Justin Howe's Blog, page 53
March 8, 2012
Ur the Great, Known By Many Names
Your world lies in ruins.
Ur, City of the Golden Pyramid, once the jewel of the world, now a ruin. Ur the Great, known by many names: Urceb, Uulro, Baalbel-Ur…
Ur, the first city, and the last.
Some say the ways of the populace grew so abhorrent as to offend the very gods. Others say it was destroyed by a plague that came from the stars. Eight hundred years ago Ur disappeared. Soon after, the world was wracked by the Cataclysm. For centuries life was a desperate struggle, and only in recent...
March 4, 2012
The Phantom Lord Speaks
"For me the daylight world is but an illusion; the dreams of a night are real. That is where my true life lies." – Edogawa Rampo
March 3, 2012
These Days
Jin and I got smartphones. There's the first picture.
Look! It's Pohang!
This is the end point of the harbor where it becomes a stagnant canal. If you walk straight across the water (what? You can't?) you'll pass the fishing fleet on your left, and the ship repair dry docks on your right, then you'll come upon a few scrap heaps, and the ferry boat landing before passing the lighthouse and going out into the Sea of Japan East Sea.
Lovely, no? The plan's to extend this canal down to the river. So ...
March 1, 2012
The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March
"The Lost Classic"
"The book that made me want to be a writer." – William S. Burroughs
The Wild Party is a notorious (banned in Boston) narrative poem written in the mid-1920s and published in 1928 about a pair of hard living theater types, Queenie and Burrs. One day they decide to throw a party for their equally hard living friends. People get drunk. People get fucked. People cry. People fight. One guy gets shot. The cops bust up the place. The party ends. It's a quick read with a large cast o...
February 28, 2012
From Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"
"Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."
February 26, 2012
My New Fighting Style Is Unbeatable
From the Strangest Thrill-Drama in All History! "Delinquent in Outer Space" at Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blog.
February 25, 2012
A Squalid, Sinister Atmosphere, Full of Slime and Decay
Locus Online gave "Shadows Under Hexmouth Street" a recommended review.
They say some other stuff. Click the link to read the rest of it.
I was as they say stoked.
February 22, 2012
"Shadows Under Hexmouth Street" at Beneath Ceaseless Skies
"Shadows Under Hexmouth Street" is my Joe Mitchell in Lankhmar story (mixed in with bits from my late aughties day job at an architectural preservation company).
Joe Mitchell was a 1940s New Yorker writer. That's him over there on the left. He specialized in urban pieces about kooks and weirdos. Lankhmar's a massive fantasy city created by Fritz Leiber. That's it in the middle as drawn by Mike Mignola, the Hellboy guy. In the early 1970s Leiber published Our Lady of Darkness, there on the...
Hipster: The Inverted Pyramid of Hate
Hipster's come to be a meaningless insult. It's become one of those vague words no one has a clear meaning for, but still a desire not to be called. A bit like what happened with the word "sentimental".
Examples:
"I freakin' hate hipsters!" said by 42-year old exurban Ohio resident inside a Starbucks in reference to every 20-to-40 year old living in a metropolitan area.
"I freakin' hate hipsters!" said by 27-year old Brooklyn resident about everyone who reads home design blogs.
"I freakin' hate h...
February 17, 2012
Questionable Complaints
A complaint I hear regularly from expats is that X (where X is some Korean thing like beer or gum) tastes like chemicals.
"Korean beer sucks. It tastes like chemicals. Where can I get good gum? Korean gum tastes like chemicals. Anyone know where I can get shampoo online? Korean shampoo tastes like chemicals."
(Yeah – I don't know about that last one either.)
But my question is where the hell are these people coming from and what were they eating there to know so well what chemicals taste like?
...
