Squid

If anyone is wondering how the washing machine repairman thing played out, it played out with soapy water all over the basement floor the first time I (being apparently the first to the punch) did a load of laundry. So I called maintenance, and had this conversation:

Phone Drone: May I have a number where you can be reached?
Squid: Sure. Five five five....
(interminable pause)
Squid: ... got that?
Phone Drone: I'm sorry, what?
Squid: Five five five.
Phone Drone: All I'm hearing is 'five five five'.
Squid: Sorry, I was waiting for you to acknowledge that you had that before I continued.
(interminable pause)
Squid: ... the rest is five five five, five five five five.¹
Phone Drone: Okay!

Initially I thought this must be some kind of weird culture clash thing, but on further consideration, fuck that. I have been reciting long numbers and other, frequently arbitrary lists of things to an enormous roster of professional phone-answerers every day of my work week for two years now, and nothing like this has ever happened to me. This person is either new and stupid, or experienced and extraordinarily stupid, and deserves to be mocked via the internet, forever.

¹ Don't interpret this as permission to phone me.

"Supernatural is an occasionally genuinely creepy show," thinks I. "Good thing it will never have grey aliens in it; then we might have a problem."

What do I see, in the very next episode?

A grey alien, slow-dancing with an Archetypal Frat Boy twice its size, under a disco ball, to Chris de Burg's Lady in Red.

FUCK YOU, ERIC KRIPKE. FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE EAR.

[Poll #1308338]

I didn't start hearing about Twilight until just before the fourth book came out, and it still took me several weeks to even figure out what medium it was in: I knew there were actors attached to it, so I figured it was a show. I may have been mixing it up with Moonlight, which was some recent vampire detective show that I don't think lasted a full season. What I'm trying to evoke here is that my finger is right on the pulse of the media. There are going to be spoilers for Twilight and sequels in this post. If you're on my friendslist, odds are you don't care.

I ignored Twilight for a long time because I'm not interested in vampire fiction. Twilight is actually great for me to use as a prop when I discuss why, because it is every vampire romance trope, turned to eleven. For those of you coming in late, it is the story of an unabashed Mary Sue with a random quality that makes her arbitrarily irresistable to vampires, who of course acquires an overbearing, stalkery vampire boyfriend who spends a lot of time fighting, and talking about fighting, his visceral desire to kill and eat her. Along the way there's some business with a more boy-next-door type werewolf who oscillates from friend to boyfriend, a tiny amount of plot, and a half-vampire chestburster baby that may be the single funniest thing in all of Western literature.

( In which I go off the rails explaining my disinterest. )

Anyway, into my life of blissful indifference to the whole Twilight phenomenon comes cleolinda with Twilight in Fifteen Minutes, which is of unusually high quality even for a Movie in Fifteen Minutes, and contains a bunch of links to cleolinda's recaps of the Twilight books. And I find myself shoving these things through my eye-holes as fast as I can, and something changes in my brain. Through cleolinda I have realized that, while this is not the most fantastically horrible fiction ever written by any means, it is certainly the most fantastically horrible to ever become this kind of enormous media phenomenon, and I have become some kind of freakish, shambling fanboy fanboy.

I still have no interest in reading the Twilight books, because I'm obviously not going to enjoy them. There's a good chance I'll never bother to see the movie. But I cannot get enough of secondary media about them. Parodies, commentaries, lolpires,³ anything I can get my hands on. When I saw Roger Ebert's review of the film was up, it was like Christmas in my brain. I hardly recognize myself. Oh my god, I can't wait for the fourth movie. How are they going to do the chestburster scene? Can't wait. To tide myself over I have this frame from the trailer, which is good for an unsuppressable spasm of laughter every time I think about it. Perhaps the greatest things to come out of this phenomenon are a couple of interviews with Robert Pattinson⁴ (on the left there, playing Edward) in which he apparently forgets he's talking to the press, suddenly becomes extremely focused and begins to talk about his hatred for his character and his horror and bemusement at the source material.

So ... in related news, I just pulled a True Blood marathon. Wait! It's not as ironic as it sounds!

