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Test

Writing

I think I may have figured out what was happening with WordPoop (think “automatic update” and you won’t be far from the truth).  To test this, please respond in comments if the entire passage below gets posted (it ends, “So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…” )

Julia (“Jules”) Wakefield is a twenty-five year old secretary who works at a British government agency, in a department so boring and inconsequential that everybody who’s ever worked there leaves it off their resume.

That’s during the day. At night, however, she is a fantasy maven: a mistress of a popular Internet website which explores and plays in the world of fantasy, and she is constantly looking out for The Next Big Fantasy Thing for her many hundreds of online fans and followers.

So when she discovers that her little neighborhood bookstore has found an obscure fantasy series from the 1930s, she buys the books; but when she reads them, she’s puzzled. The writing isn’t much good, the characters nothing unusual for the fantasy world, and the scenarios, while filled with erotic adventure, are quite bland, even though they do feature the standard fare of goblins, trolls, fairies and elves.

She posts her opinion online, and is mortified at the response from her readers in the comments section: “Missed the point,” “How could you be unmoved by the experience?” and the most cutting, “I thought you were smarter than this” are but a few of the remarks. She’s about to close the comments, when the very last one appears: “Did you not lick the symbol?”

Jules has no idea what this means, so she emails the commenter for an explanation, and in the response, she discovers the secret of the books’ popularity.

At the end of each chapter there appears a large, strange symbol (a different one for each book). Her reader tells her that if Julie licks the symbol, she will instantly be transported into the book and story itself, and will appear as a participant in the story at the beginning of the chapter, as the storyteller. (All the books are written in the first person.) When the chapter ends, the reader explains, she will be returned to reality, none the worse for wear, with absolutely no time having elapsed since she licked the symbol, and the chapter will have been magically rewritten with herself as the new storyteller, and the symbol will have disappeared.

The only problem is that while in the story, if she changes any part of the storyline in any way, even by misquoting the dialogue, the entire story will change from that point on, and she will not be able to control what happens. Only the occurrence of the last sentence in the original chapter can bring her back to reality—e.g. “At that moment, the door to the room opened, and a strange figure entered the room.”

The kicker is that if the last sentence cannot occur—say, if the door has already been destroyed by a phantom attacker—then she will no longer be able to return to reality, and will be trapped inside the story until the end of the next chapter. Worse still, if she happens to be killed in the story, she will instantly be transported back to reality, and could suffer a fatal heart attack, or not.

So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…

And yes, it’s the premise for a series of novels I had planned to write several years ago, but lost interest therein because “fantasy”.

Update:  Okay, I think I’ve figured it out.  Normal service will resume tomorrow.

Monday Funnies

Funny Stuff

Is it just my imagination, or are the weeks getting short?  I’m pretty sure that some bastard stole my Saturday… not to mention a couple of my posts.  And my email is still fucked (sendee, no receivee).

So to escape Teh Worries, Teh Funneez:

Good question.  Let’s ask Brie Bella, twin sister of last week’s Nikki:

Now go away and let me tackle my systems issues… aaaaargh.

A Short Stroll Through The 70s

Music

When talking about 1970s music, too much time is spent on the loud stuff:  Zep, Foreigner, Grand Funk Railroad, and so on.  Ditto all the prog-rock of the era like Pink Floyd, Genesis.  Yeah, I love listening to all that;  but I also like the quieter stuff — and I don’t mean the Carpenters or Abba, either.

Many of the 70s stars actually got their start in the 1960s, but it was in the following decade that they really got going.

Here’s an example:  the peerless songwriter Dave Mason, formerly of 60s band Traffic, doing We Just Disagree.  If you listen to this as an appetizer for the rest of this post, I think you’ll get in the proper mood.

In that vein, here’s Stephen Stills and the others doing Southern Cross, and while we’re there, let’s also consider Orleans doing Dance With Me  and Exile being naughty with Kiss You All Over.

But it wasn’t all ballads like Kate Bush doing The Man With The Child In His Eyes, of course;  not when David Bowie was performing songs like Lady Grinning Soul, or .

Update:  I think WordPress ate half my post.  Apologies, and I’ll add the rest when I can retrieve it.

Wiki-plead-ia

Media Assholes

If you happen to go to Wikipedia nowadays, you’re confronted with this banner:

Neutral and verified information?  And yet, time and time again we’re faced with situations like this:

Since the election of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Wikipedia editors have been downplaying or removing mention of controversies from her page. This has included minimizing mention of antisemitism controversies over her comments about Israel and its supporters, excluding mention of personal scandals, and censoring details about Turkish lobbying ties. Editors have meanwhile given considerable attention to alleged mistreatment of her by others, particularly President Donald Trump who editors tied to threats Omar received.
Omar’s treatment on Wikipedia regarding antisemitism, where editors have kept such allegations out of her page’s introduction in favor of more benign descriptions of her views on Israel, stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of various Republican officials.

And there are more, much more examples.  Even one of their founders thinks they’re full of shit.

So to the Wikipedia people who want my money:  fuck you.  I hope you dance the wokey-pokey.

And Yet Again

Heroism, Marxists, Third World

As I’ve said in the past, here and here, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was a conundrum.  Others, it seems, are even more positive than I am:

Almost nobody is more reviled by the international intelligentsia and media than the late Augusto Pinochet, the late 20th -century Chilean dictator. He holds a prominent position in the political left’s “rogues’ gallery” comprised of those who stood in opposition to their goals.
His supposed “crimes” included conducting a military coup to illegitimately grab control of the Chilean government from a popularly elected president, rounding up and torturing huge numbers of innocent citizens (killing as many as 80,000 in the process) and corruptly stealing vast sums of money while ruling as a dictator.
But many of those claims are either false or exaggerated — most credible estimates of those killed are below 5,000 — or they must be viewed in context. More important, if we raise the examination of Pinochet from the bitter soil of leftist ressentiment to the question of human flourishing, he appears as one of recent history’s shining lights.

Read the whole thing — and my earlier posts on the topic too, if you haven’t seen them before.

I will never forget two things about my visit to Chile:  the sight of old women placing flowers on the sidewalk outside Pinochet’s modest private home (now a museum) in Valparaiso, and at a formal dinner one night, one of the toasts was:  “To General Augusto Pinochet, savior of Chile.”

It was delivered without irony, well received and supported by all the guests, and even more telling, it was said in English — no doubt for our benefit, and to make a point.

Interesting stuff.