Lars Von Trier is a Fucking Nazi and Must Burn?

It had been a strange, even surreal festival marked by ecstatic visions and doomsday fantasies and nearly hijacked when the Danish director Lars von Trier, in competition with “Melancholia,” announced at the press conference for his movie — perhaps jokingly and certainly stupidly — that he was a Nazi. # (emphasis mine).

In recent years I’ve come to despise journalists with a passion. To talk about Von Trier’s half-hearted attempt at humor earlier at Cannes, and describe it as being ‘perhaps’ a joke, “but we can’t know for sure, he might be a nazi! In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the burden of proof that he’s not, is on him!”, is such utter sensationalist bullshit that it’ll clear a room in five seconds flat. There was never any question that Von Trier had simply wandered blind into a bad joke with no exit, and anyone with half a brain found his exclusion from the festival to be a laughable reactionist move.

Von Trier is a provocateur, this is what he does.

A more reasonable piece of commentary might have been:

[...] announced at the press conference for his movie, in a failed attempt at his trademark provocative humor, that he was a Nazi.

If you’re writing for one of the untold number of amateur movie blogs out there, I’d still scoff my nose and consider unsubscribing if I came across as stupid a remark as the one in this quote — because I’m a snobbish asshole like that — but when you’re writing the New York Times’ story on the grand prize for Cannes, I’d expect you to plant your innuendos more cautiously, please.

2010

When even the downs were bigger ups than most ups, you know you led a pretty badass life in 2010. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that if 2011 turns out to be half the year 2010 was, it’ll make 2009 its bitch. And given that we suddenly find ourselves in New York, it’s looking pretty good.

Needless to say — which is a lie, because otherwise I’d have no way to start this paragraph — my writing has tapered off over the past year. Again. But it’s well in line with the promise I made myself to care more about the quality, than the quantity. A strategy that paid off several times, most notably when I profiled everyones favorite wookiee of course, a subject about which I’ve got a thing or two more to say in the coming year. More than two things in fact.

In trying to focus on writing things that can last, or at least be really good for the time in which they manage to have appeal, I’ve skipped writing many an entry, most often on tech, most often about the iPad, iOS, because… Well, look around. You can’t walk down the street without kicking entries about tech, and more specifically about the iOS. And Android. And it’s interesting; I read it of course. But a few years ago, those were subjects still covered by a few small-time nerds and a few big-time columnists; now you can’t open the paper, turn on the TV or ‘J’ through Google Reader without being assaulted by opinion and rumor pieces left and right.

Clytus, I’m bored.

Write about iOS, or Android or whatever floats your boat. But do it in your own way, or about something no one else is paying attention to. If you’re just piping up in the hopes of catching some spill-over traffic… What’re you doing?

And the second thing, which has weighed on me for the last few months, since I first started the project of which the Chewie piece happened to be a spin-off, is one of observing precision and discipline in research and writing. This happens to be the case with any kind of writing, especially tech-writing, but certainly also something as seemingly niche and nerdy as Star Wars, as it were. If you can read this, you’ve got access to the internet. If you’ve got internet access, you’ve got no reason to regurgitate hearsay, unfounded rumors and ridiculous myths. Half the troubles in the world stem from doing just that, and given that we live in the age of information, not disinformation, it’s about time we start manning, or womanning, up and getting down with some research.

Happy new year you. Now go forth and conquer.

The Lost Drive

With the exception of the two first seasons, it seems like a law onto itself that every season of Lost has to start a bit ‘off’. Not necessarily bad in any easily distinguished manner; merely ‘off’. And I think the same has held true for this, the last season, until now. Episode 3, ‘The Substitute’ was the episode to finally break in the season for us. I would love to find the time when once in the future we sit down and re-watch the show from beginning to end and find out what the deciding factors are. Something tells me there’s a recurrence amongst some of the directors and writers among who that special Lost-ness really thrives.

