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What I'm Reading: Divided States of Hysteria, by Howard Chaykin

And now for something a little darker than cute cartoons about vampires.

Howard Chaykin's comic Divided States of Hysteria is out. Terrorism, death and destruction, political hacks looking to take advantage. Written in what now seems like a more innocent time, 2016.

First issue's collecting a bunch of psychopaths. Not sure what they'll be doing, but I trust Chaykin's road trips to go somewhere interesting.

"So now that liberal-center-left narcissism, with a healthy dose of identity politics, has lost the game to right-wing ignorance and hypocrisy-driven rage, and I find myself anticipating a future spent in a live-action dystopia, the book seems almost naively cheerful and filled with hope. Go figure."
—Howard Chaykin, Divided States of Hysteria #1 editorial

There's been some controversy about a cover, apparently people think showing cruelty in art is the same as endorsing it? I don't know. Anyone not familiar with Chaykin's American Flagg! or Black Kiss will probably be appalled at the mix of explicit sex, explicit violence, and explicit politics; this book is for people who aren't appalled.

Synchronicity: Just found this Howard Chaykin art for Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination

Castlevania

Castlevania on Netflix is out, written by Warren Ellis, R-rated as fuck as they say.

I'm an oldest-school Castlevania player, but dubious of all videogame adaptations (people used to complain about Uwe Boll, as if Bloodrayne was any worse than Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter). And so far it hasn't changed my opinion: The dialogue is painful, like a bad translation from Japanese text boxes, with a little goat-fucking humor. The plot's told in jump-cut scenes. The art's nice, but has minimal animation until the fight scenes; those are rendered in gory detail.

But the plot gets moving in episode 2, and I like the squalid medieval atmosphere. The Speakers are poorly explained, but giving any backstory for magic-users is a huge improvement. By the episode 4 (end of this season), Trevor Belmont's whininess has mostly stopped, and he starts being the whip-cracking hero we know, just enough to face a classic Castlevania sub-boss.

★★★★☆ which could have been higher if the start wasn't so slow and awkward.

W3C DRM OMGzors

Oh sweet zombie jesus the DRM whining again? You can have fucking Flash (you goddamned savages), or you can have DRM and a nice native player. Ebooks and downloaded music are mostly watermarked and DRM-less (except on Kindle), but you can't do that on the fly with video encoding.

You aren't going to convince Sony/Netflix/etc to just give you non-DRM copies of a $100M budget movie or series. And once in a while I like a Guardians of the Galaxy, Inception, or Justified. If you don't, the presence or absence of DRM in the browser makes zero difference to your life. You're just bitching about something that doesn't affect you.

For a slightly more calm, less profane explanation, read Tim Berners-Lee's post.

The Land Before iPhone

In which millennials try to recall kindergarten pre-iPhone

iPhone was nice, but not a big change to my lifestyle; I already had a Treo, and before that a LifeDrive, and before that a Palm III, and had Internet since before I was boinking those kids' mothers. I was basically the model for the Mondo 2000 "R.U. A Cyberpunk" poster (the joke being R.U.Sirius was… nevermind), and yes, I read Mondo2k & Wired before they were dead and/or uncool.

Installers

Indie game dev leads you to some dark and terrible places.

I so miss the App Store being an endless payout slot machine without spending $10M on advertising, and miss the 6-figure jobs for fixing peoples' apps because nobody knew Objective-C (even less know it now, but they're stupidly trying to rewrite code they don't understand into Swift, which will break again in 6 months).

Now I'm a poor but honest pixel farmer, forced to shovel shit to get to market.

Making a Mac binary for Reaper's Crypt was trivial (on a Mac, probably impossible elsewhere), and produced 1 file: "Reaper's Crypt.app" (a Mac application bundle, hiding all the mess so you don't see it).

Making a Linux binary was not much harder, and produced 17 files and directories, with libraries and data scattered all over, with the binary sitting in the middle where nobody could see it. So I'll have to make a little script to go launch that untidy mess. When I did Linux, there were at least 3 standards for icons, and by now I'm sure there are 13 more, so they get a raw image file.

Making a Windows binary required me to install WINE with MacPorts, which took hours, and the binary is in the middle of a similar mess of 20 files and directories. So for this I need an installer to make a .msi file, which nobody I know has done this decade; I think I have a handle on this. But now I don't know if I need 32-bit "win32" or 64-bit "win32" (what.); there's no fat binaries in Windows, so it's one or the other.

I am not Hercules, and these Augean stables are filthy.

The Real World

People who think the "Real World" matters and care how much they "made a difference" just weird me out.

Electrons are a real part of the world, too.

You will die and your persona & works will be forgotten. Humans will go extinct, possibly quite soon. In a billion years the Sun will burn the Earth to a cinder.

There are, as you know, no gods or souls.

So it's OK to fuck around and do nothing productive, make art for no purpose. Because nothing matters, you can do anything.

What I'm Reading: Revenger, by Alastair Reynolds

Just what I needed, a reasonably hard SF adventure story.

In the Eighteenth "Occupation" of the solar system, millions of years after the Sun & planets have gone boom, monkey-people more or less like us live in millions or billions of habitats, from Little Prince-style planetoids to big cylinders, and solar sail & ion drive ships cruise between them looking for ancient booty in booby-trapped worlds called baubles (not quite to be confused with Vernor Vinge's Bobbles). It'd make a great RPG setting, and there's at least 3 things I plan to steal^W liberate for my SF game.

Character expectations are subverted often: The protagonist Arafura Ness & her sister Adrana, seem like "nice" pseudo-Victorian girls until they run off to join a ship, the robot Paladin seems like a harmless nanny or tutor until it isn't, the ship's crew start out rough but soon you get some sense of who they are and why, and the specific jobs in bauble-hunting make sense. The villain's a right bitch, but there's a justification… But the title tells you how Arafura sees things. While the girls and Captain Rackamore in particular are sometimes fools, at no point do I lose interest in anyone or feel annoyed by them existing and taking up pages, like everyone in The Stars are Legion.

I have a slight complaint in that the bauble worlds, the mechanics of the traps & treasure troves, are barely touched on, and I want a detailed sourcebook with maps and diagrams, or at least an inside cover map of Fang like Treasure Island. The physics isn't given in enough detail for me to check Reynolds' math, but it's not wildly implausible, just handwaved.

“Very well, Just Fura. I make no promises. You look like a barefoot street waif and you’ve got spite in your eyes. You’ve been on the glowy and that never sits well with me, especially if it gets in the grey. But if you’re half the Bone Reader you think you are, maybe you have something to offer.”
“I’ve plenty to offer,” I said. “Intelligence. Baubles. Fortune. Quoins.”
I spared him the bit about bloody retribution.

★★★★½

It's Reynolds doing "YA", more in the style of a Heinlein juvenile than the usual trash of that genre, but that also means it's mainstream enough that children who can neither read or think have taken to posting meme-image "did not finish" "reviews". Ignore them. Trust only in me.

Update: Reynolds wins the Locus award for best YA novel, and clarifies its YA-ness

What I'm Not Reading: The Stars are Legion, by Kameron Hurley

I've been trying and failing to read The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley (who I have liked in short stories) for weeks now, and I'm giving up 1/4 in. The characters are all idiots, I loathe most of them, and the story is repetitive. There's bits of cool worldbuilding and then the author says "no, there will be no sensawunda here! Eat shit!"

★☆☆☆☆ for what I've read.