This is cleolinda's fault also. She is ruining my life. After I finished the Twilight recaps I wandered over to the True Blood ones. Unlike Twilight, True Blood comes off very well in her recaps, and I have two scarves to finish before Christmas, which means consuming a lot of audiovisual media. There are things about it that are not as good as the recaps made me hope they would be, but it's still a pretty damn good show. While I was reading the Twilight recaps I kept thinking that the world needed some fiction in which the woman in that stupid love triangle with the distant, mysterious vampire and nice-guy werewolf refuses to play along with their bullshit, because my creative impulse is fuelled mostly by resentment and spite. This is that fiction. Which is great, because it means I don't have to do it.

True Blood was created by Alan Ball, based on some books I've never heard of and don't intend to read, though if the show represents them accurately they may have been conceived as a direct poke in the eyes of Stephanie Mayer, Laurell K. Hamilton et al. Ball's other show of note is Six Feet Under, which was well-written, well-acted, beautifully shot and totally fucking unwatchable: I cannot tolerate shows that are about nothing but loathsome people being horrible to each other under the guise of affection. True Blood is less of a visual feast, unless you really, really like Anna Paquin's legs, but the first- and second-tier characters all range from acceptable to show-stoppingly awesome.⁵

I think I am not entirely the intended demographic here either, because every time Bill the Vampire goes all Sinister Vampire I begin laughing and cannot stop until he desists. Some of the vampire stuff seems so self-parodic -- like the protagonist, Sookie, running barefoot in a filmy empire-waisted nightgown to Bill the Vampire's house to bang him in front of the fire in summer in Louisiana: are you shitting me? -- that I wonder if it's not the correct reaction after all, if probably still the minority reaction. In the context of this genre the actor who plays him reads strongly as a werewolf to me -- I don't know, maybe it's the stubble -- which just makes everything weirder.

I had intended to analyze Sookie's refusal to go in the damsel box no matter how hard half the other characters on the show are trying to shove her in there, but on further consideration, I'm going to let the season one finale speak for me. ( Spoiler cut. ) Fuck, yes.

I leave you with one last observation. Halfway through the season, Stephen Root shows up as a nebbishy gay vampire. Jimmy James. The man so nice they named him twice. Gay vampire. I just ... okay. Sure. He's a good actor and he sells the role, but ... Jimmy James.

¹ It took me ages to understand this dynamic, because I don't grok blood families at all. Mommy/daddy play is apparently commonest among people who had poor or nonexistent relationships with their parents because it fills a need that was never satisfied; I had poor-to-nonexistent relationships with both of my parents, and what it did to me was cauterize the need so entirely that I can't understand it except in the most distant, intellectual way. (I have good relationships with my father and sister now, but my familial relation to them is a weird complication of my affection, not a foundation.) You can see this in my writing. I think of families as machines for creating children with conflicting combinations of traits. Biracial much? I am so transparent sometimes it embarrasses me.

² Not that I wouldn't advise actual men in the audience against having sex with Bella also. Her last name is Swan. Keep an eye out, and don't go there.

³ To my knowledge, I just made this word up. Which is why I should not be in charge of making up fandom jargon.

⁴ Who, like a lot of male actors that age, started off kind of unearthly but, now that he's matured a bit, is just starting to look really peculiar. My obsession means I've seen a lot of images of him recently and I have the same 'what, really?' reaction every time.

⁵ He takes off his earrings. Oh, Lafayette. Please don't be dead.

One of the challenges the WIP presents me with is living up to the potential of the setting's central conceit without getting catastrophically sidetracked. I could write stories in even the setting as it is as the WIP opens for the rest of my life without exhausting its potential, though this is unlikely to happen because, as usual, what I'm most interested in doing is taking a good hard look at said central conceit and then breaking it. What I really need is a thriving fanfic community to do the work for me. Sign up in the comments.

