dumb white American experience with Muslims, not one has tried to terrorize me. They've shown me Bollywood movies, played good-natured tricks on their students, gone completely nuts over birthday cake, played Super Mario, yelled back at Dora the Explorer, discussed philosophy, raced boats, learned to draw manga, rassled their kitty cats, given to charity over holidays, shared recipes, saved me when I had malaria, cheered for Stevie Wonder at the Paralympic opening ceremonies, and confessed to an unconditional love for Babysitter's Club.

That's the kind of thing they're showing on All-American Muslim, from the Muslims' point of view. And that is the kind of thing the Florida Family Association seems to find so objectionable.

Remind me why Lowe's listened to them, again?

I’m beginning to suspect that the monumentally stupid things the Tea Partiers—and even the more general GOP candidates—keep saying are in fact part of a strategy. If your opponents are concerned with analyzing assumptions and relying on facts, all you have to do is make a short statement that is so mind-scramblingly, brain-torquingly wrong on so many levels that it’d take a full-on graduate thesis to address every problem within it. Congratulations: they’ll now have to spend weeks compiling and organizing facts and statistics, and by the time they have it together everyone will have the sound bite so firmly in their heads it’ll be impossible to dislodge.

And hey, if you spout out several of these in a row, they’ll NEVER catch up!

Maybe we opponents should just stick with the slightly less fact-based, but age-old, counter-strategy—simply pointing and laughing at the stupid. At least it’s less time-consuming.

Today at work we got to entertain two charmingly exuberant boys while their mother plodded about her business.

I would just like to say that I believe that discouraging children from tearing around like natural disasters is actually unhealthy in the long run. Kids have a lot of energy, and when possible, I’d say it’s good to let ’em burn it off with random bursts of horseplay.

I just wish they would find somewhere other than the library to do it.

The really weird thing is, our Liberry has a nifty little wildflower garden, an uneven field with a path, a small stand of trees, and a river surrounding it. It is an ideal little microcosm of Outside. And in the land of Outside, it is perfectly fine to race around and yell and tackle your brother. Inside, yelling is bad form, to say nothing of stuffing your brother’s head into a bookshelf. And yes, it’s cold outside, but that is what boots and coats are for—and I know you’ve got them; you’re holding them.

But I never see kids out there. They’re always inside. If they’re lucky, they have parents with them muttering “Shh” ineffectively every few minutes. If they’re not, they’re here from after school to closing at the Branch Library And Free Daycare Center,* at least until we throw them out.

I am beginning to suspect that parents do not know about Outside. As in, it just doesn’t register for them as anything other than The Place Where The Car Is. It doesn’t occur to them to send rowdy kids Outside, because Outside is not part of their existence. Which is a real bummer, because Outside is kind of a cool place—even for me, a certified Indoor Kid, Outside is a hell of a trip, even if it’s just the weird halfhearted park we’ve got.

So I have taken to reminding parents and kids. “Gentlemen,” I said to our small, wrestling patrons, “remember, you have to be calm in the library.”

The mother mumbled something that might have been agreement, but the boys didn’t hear.

“However,” I went on, “we have a great garden outside you can check out!”

The mother did not even seem to grasp that, but I hope I planted the idea. Outside. It’s a great way to let kids be kids.

Now if we could just unwedge little Jaden from the book drop, I’ll show you how to get there.


*Which also doesn’t help because that means they do not eat for at least six hours, except for the occasional piece of candy whose wrapper always winds up on the floor. This does not help encourage Indoor Behavior.

Great Moments In B-Movie Science!

In Terror From The Year 5000, a crazy scientist builds a time machine that transports stuff from The Future to Now—and in order to prove this, he sends one of the Future Things to another scientist who determines that the artifact is indeed from 3000 years in the future.

He does this by carbon dating.

Think about it, won’t you?

