OddLife: Daniel Robichaud's unfinished work
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
dark_towhead's LiveJournal:
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | | 10:01 am |
Tweet Attack! EEEEK! Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter | | Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | | 10:01 am |
Tweet Attack! EEEEK! Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter | | Monday, November 16th, 2009 | | 10:00 am |
Tweet Attack! EEEEK! Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter | | Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | | 10:02 am |
Tweet Attack! EEEEK! Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter | | Saturday, November 7th, 2009 | | 4:40 pm |
| | Thursday, November 5th, 2009 | | 11:00 am |
Tweet Attack! EEEEK! Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter | | Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | | 11:01 am |
Tweet Attack! EEEEK! Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter | | Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | | 4:47 pm |
| | Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | | 4:17 pm |
World Fantasy Convention 2009
So, for the first time in almost 11 years, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hntrpyanfar and I will be spending Halloween apart. Feels strange, that. She's sticking around San Antonio, while I fly off to chilly San Jose, California to attend my first evar World Fantasy Convention. The guest roster reads like a Who's Who of fantasy (might I actually meet Robert Silverberg? GULP! Author of Book of Skulls, one of my fav fantasy novels, as well as many, many, many other books? Or Connie Willis? Another GULP! Or . . .), but it should be fun! I volunteered for panels, not expecting to actually be on any. However, much to my surprise, my number got called: Friday 4:00 PM Gold Room Overlooked Early Writers of the SupernaturalAuthors like A. Merritt, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers are among the many often overlooked contributors to our modern view of fantasy and horror. In many ways they are the link between Poe and our current sensibility. Who are the notable and even lesser known authors of the supernatural and macabre 19th and early 20th centuries and what were their contributions to our field?
Jim Young (moderator), Bob Brown, Adam Niswander, Daniel R Robichaud, Barbara RodenWhen I first heard about this, I was in full on panic mode (with a touch of "Me? On a panel at WFC? ME? How! Cool!"), but now that I've have a chance to sit down and put together some ideas, I am feeling much more mellow. Eager even. Curious to expand my reading list as well as share my own (as well as taste, once more, some freewheeling panel joy). If you're heading to WFC, feel free to drop by and say "Howdy!" or whatever greeting is preferred in your neck of the woods. Current Mood:  bouncy | | Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 | | 11:23 am |
Pondering The Places of Import I Have Visited
I sit stunned and amazed by this passage: "Important places impress. Very important places impress absolutely. "Thus a climber may only stand on the summit of Everest for scant moments--made stupid by exhaustion and lack of oxygen, hurried and harried by the cold, a full bladder, and the need to get back down the ridge to Camp VII before nightfall--but those few seconds will last forever in his memory and imagination. The heart has few enough fixed compass points; we forget none of them." (Dan Simmons, Summer Sketches, pg. vii) Current Mood:  thoughtful | | Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 | | 11:55 pm |
| | Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | | 10:56 am |
For A Chuckle: Mathematicians and Movies
Thanks hntrpyanfar for IMing me the link . . . I found the punchline to the zombie bit to be the laugh aloud funniest part of this Boston Globe article from a coupla weeks ago. Perhaps I was particularly tickled because, while I was a wee undergrad student working on my Physics B.Sc., I had seriously considered writing a textbook titled Splatter Physics. The Newtonian Physics sample problems were often outrageously violent, I'd thought, so why not ramp up the gore/humor factor? For example: "Overconfident skier Sue finds she cannot properly turn. If she begins skiing down a thirty degree incline of dust on crust (effective friction = 1 milliNewton) at 5 meters per second, what is her velocity when she strikes the snow covered boulder thirty meters down the slope? If each 10 centimeters of snow provides 2 Newtons of retardant force, will Sue hit the boulder 1 meter inside?" Current Mood:  amused | | Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 | | 1:08 pm |
| | 12:02 pm |
"Surprise! You're Canadian!"