For those of you just tuning in, of which I am pretty sure there are none, this conceit is that periodically stuff falls from the sky that any untrained sophont¹ can cause to turn into more or less any noun -- objects, creatures, and abstract things like 'my ability to fly' or 'the fourth primary color' or 'Beethoven's Fifth'. Most of this stuff is not around any more because some idiot made a type of creature that can replicate itself (given access to more stuff from the sky) and, once it's replicated enough, has both the ability and the inclination to establish a hegemony over all or most of humanity, whittle down the numbers of or outright exterminate other sorts of creatures, and track down most of the objects and the more annoying abstract concepts and destroy or repurpose them.

Aside from the rings of the gas giant it orbits being partly made out of magic stuff, the physics of this world are mostly as you'd expect, and the only ways to break the laws of physics are to be made of magic stuff or have the assistance of it (q.v. 'my ability to fly'). However, that leaves a tremendous amount of room for things that could not come about without supernatural assistance but which are not themselves supernatural, and the tone of the setting demands that these things be fairly bizarre. The second type of weird creature introduced in the first five hundred words of the WIP is a kind of semi-sentient biological aerostat that looks roughly like a ctenophore, which is a category so diverse that this comparison is actually, technically, accurate. I had assumed initially that they were magic, but outside of my prejudices about creatures that no sensible evolutionary process would give rise to, there's no reason for them to be. It's quite possible to turn magic stuff into creatures that can produce mundane offspring, or to turn it into a factory for producing such things -- I've mentioned cornucopia machines before.

This becomes a problem because there's no reason for the setting not to be seething with weird shit of varieties that I don't want to deal with. What's the first thing you'd do if you had a machine you could configure to produce any one thing? I'd start making sex toys, because that's where the money is and, well, because my interests are fairly narrow. But I don't want to have to deal with a self-reproducing race of robot girlfriends. There's a whole book in that, for one thing, and for another thing, a dozen people have already written that book.² More importantly, I want to write this book, which does not have room in it for me to deal with the implications of robot girlfriends; yet I can't ignore those implications if I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror.

Some of it I can handwave. Robot girlfriends that you can breed in your backyard are ... extraordinarily disgusting, I realize now that I've written that phrase, but they're also bad for business. Things that can reproduce are probably more along the lines of weird A Wizard Did It-style biological experiments. The cultures that had robot girlfriends, and I'm sure some cultures did, have been dead or subjugated for between twenty and a hundred years; most of those things are probably out of commission now, because planned obsolescence. I can deal with one or two robot girlfriends, just not one in every driveway.

Hmm. I may have just talked myself into feeling better about this.

Now that I'm thinking about it, this raises questions about Nishimura's friend the revolting monster. He is designed to have some specifically conditioned magic stuff plugged into himself; he can function without it, but it's as basic a drive for him as eating. It's also fantastically illegal, and he could care less about that, but it makes it damn difficult to get ahold of the magic stuff he needs. He is probably my primary villain, though there is another contender for the job. I had assumed he belonged to some race of magic-stuff creature that is given just enough stuff not to go extinct³, of which there are several, but he may actully be some kind of weird android. I'm not sure I like that, though. It makes his appalling physical appearance seem improbable somehow -- which is an arbitrary, irrational judgement, but, well, it's my party.

On the other side of the coin from all this I have the problem of making sure there's enough weird shit in the world for the conceit of the setting to feel sufficiently explored. Nothing drives me crazier than an interesting premise that the author never goes anywhere with. I don't have enough thoughts about this to make a full paragraph, it turns out. There it is. This irritates me, because my brain usually spits this stuff out in something very close to essay format; I feel like I've tried to step up onto a stair that isn't there. Good thing I'm not getting paid for this.

Nor do I have any closing remarks!

¹ But training helps, if you want consistent or precise results.

² I'm sure a couple of people have already written this one, but I have yet to encounter their versions of it, and until such time as I do, I don't care.

³ He needs more stuff plugged into him because he is supposed to be, more or less, a human being with magic powers of some kind I haven't devised yet, and it's impossible to make anything that complex from a single unit of magic stuff. You can make a full-featured human being (or other sophont with a biology), but as soon as you start adding supernatural abilities you have to compensate by taking away other types of complexity, like the personality, or the fingers. And that's if you have a really good unit; it would actually take about one and a half of an average one to make a human being. This is all relevant to the plot.

