Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 33

Satan's Plea on Sale!

Oh man, gonna be the 10th anniversary of having written this novella (or short, depending on your cutoff), but apparently Satan's Plea is on sale by amazon. The paperback that is. Normally sells for 20$ and is currently 4.36$. Not sure why Amazon wants it that cheap, but apparently that doesn't affect my own royalties, so go ahead and get it, cause I'm definitely raising the prices for most the paperbacks over the next year, what with inflation and all. 
Check it out ASAP as I have no idea when Amazon is gonna end the sale. 
Peace
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Best Books of 2021

Ones I read, that is. 
Well, it has been a crazy year. I knew it would be worse than 2020, and I have a sense that everything will get worse in the future given the tensions rising among the great powers (the stupidity of the elites in each nation and so forth, we've seen this show before) as well as Climate Change. So some of my books have been brilliant dives into the real world, peeling back the wallpaper a little and some of them are escapist tripe, but enjoyable.
Here they are (some manga ahead):
Abandon the old in Tokyo . Short Manga stories about the poor in Tokyo. Loved it. Dark with sad endings, but really hits you right. Check it out. Seriously. It takes less than an hour to read and yet is so brilliant. 
Against a Loveless World . Really, some brilliant story telling here. Heart wrenching but man is it good. Check it out if you can. 
Captain Blackman . Also a great novel. I think it's the best tone I've read from Vietnam or about it from the American side at least. 
The wretched of the Earth . Definitely worth reading, if only because most everyone alludes to this book over and over (and sometimes they really seem to get it way wrong). 😑. Highly recommend even if I think he got some things wrong. 
Unwomanly face of war . Women on the eastern front. Really good stories, though many are really damn dark (as you can imagine). 
American Histories . Really good gems here in this short story collection. 
A little Hatred . Man was this an enjoyable read. Took little more than a couple days to do so. 
Tokyo Ueno Station. Another brilliant look at the homeless in Tokyo. Loved every bit of it. Heartfelt and incisive. Really worth it. 
Showa . Japanese Manga historical fiction. The balance between the story of the author growing up and the history is brilliantly done. Can't recommend this enough. 
Solid ones but not completely brilliant:
Homeland Elegies . Not sure what to think about this book. Had some real good thought provoking parts. So that alone should have you reading it. 
The vanishing Half . Didn't get into this that much. I mean, this is well written and a damn good story. But I think the questions and thoughts raised in the first half aren't really answered or dealt with in the later chapters. Liked it a lot but some of that is preaching to the choir, you know? Wanted more from it. 
Notes on a Foreign Country . Solid stuff, even if much of it is preaching to the choir (for me). And, of course, some of it didn't pierce deep enough for me. Still worth looking through. 
Reign of Terror . Not as good as I had hoped. Even after I hoped that the filter of time would improve it. I mean basically it reiterated all I already knew. I do appreciate the author trying to show some attempt in looking into this aspect of our society, but not as deep as I'd have hoped.   
Not the end of the world . Also barely making the list, as the above one.  I mean some of the stories really do hit right in the heart, but for the most part felt kinda what you see coming out of the MFA world (don't think the author is that at all though), much like the myriad of cafes/restaurants I see today that are perfectly decorated but lack.. well something... these are nice, well written stories, but really lacking in just something else. What should I call this? Writing for suburban [1] ennui that DFW etc all have kept alive till today (and one with which the Cold War tainted our literary landscape to this day). Shame. 
honorable mentions: No One is Talking about this . Love some of her essays on LRB and as a writer I appreciate what she did here with the portal of the internet vs reality. But much of this ended up falling flat for me. Good stuff and good writer so I will read more in the future. 

[1] and more specifically a very provincial kind of American or European view of the world.. 

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Omicron & the Matrix (spoilers!)

