Enter the Octopus

China Mieville on Bat Segundo

Maud Newton on books of doomed love

City libraries shut out of broadband stimulus money?

What happens when novelists sober up?

David Aaronovitch’s “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History”

AV Club interview with Judd Apatow

The six foot long typographic map of Paris

An interview with the guy who created “the Barrel Monster”

Build your own air conditioner, MacGuyver style.

The Shake for women! It “beats the fat off!” (Just watch this….)

Check out Alice’s Tea Room from Comic-Con

Woman set up K college fund for sister’s kids. Mother finds out she made the money through pornography, and now wants to return all of it.

Bring me the head of Jar Jar Binks

Aussie comedy troupe The Chasers having fun with Bible literalists in Texas.

Guess what happens when two Georgia cops decide to use their equipment to run a background check on Barack Obama?

“Stop! Don’t Touch Me There! This is My No No Square!”

Humans subconsciously time their blinks so as not to miss information.

Bass fisherman finds downed plane in lake

Conan O’Brien and Andy Richter dub”‘Ghost in the Shell”

Former US Prez Jimmy Carter leaves Southern Baptist denomination over its subjugation of women.

Mark Chadbourn on the real world roots of fantasy

Six tricks for writing when you don’t feel like it

Announcing the Not the Booker Prize

Neat H.P. Lovecraft short animated film: Lovecraft-A Dream

Gamers game for life, according to new study

Dorchester’s editorial department is looking for an intern

Using Tom Waits lyrics as inspiration for role-playing games

Selected links from my daily Twitter feed. Remember, you can follow me: @mattstaggs.

These Palm Pre commercials are spooky as shit.http://bit.ly/57Td6

Do not watch this. Seriously. That which has been seen cannot be unseen. http://bit.ly/GtBRl

William Shatner reads Sarah Palin’s farewell speech. As a beat poem. http://bit.ly/RkVWx   (Working Link here)

Depeche Mode to feature in Left 4 Dead 2!!! http://bit.ly/12lt6I

“I Love You Beth Cooper!” viral marketing Epic Fail. http://twurl.cc/1cgn

Five year old plays “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash http://bit.ly/2UqQIf

Tooth worms?!?!? My teeth itch already. http://www.sciencedaily.com…

You might have heard that Electronic Arts got in a little bit of well-earned trouble over Comic-Con weekend over a contest promoting their new “Dante’s Inferno” video game. The “Sin to Win” contest encouraged attendees to “Commit Acts of Lust” by snapping pictures of themselves with as many “Booth Babes” as possible, posting the photos online and Tweeting the game’s publicity team. The contest winner, EA promised, would win “Dinner, a sinful night with two hot girls, a limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of Booty”.  The ads promoting the contest featured the logo printed on a woman’s chest.  Needless to say, lots of people had a problem with this. Some of the Booth Babes themselves felt that the contest was tantamount to calling an open season on sexual harrasment. Others just thought it was in plain old bad taste. I happen to be one of them.

Look, I like beautiful girls as much as the next straight guy, but can’t we just let the whole Booth Babes thing go? It’s done, okay? It’s not just sexist, it’s boring and shows just a complete lack of imagination at an almost cellular level.  Durr hurr, guys buy videogames and comic books, so let’s lure them here by way of putting a beautiful woman on display like meat in a butchershop window. What does that say about how these companies feel about their customers, anyway? It’s fucking insulting to everyone involved, and it’s lazy to boot.

Speaking as a gamer and sf/f fan myself, I have to tell you that if you think the only way you can get me to give your product a second look is by shoving a pair of tits in my face then I have to wonder about the quality of your product in the first place. Honestly, I’d rather speak to someone who knows a little bit about your products rather than some buxom 21 year-old gal in spandex who could give a shit less about what you’re selling as long as the check clears and nobody gets too touchy-touchy. A little sex appeal is fine, but subtlety is best. Images of  women on all fours tattooed onto another woman’s chest is just pathetic: the lowest level of the lowest common denominator. It’s like something from Mike Judge’s film “Idiocracy“. Pathetic.