⁴ Who I don't even like. I was so disappointed. I was halfway into Perdido Street Station before I felt like the plot had started, and to get there I had to wade through piles of dialogue that is frequently horrible. Aspects of the setting are delicious, but none of them are central enough to Perdido Street Station to keep me reading. Are his later books better? Did he ever, say, figure out that nobody fucking talks like that?

The events described herein took place some Friday a couple of weeks ago, maybe 3 October. I've been telling this story a lot recently because it tends to go over pretty well, and I had a dream about telling it last night -- though for some reason I said 'keta salmon' instead of 'Arctic char' in the dream; I instantly knew that was wrong but couldn't find the right term -- so now I'm telling you lot, because I haven't met my quota for this week. I don't think this is the right medium for it, or anyway, I haven't figured out how to make it work in this medium: this is droll, but, for example, when I told this story to my sister in person, she laughed so hard I was afraid she was going to drive us off the road.

We catered a large event recently, a funeral with some three hundred attendees. Among other things, they had ordered two poached salmon platters. These platters call for one whole salmon each, head, tail and all. I ordered them a couple of days early to give myself some contingency time, and to my not very great surprise the salmon arrived without heads or tails. Apparently the seafood warehouse was out of head-on salmon altogether. As a compromise, they offered to send us two head-off, tail-on salmon, and four fish-heads: two grouper and two arctic char.

Groupers have wide, fleshy, almost froglike heads, totally unlike the hard silvery heads of salmon. Arctic char are closely related to salmon and very similar in appearance and even flavor -- but for the purposes of the food industry, they run about half the size. So, our options were to court the anger of God with hideous mismatched Frankenfish, or to present the customer with fish visibly having only half the intelligence of normal salmon.

The actual solution to this problem was to send Underboss #1 down to the local fish market to buy a couple of salmon heads; we can't technically sell product from there, but no one was going to be actually eating the damn things, and we were backed into a corner. Meanwhile, my suggestions that we attach both bodies to a pig's head with an apple in the mouth, or put both char heads on a single body and tell the customer it was a good omen, went unacknowledged.

The front hall of my building has an unpleasant smell lately, a bit like rotting vegetation and a bit like dog anal glands. It's not very intense, and it stops at the door of my apartment (probably due to air circulation; I have the windows open all the time in autumn but there's no circulation in the hall), so I don't care. I think it's from the trash cans in the basement, which have been pretty rank recently.

Some pair of giggling idiots who go up and down the stairs once or twice a day -- I assume one or more of them lives on one of the upper floors and not that, say, they just come here to exercise -- has taken to speculating as they pass my door that the smell is coming from here. I don't know why this is; maybe the smell stops when you take the next flight of stairs up. Maybe because I have a dog. Regardless, this drives me insane. Barring a set of unlikely circumstances, they know that the doors in this building stop sound only slightly better than tissue paper and that, if I'm home, I can hear them. The obvious solution to this problem is to wait silently on the landing and kick the door open when they pass, but my door opens inwards, so I may have to settle for taping a sharp note to it.

Have changed the (tongue-in-cheek) scathing pop culture commentary tag to belated reviews because that's the only kind of review you should expect to see here: It's not unheard-of for me to see movies opening weekend, but I have to think about them for a long time before I'm ready to review them, and I operate well behind the curve on nearly all other sorts of media.

( Mass Effect, Ex Machina, Midnighter )

Today I had the pleasure of struggling to write the first sentence because it's hard to put words together, instead of struggling to write the first sentence because I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Then I finished struggling with the sentence and wrote another 401 words, for a total today of 413.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, lilairen!

This is my strangest setting ever. I knew it was pretty weird, but only now that I'm trying to render parts of it in a format that is at least first-draft levels of accessible do I realize how very bizarre it actually is, in much the way that my habits seem only mildly awful and socially unacceptable until I try to explain them to someone else. This thing feels weird and foreign even to me, which is intriguing; usually things out of my own brain feel prosaic to me. It makes me worry that it's full of darlings, or possibly that I have a tumor.

My hobby: handing heavy boxes that don't look heavy when I'm carrying them to macho yet feeble coworkers who never learn.