Well, we attended Context this year (and yes, I was at the party when it got shut down by hotel security; no I won't admit to anything) and that's a whole separate post on its own. I picked up the held mail this morning and found a pleasant surprise: A copy of the local newspaper from Cross Plains, Texas shipped to us by Project Pride. Trista and I took a long road trip several weekends ago, to visit the Robert Howard House, and like a doof I haven't updated until now. But the newspaper kicked me in the butt to do so. Because we are in it. A picture of us, as well as some misleading info. Robert E. Howard (for those not familiar with him) was a pulp fiction writer during the early 20th century. He tried his hand at just about every genre of pulp (from horror to fantasy to boxing to even a handful of mysteries), but is best known these days as the originator of Sword and Sorcery fiction and the creator of the enigmatic barbarian Conan the Cimmerian. He lived and died in small town Texas, and his story is recounted in the delightful film The Whole Wide World where Howard is played by Vincent D'Onofrio. Well, fillums are one thing, and actually visiting a place is quite another. ( pictures contained within )What's truly funny is: The paper only gets most of our facts right. Certainly not all. hntrpyanfar was born in Canada? I suppose that explains why she sounds so funny! I thought it was simply proper enunciation, but nope. No one was more surprised to learn this than her. Current Mood:  giggly | | Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 | | 11:08 am |
"But all these were But figyres and shadowes Of things to come"
61) Come Fygures Come Shadowes by Richard Matheson (Gauntlet Press, 2003, 144 pages) A curious remnant of an ambitious novel project undertaken when Matheson (author of I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, and plenty more) was still a young author. Alas, the project was deemed too long for publication, so all that remains is this opening section, which is a mostly complete novel in its own right. The book deals with a dysfunctional family of spiritualists during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Claire is the daughter with great talent, and though her mother (whose talent is on the wane) is grooming her to become a Great Spiritualist, Claire is absolutely terrified of the spirit world. Of what it does to her, how it feels, and just about everything associated. Her younger sister Vera is driven by jealousy, and her brother Ranald is pretty much untouched by the spirits. Mother and Father are separated. Essentially, we get part of Claire's coming of age, and though her ultimate fate remains unresolved, by novel's end there is little doubt that her destiny is a dark one. Matheson writes well and here we find bits that will return in his later works like Hell House, A Stir of Echoes and other horror tales. His apparent affinity with lore of the paranormal is echoed in his literary descendants as well. It's intriguing to see Stephen King's Carrie and divers psychic characters as inspired by Matheson's work . . . But that is neither here nor there. The book is at once intriguing and frustrating (there was obviously a wealth of additional material that remains untapped, though the contents are hinted at in the author's apologetic afterward), but I'm glad to have found a copy in the SA Public Library system. Current Mood: thoughtful | | Friday, August 21st, 2009 | | 12:41 pm |
Your only weapon is your ability to make them look like morons.
60) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor, 2008, 392 pages) Short subject: Damn you Cory Doctorow! Capsule Review: Seventeen year old Marcus Yallow (aka W1n5t0n) skips school to head into the San Francisco on a scavenger hunt expedition (hosted by website Harajuku Fun Madness) just in time for terrorists to detonate the Bay Bridge. The Department of Homeland Security picks up the protag and his three pals and detains them for several days (detains with extreme prejudice), and once three of the four are released, Marcus finds a new calling in life: fight the DHS in any way he can. It's a long, weary, frantic, frustrating, and occasionally joyous journey to Fight The Power. This is YA at its finest, speculative fiction at its most compelling, and this is one of the best books I've read so far this year. What a doozy of a book. The prose is pretty unadorned, though given to asides and tech explanation, and I found protag Marcus to be pretty well drawn. As the story is first person, it's fascinating to watch the narrator's portrayal of other characters (particularly those he is sympathetic to) blossom from single minded one-d personalities into something a little richer (revealing Marcus' own maturing; nice). Of course, the bad people are pretty rotten to the core, but are they really this way? Ah, the unreliable narrator, how I love thee! The book is a loving (?) homage to George Orwell (with a title like Little Brother? Ya think?) as well as hacking and a host of tech. The universe is clearly the product of an alternate history to ours, but its themes of sacrifice and security, as well as the motif of the Incompetent But Ubiquitous Authority are quite haunting (and rather scary for their plausibility). It's a book that kept me turning pages long, long, long after I shoulda gone to sleep. And it got me teary eyed and smiling and frustrated and exhilarated . . . Yes, it played my emotions like a finely tuned concert piano. Well done, Mr. Doctorow. You bastard. Current Mood: thoughtful | | Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 | | 11:49 am |
Apologies
The icky pics from last night/this morning are now hidden behind cuts. Were I to reply to the comments I got to them, I would be sending those pics "afresh". Sorry to squick you out las and mattieflap! | | 12:50 am |
"See what I mean? It's just more shit I have to do now."