They may be better craftsmen, but above everything else, it seems, at least for me, that there’s also another thing that usually characterizes those best episodes. Namely that they’re the character portraits. The first two episodes of this last season were mostly plot-driven, catching up on events from the previous season and setting up the events that will drive this season. Getting the pieces lined up. ‘What Kate Does’, episode 2, had its moments, but was still, at least in my opinion, more concerned with plot than character, whereas The Substitute was almost entirely character-driven.

It certainly helps that Terry O’Quinn delivers such a fantastic performance as Locke, but the episode itself was also filled to the brim with narrative glee and one amazing scene after another, all centered around the character of Locke. Yes, there’s the whole alternate timeline to keep things fresh, but it’s still pretty impressive how even after five seasons, the Lost team manages to twist and turn the character in new and fascinating ways.

I could gush over Lost all day, I really could, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some Fringe forums to troll.

A Word About Wordy

I’m lucky enough to have force-fed myself enough roleplaying games and science fiction comics to have picked up English to a level where I’m often more fluent in it, than I am in my mothertongue. And for the purposes of of blogging about those two particular subjects, whatever grammar, puntuation and structure snafus that happen to find their way onto this blog are less a real worry than they merely distracting (and at times embarrassing).

But if one were to take writing more seriously, be it for personal, academic or straight-up professional reasons, a friend of a friend of mine recently started a site that’ll do just that, hassle-free.

I don’t generally plug things on this site unless I truly like them. And until I tried Wordy, I honestly didn’t know what use I could have for it. But listen, Wordy gets it.

It’s on-demand copy-editing, and it’s ultra slick. No hassles, no clutter, no crap. I took it for a test-run on a chapter from a book another friend of mine is writing, and the experience couldn’t have been better. If for nothing else, you should check it out just to marvel at the elegance of how they’ve set up the site and how clear their process and goal is.

Particularly interesting to some of us, is that they’re working specifically on a WordPress plugin, which should make it even easier to use. They’ve also got a blog (in Danish).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some K2 code to clean up.

Ga-Fi

I’m a man of few available hours these days, much to my dismay, as I do crave so, the act of classic blogging. And yeah yeah, I should fix the weird layout issues WordPress 2.8 caused in my footer, but it was either that or an entry, and since my friends have started pointing fingers and calling my blog dead…

Now, games, peeeehew. Do they ever suck.

Three pillars create entertainment in a game: gameplay, fiction and aesthetics. For obvious reason, any game that has good gameplay, can get most often get away with a lot more slack in fiction and aesthetics than a game which is strongest in either or even both of the other two. But people, that doesn’t mean you can just downright ignore them, alright? Now, fair enough, the more common problem is when aesthetics are favored over gameplay and fiction — it’s after all easier to sell a game with screenshots of ‘teh pretties’ than it is to somehow show how fun a games is, or how invested you’ll be in its amazing turning points.

In either case, fiction loses out. And when fiction loses out, games become stupid. And when games become stupid, I get a headache.

Case in point: Portal. Have you played Portal? You should have played Portal. If you haven’t played Portal… What are you even doing here? Go play Portal, we’ll wait.

...

Is he gone? Lock the door, we’ll go on without him. Sucker. Aaanyway, I don’t need to remind you, who did play Portal, just how awesome the writing, and writing alone, makes that game. Without the writing, Portal would be little more than a cool tech-demo puzzler. But with great writing…

It’s a turret! Just a turret! You know, the things that usually go BEEP RATATATAT? That’s that! All games have them (all!), and yet only one is as cute as a kitten, and memorable for it.

That’s what good writing alone is capable of.

Bad writing?

“But Michael, that isn’t bad; didn’t you watch Troll 2?”

