Justin Howe's Blog, page 41

The NASA Voyager Recordings

Music and bands are the dullest conversation topics 99% of the time with that 1% for actual musicians and people engaged in courtship seduction rituals. These conversations tend to quickly veer into the realm of status posturing and one-upmanship.

“Oh yeah, well have you heard of this stoner-core, emo, noise, dark ambient, anti-rock, Bolivian band?”

Blah. Who the fuck needs it?

But that said, I feel the irresistible need to share my latest musical obsession with you all: the NASA Voyager recordi...

Project GutenBLARG!

Every now and then I think of spending a whole year reading nothing but books on Project Gutenberg. I’m unsure if this would be a great idea or a terrible one. To this end I will download heaps of books and put them on my kindle. This is what happened yesterday, and while I don’t know if I’ll spend a whole year reading Gutenderp it’s likely a lot more forgettable Victoriana and Alexandre Dumas will enter onto my to be read pile.

The picture is from Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blog. I have dozens...

Nero’s Megadungeon

I finished Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape. It was pretty great. I recommend it.

It’s the type of book you can read a chapter of and then put aside for weeks or months and then pick up again when you’re on the way to the can or wherever, read another chapter, and continue on this way until the book’s done. It’s a collection of biographies, so it never feels like you missed anything.

Here’s a bit about Nero’s swinging megadungeon:

“What they saw as a labyrinth of rooms within a mound of ear...

Damn, Horace!

“Lonely people write letters, so that they can communicate with those whose eyes are turned elsewhere. Often such letters are merely negative, calls for sympathy, cries of despair. Often they are dreary personal reports, tedious self-analyses, lists of miniscule happenings within one tiny system.”

- From Poets In A Landscape by Gilbert Highet (the Horace chapter).

Assorted Game Updates

I’ve been gaming with some regularity. Here are various updates:

In Ur, the party hired a cohort of orc magi and assaulted the ghoul stronghold, where they slew plenty, and one or two of them was nearly slain themselves. They encountered one Helemor the Awakened, but were unable to defeat him. He escaped down to the lower level where strange machines emit eerie lights and a column of pitchlike darkness rises to fill the sky above the complex. They’re peering about, regrouping, and preparing to...

Last Rites Audio

The audio podcast of my story “Last Rites For A Vagabond” is now available at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It’s 21 minutes long and read by Rajan Khanna. Listen to it as you drive to work, do laundry, or any other task in which you might listen to stories. Ideally, you should listen to it at work, so that way you make money while you listen.

Snowpiercer

I finally saw Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, and without so much as a spoiler alert I’ll say it mixes chem trails, John Galt the Social Darwinist, a wonderfully absurd school room scene, lots of ultra-violence, some fey aegyo, Tilda Swinton doing a creepy malevolent Ms. Marple the School Marm impersonation, and a nod to Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” all together to make a satisfyingly bleak action picture. Not to mention it has characters who are actually characters instea...

Meanwhile in Ur…

The party prepares to assault the ghoul stronghold at the center of the Nightzone.

July Books

A bumper month for laying about on the couch reading!

1. Mindplayers – Pat Cadigan

In 1955, EC Comics launched a comic called “Psychoanalysis”, and it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect for a comic called Psychoanalysis with a nameless doc talking to people laying on a couch. Mindplayers is sort of like that comic, except it’s SF from 1992, so the psychoanalysis is done via VR you access directly through your optic nerves after you remove your eyeballs. The book has more an episodic than...

You Live In A Heavy Metal Universe If…

… your advanced technology is extremely painful to use. Need to download a new app to your phone? Well, that’s easy. Just insert this eight inch spike into your right eye, and this barbed plug up your butt, and you should have it downloaded in a second.

… your spaceship’s engines are covered in sharp, spiky bits that A) whir about fast enough to dice the unsuspecting into bone jelly, B) bleed off gouts of energy, preferably lightning, to once more wreak havoc on the unsuspecting. Also, your en...