So! After a hiatus of a few months courtesy the Fukitol shift, I am once again having weird dreams. I won’t say I missed them, but … well, okay, yeah, I missed them.

Last night’s was all about Doctor Who. It seems Ten was getting chased around a ruined castle by another Empty Child. Except this time the child was not actually human; it was a blob of vaguely humanoid blue-white light which had, for reasons best left to my subconscious, elected to wear a red gingham dress. She was not actually made of light, though; she was made of antilight. I am not sure what that even means, but this was important.

Also, she was actually malicious, as opposed to just stupid. She did have a bunch of mindless minions. I’m not sure what their plan was, or what would happen if she touched Ten, but whatever it was had him curled up in a fetal position when she got him cornered, gibbering and sobbing.

Fortunately, Donna and Rose were there and had figured out the wavelength of the antilight and translated it into, um, light (anti-antilight?)—and when Donna set up a floodlight over the castle grounds, where the mindless horde was approaching, they were annihilated into blue sparks. Rose found the Doctor and used a flashlight on the same wavelength,* causing the child to poof into sparks as the dress fluttered to the ground.

She was very nice to the somewhat embarrassed Doctor about the whole thing, but she made the mistake of telling Donna he’d cried, and she managed to scorn at him like a champion.

The crazy dreams are back. Madness can’t be far behind.


*I dunno; maybe the castle’d had this problem before and kept the lights around just in case.

All right, so the poll from my last entry has been very interesting, and has turned up a lot about what people define as a “geek.” Bonus points to those of you who supplied the original definition, too. From the poll, we can establish that a geek is one of two things:

1. Someone who bites the heads off of small animals in a sideshow, or
2. A person with a vast knowledge of and enthusiasm for a particular, often non-mainstream subject or subjects (most often technical, mathematical, scientific, or speculative-fiction related, though there are subsets of “literary geeks,” “drama geeks,” etc.). Anayltical. Pedantic. These traits may reach the point of impeding social abilities.

I’d argue that a lot of the second definition has become the basis for a subculture of such people, with its own definitions of “cool” and its own rules of interaction, but that’s a discussion for another day. Right now what’s important is that neither of these definitions seem to fit with this book I picked up—Marybeth Hicks’ Bringing Up Geeks.

I admit, I saw the title and was rather intrigued by the idea. Is it for geek parents trying to indoctrinate their kids? Is it one of those “so your kid is a geek; now what?” books? I was curious enough to pick it up.

Turns out the book is, above all else, a study in cognitive dissonance. Mostly it’s your standard sanctimonious book telling you that “MY kids are great; you should raise them like I do!”, with some good advice and some totally bizarre advice. The idea is that raising kids to be uncool and unpopular is actually better for them in the long run—something I don’t really contest. But Hicks keeps referring to this as raising “geeks,” and the word pops up all over with very little recognizable connection to what a geek is except for the part about being unpopular with the in crowd, so that my main reaction to the book is, “You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” She could have taken the word “goth” and it would have made just as much sense.

Because she has decided her kids were geeks, Hicks goes on to redefine “geek” to make her kids feel better about it:

Genuine, Enthusiastic, Empowered Kid.

Okay, well, we geeks aren’t quite as self-esteem-less as people make us out. So let’s consider the evidence. I looked through the book, so let’s see how her ten pillars of “geek”dom actually correspond with, y’know, geeks:

