Mad Dogs and Englishmen

So in response to my previous query about whether I should trust the 'docs for life' offer. Life came over and rendered it completely moot when I spotted THE MOST GORGEOUS PAIR OF BOOTS at a market today.

These be they (not my photo)



Love. At. First. Sight. And they were size 6. I am a 7.

*rips self to pieces*

So after stitching myself back together and asking the opinion of a nearby leatherworking specialist (I go to awesome markets), I decided that if I didn't buy the damn things and try and make them fit (the boots might be second hand but they are brand new, and the leather is pure solid wonderful) I would never forgive myself.

It's not a lost cause, the length is good and I can get my foot in, it's just the width. So yeah, I've got a fighting chance with them. The leather is amazing, it's better than any of my boots, and even my coat. The soles are good, doc made, and looks like they've never been worn. And unlike every other pair of boots I have, they don't take ten hours to put on.

Please oh please may this work or I will be very miserable. Particularly since I've realised they don't seem to be sold any more, and while this means I could probably get three times what they cost by putting them on ebay, I waaaaant them.

Last night I dreamed I was a slake moth (or I was riding it, dream was vague), flying above New Crobuzon. Then I fucked right off because no way was I staying in that shithole for another five minutes. Being a flying dream it was  beyond great because I have very realistic dreams about flying where I have to actually beat my wings and take into account things like wind resistance and updrafts (I flew a lot better in this dream than in others, maybe because I've had so many I'm getting better at it, or because I took into account I had, y'know, wings, rather than just flapping my arms like I usually do). I think I started off going up the river as a pirate (the Black Pearl was involved), and then probably I realised I was dreaming and was like 'save the slake-moths'! So I did.

I mean, there's no denying it was a good book, if only because it's engraved itself into my subconsciousness (nearly wrote sunconsciousness, which is just awesome) as thoroughly as Mass Effect has, so its clearly powerful. Unfortunately it's powerful like Man with the Iron Heart, in which I start really hating the author because he has created something which revolts me to the pit of my stomach.

In my version, the story ends with a huge pack of slake moths decending on New Crobuzon and eating everyone, then inhabiting the ruins in an awesome post-apocalypse beauty-fest of crumbing buildings and nests and insanely gorgeous wings which blot out the sun, and the reader is left with a satisfying feeling that nothing of value was lost, the good guys won and the world is a better place as a whole.

That or Mass Effect Mirek turns up with the Normandy and ships the slake moths off to the Rachni home world where they eat Rachni song forever and live happily every after. And then a Reaper turns up and eats New Crobuzon. Which turns out to be like the Batarian home world. And Mirek feels kinda bad but not really. And the Batarians really hate him now. And no one cares because the Batarians are enslaving arseholes of the galaxy and everyone is better off as a whole. And the Rachni are happy because they thought the moths had died out. And no one gives a shit about the main characters because Mirek shot them in chapter 1 for attacking a critically endangered species.

So I finally finished Dragon Age Origins. And unless Dragon Age 2 basically is cut and paste Mass Effect 2 I won't be buying. Actually I probably won't anyway because their world feels so flat and dispiriting I never want to spend time there again. It got me thinking about something I've seen before that bothers me a lot, it often happens when creators want to make their story 'dark and gritty'. It happens that as a reader/gamer/etc you everytually reach saturation point and just plain don't care what happens next because this world is too gloomy to be worth saving. It didn't happen in Dragon Age, but that was because their world was a whole bunch of cliches done straight up dreadfully and I couldn't believe in the world at all.

Again, I'm probably spoiled by Mass Effect but I think if I'd come here directly from Jade Empire or Knight of the Old Republic (KOTOR rocked and wasm everything I loved about Star Wars, and Jade Empire was a bit meh but had enough innovations and weird stuff that i kept playing just to find out what happened next). I'd be pretty disappointed too. Most of Bioware's games are very good at making you feel awesome, and their worlds have the right balance of good/nasty.

One of the reasons I didn't like thew second knights of the Old Republic game, and why I don't like DA:O, is that they both set up a dark and nasty world, and make the character incapable of doing anything about it. In DA:O you can't free the elves, you're told afterwards that everything you did to help them was pointless (fuck you Bioware) and half the time you made things worse. Well fuck that, if that's the case the darkspawn can have you for breakfast, dickcunts. Same with the wizards, whose situation is beyond fucked up, but apparently you're supposted to tactically agree with their treatment. And that's completely without getting into my pet peeve, the chantry's role in this game.

