Mark A. Rayner's Blog: Mark A. Rayner's Goodreads Blog, page 109

Don't judge me! (A post about video games)

Dara O'Brien just nails the whole video game art form, not only from the ridiculousness of the games themselves, but also from the perspective that not everyone plays them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some of my fave quotes:

"You cannot be bad at watching a movie; you cannot be bad at listening to an album; but you can be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you, and deny you access to the rest of the video game. No other art form does this. You've never read a book and three chapters in, the book has gone: 'what are the major themes of the book so far?'"

"Oh my god I'm in a gun battle! Which one of these buttons isn't crouch?"

"You're not supposed to like video games. It's the largest entertainment industry in the world, and we're supposed to NOT enjoy it. … If I'm at a dinner party and somebody asks me, 'hey Dara, how do you like to relax after a gig," it's less embarrassing to say: 'I like to masturbate to hard core pornography.'"

And his pantomime of what his video game characters look like perfectly reflects my character's actions the first time I played Bioshock.

You can find the video at YouTube if the embedded one is stuck on crouch.

Hey, Alltop likes that pet a unicorn game! Via The Daily What.

Louis CK is a seriously funny guy

I wanted to post this earlier, but it took a while to find the clip, but here it is, and sorry about the ad:

Disquieting Postcards I've Recently Received from My Future Self

Here's a snippet from one of my recent short fictions, published by the brand-spanking-and-awesomely-new, AE – The Canadian Review of Science Fiction. Essentially, it's about the dangers of self-improvement through time travel:

Dude!

Recognize the handwriting? Yeah, it's me. More precisely, it's you, circa fifteen years from now. Good news — you've finally lost that twenty pounds! Too bad you had to amputate your right leg to do it. At least it means our BMI is low enough to keep us out of the local "Fat Reduction Centre." The less said about those, the better. I hope you like the card. This is a picture of our home town after the alien invasion. Cool, eh?

M.

— P.S. Don't sweat the aliens. They're good for us.

Read the rest of the story at AE, and be sure to check out the other short fiction and essays too.

Alltop once married its own great-great grandparents.

You clay stassy, San Diego!

Love this clip, in which a newswoman demonstrates how to call a turkey. Safe for work, but really, it shouldn't be:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also found on YouTube if the embeddy thing doesn't work.

And if THAT wasn't classy enough, here's another hilarious (but rude) cartoon from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Alltop approves of all forms of lurkey tove.

René Magritte: Merchant Banker Masters His Mental Powers at Walton-on-the-Naze

While an art historian will tell you this 1964 painting is called "The Son of Man", and is meant to be a meditation on what is hidden in the visible world, they are of course, hiding the dreadful truth.

Since the early days of the 20th century, Britain's merchant bankers have controlled the world economy through their prodigious mental powers. A favourite training ground for this activity was the Essex seaside resort of Walton-on-the-Naze, mostly because of the heavy absurdium deposits in the region, but also because of the lovely beach and nice weather.

Absurdium, as all psionic adepts know, greatly enhances even the most latent mental powers, and so, The Ancient Order of Merchant Bankers would send all their most promising members to enhance and train their abilities. They could only graduate when they could perform the "apple in the eye" trick, pictured here. While this may seem like a simple bit of levitation, you will note that the banker's left arm is now bent backwards at the elbow.

Not pictured: the beach filled with non-banker holidaymakers bursting into flames, though Magritte does allude to this horror by filling the sunny sky with dark, human-smudge clouds.

Naturally, the Ancient Order no longer uses this ritual, and since discovering the derivative and credit-default swaps, it appears as though its members' prodigious mental powers have largely disappeared.

You can find more Famous Paintings with SF Titles here.

Alltop loves the derivative!

Classics of Literature — Ender's Game

This is a fun and page-turning read about eugenics, institutionalized child abuse, and genocide.

Humanity is at war with a distance race of aliens (called "Buggers") and for some reason, the adults are unable to discover the best way to fight this implacable ant-like enemy. (Apparently, Boric Acid doesn't work.)

What it really requires is the sense of wonder and innocence that only a child can have, and so, the people in charge of Earth's governments start a breeding program to turn out kids designed to be excellent space warriors.

The children are all tagged so the authorities can monitor all their thoughts and movements, while they are being evaluated for service in the International Fleet. (A device that is similar to an iPhone, but a little smaller, and you can't download your own apps to it.) After he is un-tagged, a young Ender Wiggin is attacked by bullies, and he kills one of them, so that the bullies will no longer bother him. The IF realizes it has made a horrible mistake. This is just the kind of ruthless logic they need in their war.

