David G. Cookson's Blog, page 14

Imposter Zine Issue Number one: a review

By Ashley A.F./aka AshleyStar Galactica in the 25th Century/aka @godwhatamess

Another zine series from my friend from the Twitterverse, Imposter number one contains the long-awaited analysis of a phenomenon in which I have found myself participating over the last year and half: the live tweeting of the Super Sci-Fi Saturday Night lineup on METV.

METV is a station out of Chicago that has been operating since 2005 which brings viewers a large collection of beloved classic TV shows (MASH, Leave it To Beaver, Gunsmoke, to name a few). On Saturday nights, it runs a lineup of science fiction shows, anchored by Svengoolie (who hosts a different movie every week). A small but dedicated crew of us live-tweet jokes, observations, pictures, gifs, and for many of us, it is appointment television. (And for me, it has supplied the inspiration for a novel that I am in the process of finishing up.)

This is how I know “Ashleystar Galactica.” And she offers a perspective of it that provides context for what it means to find a place for yourself online. While there are all kinds of reasons to get off the internet, for some, it provides much needed community. If you’re ever on Twitter and feel like saying hi, feel free.

The second part of Imposter is longer and forces me to re-examine past prejudices. I’m talking about the “Cathy” comic strip, which ran from 1976 to 2010 and was much derided by, well…people like me, based on my cursory examination skipping past it in the comics.

Ashley turns this all on its head by making a spirited case of her identification with a character who in her own way represents a feminist icon. And it is a damn good case. There is truly no other character like her in the comics or even on TV. It’s a lot to get through, but it’s well worth it.


(Anyone interested in reading Imposter can get in touch with @godwhatamess on the Twitter and she’ll tell you what to do.)


Davezine Number Fourteen: The Bad Roommates issue http://davecookson.tripod.com/Davezin...
Pain Center: the Novel! is my most recent book and available here. http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...

All This Life

All This Life by Joshua Mohr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


At the Golden Gate bridge, a father drives his son across when they witness a horrific scene, which the son films and posts to YouTube…a girl realizes in horror that her sex tape has gone viral…A boy who was the victim of a bizarre and tragic accident attempts to reconnect with the one who abandoned him…a caricaturist dealing with her personal demons takes in a strange new roommate in her San Francisco apartment.

It is a tableau, a mosaic of interconnected characters that in some way are all joined by that single event on the bridge. And it all speaks to the nature of what it means to live most of our lives in an online world.

This book is terrific. That Mohr is able to clock in at just under 300 pages and get all these characters to their destination is an amazing achievement. I truly enjoyed every part of this book. And though my personal feelings toward relationships on the internet tend more toward the sunny side, Mohr’s assessment through the eyes of his characters is not wrong.

Highly recommended.





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Saturday Night: the Times of Clouds and Sun

This is my fourth time thru the editing stage of my latest book, The Times of Clouds and Sun. Hopefully, you will read the whole thing one day. But here is an excerpt that should resonate with my Saturday night TV friends.

The night started with a Western, which he didn’t watch. He had dinner and was in time for Voyager Trek, a horrible mash up of 70’s sci-fi TV shows that ran for half a season and was remembered by only a staunch few.

It starred Dick Gerard, a guy who used to be big news back in the 70’s (but later descended into making low budget porn in the late 80’s), as the titular Bob Voyager, who traveled with his robot friends Orbit and jusTIN and visited alien planets trying to spread a message of freedom and unity, all the while being chased down by the evil lizard monsters who were hot on his trail trying to destroy his way of life. It was like a bunch of other shows and it was much lesser and quite terrible and, and…the perfect sort of thing to riff on in Twitter with the other smartasses on line. Whom he missed terribly once the whole thing had been disbanded…
Now he watched dispassionately…

At the height of his online popularity, he could boast of being friends with a thousand other people…the ephemeral friendship of the faceless people who were regulars and liked his contribution to their Saturday night. His jokes, his observations, his cutting and sharp caustic wit. Where did all these people go during the reform act that resulted in the online purge that turned over a thousand of his closest friends one night of the week into people that in effect no longer existed? In as much that people who did not exist online were not real to him in that he could not count them or count on them to be there when he needed them…and who at any one time could be one shadow ban away from never seeing him again?

