Book review: Southern Gods

Southern Gods is one of those books that can be glibly, though accurately, summed up with a trite phrase. In this case it would be “Cajun Cthulhu”. The title holds great promise on what turns out to be a strangely small scale adventure considering the subject matter of gods trying to destroy our world.

The story begins by following the lead of hired muscle “Bull” Ingram, a giant of a man who has been tasked by a DJ to track down a man he’s sent out to sell records to local radio stations. As Ingram journeys across the 1951 south he uncovers dark horrors that suggest the very world itself may be in peril due to malevolent and ancient gods trying to bust on through.

The early chapters are promising. Ingram is a rough but likable kind of lug and the mystery behind the pirate radio station that broadcasts music to go crazy by, along with Hastur, a devilish Blues musician, are set up nicely. Things start to come apart at the Ruby, a nightclub Ingram goes to in order to meet–and kill–Hastur. The scene is a literal orgy of violence that sets in motion the rest of the events and despite the author’s loving attention to every gory detail, the depiction fell flat for me. As I mentioned in the Broken Forum thread and in agreeing there with another poster, Drastic, when you’re openly invoking the Cthulhu mythos as Jacobs does here, sure you can bring your own take to the material but if you stray too far it’s no longer really Cthulhu anymore but its own thing. That in itself isn’t bad but reducing the Necronomicon to a book filled with grotesque imagery that makes you go crazy just looking at it, feels unconvincing. The angle with the music and singing, which struck me as far more interesting and original,  is largely forgotten once the bad books are uncovered, to the story’s detriment.

The ‘love’ interest may as well have come with lug nuts, it was so blatantly bolted onto the plot. The other leading protagonist, Sarah, seemed to switch between being weird and emotional to focused and strong more on the requirements of the story than through any natural character arc. I felt nothing in regards to the daughter Franny’s fate because for most of the book the character is tucked away in the background.

In the end, what started out as an intriguing take on the Cthulhu mythos ends up a disappointment that focuses on the wrong things. I also noticed a strangely high number of typos and grammatical errors in the book. Somewhere in the first half of this book is a great take on the Cthulhu setting but the second half squanders it for what is basically a protracted slugfest. Not exactly what I imagined in a ‘evil gods out to enslave humanity’ story.

The longer calibration run

Today under sunny skies and with the temperature a positively balmy 15ºC I headed back to Mercer Stadium to do one more calibration run.

My plan was to do four laps or 1.6 km and I completed the run with a corrected pace of 4:59/km. Pretty slow compared to a typical pace but being able to clock under five minutes after four months off is not too bad. The little Achilles tendon lump in my foot could be felt for the first lap or so but I didn’t notice it for the rest of the laps. My stamina felt a wee bit improved over the last calibration and this time I was able to calibrate to the actual distance I ran so in theory it should be accurate as all get-out.

The only incident of note was when a small kid (maybe 3 or 4) stood by the inner lane on the playing field. I watched as he was poised to directly enter my path. He father, a distance away, was calling for him to come over. The kid did exactly what you’d expect–he stepped off the field and into my path just as I approached. Fortunately I had expected the worst case scenario and scooted by in the next lane over without incident.

It still amazes me that any kid survives long enough to become an adult.

My next planned run is on Monday and will probably be a 2 km gate-to-gate dealie at the Brunette River trail. This will be my first official™ run of the year.

The second (mini) run of 2013

Take 2 of my calibration attempt was made under sunny skies at Mercer Stadium again. Once more, I opted for 800 m (two laps) and reminded myself to not screw up the calibration like last time.

In a hopeful sign, my lungs, while still burning fiercely, took ever-so-slightly longer to do do. Even better I actually set the calibration properly. The only point of concern is that calibration can only be set within a certain range. I ran exactly 800 m (on the inside lane, just as they recommend) but I could only adjust the calibration up to 770 m. This is still fairly accurate and I can probably boost the accuracy by running farther so I may adjust it again sometime in the weeks ahead. I was a bit surprised that it was off by as much as it was, reporting 200-300 m to go as I finished. My pace was 4:43/km, not bad for 4+ months off, except my fastest km is 4:15/km. Rusty!