Listen kid, mediocre is the new bad. In the same way that Dead Space itself is mostly a really well crafted, thoroughly mediocre game, the mise-en-scène, if one can call it that with a straight face, is that of absolute mediocrity. Consider how much better a game Dead Space would have been, if the fiction had simply been given the same care and attention that was paid to something as irrelevant as those beautifully rendered floor panels. A little love and care in the writing and direction… Is that too much to ask? Fair enough, there is only so far you can go with a ‘distress beacon’ plot, but stories are great not because of ‘what’, but because of ‘how’.

It is truly mystifying how an industry which so thrives on transporting people into the fantastic, spends so little on the oldest traditions in the portfolio of the fantastic.

That other major entertainment juggernaut, Hollywood, knows that good fiction is the key, even if they’re afraid of anything that isn’t an existing property. That’s why they’re so busy falling over each other to buy up comics, a huge, previously untabbed source of great fiction, ready for the taking. In his heart of hearts, even Michael Bay knows that explosions, bimbos and big robots alone, are too shallow to keep people coming around for a sequel; and whether or not it’s your cup of tea, and while it may not be Dostoyevsky, I assure you, Bay screenplays don’t happen overnight, and they aren’t written by ‘Phil from accounting’.

It’s high time games started taking this aspect of themselves seriously. It’s staggering that it hasn’t happened yet, considering how infatuated the entertainment industry as a whole, and the games industry in particular is with franchises. Consider that before one frame of celluloid was exposed, Lucas spent well over 3 years writing, just writing, Star Wars. That’s after years of thinking about it… Star Trek was—according to Wikipedia, cuz I ain’t no damn Trekkie—in pre-production for up to six years! Lord of the Rings? Psh. Forget about it.

And every one of those franchises exist today, first and foremost, because of writing. After that, any of the many steps from there on out can easily make a wreck of the entire project, but no amount of subtle direction or jaw-dropping special effects will miraculously polish a turd of a script.

You’ll be lucky if you can find me a game that has had a combined pre-production period of more than one year.

With all of this in mind, is it so odd odd that until recently I kept confusing inFamous and [Prototype]? It’s not that I think either development team consists of bad people, or even untalented ones. They probably have the best of intentions, like everyone else. And I’ve heard good about both games from colleagues. But in my eyes, on a fundamental level, these games have no vision. So they fall back on clichés and platitudes, the likes of which seem so familiar because they are composites of other cliches and platitudes, to the point where, if this is defining for the games industry, we should just cut our loses and not bother with fiction at all.

It doesn’t all have to be hulking power armors, head-butting, ass-slapping, badittude slow-mo walkcycles and omnipotence, does it?Some, dignity, would be nice, you know?

I leave you with this, not because I’m done, but because I’m sleepy. Psycho? Jester? Is this a much hyped 2008 state-of-the-art top-of-the-line grade-A computer game or no-name action flick from the 80’s?:

CPH.LITT.08 — Feat. Paul Auster & Siri Hustvedt

Rikke and I took off early from work on this glorious summers day, to attend the Copenhagen Litterature Festival ’08, where we had one-day passes and a couple of tickets for the pay-for talks. One was with Henning Carlsen and Paul Auster on the book and film ‘Hunger’, and how it affected Paul Auster’s authorship, and the other was with Naja Marie Aidt and Siri Hustvedt, on their latest books and their shared fascination with the concept and idea of ‘evil’.

In-between the two, we caught a talk between a norwegian author, Espen Haavardsholm and Ib Michael, the latter of whom is a well-known Danish author, the subject being inadvertent similarities between the two people and their latest respective books, both of which were fictionalized autobiographies.

Now I regret to admit that I am in fact a horrible reader. I have all of the best intents and joys of reading, but with all the other things I seem to constantly get myself involved in, I never seem to have the time to take. And when I do take the time, I regrettably often find myself disappointed with the books I pick.

But I studied for the event by reading Auster’s City of Glass (which was good I might add), watching Sult and afterwards reading Auster’s essay, The Art of Hunger, and luckily doing so gave me enough of an anchor to feel less like an intruder.

