Recently, One Million Moms decided that the new show Lucifer
deserved to be protested. I can’t say
Because Satan is worse than anything!
enough good things about a group that suggests they have a million (or more)
members, but in reality only have a few thousand, and use that imaginary clout
to cow advertisers and networks into their bidding.
The wants of the few, or the one, truly do outweigh those of
the many.
Having seen the light, I reached out to One Million Moms via
Twitter and let them know I not only agree with their heavy-handed approach to
censorship under the guise of Christian morality, but that they should also
protest my book Tears of Heaven.
Here's the Tweet I sent them:
Protest this book @1milmoms—Strong female character saves
the word and doesn’t cook http://amzn.to/1isw23Z
Unable to come up with 666 reasons for why
they should protest, I settled on the following:
#6 Reason to Protest
It's chock full of
strong female protagonists fighting pirates and slaying demons!
#5 Reason to Protest
You read the book. Did you ever see Del cook, clean, or get
her husband a Scotch on the rocks after work?
#4 Reason to Protest
Strong, witty, female protagonists who
kick butt and take names SHOULD NOT be allowed into the hands of impressionable
readers!
#3 Reason to Protest
Get on board with decent Christian values and morality. Men
and women fighting together to save the world? The Bible won't stand for this
and neither should we!
#2 Reason to Protest
IT’S A SIN I TELL YOU!
A SIN!
#1 Reason to Protest
Reading might make people think. Thinking might make people . . . ummm . . . I
dunno.
Break out the good Scotch my friends! Hell
Becomes Her has passed muster with my editor. It is
This is Marrin's BOOM STICK!
now off to the proofers, and from there
it will ride a winged-horse to the upper levels of Truth™ and Glorgy®! In honor of this moment, I offer you another
excerpt from the book:
“There was some dabbling in the early
days,” Marrin said. “Quite a few mythic creatures aren’t mythic at all. Although most don’t exist anymore. They’re extinct or nearly so.”
“Like us,” Del said and shook her
head. “Typical Throne policy. But how don’t I know about these Viking
elves?”
“Viking is a job title, not a people,”
Marrin scolded, but he smiled after he said it.
“How much time have you spent in the Nordic countries?”
“Some, but I’ve never been a fan of the
cold,” Del replied. “I went there for
assignments, and left when I was done.”
She turned to Jane and asked, “You?”
“A bit,” Jane said. “But my . . . education comes from Jaccob and
Joshua. We had rumors of a tribe in
Northern Nevada. They’re either
incredibly good at information control, or they aren’t doing anything out there
worth notice. Jaccob favored the later,
and Joshua figured why go looking for trouble.
There’s plenty in our region to sort out. We didn’t need to borrow more.”
“Oh wow,” Marrin said suddenly. He bounded off the ground fast enough that it
made Del’s head hurt. The big man
practically bounced into his room.
“If we’re going in for Ljosalfar,” he
said, his voice muffled by the walls, “I’m glad you talked me into this.”
Del looked a question at Jane. The other woman shrugged in confusion.
Marrin re-emerged from his room
carrying a leather shoulder harness with a pair of heavy looking revolvers
sticking out of the holsters and three boxes of ammunition. After the events in Utah, Del had made a
point of insisting that Marrin update his firearms. Previously, it’d been a chore to get him to
carry more than his sword. Nephilim,
except for Del, generally loathed change and often didn’t update their weapons
with the times. It was a combination of
their divine half that didn’t have to adapt, and their human half that didn’t
want to take the chance. Del’s cousins
ended up a few decades to a few centuries behind the times, often with tragic
consequences. Humans might fear change,
but for Nephilim is was downright deadly.
Han Solo wishes he had one of these.
Before Salt Lake, Marrin had conceded
the argument by compromising with an archaic Broomhandle C96 Mauser, and an original
issue Colt M1911. Neither of them was
less than a hundred years old. She’d
insisted he keep them well-maintained, but didn’t like that he had to carry two
kinds of ammunition for outdated weapons with disadvantages compared to more
modern handguns. It had never become an
issue, but Del had made a much stronger argument that in the future it
could. You didn’t want a misfire at a
critical moment in a fight, and almost everything was critical when going up
against rogue demons.
As far as Del knew, he hadn’t settled
on a weapon.
Marrin grinned as he pulled on his
shoulder harness and worked the straps into place. The leather was old, age and use darkened,
which suggested it was the one he’d used to tote his Mauser and Colt. But the holsters were new and customized to
fit his updated weapons.
“You got the Matebas,” Del noted.