The right foot is still sore from the injury (meaning if I press a finger into it I can feel it) but it seems to be a build-up of some sort and my doctor is convinced that stretching and running should be okay. It doesn’t hurt while I’m running so I’ll keep ramping up for now. Next time I’ll see if I can run for over five whole minutes!

The first (mini) run of 2013

Today was the day I finally started my road back to jogging regularly. Which is somewhat ironic, given that I don’t jog on roads.

Instead Jeff took me up to the zany looking track at Mercer Stadium (pictured below courtesy Google Maps, as I lack a blimp with which to fly over the track to take my own photos).

Mercer Stadium track

After four months to nurse my right Achilles tendon back to health my goal tonight was simple: don’t break anything and complete a couple of 400 m laps to calibrate my new iPod nano.

Some observations:

  1. It felt great to be running again.
  2. The actual running felt like agony, with my lungs on fire after a piddly 400 m lap.
  3. I defeated the entire purpose of the run by screwing up the calibration at the end. I had set the distance to 0.8 km (two laps) and at the end of the run when it pulled up what it thought I’d run vs. what I’d really run, I adjusted it to 0.40 km, exactly half the intended total. I couldn’t bear the thought of running again to fix it so it will have to wait until the next time, probably in a few days. My real pace was around 4:20/km, which is remarkably good for a four month layoff (and probably explains the lungs of fire, too).
  4. The problematic right foot did not hurt, though I could feel where it had been hurt. Ominous sign? Perhaps. The good news is it feels perfectly fine now.
  5. No more clickwheel. Woo!

Here’s hoping that the next run goes smoothly, that I calibrate my iPod properly and that the properly-calibrated data uploads to the Nike+ site without blowing everything up.

A book of dreams

There’s a thread on Broken Forum about dreams titled “Last night I dreamed…” After the inevitable quote from The Smiths the thread has become a storehouse of dreams that range from the banal to the predictably bizarre or disturbing. I thought it might be interesting to adapt one or two into short stories. Dreams lend themselves well to the format as they tend to be fragmentary experiences that are either short on narrative or lacking it entirely.

After requesting submissions from the dozens of dreams posted, I went with the two that were suggested and will be working on them over the next month or so. If the results are promising I’m contemplating an entire short story collection using the same idea of pulling together dreams and adapting them as short fiction. I’m sure someone else has done the same thing already, as any decent idea has been worked and reworked countless times. But what the heck, I’ve never claimed to be original and the idea intrigues me. I may even have a few of my own dreams that could lend themselves to this kind of project.

Movie review: Oz the Great and Powerful

Nic and I wanted to go watch some mindless spectacle so we settled on Oz the Great and Powerful. This is a great example of a movie filled with CGI for its own sake. So much of the movie looked fake–deliberately so in the case of the backgrounds, which were callouts to the look of the original Wizard of Oz–and was distracting because of it. Just because you can CGI a bunch of butterflies doesn’t mean you should.

James Franco was okay as Oz but lacks the presence the role needs. When he smiles he looks like a goofy kid, not an oily con man. Michelle Williams did what she could with the role of Glinda but had weird eye makeup or something that made it look like she was always on the verge of weeping. Plus I’d just seen her again in Brokeback Mountain and was half-expecting Ennis to show up and ask her how she could afford that g-damn fancy dress she was wearing.

The battle between Evanora and Glinda at the end of the movie was wholly unnecessary and brought to mind the Gandalf/Saruman fight–not a flattering comparison. And Evanora obviously went to the Emperor Palpatine School of Discipline.

The flying monkeys were baboons and didn’t look as scary as Zach Braff (human or monkey form). Disappointing.

Overall I found it mediocre but not entirely objectionable, like eating a bag of chips that aren’t your favorite flavor. You’d miss nothing by waiting to catch it on video.

It made $80 million this weekend.