Of what we saw of it, CPH.LITT.08 was a most welcome event here in Copenhagen, which often feels as if the introvert has lived for far too long in the shadow of the obnoxiously extrovert. If nothing else, it was a most enjoyable event; as any event where intelligent articulate people articulate intelligent things usually are.

Halfway. A Third Done.

April 15th, and Script Frenzy is half empty. Me, I like to think of it as: “ARGH! Two Weeks!? Twooo Weeeeks!?”

Now, first off, let me just correct a common mistake made by quite a few people I know. I didn’t quit Script Frenzy, I quit Cheap Cyborg, and in its place, I’m writing… a drama… comedy… I don’t know.

A script.

Shit. I have no idea what it is. I’m on page 35, and it’s still up in the air. But then, I’m writing from the loosest of outlines and pretty much making it up as I go along. Laying the tracks for the train just in front of it.

Luckily the train is slow as molasses.

The upside is, I’ve found myself to be not entirely incompetent at writing dialog. Once my characters start talkin’, they just won’t shut the hell up.

The downside is, once my characters start talkin’, they just won’t shut the hell up! It’s making my scenes rather long, which of course rakes up the page count, which is good for Script Frenzy. But it has undoubtedly put a dent in my plan to win an oscar for this particular screenplay.

But yeah, as expected, I’ve wanted to throw in the towel many times. And to be honest, I have no illusion of making 100 pages for April 30th. This month has turned out to be one of the most booked I’ve ever had. And in the good way.

If I didn’t have a script to write.

But that’s alright; I remember what it was like, as a kid, to try something and fail miserably at it.

You get up, and you try again.

And again.

Take a break.

And again.

It’ll take years before something worthwhile leaves these fingers, just as with everything else I’ve ever tried.

The key is to be naive and not know that that is the case.

Luckily being naive is my speciality.

Bork Bork Bork

I chickened out.

It’s three days to Fade In and I dang-diddly chickened out.

I admit it. I’m not ready to wrangle Cheap Cyborg. Shit, I’m not even sure I can write a 100 pages of anything in a month, let alone an ambitious, if messy and unfocused science fiction epic…

Especially a messy and unfocused science fiction epic.

And just as everything was going so well.

Sure, it was in the nick of time, but I had finally gathered up all my Cheap Cyborg notes, started fleshing out the few characters I had thought up and I was even working on a rough outline.

I had almost convinced myself that I could do it. That I could really step up and write the shit out of this thing. Yeah, so I had a bunch of holes, but I could make it up as I go along, right? It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be long…

Well, I’ve tried facing the brick wall of ‘what the fuck do I do now?’. It isn’t fun. In fact, it’s brutal and unforgiving and it takes time. Under pressure of time and especially when trying to prove to myself that these nimble ungroomed fingers can do creative writing as well as code, a more accessible project is probably a good idea.

So around noon yesterday I created a new Scrivener project, full-screened it and stared at it for a while, waiting patiently for my brain to start sending those nuggest of gold I knew were in there down the river…

And I waited…

And I waited…

This is the hardest part for me, about writing. Psh, not that I know, because really I haven’t written anything to such a length that I can properly say that, so really everything that follows is a pile o’ dong… But please, by all means.

Anyway, this is the hardest part of writing. It’s not that conjuring ideas into existence isn’t easy. It’s a breeze. I have a folder-load of those, I’ve called it ‘Writing’. But truthfully I should rename it to ‘The Idea Graveyard’.

It’s not that the ideas are bad… Come on!... Alright, alright, some of them are bad… Okay, so a lot of them are bad… probably. The point is, finding that one good idea that is at once powerful, elegant and simple as well as translatable, is inhumane.

Someone really famous—who exactly I’ve forgotten, so he/she can’t have been that famous—said something to the effect of: perseverance beats out skill and luck every time. And in turning those graveyard ideas into workable ideas, perseverance will undoubtedly eventually get me over the finish line.

But the good idea saves you the time and a hell of a lot of work.