The grin on Marrin’s face was
contagious. He looked like a little boy
with a new puppy.
Indiana Jones and the
Kingdom of the Magical Refrigerator makes me into a big ole science geek. Gut reaction to the famous “nuke the fridge”
scene was immediately and, generally correct.
I’ve only ever run into one fan who claimed that the scene was wholly
plausible for Indy to survive, let alone walk away from generally unscathed. Here’s the scene for you to review:
There’s a punch line to all this, but stay with me here. First, let’s review a
few details about an atomic blast that I spent several hours researching to
talk about the scene:
Concussive Force
The shock effect alone at
point-blank range crushes most objects in its path, including the parked cars,
all of the houses, all the items in the house and the car the bad guys are
trying to get away in. A reasonable
review of it stands that hollow cubes of metal, even lead-lined, wouldn’t be up
to the task structurally to a) survive the force of the blast or b) ride that
wave like a surf board.
Heat
If I remember correctly (and please
correct me if I’m wrong) the thermal radiation from an atomic bomb in the initial
blast is somewhere around 50 million degrees F.
The movie rightly shows houses and mannequins bursting into a
flame. Steel melts at 2750 F, and lead
at 327 degrees F.
Gamma Radiation
Alpha and beta radiation are pretty
easy to stop, and sure, a thin sheet of lead such as that lining a common
household refrigerator would be up to the task.
Gamma radiation, however, is a whole different ball game. Even a small amount of radiation exposure
would do great harm (and we’re not just talking about splitting your
personality into a large, indestructible hulk).
To successfully shield against that, you need lead about 1.3 feet of lead.
At this point Indy should be a flat
piece of glowing charcoal. But ok, let’s
forget the heat and the concussive force and radiation and accept that Indy
safely blasted out of ground zero and was perfectly protected by his lead-lined
coffin . . . sorry, refrigerator!
Impact Force
Indy’s magical fridge survives
being blasted out of a house that was being crushed and burned to nothingness
(along with everything inside of it) fast enough that it could fly out of ground
zero, ahead of the blast and catch up AND PASS the speeding car of the bad guys
(so we see them get theirs!). It impacts
the ground at 100-120 MPH (a conservative estimate given the time in which the
car had to accelerate and still be caught by the shock force), and
BOUNCES. It bounces REPEATEDLY! This is awesome. I love watching this happen. I laugh every time because of the silliness of
this in particular. The same thing
happens in “Iron Man” and I laugh there too.
With NO OTHER SAFETY MECHANISMS IN PLACE such as might be for a trip over
Niagara Falls, of which most people who attempt do not survive, and bouncing around inside his fridge while he impacts over and over, somehow,
Indy still opens the lid and walks away almost completely unscathed.
Wow, that was so much fun.
Give me another!
Or, I could have saved myself a great deal of time and
effort and turned to science. My
Google-fu is weak. I just nuked the fridge!
CHAPPiE is one of
the latest in a slew of near science fiction films that explores the idea of
artificial
Do you want to play a game?
intelligence (AI) and all the issues that go along with that. What amazed me most about the film was not
the portrayal of the titular character, CHAPPiE (Chappie) as an infant
intelligence learning through direct exposure (although Neill Blomkamp
certainly delivers on that score), but rather all the issues that the movie
touches on, only to barrel right past.
These missed opportunities for potential depth are not necessarily
a bad thing. Blomkamp has a good sense
of pacing, and the movie stays on target throughout the climatic scenes to
deliver on all the promises offered from the first two acts. But the questions of AI, and its seemingly
inevitable birth into our world, are ones that both fascinate and frighten me. Given proper time, Blomkamp would have had to
make three (or more) movies to properly explore the major themes he offers more
in passing through this scifi/action thriller.
In Ex Machina, a
very slow-paced and thoughtful look at the question of AI, when character Nathan
Bateman (well-played by Oscar Isaac) is accused of creating artificial consciousness
without considering the effect, he offers (and I’m working from faulty memory
here) that AI was never about one person creating it. Instead, it is an inevitability of a process
that we mere mortals put into motion long ago.
It’s what theorists call the Singularity.
If you’re thinking that this is pure science fiction, you’ll
definitely want to check out this Ted Talk with Martine Rothblatt, who created
Sirius Radio, and founded United Therapeutics.
We may be days, years or decades off from true AI, but it’s certainly
coming, and the myriad uncertainty and questions that come with it remain
wholly unanswered.