Looks like Omicron might be pretty bad? Get vaxxed if you haven't already. triple dosage, if you can. I got mine at Amazon clinic and it was worth it, tbf. Fast and lotsa people [1] got through. Can't complain, especially after a host of pharmacies essentially were booked up until forever and were like gtfo, you, and sign up online or die.  😤 Not the pharmacists' fault, just the companies they work for who are short staffed. 
And don't get me started on tests (making this a huge failure of the Biden admin and the FDA for not approving enough kinds of tests quickly enough [2])
[spoilers ahead) Anyhow, watched the new matrix flik, and man what a wasted chance. It started out pretty cleverly meta af and all and then just ends like the first one, but with more bullets etc. Sad. I'm serious. Very sad as it could have been more. Maybe worth it just for the starting part. 
This reddit thread kinda encapsulates it, as does this specific thread within it:
"

I don't want to say it's crap, but I won't argue with anyone who does."

 Fair enough. Don't entirely agree with the following reply:

At one point I checked to see how much time had passed - assuming I was just over halfway through - only to find that I had about 1/5 of the movie left, at which point I realised I couldn't even recall what had just happened in the past hour. I feel like my brain saccadic-masked it all because it deemed whatever I saw to be unintelligible or something.

Do they plan to follow up on this? Because I genuinely don't even know if that ending was supposed to be definitive for the franchise or not. I've never been that confused about a movie before.

Seems a little off to me. Much of the story and the reasoning was clear to me (the resurrection of Neo-trinity as it would help having that story/hope around etc), but it still didn't make it a good movie, see?
Another person makes a good point that the action scenes were horribly done. Really feels like that part was phoned in. 
as does this one:

I was super onboard with all the metanarrative stuff going on in the beginning, but then they just kinda shelve it and then here we are repeating all these same scenes from the first trilogy, only its all worse this time. I almost started laughing when Not-Smith and Neo fell through a floor and magically into the subway station from Matrix 1, where they then proceeded to just havea significantly worse version of that same fight.

Note how this person explains the plot holes:
Also keep in mind The One is a result of balancing the Matrix equation blah blah etc etc after the fact. The Analyst started with what was needed for that balance--Neo and

 Trinity this time--and build around them. So it makes sense they have the super user powers collectively.

And holy crap but do some fans have the most in-depth theories [3]:

They were mostly addressed in the OT and information from the Animatrix. 

The Animatrix which animated the prequel founding of Machine City and the creation of the Matrix supports it was the real world. If you rewatch the scenes and listen to what the Architect and Oracle said, it basically explains most of it. Neo is the sum of all the free will that refuses to accept the Matrix and his purpose in life is to basically do server maintenance by turning the servers off and on again by rebooting the Matrix and starting Zion all over again. When he touched the Source code after meeting the Architect that was arranged by the Oracle for Neo to choose Trinity this time out of love for her instead of a general self sacrificing desire to ensure humanity's survival, changed the game. Neo left with basically system admin access to the machines in the real world too. When he tried using it, he wasn't ready and he got knocked out and was jacked back into another server between servers. The Mobil Avenue where the Trainman is System Admin and rules that digital server. Trinity had to have been plugged in somewhere to reach Neo and get him out. Since Neo was connected to the Mobil Avenue server, he had a wireless connection with it. 

When he was seeing things in the real world, if you notice only the things that carried machine code/machines were glowing to him. He couldn't see anything else. He couldn't see Trinity was impaled until he physically felt the ship piercing her body. He describes seeing the light of the machine city which we can see through his pov when they cut to it. How it only shows Trinity's reaction to the sun since only she could actually see it, but not Neo. Also again he sees Machine City in that clip and only sees it glowing, but the rest is black. The battle between Neo and Bane's possessed body by Agent Smith, he only sees Agent Smith's machine code and once the body dies, he can't see it anymore. Also he needed Trinity to drive the rest of the way since he cannot see the regular surroundings. Neo couldn't fly, bend reality, move super fast, etc in the real world. Only see and effect things that are part of the Source machine code.

