Cyborg Assassins I Have Known

I'm currently reading and enjoying the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. I bought the book because of the opening chapter, "Foiled Again," narrated by an incarcerated super-villain named Dr. Impossible. It is unarguably in the vein of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and (for me at least) that's a good thing. The other half of the narrative is from the point of view of an ex-government cyborg special agent who is trying to find her place in the world after beating the crap out of a team mate who made the mistake of speculating within ear shot just how much of her anatomy might be original parts. As I mentioned last year around this time, I enjoy a long (albeit wary) friendship with an android kill-bot known as cs10. She gets extremely cross when I don't pass on good reads as soon as I find them, and since she sometimes scans this blog, and since this novel prominently features a cyborg assassin as a principal character, and since making cs10 "extremely cross" can have dire consequences, I am mentioning the book right now, before I have even finished it.

(Special thanks to Forbidden Planet International, from whom I snagged an image of the UK edition of the book, which is waaay cooler than the American cover.)

Half Minute Horrors

cs10 told me about a fabulous new children's book called Half Minute Horrors. They were inviting new submissions, so I wrote one for cs10.

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"File Under 'Friends, Robot — Important Considerations' "

Do not say to your robot friend,

"There is more than one way to skin a cat,"

Unless you have more than one cat.

"Show Me Where It Hurts" or "Why I Make People Uncomfortable"

After decades of searching, I finally found and purchased a copy of Edmundo Vasconcelos' Modern Methods of Amputation. Everything I know about unintended irony(*), I learned from this book. I will be making T-shirts.

(*) cs10 is welcome to chime in on whether it is linguistically possible for irony to be unintentional. She may also chime in on whether, in her experience, this figure accurately depicts the best position to take when extracting all four limbs from a human, with the caveat that the author's intention is that the amputee survive the procedure.

Also, I suck at quitting blogging.

The "Essential" Buffy

I'm going to use this entry to migrate a comment thread to an upper tier. cs10 and I have been having a long chat in the "Wrapping Up the Holidays" comments, and I mentioned that I am mired in Season Four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A very generous friend loaned us the entire DVD collections of Buffy and Angel, and we are finally coming to terms with the fact that we are just not going to become Buffy fans. We recognize the brilliance of some episodes, and we appreciate the ambitious story arc, but as vampire Willow once said "Bored now."

So I need a list of essential Buffy/Angel episodes to watch so that I can return the discs with the best possible final impression of the show. cs10 said that it would be helpful if I said what episodes we have liked. Off the top of my head, I would have to say that "Passion" was one of the best bits of TV drama I have ever seen. We also liked the big climax to Season 3 (although neither of us really cared for the character of Faith). I liked the two "vampire Willow" episodes. I also like the character of Anya.

I haven't been able to get into Angel. It has the monster-a-week thing that bugged me about 1st season Buffy, and I don't really dig any of the characters except maybe Angel's cop friend (whose name I'm blanking on).

Oh, and I loved Firefly.

So, have at it folks. What Buffy/Angel episodes do I need to maintain geek cred?

The Return of the Word Count Graph

In my previous NaNoWriMo blogs I would post progress charts of my daily word totals. They were pretty popular (well, OK it was only cs10 who commented on them, but we make every effort to content the kill-bot), so here they are again.

The graphs are built by a spreadsheet that I use to track my writing totals. It also calculates how much I have to write per day to stay on pace to meet my monthly goal. Maybe I'll write more about that another time.

The January total was 14,519, which was 94% of my goal. We'll grade that as an "A", right?

Rams Do It, Cats Do It, Giraffes Just for Laughs Do It...

Last week Newsweek published an incendiary feature editorial on the Biblical arguments supporting same-sex marriage. While the article is not as acerbic as Alex Frantz's ironic list of additional Biblical Constitutional amendments (which I blogged about here), it was still nice to see a major magazine take the Religious Right to task for cherry-picking which bits of Bronze Age mysticism are still relevant in the modern world. Along those lines, for a far more detailed study of the Biblical stance on homosexuality, check out this aggregation of entries from the Church Discipline blog. (A particular eye-opener is the July 28, 2008 entry, which includes this quite explicit National Geographic video on homosexuality among animals. Seriously, folks, once you've witnessed one dolphin giving his buddy a blow-hole job, your notion of what is and is not "natural" will be forever altered.)

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Thanks go out to cs10, who just notified me that I have been using "November" in all of my December word count entries. (Before she was a kill-bot, she was an editron. In her presence, one does not fuck-up the English language... er, I meant "In her presence, the English language is a thing up with which one does not fuck.")

It's all fixed now, love! Thanks for the tip. You can retract the laser scalpel. Never mind the retina... I've got another one.

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Today's writing totals:
Blog: 123 words
Novel: 404 words (character outline)
DAILY TOTAL: 527 words

DECEMBER RUNNING TOTAL: 9,577/15,500 words

Bad Robot

My dear friend, the beautiful but deadly android known only as "cs10", sent me a link to the Writing Gifts section of Shakespeare's Den.

cs10 and I have long enjoyed congenial debates on the nature of evil. I sit in her lair and drink weak tea while she rinses the viscera out of her extensible talons. We are particularly interested in determining which actions constitute "evil", and which are merely "wicked." Our consensus is that wickedness is when one acts in a manner that is considered morally wrong but which does not directly harm others. Evil, on the other hand, is when harming others is pretty much the whole point. cs10 falls on one side of the divide, and I on the other.

This is why her email missive is so morally intriguing. On the surface it seems like a harmless act, perhaps even considerate. However, things are rarely so simple in her coiled chrome cortex, and any doubts as to her intentions were dispelled when her email ended in the villainous laugh: "muah ha ha!"

But is her message evil? Tempting me to disenfranchise my family and instead spend all of my Christmas savings on quill pens, sealing wax, and Jane Austen action figures... well that's certainly wicked, but it doesn't actually harm anyone. At worst I might be tempted to pickpocket, but I'm not likely to kill anyone. Even if I did go on a mad killing spree (and I doubt my knees are up for that), all of that blood would be on my hands, not hers.

Perhaps cs10 has decided to slip over to my side of the divide... to try a lighter shade of darkness. Wouldn't that be a delightful lesson for the holiday? At this magical time of year, even a blood-drunk, murderous android can set aside her arsenal of field surgery tools and embrace the common values that unite the disparate forms of life on this planet.

Erm... no. She just sent me a follow up email explaining that what she meant by her previous message was that she has killed my family, and that I may now spend my Christmas funds however I see fit.

Her early Christmas gift to me.

Oh, and she attached pictures. How thoughtful.

Well, at least that clarifies things.

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Today's writing totals:
Blog: 372 words
Novel: 500 words (actual text of the actual novel... none of that planning crap)
DAILY TOTAL: 872 words

DECEMBER RUNNING TOTAL: 5,844/15,500 words