So I waited…

Aaand…

I’m ready. I think. No… I’m ready. Yes.

Now comes the harsh reality of actually writing one hundred pages in one month. Between my birthday, three RPG sessions, a night out on the town, a concert and various other minutia, I’m already down to three weeks. That evens out to about 5 pages a day, which, I happen to know, is what George Lucas writes in a full day, morning to evening…

Since I only have night and weekends, that’s… optimistic.

I would characterize it borderline insane, but I don’t want to jinx myself already.

I’d better go flesh out my outline a bit more…

April

Bachelor Weekend Writing

I needed these last 10 days of vacation like Superman needs the sun. You know, that part of life that isn’t work? The part that is relegated to the few hours of your day between waking and leaving for work and coming home and going to sleep?

That’s what we’ve been doing, and it’s been heavenly. Lounging, reading, watching, browsing, shopping, roleplaying, coding, loving and Thinking.

Like putting the brain into sleep mode (with, in the back of your head, the knowledge that it will inevitably be awakened brutally tomorrow morning when Rikke’s cell, with some glee I think, brings us back into worker-ant-mode).

So at the moment I’m looking forward about a week, to April 1st, which aside from being yet again that day a year where the media becomes entirely useless (well… more so) in their attempt at ‘funny’ deceiving pranks, is also the start date for Script Frenzy, which as you may remember, I’m joining this year.

This is me by the way. Add me.

Obviously; the trouble is—as you should have come to expect—I haven’t actually prepared myself to the extend I should have; nor the extent I sorta-kinda-maybe promised myself I would.

After all, by now I should have a fully fledged outline, complete with characters and curves and arcs and… so on. Conventional thinking says that might help me ein bischen with felling down one hundred pages in 30 days. Conventional thinking, in this case, is probably right. Yeah.

But then, you know, life. And between Monolith (which is proceeding steadily, thank you, though I fear it will come to a stand-still as I punish myself towards 100 pages in April) and roleplaying and not doing anything. Well, the days are only so long, and I am so so lazy.

Don’t get me wrong; I do in fact have an idea. Yessireebob. A gen-u-ine idea.

In fact, it’s the idea that wouldn’t die. You know? I keep finding all its flaws. Keep doubting my ability to actually, truly, live up to it; to write it properly, like it deserves. In my head anyway. But despite that, it always creeps back in.

It’s code-named ‘Cheap Cyborg’ by the way. Not that that title is representative of the story any more, but that’s how it started out, and since I haven’t really found a new one yet… Hey, Cheap Cyborg.

Besides, titling a work should be like a coronation, right? “I pronounce you ‘Star Wars’”. The crowd roars. You bathe in money and fame.

Then you wake up.

The history of Cheap Cyborg is long and sordid and absolutely uninteresting until it becomes a bestseller and I bathe in money and fame (and wake up).

But essentially it was pretty much from its birth meant as a comicbook. Yeah, it could be a novel, but I always thought of it as very visual, so… And I’m not convinced that its structure, pacing or subject matter fits a film.

And…

Well, alright, so, some of it is a bit odd. Weird even. It’s Science Fiction, right, so… Well it wouldn’t beat out Pirates at the box office, I don’t think. In fact, it would probably be hailed as a damn mess and a waste of money, I would be called a fraud and a waste of air (Wake up! Wake up!).

The clinch is, for Script Frenzy I always thought I would write a film script, because that’s a format I understand fairly well. And comicbook scripts… Well… There’s no format to stick to. Everyone has their own style and rapport with their artist(s). It’s a mess. And one of those awful liberal ‘artistic interpretation’ messes even!

Thus it came to be, that I decided to pen Cheap Cyborg as a comic, but in film script format. I want a readable more than a produceable project at the end anyway, and this saves me having to nail down each frame as well, which I’m not sure I can do satisfactory while also trying to ring the bell at the top of the 100-page-tower…

So that’s what I’m doing.