Then there are some people claiming wokeness has gotten to this franchise as well (not really valid, IMO). 
And then some fan hopes:

both Zion and the Matrix served as two equally fake layers of simulation

well, that was a big theory back in 2003 after the end of the first second film - if Neo has powers in "the real world", is it just another layer of simulation? but apparently not, according to Rev. i was always a little disappointed in that outcome, but also the theory seemed kind of uncreative as well (13th floor did it already, etc)

Seems like people really think about this stuff, huh? Not me. Oh and this Redditor raises a great point about effects in our movies. All CGI still doesn't meet the criteria:

Mad Max: Fury Road

 showed up on the scene, blew everyone's minds, demonstrated exactly how to pull off practical effects + CGI for maximum impact... 

... and then every Hollywood studio completely ignored the lesson.

Edit: Although Chris Nolan has been doing it for years now, forgot to mention.

Well, that's about it for me on that thread [3]. Here are the reviews about which all I can say is that even though the right has stolen the idea of "red-pilling" people as opening their eyes to right wing ways, aka propaganda, that doesn't make the matrix a movie about right wing ways. The right has and always will co-opt other symbols (especially even remotely lefty ones) because they don't have much moral authority, only that of violence. More on that here. 
So far the best movies of the 
[1] A random aside, but started this draft a week ago and finishing it now. lotsa things happening, people. re omicron, there's talk of daily deaths of 3-30k (previous peak here was 3.3k) and one has to wonder if even the average comes to pass, we're looking at apocalyptic levels of deaths, and I still can't completely fathom it. 
[2] I swear tfg, are people trying to get Trump in in 2024. The few times Trump probably got credit and 74M people voting for him are when he signed the Dem's free money for people bill and when he yelled at the Fed about raising interest rates (correctly, as the it seems it shocked the feds since then and him violating some really fucking stupid norm of "no political interference with the fed no matter what" made him seem competent) and also when he yelled at the FDA to approve now and not take a fucking week to be idiot bureaucrats. Seriously this is some stupid shit people. 😞 sigh.  

[3] this last one:

In broad strokes, it's an epilogue to a love story that Lana was (at times almost begrudgingly) only able to tell in the confines of the Matrix IP she and Lilly created. And the epilogue to the love story itself worked very, very well to me.

Truth be told, it felt like both a Thank You and a Fuck You to the original trilogy. The meta commentary is primarily found in the first Act, and this is where the Fuck You is both not as clever as it thinks it is but curiously neither is it as clever as it could have been. The Thank You though is sprinkled throughout, and this is the aforementioned love story. So it is really no surprise when I say that anything connected to Neo and Trinity is the most fleshed out. Honestly? I barely remember anything explaining anything with regards to any new character and any new variation of the Matrix (not the fault of any of the new cast. Generally, alongside a few familiar 'Sense8' faces, they were good). This is the absolute least of what Lana is interested in (the Fuck You) and that transfers to the audience.

I also suspect that after years of hesitating to come back to the role, the idea of focusing more on the Neo/Trinity love story is what finally convinced Keanu to come back. Keanu and Carrie sell it, by the way. All the way.

So much more that could be said. So much more that could be faulted, questioned (the action scenes are an afterthought, although the final act 'chase' was a lovely form of fucked up symmetry to our first ever meeting with Trinity in '99). As a Matrix movie, it wasn't necessary, and Lana whilst being respectful clearly wasn't interested. As a closing of a love story that gave both her and Lilly their careers, lives and personal identities? It might be the most personal story Lana has told.

Just a final thought. If there is to be more movies in this IP, spread it out. Let others tell stories in it. Writers. Directors. But on one condition. Leave Neo and Trinity alone. They have their ending. Give others their start. I can think of nothing more Lana than that.

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Damn More Manufacturing of Consent.

Our elites really want us to focus on other people and not them robbing the country dry while being way more evil than Russia or China could ever be. 
So this video is pretty good and clarifies what's happening there. Once again, don't buy the propaganda (and wtf is Biden doing? Did his pulling out of Afghanistan mean he had to make a deal with the defense contractors/companies?), we're the ones escalating things by sending warships into the Black Sea and sending more weapons to Ukraine. 
Imagine if China did that to Cuba and sent warships into the Gulf of Mexico. But, of course, our elites want us screaming about some foreign country that's bad. Or talk about democracy going down elsewhere when we have fash people in our country who doing damn well to destroy it. Stop focusing on monsters overseas. 
This is everywhere in the West. In Europe plenty are up in arms about Qatar because of 1k migrants dead. Yea that's bad, certainly. What about 20k migrants killed by Europe at the bottom of the Med sea? Oh, not a peep. 
Don't even get started on the minute of hate around China. Just idiots, just apes screaming hoping that people don't focus on the failures of the elites or their sins. Remember, jobs went to China, but there was grand robbery here at home by the rich... of course, if they can get you to blame others, then all the better (never mind the nuke issue or the need for, with climate change, or even with this pandemic) to get some sort of working international movement of states. 
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DAmn. If you're in KY and the nearby states, hope you're well.