The subject line is a snippet of dialogue from Harry Dean Stanton's character in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me film. The particular shit I have to deal with is this: ( icky pics )Yep. Cockaroaches. Crept up while I was writing my capsule reviews this evening. Little bastid. And for a little perspective: ( more icky pics )Good news is. las has given us several suggestions for combating the roaches. Many of these are working. This is the first full sized live roach I've seen in about a week. Yay! More cat nip waits in my future (it's a cockroach repellant). I don't like killing these things. They squirt all over my shoe. Ugh. Current Mood:  grrrrr... | | 12:47 am |
A Super Fella and a Superp Collection
58) All Star Superman: vol 1 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant(DC Comics, 2007, 160 pages) As with many Grant Morrison comics projects, Superman is a mixed bag of strange, often ingenious, and just plain weird stories. Vol. 1 feature the first six issues of Morrison/Quitely/Grant's run on Superman, and it's a doozy. In issue one, Superman does his super job (saving a research team from a sabotage situation on their solar expedition, orchestrated by Lex Luthor of course) only to have his cells bombarded with deadly solar radiation. The very thing that provides SM with his super strength and such turns quite deadly, and now he has a limited amount of time left to him (unless and until the midnight hour saving throw, I'm sure), and boy does he intend to go out with a bang. He springs his identity on Lois Lane, gives her the greatest gift in the world, discovers his own dark side when exposed to a brand new Black Kryptomite (the day is save by . . . wait for it . . . Jimmy Olsen?!?), pays something of a time travel visit to the most important day of his youth, and even takes time out to play with Krypto the Superdog. While material of this nature lends itself quite easily -- too easily, in fact -- to sentimental bullpuckey, Morrison keeps his sense of humor and pathos in tact. Quitely's pencils are simple but beautiful, and Grant's colors are nicely done. These images pop, and the stories (when they don't delve into the huh? Region of Just A Little Too Surreal) are pretty easy for nonfans to digest. Let me admit: I don't particularly like the character of Superman and I don't typically read Superman; the only reason I picked this up was for Morrison's crazy imaginings. Final Analysis: not bad but not as purely awe inspiring as much of Morrison's other works. 59) Cages and Other Stories by Ed Gorman (Deadline Press, 1995, 372 pages) Sure Ed Gorman is a novelist, but for my money he excels at the short form. Here are 21 stories which run the gamut from mystery to sf to crime to horror. Some are beautiful, some are tragic, and some are both. I found only a handful to be forgettable, which is a pretty good for a collection. Gorman writes about human pain with a strong sense of empathy. Not a one of these stories is particularly gratuitous, though a few of them just don't really touch me the way others do. "Moonchasers" finds a pair of kids falling in love with the legendary quality of a wounded bank robber (who resembles their icon, Robert Mitchum) and discovering just what human evil really is capable of (in fact, it resides not in the bank robber but in the hearts of their own community). "Mainwaring's Gift" finds a drifter looking for his One True Love on Christmas Night. Almost a year earlier, they shared a night of passion, and though not a one of his letters has been returned, he hopes to rekindle the flame. What he finds is a condition he had not counted on, and a surprise gift for the holiday. "Deathman" considers the habits of a hangsman, and finds that while he has no regrets about the job he performs, he carries his own emotional weights. "The Brasher Girl" finds evil in a remote well, a voice that speaks to a person's mind and sets free their darkest impulses. And more. This is a pretty solid collection, all told. And while stories like "Dreams of Darkness" and "The End of it All" don't particularly appeal to me, they are still solid stories. I was surprised as hell to find this in the SA Library system. It's a limited hardcover, signed edition (#266 of 500 copies). Nice. Current Mood: thoughtful | | Monday, August 17th, 2009 | | 11:54 am |
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