Again, here's where I once again sing the praises of Mass Effect. Religion is a touchy subject and Bioware have so far done a good job of dealing with it. When religion did come up you had the choice of 'yes I believe in god', 'no I don't believe in god', 'none of your business''. In Dragon Age it seems to be implying that the really obvious Christian analogy (another problem, religion is bad enough without bringing in IRL versions) is the clear and obvious choice, and I was getting really sick that my character who I wanted to hate the Chanrty, was never able to speak out against them.
For example, there's one quest where this one guy wants to open a church. There is no option to stop him from opening the church, you have to help him, or ignore the quest and pass up the xp. Again, I wouldn't be so miffed if Mass Effect hadn't done exacly the same thing ten times better. There also the really irritating moment when one of the few characters I liked, an atheist, got into an argument with a very devout character, and the devout character won the argument with a 'oh, you must be very sad and lonely without god'. I wanted to strangle the developers.

So basically it's a crapsack world, which will remain a crapsack world no matter what you do, and you're left wondering why you even bothered, or whether it would have been better to pack up Alistair, Stern and Morrigan in a big bag with the dog and bugger off to the other side of the world and leave those fuckarses to it, because seriously, nothing of value would have been lost.

One game I'm never playing again, thank you. I like roleplaying games that allow you to y'know, ROLEPLAY. Mass Effect allowed me to play as Mirek and he's a 17 year old Holocaust survivor!  I only completed it because I don't like leaving things unfinished, and the difficulty curve was so fucked over it felt like a personal challenge.

I think I'll replay KOTOR while waiting for Skyrim to come out. Dragon Age was basically a shittier version of Elder Scrolls (which I played through and thought was okay, although the dungeon crawling got a bit tiring), and after Fallout 3 I'll be happy to play whatever that lot want to throw at me.

A word of warning; the last book that made me react like this was The Man With the Iron heart. You Have Been Warned.

( If you're not scared away and don't mind spoilers, read on )

Still chewing over whether to see this or not. On one hand, it looks like a ton of fun and ultraviolence set in my favourite historical period. On the other hand, it sounds like Tarantino is doing with his Jewish characters what I like doing with my Nazis characters: dropping them in the middle of their enemies and standing back to watch them fuck shit up. And unlike Tarantino I don't think they are worth writing up, and only partially because they are morally bankrupt and usually degenerate into bloody orgies with Mengele, Kroenen and OC Elena drenched head to foot in blood and giggling like maniacs, it's fun, it calms me down, but I doubt it would be much fun for anyone else. And Tarantino seems to have done basically that only with Jewish protagonists.

Which brings me onto my next point, which is that if I see it, my nazi characters will be out of their seats and violently attacking the screen before you can say Kristalnacht. There's been an onrunning fued between the nazi contingent and Erik, Charles, Mirek (with Johannes reluctantly roped in because even he's scared of them, despite being a nazi himself) over basic breathing rights, and since then have been banished to opposite ends of my brain and told that the first one to break that damn barrier is going to get fried. I am not having the Holocaust re-inacted with Mutant victims and Demonic perpretrators in my head, thank you. Last time it took down a lot of scenery and the other characters are getting sick of patching it up. WW3 in your own time please. Both sides are still stubbornly tring to break into each others enclosures, and if I watch IB, it's pretty much inevitable. I have far too many headaches before I decided to separate them, no more thank you. I don't like the idea of sitting in my cinema seat and having to grip the arms of the chair in order to keep from violently attacking myself and both sides take violent offence at what is happening on screen.

So yeah, maybe, cause I like Tarantino and and those buggers need to be taught to behave, goddam it, and I'm not letting some figments of my imagination take over. On the other, this may end up like another 'Man with the Iron Heart' that everyone else hates, and which I could do without.

( THIS )


Definitely turning out to be my song at the moment. Stop beating down my dreams! Stop fucking laughing at my ambitions in the certainty I'll never attain them! Stop mocking me for doing things that have no material reward! And for god's sake uni, get me out of that fuckign class which masquerades as novel writing but should really be titled 'How to Prostitute your Abilities for Money'. I came here to fucking write, not sell. And the constant reminder than I have to work my arse off to sell- WHAT IF I DON'T WANT TO SELL YOU DOGFUCKERS! IS IT SO INCOMPREHESIBLE THAT I WANT TO DO THIS FOR NO OTHER REASON THAT I FUCKING WANT TO?