This is where CHAPPiE
falls down, not as a movie, but as a vision of the future where AI, placed into
a police/military-grade robot, has abilities far-exceeding human
limitations. One of the first missed
opportunities comes when Chappie himself has the chance to question his creator
Deon (excellently played by Dev Patel) as to why he would put the AI into a
body doomed to die. This is exactly the
conversation most people would love to have with our own “creator”. It’s the start of a slew of deep self-aware
questions for which humans have been struggling to answer throughout our
existence, and which have led, directly, to the creation of AI.
Don't worry, he's only an analog!
The film also provides a very brief, nearly glossed over
religious response in the character of Vincent (Hugh Jackman). Blomkamp provides no hand-holding with
Vincent’s character, and so if you’re not careful, you’ll miss his all-too-few
religiously-based, wholly negative, responses to the question of AI. Time really isn’t on Vincent’s side to share
with the audience the basis for his feelings and his personal bias (which is
strange for a guy in the heart of the robotics industry). But the message is clear enough—a spiritual
crisis will likely exist for humans in general and theists specifically when
mankind creates unique, individual, self-aware life.
Finally, and possibly the worst sin of the movie, is the
question of consciousness. If you
watched the Ted Talk about with Rothblatt, you can see that she’s not talking
about transference of everything that is RobRoy into an immortal frame. Instead, she’s talking about (nearly)
everything that makes up RobRoy, to the extent that technology currently will
allow, and creating a unique analog that is RobRoy 2.0. Such a creation is separate from me in all
respects, except how others will view him, and how he will interact with them. For Chappie, though, consciousness, despite
Deon’s admittance that human don’t understand it, is wholly definable by the
AI, and potentially transferable. This
isn’t RobRoy 2.0. This is RobRoy,
leaving his 40+ year old, frail, battered and disease-stricken body, and being
place . . . anywhere. In a computer
mainframe, in an internet cloud, in the titanium body of a military-grade robot
with the potential for immortality.
Don't hate me because I'm better than you and may destroy you're entire world and life as you know it.
That, right there, is the real question, the real concern,
the real fascinating and frightening idea.
That is where AI peers through the void to find an answer and finds
something peering back. I don’t fault Blomkamp
and CHAPPiE for hand-waving past a
question that theorists, philosophers, and scientists struggle with. It’s as if he glanced at the idea and ran
(screaming) right past it. That serves
the pace and plot of the movie, but it’s another missed opportunity to really
look through another door that Blomkamp cracked open and never shut.
The future is AI, and thus AI movies (along with scientists
and philosophers) will delve deeper into the questions in, and of, our future—while
having robots fight and blow things up for our amusement. Despite all that, CHAPPiE delivers what it promises, and offers just a glimpse into
more.
Thank you so very much for following me here on my blog, on
Facebook, on Twitter, wherever. It’s
great. Every little bit helps. As a small token of appreciation, here’s
another preview of my upcoming Hell
Becomes Her, the sequel to my award-winning Tears of Heaven. Enjoy!
“Elves?” Del asked. “They’re a myth.”
“You’re a myth,” Jane replied.
Del narrowed her eyes at the other
woman before she realized the Jane wasn’t doing a grown-up version of
I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I.
“Fair point,” she said. “But elves?
Like live in a tree, sing songs, make cookies, elves?”
“Those are Keebler cookie whores,”
Marrin replied. “They aren’t real
elves.”
“Do they sing songs?” Jane asked him.
“Focus,” Del ordered with
impatience. “It’s all I can do right now
not to start running to Nevada. I know
that’s insane, but that’s where Jordan is, so that’s where I need to be. Jordan didn’t go a single night without
nightmares for three weeks after Salt Lake.
She still has them from time to time.
She’s tough and resilient, but she’s twelve years old and she doesn’t
deserve this. Let’s try to keep the
conversation short, sweet and to the point.”
“The Ljosalfar,” Marrin said in a perfect, melodic accent, “are Light
Elves, sort of like Tolkien’s elves, but with fewer Rings of Power. They aren’t warriors either.”
“Light Elves suggests . . .” Del let
the thought hang. Marrin nodded to her.
“Right. The Dokkalfar. Dark Elves.”
“That sounds racist,” Jane said.
“You’ve been living in the U.S. too
long,” Marrin said, “but they are separate races.”
“You try being a minority, in a
minority, in a country that would prefer homogenized skin tones,” Jane defended
herself.
Del gave her a sympathetic look. She could understand the sentiment of being
outcast through no fault except existing.
Del looked back at Marrin. “How?” she asked. “How are there not one but two separate
sentient races?”
Not a real viking.