The rest of the novel follows Ender's rise through the ranks at Battle School and Command School, a marginally creepy shower scene, and eventually, the set up for an excellent sequel, The Speaker for the Dead.

It is worth noting that an anagram of Ender Wiggin is "Ending Grew I."

Christmas Shoes – Patton Oswalt

The snow is making it feel very Christmasy today, so I thought I'd post this hilarious routine by Patton Oswalt:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also here on youtube.

Alltop gets cranky at Christmas time too.

Irony alert!

I saw this photo this morning, and a passage from my post-apocalyptic comedy, The Amadeus Net, came to mind. This is the character of Les Parsons, who is a retired Canadian diplomat, speaking:

If not for the Shudder, Canada would have disintegrated, like the United States did. And there is the supreme irony. A physical threat like the Shudder was capable of bringing our country together, while in the States, it was the final straw. The cracks in the American social system were the Achilles heel; all it took was the arrow, that chunk of rock hurtling out of space, to kill the body politic of that great nation. I know all this intimately, because that's where I was stationed following the disaster. In the U.S. Actually, the Principality of New York. And then in Detroit, which is technically part of Canada now, thought most Canadians would never admit to it.

Photo by Jason Tester, via BoingBoing. More about The Amadeus Net at the publisher's site. (You can also buy it there, hint, hint.)

Alltop has 10,000 spoons and no sense of irony.

The New Clone 12000 Helmet Finally Comes to Market

This fully functional metro-wanker-clone helmet will render your enemies helpless with laughter, right before you incinerate their lower intestines. Two Gigilo-Hertz-powered ocular particle beams makes the Clone 12000 more devastating than last month's supernova in the Coagula System and only half as radioactive!

Decranialization is still a necessary feature of the Clone 12000, but Hyper-Clones will be happy to know that nearly half of the test group survived helmet implantation.

Other documented side effects include: Dry mouth (but not for long), urinary retention, blurred vision (while particle beams are operating), constipation, weight gain, crushing headaches, nausea, frequent explosive diarrhea, abdominal pain, inability to achieve an erection, inability to achieve an orgasm (male and female hyper-clones), loss of libido, agitation, anxiety, self-loathing, and some cyborgism.

Alltop also cause side effects. Originally published in 2007.

From Toulouse Le Grandfig in the Land of the Future.

Classics of Literature – Dune

Dune is an epic science fiction tale about religion, inter-stellar politics, and the awesomeness of riding around on giant worms that crap out the greatest drug ever.*

The drug in question is called melange, or spice; in addition to extending lifespan, spice allows human beings to see into the future and travel between stars, thus always being able to find a source of Cheetos. Unfortunately, the spice can only be found and mined on the desert planet, Arakis.

Enter Paul Atreides, heir-apparent of the noble family that has just been given control over the planet by the interstellar emperor. In addition to having kick-ass mentors, Paul has a mother who is an ex-supernun (of the order Bene Gesserit). His father, despite being an interstellar Duke, and a fascist, is kind of cool. Oh, and Paul may be the messiah, because he was in utero when his mother was all tripped out on the prescience-inducing melange.

But he may not live long enough to fulfill this destiny, because the House Harkonnen doesn't really want to give up the lucrative planet to his father. The head of the Harkonnen clan is Vladimir, who has an apocalyptic eating disorder. He requires anti-gravity devices to move and he is so depraved, he actually enjoys having his disturbed human-computer (mentat) lance his numerous boils. He also lusts after his nephew, 1980s Sting; to be fair, Sting likes to dress in a leather breechclout kind of thing, so if you swing that way … well, ring-a-ding. So yeah, the Harkonnens are bad. Obscene. Naturally, they try to have the Atreides killed.

Luckily, Paul manages to escape death (unlike his dad) and he is rescued by the desert-dwelling Freemen. They are basically a mix of Jihadis, Zen masters, and seriously kickass ninjas who wear rubber suits. They teach Paul how to drink his own piss and ride around on giant worms. But not in a gay way.

Worst of all, the Harkonnens have a stranglehold on the Cheetos shipments to Arakis. (How else to you think Vladimir got all his boils?) It is up to Paul, or Muad'Dib, as he is known to the ultra-butch Freemen, to avenge his father's death, and free all the Freemen (and Cheetos) on the planet.

*Actually, it's the larval stage of the giant sandworms that crap out the spice.