He watched the show and tried not to think too much about what Julie was up to instead of being with him tonight. How she could love someone else and not him? How she could be so damn nice and play off of him so easily yet be with someone else…?

As long as he didn’t ever meet the boyfriend, it made it easier…though the image he had in his head might have been much more intimidating than the real guy in real life who got to be with her instead of him…

We Can Save Us All (review)

We Can Save Us All by Adam Nemett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It is a few years in the future, and the world is a chaotic mess, beset by war, natural calamities and the scientific reality of time collapsing in on itself. Many truly believe that the end is near.

(Hello, We Can Save us All. I think we’re gonna be friends.)

Charismatic Princeton dropout Mathias Blue sets up a “Hall of Justice” like facility off campus called “The Egg” and at The Egg he assembles a group of other likeminded and alienated dropouts. Together, they form the Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes, with the self-imposed task of saving the world, such as it is.

His right hand man, David Fuffman, aka “Business Man” is along for the ride. He has always been hampered by his awkwardness and lack of strength. He is hopelessly in love with Haley Roth, a former high school drug dealer who finds her way back into his life at the Egg. He is a self-proclaimed super hero in his mind but in reality he is still that weak person he was before. This comes into play early when he finds that in spite of his new position as the member of a legion of superheroes, he is incapable of actually saving anyone when it matters.

But the group does a lot of drugs and have demonstrations and help out people where they can. And it all rolls along just fine until it takes a turn and this little cult begins to look like what it really is…
This book draws heavily from the world of comic books and taps into the zeitgeist of this time that we live in, where optimism still pokes its head through sometimes, in spite of the direction that our world appears to be headed.

I loved this book. Even as I often have little hope for the world that we live in, I sometimes still believe (like the Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes) that we can save us all.




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The Armadillo Effect

Yeah, what the hell, here's an excerpt from my upcoming novel, The Times of Clouds and Sun.

“How are you doing?” Larry came over to Baxter’s desk and leaned over the wall.

“Pretty messed up, right?”

“Yeah,” said Baxter. “But for now I take some comfort that even as we are doing the bidding of Satan, giving hand jobs and happy endings to all his followers, as far as I can tell these people are harmless and have no real power to do the things that they are claiming they want to do.”

“Right.” Larry yawned. “They just have a lot of money and we keep taking it. And the world continues on unabated no matter what we do.”

“I’ve always taken a special level of comfort in the fact that what I do has no value whatsoever. It’s the Armadillo Effect.”

“The what?”

“It’s something Julie says.” He couldn’t help but smile a little at the thought of it.”

Larry didn’t seem to react. “The mysterious Julie…”

“She’s not that mysterious…I mean, she works for this company. She works right on our floor…you could probably even see her if you took a few steps over there…”

“Yeah, sure, whatever, I got my own problems, I just got up to see how you were doing.”

Larry left and Baxter returned to his work. His harmless yet still soul crushing work…

A mostly tongue in cheek look at personal time management.

The other day I lost an hour.

Doesn’t seem like a big deal. But that hour turned into two hours which turned into going down the rabbit holes of day to day life and suddenly, all the writing I wanted to do in my current little 45 minute window I like to use…didn’t happen.

And that’s what brings me to the Time Management Essay I have been wanting to write for quite a long time…

I always wanted to write about this time issue, but have been held back by two things.

1. These days, the time I have for writing is almost exclusively dedicated to my wonderfully sprawling National Novel Writing month novel, entitled “The Times of Clouds and Sun.”

And

2. No one will find this interesting.
But this is something that aspiring writers talk about, this “how to make time while you have to work a job” thing.

I preface my words with 2 disclosures: I have no kids.

And…

I don’t have the sort of job where I need to take my work home.