Six things I like

It’s time for another list!

I am trying to accentuate the positive of late, so here’s a list of six things I like:

  • apple fritters
  • being able to post to the Internet from the comfort of my bed
  • the comfort of my bed
  • new tech toys
  • writing an especially good turn of phrase in a story
  • compliments on accomplishments I’m pleased with
  • the Jonathan Coulton song “Shop Vac”

(I included seven things since I mentioned my bed twice.)

The new SimCity game I’m not buying

One of my best gaming memories was going to Super Software and indulging myself by buying not one but two games. It felt positively decadent. This was in 1989 so the Internet effectively didn’t exist yet and magazines were still my main source of gaming news and previews. Super Software was a large software-only store in Richmond that carried games for nearly every major system. At the time that meant everything from the Apple II and Commodore 64 to the Atari ST and Amiga. I had my trusty Amiga 500 and there was a good selection of games for it.

As I strode in on that day in 1989 I found two games that were both part of what would become called ‘god games’ or sandbox titles: SimCity and Populous. Each went on to be massive hits, spawned numerous sequels and I sank many an hour into constructing urban paradises or smiting my computer opponents.

In the long term SimCity got its hooks into me more deeply. I’ve always enjoyed making things–not necessarily in the woodshop sort of way. In fact, I hated woodshops as a kid. Saws and other sharp tools held little appeal except as tickets to the hospital for a klutz like myself. A virtual way to build and create, though, that I could get into.

The original SimCity was fairly simple and only nodded in the direction of realism. You could construct a city with a rail-only transit system (no roads at all) and it would work. It may be that the pseudo-realism was part of what made the game click. When the sequel, SimCity 2000 came out, it introduced numerous improvements, an increased level of sophistication and an entirely new (and glitchy) water/pipe system that was almost universally disliked. Sure, having to make sure the water flowed added realism but the process of laying pipe and making it work felt more like an uninteresting chore. By the time the eminently charming SimCity 3000 appeared, the pipe-laying was gone.

SimCity 4 was the most ambitious of the titles yet, with full regions that could interconnect and layers upon layers of charts and simulation. I confess I never played it much because the drive to be more realistic–while perfectly logical–just didn’t have the same appeal to me as the slightly goofy earlier titles.

And so we come to the newest version, just released today. It’s not called SimCity 5, just SimCity, as if being framed as a reboot. And in a way that seems about right. The cities you can build are smaller but the simulation is even more detailed and realistic than ever. The game requires an always-online connection and while it doesn’t force you to build alongside other players, it does take away the option to save your city at certain points, instead relying on EA’s cloud storage to do the work (and in the first 24 hours it is working with predictably spotty success). While I marvel at the look of the game and genuinely applaud the game moving even more toward being a true simulation, I can’t help but feel that this is the next step in me being pushed away from the series permanently.

Maybe I can’t reconcile my creative drive with a proper simulation. If I want to build something silly, I don’t want to be (unduly) punished for it but the new SimCity torpedoes that philosophy.

I guess there’s always Minecraft and its (literal) castles in the air.

The fake house I drew when I was 17

I promise I’ll scan more than one of these for my next trip down mediocre teenage art memory lane.

In the meantime I like this minimalist but slightly goofy perspective exercise. It’s simple and has a looseness that I probably couldn’t have captured if I was actually going for that. It’s not dated but judging from some of the work from the same book it looks to be from early 1982, a mere 31 years ago!

The Perspective House on the Hill

I deliberately allowed the image on the reverse side to bleed through on the scan because hey, art!

Note: If you reference the previous post, I lied. The teacher did not grade this particular piece. But I can pretend I got an A for it.

The fake chipmunk I drew when I was 15

I’ve been going through some of my school sketchbooks of late and what I’ve found is that I was a fairly consistent and mediocre visual artist, with occasional flashes of talent/skill/luck beyond my usual stuff. The following is not an example of that. Sorry!