“The suffix, alfar,” he said the word as if he’d invented it, “more easily
translates to spirit. So they’re—
“Light spirits and dark spirits,” Del
interrupted. “Got it already. That’s not what I’m asking. How are there elves, of any color, running
around and I don’t know about it? And
don’t start saying, ‘There are more things in Heaven and Hell, Del . . .’ I
swear I’ll find something dull to stab you with.”
Marrin held up his hands to ward off
the threatened attack. “The Choirs and
mortals weren’t the only sentients the Throne created. There was some dabbling in the early
days. Quite a few mythic creatures
aren’t mythic at all. Although most
don’t exist anymore. They’re extinct or
nearly so.”
“Like us,” Del said and shook her
head. “Typical Throne policy. But how don’t I know about these Viking
elves?”
“Viking is a job title, not a people,”
Marrin scolded, but he smiled after he said it.
I'm the greatest writer ever, but only half the time!
Writers get frustrated all the time. We dwell in a world of diametrically opposite
emotions. On the
one hand, we’re the GOD
EMPEROR OF THE UNIVERSE, able to build up or tear down entire civilizations. We give and take life on a cruel, cruel
whim. We throw good, kind, strong
characters into a meat grinder and laugh with evil, maniacal glee.
On the other hand, we wallow in self-pity and
self-depreciation. Writing blocks,
filler words, telling-not-showing and the deep, dark, depressing knowledge that
every line—every single line—is boring, repetitive and could more easily have
been constructed by a three year-old on a Thorazine drip.
Into this manic-depressive world as crafted by Two-Face—Enter
the critic. Feedback is integral to the
writing process. No writer works in a
vacuum, and having someone tell you, “No, no, I’m sorry, but this doesn’t work!”
is of the utmost importance. Critics can
also go too far, especially if they’re friends.
They may not understand that telling you, “Your writing has literally
destroyed more hope and joy in the world than all the evil ever imagined,” can be
a bit much to bear.
Don't harsh my calm!
Two solutions present, if you're interested:
1 - Stop showing other people your
writing. If you're writing for your own enjoyment and anxiety, that's great.
Keep doing that. There's no compulsion to show it to others. I showed nothing
of my early writing to anyone ever, and I'm quite happy that I did. But, if
that's not going to work . . .
2 - Instead of getting upset, ask for
direct feedback and start improving your writing. Read books like Stephen
King's "On Writing" and Strunk & White's "Elements of
Style" (as well as a million others). Find those authors that appeal to
you most and study what they've done. Until you can emulate it, simply imitate
it.
Here's a bit of a steampunk short story that I'm finishing up for an anthology. This is set in the same world of Aubrey Hartmann who debuted in And Into A Watery Grave, but this time in the neighboring realm of Hamill—who you may remembered fought against our hero in the short Grenadiers and Dragon's Fire. We're a decade or so previous to those events, so Hamill is still a kingdom, and not yet the Glorious Republic of Hamill who fight against the Estro-Breitag Empire.
Enjoy!
Alissa
dashed among and around the trees. She
leapt over shrubs that
snatched and snagged her. Her hands pushed off from dark gray and deep
brown trunks in her desperate attempt to get away from the Brazen. The second set of clockwork boots caught up
to the first and two whistles sounded in near unison. A thrill of fear down her back at the sound.
“Do
not fear,” they said together, their voices almost exactly the same.
She
cried out in frustration and panic.
There was no escape. She could
only run for so long on her human legs.
They were metal and wheels and gears.
They would never grow tired. They
only had to keep after her, keep pressing her, and eventually she would
stumble, fall and they would kill her.
Another
brush of air and she felt the back of her dress catch and tear as the Brazen’s blade
ripped through the tattered cloth. A new
line of pain scratched into the back of her left calf as she kicked away, the
very tip of the Brazen’s falchion had caught her. Alissa’s breath was ragged and her lungs
burned from the effort. The strength
flowed out her arms and legs like water from overturned cup. In minutes they would have her.
She
fought her way up another small hill and scrambled down, half falling as she
struggled to maintain speed. Alissa
rounded a large tree trunk and a thin ravine gaped open before her.
“Go,
duchess,” she heard Nitta tell her. “Go!”
Alissa
dug deep, used the slant of the hill and pushed her abused body to gain as much
speed as possible. A part of her mind
told her she’d never make it—the gap was too great. She ignored the warning, and drove herself to
the edge and up into the air. The open
space of the ravine yawned wider. A
jagged pile of rocks loomed beneath her.