And I have notes. Lots of notes. Pages of notes.

Going in roughly all directions.

And no outline. Did I mention that? No outline? Yeah… I have no outline.

I don’t want to call it quits ahead of time. I mean, I’m not a quitter, you know? But… Psh; it’ll be a miracle if I make it to the 100 pages, I can tell you that much up front. A Goddamn miracle.

But I’m not a quitter. Nope.

I won’t make it.

But then that’s what 2008 is all about, so I might as well get too it.

There’s one thing that always brings me back from my late-night fits of self-pity, when I fling glasses of sherry at the wall and wail out: “I’ll never amount to anything, waaaaahhhh. I’ll never be a respected author!... Aaahahaaaaa”, which may also be helpful to you, if you happen to be a Star Wars fan, like me.

Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays. Because, if Star Wars could be born from such crud; well then there is a your favorite author inside us all.

Seriously.

If When all else fails, luckily the plot generator on the Script Frenzy site is a veritable treasure trove of money-in-the-bank ideas:

In a haunted space station orbiting Pluto the oldest park ranger in the Andes attempts to rewrite Finnish history.

Eh… Screw Cheap Cyborg, I’m going with this.

PS: I will of course be following up on Cheap Cyborg here, but you can also follow my progress on Twitter.

Writers on Strike

The writers came out of that meeting like Rocky Balboa — eating lightning and crapping thunder. After weeks of speculation and rhetoric, this was it. Writers formed their legions, shields covering them from shoulder to ankle, imagining the producers as Persia’s most elite warriors doomed to build a corpse wall outside Thermopylae. #

You go girl! Oh, and some insight on behalf of Lost:

From all appearances, Lost may have the best advantage of all series, given that it has been stockpiling new scripts since June and not a single episode has yet aired. At this point, 14 of 16 episodes have been written. And if the strike does last long enough to really affect other series, Lost could very well be the only quality scripted dramas on television in February (along with perhaps 24, though it’s far more behind in its scripts due to a major overhaul of location and storyline). #

And finally a word from John August:

I’m contracted on two scripts right now, but they’ll be sitting unopened in their folders until the strike is resolved. I have a deal to write a spec for Fox, but that will also have to wait. Pencils down means pencils down. I’m not writing any features or television until there’s a contract. #

Salivant Words: A Journalist's Admiration

I like nice words, and I couldn’t help reprinting this sentence:

Perhaps no journalist is so admired by his peers, in part because he has actually pulled off the life we imagined our profession would afford. Dashing off 1,000 ‘pater le bourgeois words before a two-bottle lunch, blagging through war-zone checkpoints, starry parties, whisky-fuelled late-night geo-politics and crackling media feuds. Yet as most of hackdom has knuckled down to colourless, desk-bound sobriety, there is Hitchens, still larging it, a 3-D cartoon of what we might all have been, given his ego and intellect, his brass neck and neoprene liver. #

And of course this snippet:

But Hitchens is never far below boiling point. He is an evangelical secularist, an atheist warlord.

Nice.

I would love to just quote the entire thing verbatim, as it is a great piece of writing. At least if you happen to be an evangelical secularist. If on the other hand you find yourself on the side that believes in the great-eye-in-the-sky… not so much.

Script Writing and Halloween Getaway

So, today was the second to last of the twelve script writing sessions I’ve attended at work. My relative quiet over the last few days have been from my working feverishly on shaping the lump of sloppy cookie dough representing my script, Caged, into something half-presentable as a ‘first draft’.

Well, things came to a head yesterday, as I realized that I had been too careless in defining some of the key turning points of the story, and it as a whole was tearing itself apart from trying to go in too many directions.

Left with two options, either fold and sit this round out, or take the challenge and do a rewrite for today, I decided on the latter. So since yesterday, until our class beginning at three in the afternoon, I hammered out about twenty pages of lyrically-poor, on-the-nose restructuring.

And while it makes for horrible reading, it was sourly needed, and the script is much better off for it.