Instead it’s a drawing I made of a fake chipmunk I did while our art class was touring the provincial museum (now the Royal British Columbia Museum) in Victoria in October of 1979. The museum was absolutely wondrous to me. It had the usual exhibits, mainly focused on local native art, totem poles and such, but it also had life-size or nearly life-size dioramas depicting scenes both past and present from around the province. The highlight was probably the mining town that was modeled in loving detail, complete with a fishy-smelling cannery, a street filled with shops, a movie theater and a bakery that always had the aroma of cinnamon wafting from it.

The chipmunk was part of the one of the nature dioramas. I don’t remember the exact scene it was in but judging from its stance it was probably not about to be eaten by a moose.

It’s not a bad little drawing but there’s nothing especially remarkable about it, either. I think I’m most proud that I got the proportions right and didn’t give it some weird mega-head or something. Maybe I’ll go over the digital copy and see how I’d improve on it today with 30 more years of life experience and 0 more years of useful art talent. The teacher gave me a B for it. I can’t really argue with that.

The Chipmunk Eats

Next: Something the teacher gave me an A for!

UPDATE:

Here’s what I would have done to the image if I’d had a PC with Photoshop in 1979 instead of an Atari 2600 with a Canyon Bomber cartridge:

Crosshatched chipmunk

(apply the crosshatch image effect and adjust the level to give it better contrast)

Walk this way (around Burnaby Lake)

I did one more Big Walk® around Burnaby Lake before my first tentative steps back into running next weekend.

The weather was sunny after several days of monsoon-like weather thanks to the Pineapple Express. I took advantage and found it to be mild, with little wind and most of the big puddles already having dried up along the trail. Even the cyclists and dogs off-leash didn’t bug me. It was a nice hint that spring is on the way after The Rains.

My favorite “rules are not for me!” moment came when crossing north on Roberts Street, near the rowing pavilion. As you approach the resumption of the trail on the other side of the road there is an especially giant sign that states DOGS MUST BE LEASHED AT ALL TIMES. I watched a woman stop and remove the leash from her dog in front of this sign. I don’t know if she was going for bonus irony points or what. At least the dog was well-behaved.

I used the iPod pedometer to track my pace and came in with the following stats:

2:23:53 duration
17.6 km distance
898 calories burned
18,746 steps taken

I was walking fast enough that any faster would have been a light jog. Things seem to have held together nicely both during and after the walk. Next weekend I’m heading to the resplendent gold and blue Mercer Stadium Track to do a simple calibration run fort the new iPod. It will probably be 2-4 laps or 800-1600 meters, enough to get the calibration and see if my Achilles tendon will weep in protest or behave itself. From there I will be doing a few short runs per week, starting with some 2Ks, moving up to 5Ks and finally back to my usual 10-11.5K runs. I don’t have a set schedule in mind, I’ll just ramp things up based on my stamina and pain/discomfort after each run. If all goes well I’m going to aim to beat last year’s mark by running 1,000K. Since I’ve already missed two months, I’l need to hit at least 100K each month going forward. If I stay healthy I can do it. If not, I can always lie lie lie.

Possible titles for my short story collection

By the end of the year I am planning on having my 30+ short stories all bundled up into one lovingly handcrafted and self-published volume. Freed from the dictates of a publisher I am able to follow my own whims when it comes to book design and so on.

Today I was thinking about possible titles for the collection. If all of the stories were of the same genre it would be easier but they run the gamut from fantasy to horror to (laughably bad) science fiction to speculative stories that would work nicely as Twilight Zone episodes.

Still, the majority are horror stories or ‘weird tales’ and I love alliteration and word play, so I came up with this:

Tales of Madness and Macramé

I like it but it sounds like a murder mystery set in a knitting club. Not a bad idea for a story, though.

Then I thought I could take the number of stories, cut the number in half and voila:

16 Pairs of Shorts

I kind of like this. A good number of the stories are lighter in tone or deliberately comical so this could put the reader in the right general frame of mind.

And now I realize I am blanking on the other titles I’d come up with so I’ll end this here and edit in my other semi-finalist choices when my brain deigns to remember them