For the past few years, I have gotten out of work at 1:30, early enough so that I had a nice solid chunk of time to take care of various personal needs (gotta squeeze that nap in!) and then at around 4 o’clock I was in an optimal position to write. And it worked. I wrote maybe 3 or 4 days a week, I did a zine, I wrote my books, and it was great.
But recently I had to change my schedule, and lose the sweet, sweet early off time to a dreadful 3:30…

Suddenly I became aware of all the time I was losing, about how late I was getting home, how driving home at that hour actually lost me 10 minutes every day and well…forget about writing.

So I started getting up at 5 a.m. to write. I have to be honest: I am not by nature a morning person. Technically, I am a converted morning person, but given the choice, I love sleep more than any other human activity. Getting up to be creative is horrible…

But I slugged through it for 2 months, taking advantage of a new feature of my schedule, which was having Mondays off.

Next I had the 2:30 off time. Now we were getting somewhere! I did the math: if I got home by 315, I’d have 30 minutes to shower, take care of the cat (he is diabetic and needs a shot twice a day), and have my cereal. Then a nap (I have to nap…I just have to!) and I am up and ready by 430. For various reasons I have to wrap by about 515-530.

Next month I am off at 3. This presents some challenges. But I think I can make it work….
I suppose if I were going to be really cutthroat, I could take shorter showers and cut out the naps. But let’s not be hasty.
Point being, time is valuable, but time to write is priceless. I know I have a luxury others don’t have because I have a supportive partner and a job that lets me out earlier than most people.

I lost that hour the other day but now today is Monday and I wrote for 2 hours uninterrupted.

I guess it all evens out.

One Punk’s Guide to professional Soccer, Book publishing, and corporate ideology. By Sean Carswell

One Punk’s Guide to professional Soccer, Book publishing, and corporate ideology.
By Sean Carswell. (Review)

Razorcake is a punk zine based out of LA who have been doing these little offshoot zines for a while now, which feature topics that are not traditionally considered punk. This one is basically an essay that applies a punk lens to the world of soccer and book publishing, and then turns to the basic mentality of corporate ideology which, when applied to these things, tends to ruin them.

I’ll be honest: I hate soccer. But the author makes an excellent point about how the apparent popularity of the sport runs counter to the myth that it can never work in America, that Americans have no attention span for it. The simple fact is that because there is no break in the action other than halftime, soccer doesn’t allow for the kind of commercial time that America football does and therefore is of no use to the advertisers. That’s it. It seems so simple I can’t believe I never thought of it myself.

Applying the same kind of clear logic to the book publishing industry, which the author shows to have been wrecked by an insatiable corporate beast that only knows profit. We’ve been told for years that e-books will replace regular books; that paper books will be a thing of the past. And yet…people still like books, people still buy books…but not at the rate that makes them profitable to corporate America, and that is the problem. The whole model is antithetical to a sustainable and democratic model.

In short, corporate ideology is the opposite of punk. Punk exists to stand as something that is not about profit but is about community and sustaining that community.

“Aim for Sustainability rather than opulence.” These words are written on the back cover.
There is no one overarching punk credo, but this one comes pretty close.

http://razorcake.org/one-punks-guide-...

The Times of Clouds and Sun...a few thoughts on writing

I have been working on a novel called The Times of Clouds and Sun, which I started November of 2018 as a “50 thousand words in 30 days” National Novel Writing Project novel.

And now it is February and I’m chest deep in this thing. And I just had some thoughts I wanted to spill out.

My story is about a man who works in a troll factory at some unspecified time in the future, where the internet has undergone a transformation where millions of people have been kicked off and objectionable people have been scrubbed from the record…

My hero works in an American troll factory modeled after the Russian version. This is a job he got 7 years ago after his superior (but not winning) performance in a “Twitter contest,” (something I made up but maybe could be real somewhere….) and he falls in love with a woman who just started working there. He is enormously shy in real life and will take some time to get to know her, which becomes mighty incompatible with his goal of taking a generous buyout from his company, who is looking to go younger and fresher…

I read it over the first time and was pleasantly surprised that the whole thing was at least mildly coherent.