looks like more than 70 dead. Warehouses (amazon, a candle factory as well, the latter has a refrigerated truck being brought in) hit. Talk of 250mph winds and 304mph max winds. Which sounds absolutely nuts. Only a bomb bunker would survive that. I mean, I've only lived through 40-70mph winds and that was ridiculous, so going for 5-8X that amount sounds absolutely nuts to me. [1]
The scenes of destruction are, of course, just ridiculous. 


And this was in the dead of the night. So many caught unawares, I imagine. 




There was another video of a chaser following one, but that seems to have disappeared? wtf, twitter? Can't find it anymore even on a simple search. [2] Anyhow, there are plenty of good ones. 
But that's not enough currently, in terms of the feeling of end times. Nevermind that omicron is spreading [3] we're seeing deaths tick back up here. I mean our 14 day average just barely got under 1k deaths per day. Then right back up to 1300, last I saw. This with the vaccine widely available. Think about how nuts that is. 
We are passing 800k deaths and are probably way past that, given how many governors are willing to obfuscate the truth by tamping down their numbers. Other issues like ODs are in the 100k level (not sure if that's all evenly spread out). And people are blaming... well anyone but the ones to blame (not that I think Biden has been great... just look at the other side, tho). 
Once again even reading about previous pandemics didn't prepare me for such levels of dumb. Or self entitled evil. As James Baldwin says: ignorance allied with power is the greatest enemy of justice we know. 
And what are our leaders doing? I mean Bidens BBB was fine, if not enough, but even that was whittled down by our suburban ideology [4] moderate dems (and GOP refusing to help the country).... well that's in the form of pandemic preparedness being cut down, in the middle of a fucking pandemic, mind you, from 50B (or so) to 3B. Then, every last one of those chicken littles, screaming inflation and deficit, (never once s reaming about the 9T printed for the rich at the start of the pandemic) passing 700B for one year in "defense" spending. Think about the dumb or corruption involved with that. That's 9X what BBB is (probably 10X as that spending will always go up). 
Yet our media and everyone keeps talking about BBB as if it's some big deal. While the 9T and the other matters haven't once been talked about. Again, think about how fucking dumb that is. The worst is that people aren't on the streets about this. Even my libertarian friends (never truly libertarian more so than just suckups for the rich, IMO) didn't say a damn word. 
The madness just gets to me, people, and CC hasn't even picked up in terms of destruction. 
[1] Last night we had gusts to 50mph here in Seattle and I'm not sure the area would survive 100mph, cause no one's ready for that level of wind, and you know my experience with Sandy and how I'm certain NYC won't survive a direct hit by a hurricane, even though that's more likely to happen these days. 
[2] Some of my friends see things like this as conspiratorial. Especially when it comes to covid. For something like this, my mind also veers to the conspiracy (did they cut it off so other bigger players could have more popular videos? I mean on YT all I see are local news channel ones now, so could be). The algorithms make it too easy to think this way, tbf. 
[3] And again with the talking bobble heads on twitter saying get your booster today. My man, I cannot get a booster to save my life. The wait lists are too long. That weird certainty that others are as well connected as they are, really pisses me off. Probably more than the anti-vaxxers. or nearly as much. 
[4] Remember how in 2018 I pointed out that, sure, many hate Trump, but even here in WA we voted down a very slight carbon tax? Yeah that's the direction we're headed in. Slow eco-fascism. 
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Still COVID