Of course, we ran out of time, and so in a sense, all my efforts were for naught.

That’s not entirely true of course. Now I’ve got the full script, which is currently a healthy 28 pages and I just need to start polishing it down to something which can be read.

I’ve still got a horribly slow exposition-filled second act; I’ll have to figure something out to make it at least seem interesting.

Halloween Getaway

Rikke formulated a fantastic plan, and I followed suit. We’ve rented a small house in northern Sealand, where we’ll be going from saturday till Wednesday.

I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, that’s halloween, ain’t it?”. Yes; yes it is. And that’s why we’re filling up our bags with books and movies (most of which are of the horror variety). It’ll be fabulous.

For my part, these are the books I’ll be towing with me:

Alastair Reynolds – Revelation Space

On the planet Resurgam, archæologist and scion of House Sylveste, Dan Sylveste, is engaged in an archæological dig, researching a species known as the Amarantin and cause of their apparent mass extinction, dubbed “the Event”. He has to face several political problems on the colony, including a power struggle between the archæologists and those interested in terraforming the planet to make it more comfortable. #

Alastair Reynolds – Chasm City

Chasm City is framed and largely written in the voice of Tanner Mirabel, a security expert who has come to Chasm City to avenge the death of his former client’s wife at the hands of a “postmortal” noble named Argent Reivich. #

I’m about 200 pages into this, and while it hasn’t truly gripped me yet, I’ve sworn that I’d finish it. I’m also reading the first of the books in Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space trilogy, named thusly. And while I was overjoyed with the first hundreds of pages, it bogged down in boring nonsense around the middle, and I’ve been stuck there for a very long time. I might bring that as well…

Terry Brooks – Armageddon’s Children

The world, now ravaged by nuclear war and plague, lies in ruins. Demons and their once-men underlings scour the continents, enslaving and experimenting upon what healthy young remain. Mutations from the fallout and poisons have produced offshoots from humanity – Moles (those adapted to living underground), Spiders (named for their agile, long limbs), and the scaly, brutish Lizards. Zombie-like creatures called Croaks roam free as well, searching for bodies to devour. Most humans are walled up in stadiums and arenas in large cities, fortified compounds filled with thousands of frightened refugees. A few, mostly children, live as tribes hidden in buildings on the streets. #

Robert Heinlein – Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers takes place during an interstellar war between the Terran Federation of Earth and the Arachnids (referred to as “the Bugs”) of Klendathu. It is narrated as a series of flashbacks by Juan Rico, and it is one of only a few Heinlein novels to use that narrative device. #

Frank Miller – Batman: Year One

Bruce Wayne, aged 24, returns home from training abroad for twelve years. In Gotham, he bides his time, waiting for the right moment, all the while preparing himself. Gordon, meanwhile, has moved to Gotham with his pregnant wife, Barbara, and pursues a career in law enforcement. #

Steve Wozniak – iWoz

Describes the creation of the first personal computer, details engineer Steve Wozniak’s life before and after Apple, and provides a personal perspective on the invention that helped ignite the computer revolution. #

Jeff Hawkins – On Intelligence

On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines is a book by Palm Pilot-inventor Jeff Hawkins with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee. The book explains Hawkins’ memory-prediction framework theory of the brain and describes some of its consequences. #

H.P. Lovecraft – Omnibus 1: At the Mountains of Madness

These tales of horror are in the true gothic tradition … full of hinted terrors and unholy stenches. They are something very much out of the ordinary, a real collector’s piece for connoisseurs of the unusual! Lovers of the macabre, the sinister, and the uncanny, take note. #

I very much wish I had the fifth volume of Akira (since I just bought the sixth), but oh well. But, as you can see, I’ll be a busy little bee. Especially considering that I also have to finish the second, and potentially final, draft during that time. I doubt I’ll have time to read more than a few, considering all the movies and food that also need to be devoured.

Should be interesting.