• Brainiac – Okay, this is fair enough. She waffles a bit about the difference between a kid interested in pursuing knowledge and the kid who has all the answers, but yeah, interest in learning is geeky enough.
• Sheltered – When Hicks says “sheltered,” she means it in the sense of cyberspace—her kids aren’t allowed to instant message, and she has to approve every website they visit. No blogs, no social networking sites. She also keeps tabs on her kids’ movies, feels that they should have limited exposure to popular culture, and finds video games distasteful.
• Uncommon – I think she’s trying to say you should let kids like what they like, but really this chapter is a rant about consumerism, Bratz dolls, midriff clothes, and not buying the shit everyone else is buying. Geeks are not consumers, she tells us. She has apparently never been to Think Geek.
• “A Kid Adults Like” – This is about teaching kids good manners and social skills, so that adults will be impressed with how polite they are. Because geeks are the kinds of people who charm everyone.
• “A Late Bloomer” – This chapter is not about the scrawny kid with the cowlick who doesn’t hit puberty till their sophomore year at college, if ever. Instead, it’s about willful late-blooming: it advises you that ten-year-old girls should probably not wear g-strings and go around having oral sex, even if they do have to wear training bras.
• “A Team Player” – Specifically, playing on a sports team. She has some pretty common sense advice about not turning into a crazed win-obsessed parent. I spent the chapter snickering madly at the words “geek” and “sports” being put together without fuss.*
• A True Friend – The usual. Friends are people who you can trust etc., etc..
• A Homebody – Someone who is comfortable with family.
• Principled – Geeks are the same thing as being Nice People, she contends, who care about others and never, ever succumb to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory even if they are allowed on the internets. They also never go to bookstores and read the comic books without buying them.**
• Faithful – As far as I can tell, you need to have a religion (she quickly says she means any religion and then carries on about how everyone else gets God’s Plan wrong) if any of the other stuff will work, because what kind of crazy person has morals and values without religion? She equates doing religious things like praying and going to church with being geeky.

Right, those are her ten ideas—not terrible suggestions, for the most part. But is it, y’know, geeky? Well, let me just tabulate the scores on my graphing calculator here, run it through the Geek Test, and …

Oh, fuck it. Madam, I hate to break it to you, but while your kids may be well-rounded and imbued with values stronger than the popular kids, they are not geeks.

Geekdom is not just a general label for someone outside of the mainstream. We are not defined by what we are not—it’s not just about being unpopular. There is a very specific set of positive characteristics involved in being a geek. We have a subculture—and we have sub-subcultures. We have a jargon, our own pop culture, our own material culture, a shared set of cultural icons, a specific history. We have jokes, songs, unofficial holidays, even superstitions. As far as we’re concerned, we’re not uncool—we just have our own ideas about what is cool. We have our own intra-subculture battles, we have a particular set of social rules, and we also have our share of total fuckwads. Many of us may even have some varying degrees of an upbringing like the one you have outlined up there—but that upbringing alone does not a geek make. That’s reserved for something more specific.

Find some other way to describe your outsider kids.

I hear “twerp” is free.***


*I won’t say that in my experience all geeks avoid sports with the same vigor they’d use to avoid a chainsaw-wielding madman, but I will say that most geeks seem to prefer solitary sports.

**Not that I know anyone who does this regularly.

***Unless you want to go with one of the possible etymologies of the word, which doesn’t conjure up images of beheaded animals but does bring with it the possibility that Christopher Tolkien will attempt to bring death and ruin to you and all you hold dear.

This made me cry tears of sympathy. It must be so sad not to be able to enjoy a genre secure in the knowledge that it’s excluding other people.

And you know, the anonymous yelling douchebag at the comically overcompensatory magazine* has a point. Here I was all set to write my next sci-fi book about a badass superpowered commando character with a gonzo streak who rescues people from crazy terrorists and then delivers explody justice to them along with her team of commandos,** but now I realize that what I actually wanted to do with the character was make her ride a sparkly space unicorn and shoot magical stars and rainbows from her wand that turn all straight men gay and render them unable to “do things” (as “doing things” is apparently what sci-fi lacks these days thanks to all the WOMEN and QUEERS), and making the galaxy boring because only straight men shooting each other is interesting. At the end everyone sits down to a tea party to talk about their FEEEEELINGS and wear frilly dresses.

Thank you, anonymous yelling douchebag, for clearing that up!


*The SPEARHEAD?! AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

**This is true, actually.