Gods, please, please make it so my characters have physical form, then Mengele and I could go to uni with ten canisters of Zyklon B, two machineguns and a flamethrower and sort this out once and for all. And nothing of value will be lost. I spent an hour and as half today critiquing two girl's efforts at tabliod journalism.
This is how high-school massacres get started I swear. They make you feel that you're useless, you see everyone else bending over for buggery and cannot maintain the least respect for them and finally it just seems like a mercy to put them out of their misery.
Thank the gods for poetry, that's all I can say. No pressure, no pain, just sit down and write me four haikus about the seasons. This is how you do a haiku, now try.

A Year in Water

In spring the snow melts
And our January footprints
Will turn to water.

The Vilinus summer
Flows the water of our steps
Under the high bridge.

The red leaves drift down
To the wine flowing river
Their hands touch like ours.

If it grows colder
And the seas freeze over
I could walk to you.

Peace, goddamn PEACE and fucking quiet for once in this place. No plans, no deadlines, no reminders that you'll probably fail in getting published as a poet because HELLO that's not why people write poetry. Plus, zen poetry is a great way to calm down when confronted by the utter idiocy of everyone around me. It's impossible to be pissed off while writing zen poetry. I tried, this was my result:

Pen cuts the paper
With my killing rage leaving
Torn words on the page

And:

I Ching
Coins flash in the light
I turn to the page and find
That fools run the world.

I'm still very fond of the second, but when I read it to my teacher she thought it was very funny. So much for rage. But it maddens me that all this year the more I've attended this novel writing class the more I've lost interest in AIoM. The fucking class that's meant to help me write is killing any desire for me to do so. It's not the critique (although having my work looked over by people with swiss cheese for brains is more useless than insulting) it's the assumption that it's really all a waste of time. IN THE FUCKING CLASS. BY THE FUCKING TEACHERS. IN THE FUCKING WORKBOOK WHICH I DON'T WANT TO TOUCH OR EVEN GO NEAR.

There are showers for such people.

Quote from All Instruments of Measurement as to why Johannes Deiter makes me headdesk on a regular basis

“They are both dead.” Mirek answers his unspoken question and Johannes tries not to sigh. He doesn’t want this conversation to go like this. “My father when I was small. My mother. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. You killed her.”

Johannes feels a sort of kick in his stomach and his world shifts horribly under his feet, the prelude to real panic. He doesn’t think… He was always guarding the men’s section of the camp… But there was that woman, the one in the headscarf caught trying to steal soup. And the other, which he’d thought was a gypsy, trying to escape. Then the woman handing out the soup in Morowitz- more and more images dredged up from where he’d cast them away as useless. He hadn’t thought he’d killed so many females. “I don’t-“

“Not you.” And Johannes lets his breath out slowly. It’s a staggering relief. He wouldn’t have forgiven himself if he’d killed Mirek’s mother. “Just you. Nazis. SS. In the ghetto.”

*facepalm* *facepalm* *facepalm* Congratulation Johannes, you have won the gold medal at the 'Missing the point completely' olympics. I love the bastard, but grief.

Me and a friend, talking about our characters:

Friends: So, this Johannes, is he a good guy or bad guy?
Me:... Um... (so impossible to answer that one. It's hard to lable him a bad guy, but it's blinking IMPOSSIBLE to say he's a good guy!)... He's an idiot.
Never a truer word was spoken.

35051 / 50000 words. 70% done!

Finally discovered why I just don't get on with religious people; because I hate it when people claim to have all the answers. I've always been fascinated by things we can't exlpain: Ball lightning, UFOs, as these things, the things that I like is that  we can't explain them. And why I don't read so many books about them, because they always try and find some explanation for them. Sometims there is no answer, and it's more fun that way.
Religion just takes to a new level, everything is explained by 'god/allah/whatever' wills it, and it iritates me to no end. The arrogance and blindness of it just makes me want to stay as far away from these people as possible.

---

 

13438 / 50000 words. 27% done!

I've already ranted about 'The Man With The Iron Heart', so here are my thoughts on the other books I've been reading recently, and most importantly, the characters.

( Cut for Spoilers of Victory of Eagles )

Currently reading the original Dracula and thoroughly enjoying it, so it's not all bad.