Monthly Archives: May 2011

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May 30, 2011

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Essays/My Intriguing Thoughts

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On Disassociation

There was a bit of controversy in my field of vision this weekend. No, it wasn’t my nemesis disparaging a group of people after being told that a term he used was a horrible slur. The controversy cropped up on Doug TenNapel’s online comic, Ratfist. I’d say exactly what went down, but according to my Twitter feed, that’s already been covered in multiple locations with a variety of interesting and colorful terms thrown into the mix.

But, if you want to see it from the source, check out page 99 in the comic and then frolic down to the comments section; be warned: it gets kinda heated in there.

Back? Cool.

So, clearly, there are many ways to take the creator’s comments as well as other commentors’. I had my own knee-jerk reaction that peppered my facebook page and twitter feed, but I reined it in a bit because, hell, I compared Eric Cantor to C’thulhu a while back, so I don’t have much in the way of room to talk.

Anyway, it go to the point that Jon Lim and I actually started talking to the dude on Twitter. (Yes, my friends, that deserves italics. I tweeted to the guy who created Earthworm Jim.)

A famous person acknowledged I exist!!!!

It was a really, really cool few minutes, and I was geeking out pretty hardcore – built on by my juggling of Fallout: New Vegas at the same time. Nothing particularly substantial was said, and I’m sure we’re just another couple voices in the crowd, but as it went on, Jon mentioned “disassociation” after TenNapel brought up a blogger writing about boycotting his work after having posted about listening to Wagner and watching Polanski films.

And that’s what started me thinking about it’s incredibly hard sometimes to separate the artist from the art. It’s like all of the Mel Gibson insanity that keeps cropping up every couple of years. The man is obviously a well of interesting insults, and a lot of times, the question crops up about whether people should keep giving him money. (Or, in other words, people start talking about a boycott.)

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May 25, 2011

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Essays/My Intriguing Thoughts

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On The Infintely Useful Towel

It’s Towel Day! And I forgot my towel at home. This is what’s wrong with me. I go around flaunting my gleefully-held beliefs like one should always have a towel and then go around, tossing them out the window in fits of forgetfulness.

A further example: I pledged to send out a couple agent query letters today (CLOYD will be SOLD, damn it!), and here I am, blogging about towels.

Some explanation. Towel Day is a world-wide festival celebrating the towel, as inspired by Douglas Adams’s flawless – and it was flawless, damn it – Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy trilogy(ish). The towel is an infinitely useful object, deployed as everything from a method by which one can obtain sustenance, a weapon, and a disguise. It is also one of the very few things that the bumbling Arthur Dent has to remind him of Earth in his travels throughout the galaxy, and is thus better than a photograph, because you can bend a towel and no one will shout at you for destroying memories.

Now, I could talk about my own whacky uses for towels as inspired by Adams, but I won’t. Instead, in further penance for my stupidity, I shall discuss a time when I left a towel at home on a, and was thus put in an awkward position.

That’s it. There is no other point. The story will be me going to a place, thinking “whoops,” and that is it. It’s a meandering bout of mental vomit wherein no truths about humanity or myself are gleaned. I went on a trip, forgot to bring a towel, and life goes on. That’s the point of the story. But, still, I think I should get this out there. You know, appease the Towel Spirit by saying that towels are very useful, and this is what happens when you don’t bring a towel:

You write a shitty blog post in the hopes that doing so will get out a couple more pageviews.

Feel free to skip this if you don’t care about Towel Day, but only on the caveat that you’re going to go read Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.

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May 24, 2011

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Short Stories

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5 More Things The Masses Do Which Annoy Me

A picture of our esteemed author

Well, the well has seemingly run dry for a bit. Going through an imagination drought aside from the ideas that are being reserved for my second book. Luckily, as I was trying to think of something to make up for the site, I received an e-mail from the estimable Reginald St Smythe-Smythington Holst-Dulverton BA, MA, PhD, MD, JD. It seems his shrink has asked him to write another list, and he’s seen fit to send it to me. Thus:

From the desk of Reginald St Smythe-Smythington Holst-Dulverton BA, PhD, MD, JD; transcribed by his typing servant, Froderick Raleigh:

It has come to a head, so to speak. On a recent outing outside of my manor’s grounds and into the festering cesspool of the working class that is Canterbury, I happened upon a “festival” of sorts. While–no doubt–the gathered unwashed masses there believed they were doing whatever it is the working class does whenever they feel compelled to stain the day with their presence, I had another reaction: Severe revulsion. To wit, I nearly vomited upon my driver, but managed to avoid such an embarrassing event.

After concluding my business in that wretched pit, I phoned my psychiatrist and told him to be ready for an emergency appointment. He protested that it was his day off, or some such nonsense, but then I dangled an extra four hundred pounds in front of his face and his protestations ceased.

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