Then there was the second time, where I made some red marks and notes for things that I need to change.

Now the third time through it, I am dissecting plot holes and trying to smooth over huge issues like…when does X happen and when does Y occur? And then there are those central facts about the logic of the story that need to be smoothed over and made consistent like…in the first draft, there is no social media anymore…so WHAT DOES HE TROLL???

Then there are back stories that need to be told. And whole sections that could be so much better if I just work on them…

The whole story had undergone several revisions and there are so many more to come. The whole thing was helped by my reading of a book about trolling on the internet and the battles that are waged every day. The book made me realize that while I was on the right track during my silly frenzied first draft, I was only scratching the surface. There’s still so much to do. (The book is called Like War by Emerson T. Brooking and P. W. Singer, and I highly recommend it).

But in the end, I believe in this one. And I don’t care how long it takes. I look at every problem with the novel as a welcome challenge. One day, The Times of Clouds and Sun will hit a shelf, somewhere. Maybe you’ll see it.

Pain Center: the Novel was my last book and you can check it out relatively pain free with this link.
http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...

Like War

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I feel like I gave this book short shrift in a one paragraph review and I wanted to fix that, because this is a terrific book…

Like War initially caught my eye for a personal reason. I wrote a story that was about a man who falls in love with a woman who works at a Russian styled troll factory and I used this book to fact check and color my story (I realize after writing it that I had barely scratched the surface). What I realized was that I had discovered the effect of social media was even broader than I ever thought. And that even if we were to “unplug,” the cat is out of the bag. You can no more get the influence of social media out of your life than you could stop breathing, because every decision in our lives is impacted by the opinions of others, as many Americans have to understand by now.

Like War is about the little battles that happen on the internet every day, and the way they have shaped the world around us, impacting events such as Brexit and the 2016 US election, along with many, many more events. This is an in depth look at the forces at play in a battle for hearts and minds, how people use disinformation to manipulate, how trolls and troll bots change the game online.

And this doesn’t even get into the influence of the dark web. It doesn’t need to, because the battles are taking place in plain sight.

Like War starts with a terrific overview of the history of communications that is both broad but concise, taking us from spoken to written word, through the printing press and through radio and television and internet, and how the internet has made things possible that were never possible before. It moves into chapters that examine the impact of social media on keeping secrets, on bringing down repressive governments, on the very nature of truth itself (and more) and it makes a very strong case that what we say and do on the internet causes a ripple effect, whether we realize it or not. There are effects on the way that we think that we are not even conscious of.

I give this book the ultimate compliment out of my cheap-ass heart: I want it in my personal collection, if for no other reason than to refute the many lies people use to justify their viewpoints, lies that originate somewhere and get pushed out on social media and become someone’s immutable truth.

If you want to make sense of our world, this is a good place to start.




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The Ethics of an American For-profit use of a Russian propaganda tactic…

(an excerpt from the Times of Clouds and Sun, my new novel)

“Is what we do illegal?
No.
Is what we do unethical?
“Not our problem…”

Strategic Ever Choice Industries is a pioneer in the soft usage of what was once a perverse use of the internet…we do not drive the workers to the point of exhaustion in ill-lit and windowless offices. We do not affect political elections nor do we operate internationally to affect the elections of others. What we do, we do here and we do for the benefit of our customers. We treat our employees well and we respect their rights. We pay well, we offer vacation time and benefits the Russians would have scoffed at.

We are not trolls. We do not call ourselves trolls nor do we act as trolls. We are contrarian information specialists, operating within the framework of the laws set down by the Winfrey Administration during the Internet and Social Media reform acts, an act that she signed and that her successor Gayle King helped to implement.
I’m not going to lie to you. We opposed this act. But I am a businessman. I don’t complain where I see an opportunity. I founded Strategic Ever Choice Industries and I dare anyone to tell us that what we do violates the spirit or the letter of that act.

Do we upset some people?

Yes.

Do we crush the enemies of our clients?

Absolutely.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Pain Center:the Novel (My last book) is still available. But not for much longer. http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...