Variant: Omicron. Sounds like "Oh" Micron. An ode to a measurement or something. Seriously need better names. But now when boosters are needed, it seems that it's impossible to get them. wtf. Shouldn't there be an all hands on deck for these? Meanwhile red counties are letting them go to waste. Sigh. Talked to a pharmacist and they said we have enough, just not enough people to jab them in arms. Huh. Really need to do this like the Army. Line people up, and tell em to walk, taken arms and, boom, boom. boom. No whining, just walking. I'm sure you'll get to 1000 an hour per jabber. 
I'm serious. 
Anyhow, cool quote I saw on line:
”To die for the country, tell me why would I do that, when this country is dying before me” - romanian rapper circa 2012
deep son, real deep. 
So in that case, where does r/antiwork fit in? A dying nation's symptoms?

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Thinking about this article in the LRB

First, kinda ot, is that I've been reading LRB articles on my phone at night. Now, having your phone by your bedside is supposedly the worst thing for your sleep. Some people blame the light. Some special light that kills ones sleep. I believed it at first, but now that I've been reading long articles instead of scrolling useless blogs and twitter threads for the id of humanity, I've seen this to be a lie. See, I've fallen asleep as easily as ever. 
So it's not the light (some silver tongued bastard from the new media must have come up with that to deflect blame from certain companies) but the algorithms and how they mine humanity for "wit" or garbage of the id, all separated by tribal allegiances (one of the reasons social media is the crack to other forms, like blogs, cocaine). 
Yeah, well that's one thing I've been thinking on. The other is that the corruption worldwide, the austerity forced upon the poor (or middle class if it really gets bad) while the rich keep getting away with stealing. Here's a piece on Lebanon. This especially seems pertinent to even our nation and the issues that we are dealing with. And in many ways, I think this will be on the tombstone of constitutional democracy if all it does is enable corruption:

"The Lebanese government does not provide electricity, fuel, education, security, healthcare or traffic lights, but makes a great show of its commitment to the judicial process and the finer points of the law."

Note how they can't even get an investigation into their explosion because of all the lawsuits. I'd call this death by lawyers. 
Of course things can get worse in terms of having outside influence or straight up overthrow of the gov, mainly by us. This being pretty worse. 

The election period has already been marked by violence, with the deaths of around thirty congressional or local candidates, mainly from opposition parties. 

Still, it seems our gov wants to do some interfering yet again (and those who screamed Russia will say nothing as usual). I mean seriously:

In the year since Biden was elected president, the number of people apprehended at the Mexican border has reached a record high of 1.7 million. A fifth of them came from Honduras. The narcostate is also a failed state. It failed to deal with the pandemic and has Central America’s highest Covid death rate. It failed to respond to two major hurricanes last year, with many people still left homeless. Seven in ten households live in poverty despite $20 billion supposedly being devoted to tackling the problem since the last election (after publishing the poverty figures, the national statistics institute hurriedly deleted them)

Yeah and the comments on that are spot on. 

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New COVID variant

not much is known, but following the likes of Zeynep on this matter will help give you information on it.  
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Short story time.

Saw an odd formation of clouds while waiting on the bus. And this is my story that arose from it. tbc, because I sense that it needs to be built up on. 
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HUh

Damn good quote in this good article, from Roth [1]

‘It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.’

Essentially, this is how I've felt about the current lot and my writing. Well, not enough to keep away from short fiction, I suppose, though nothing completely new has arisen in my mind (or maybe, that the muse has refused to visit me) lately and I blame this absolute crazy garrison cartoon that is life for most of it (and the internet that exposes me to it all)



And the above screenshot doesn't even include the anti-vaxxers, or the fact that we will possibly have an immunity evading variation of COVID in our midst. 
My writing, my art, may have foreseen some of this, but not all of it, and certainly not the craziest parts of it. So that France has a Vichy-apologist who had a grandfather who was stripped of rights by Vichy, is kind of crazy, but to be fair, this does sound like a Greek saga, doesn't it?
So perhaps that's not exactly that which is stopping me, now is it?
[1] Who, you might know, I have a strong aversion too, not without a little player hating. 
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