She wind-milled her arms and legs, as if she should somehow push against
the nothingness and thrust her body forward a few precious inches. The edge of the far wall drew closer, almost
within reach. Alissa started to
fall. The sharp, coppery tang of fear
filled her mouth. She reached out her
arms, willed the edge into her hands.
Her
chest slammed against the edge and she heard a harsh crack in her ribs. The air whooshed from her lungs with an
explosive grunt. Alissa scrabbled at the
cold, wet dirt, desperate to find a grip.
Her nails dug and tore furrows into the ground. None of her attempts were deep enough to hold
her. She slipped, her own weight dragged
her further off the edge toward the ravine.
Her left hand caught on something, a small root or stone. She grabbed at it, and her slide down
stopped.
The
sound of the pursuing Brazen cut off abruptly.
A clang sounded and a moment later a pair of metal boots impacted the
edge of the ravine only a stride from where she clung to the wall. The impact from the Brazen rattled through
the wall of the ravine and Alissa’s handhold.
If she hadn’t been clinging to the side of the ravine for her life, she
would have leapt from her skin in fright.
“Do not fear,” the Brazen told her and
lifted its falchion for the last time.
How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life.
Maturing and becoming an author with aspirations towards it
being a full time gig has really changed
out how interact with folks online,
especially social media. It used to be
that I was always up for a good debate. But
not everyone understand that a debate is vastly different from yelling, “You’re
wrong! You’re wrong! You’re wrong!” As a consequence, I’ve grown more circumspect
in how I approach topics of strong emotion.
But not always. Not
every day.
Today, for example, a buddy of mine posted up a comment equating
freedom of choice to his decision not to wear a helmet when he bikes. His bike doesn't have an engine, and neither
does mine, but I still wear a helmet every time I go out. I don’t even know if it’s the law around
here, but my perspective on this particular choice doesn't take that into
account.
Now, I don't fault my friend his choice. Not at all. I disagree with him (and he with me) on a lot of issues, but I have a great deal of respect for the man. But it occurred to me that wearing a helmet isn't a
personal choice at all.
Let me offer a bit of perspective here on how I arrived at
this conclusion. Way back in 1997, I was
diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, a nasty version of IBS that causes the intestinal
tract to inflame and potentially cause partial or full restriction. The result of this is, at the outset,
incredibly painful cramps, and can, if untreated, lead to a rupture. That is, as they say in the medical field, like
being nuked from orbit. There is no cure
for Crohn’s and most patients end up in the hospital at one point or another,
some of us get to have surgery—bowel retraction. That’s a fancy way of saying they cut out a
chunk or your intestine. In my case, I
lost a foot or large and a foot of small intestine and I now get to live in a
state of constant, but generally low-level, pain. It also means I’m on medication and under the
care of a couple of doctors for the rest of my life.
Melt your face off—WITH PAIN!
I could, of course, say “Eff off, bro!” and not take my meds
(which can have some fun side-effects) and not go to my medical appointments,
and not be probed liked a cow on an alien mother ship once a year.
What does that have to do with bike helmets? The same logic applies.
Unless you're a hermit that lives in a cave, if you go down
and are injured or killed because you weren’t wearing a helmet that impacts
every person around you. Worse, if you're in a vegetative state don't you leave
your friends and family in a medical limbo of horrible choices—maintain your
body on life support indefinitely to increasing medical costs, or make the
hard, hard, hard decision to terminate your life? Thankfully, in my
40-mphlmrphl years, I haven't ever had to make that kind of decision. But I
assume, for those who have that kind of choice has a deep, resounding and
guilt-ridden repercussions, yes? You and yours may forever question whether or
not they made the right decision.
It would seem like your choice to wear a helmet and my
choice to follow my doctor’s recommendations are personal choices. Your head and my gut are owned by no one
else. On the face of it, that’s
true. Your body, your rules. Unless you’re a woman who wants to take
control of her own reproductive system in the United Sates . . . but I digress.
Me, personally, I have family and (supposedly) friends. I have a wife and three beautiful little
boys.
If you bleed, you should wear a helmet!
In short, I have
responsibility. My life is not wholly my
own, and I’m thankful for that. It would
be a very boring existence otherwise. But
if I want to claim that I care about and love any or all of my friends and
family, then I need to do the things my doctors tell me in order to stay
upright, reasonably health, and long-lived while still suffering my condition.
What about you? Do
you still think it’s a groovy expression of independence and “stickin’ it to
the Man”? Do you really feel that not
doing the very least in safety is somehow making you a stronger, better, and
more righteous dude?
It seems wholly irresponsible, not to mention
fashion-backwards, to make this about "personal choice" when the
impact goes way beyond the individual.