I just read that it’s International Blog Against Racism Week, so I thought I’d throw in my two cents.

As many of you know, I’m from the Deep South. I’ve seen racism up close and personal. We’ve got it here. Of course, it’s everywhere else, too, but let’s just leave it as the South has a longstanding racial wound that still hasn’t healed, and the days of institutionalized racism aren’t as far in the past here as they are in other places. I was born after the Civil Rights era, so I grew up in a fully integrated school system, worked alongside people of all different races and creeds and have lived in mixed neighborhoods all of my life. When you’re living in that kind of environment it’s easy to think that it’s always been that way. But it hasn’t, and things can be difficult here for all of us.

I think that blacks and whites here, even those of us with the best of intentions, have trouble understanding each other. As a white man (and it’s funny. Even while writing this I feel a burst of discomfort writing the phrase “as a white man”, kind of like I would if I said something like “As a cannibal” – weird.) I worry about saying the wrong thing sometimes, of inadvertently giving for the impression that I’m a bigot. I want the black people that I interact with on a daily basis to know that I’m not of my father’s generation, or his father’s generation, that although I am familiar with some of the racist assumptions that some white people have, I consciously reject them and try to be a better person. I think that everyone deserves a fair shake in life and no culture is inherently superior to another, and that we’re all really part of the same human family. At the same time, I want to be comfortable in my own skin – to acknowledge and appreciate my own sense of place, person and ethnic identity. I don’t want to feel that burst of discomfort when I talk about my race and gender. I want to know and understand myself, to be at peace, and to grant the same peace and understanding to others. Racism and its effects poison all of this.

I like to think that people of other races feel the same way, but I don’t know how for sure.  That’s part of the problem with race, isn’t it? Maybe with human interaction as a whole. We don’t know how other people think or feel, and the only way that we can interpret it is through our own cognitive biases. That’s where the problem really starts.

While I consciously reject bias and bigotry, I live with the knowledge that no one is immune to it. I think that racism is part of the primitive reptile brain, that tiny little xenophobic core that wants to tell us that safety is only found with the members of our own tribe and that tribe is best represented by those that resemble us most. I think that no one really gets away from it, and that everyone carries assumptions that are racist and sexist, and that the best that all of us can do is to try to treat people fairly, appreciate their differences and to reject the primitive impulses that fuel bigotry. I don’t think racism is a white thing or a black thing. I think that it’s a human thing, just like war and greed. It’s an ugly part of the human condition; something to acknowledge and to work against.

Let me say something else about racism. It’s boring and it ruins everything. I hate the idea of living in a monoculture. I like living in a free marketplace of ideas and art and experiences. I like seeing different faces on TV, hearing different voices and exploring the folkways and traditions of other people. I love the food, too. I can’t imagine life without any of that stuff, and even if we all have our problems living together sometimes, I’d want it no other way.

NPR piece on mystery author Gabriel Cohen

Tolkien heirs want Hobbit film stopped (Thanks, Paul!)

Some interesting links on H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon

Great Guardian post on Tennessee Williams

Should copyright be abolished on academic work?

Self-editing: How to identify dragging narrative

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week

On “girl-centric” childhood reads

Literary tattoo anthology calls for entries

Could an Apple tablet rival the Kindle?

Check out the cover for this new Brazilian steampunk antho

Another solid review of Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”

Is BORDERS forcing their employees to sign no-blogging contracts?

Interview with Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling about their new YA anthology “Troll’s Eye View”

I had the craziest damn dream last night. It was about zombies. Again. I’m always having these zombie dreams, and they’re never really frightening except for the fact of their astonishing regularity.

Last night’s dream found me in a group of people seeking shelter from hordes of the infected in a ruined Air Force base. Everything around us was utterly destroyed. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I think the base was on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the surrounding cityscape bore a strong similiarity to what I had seen after Katrina. It was unbearably hot and wet, too. It’s interesting how the mind will fill in the gaps with those kinds of memories. Anyway, after some time, the dream seemed to move forward in time and the people I was with were building a community in the base; recycling old aircraft parts and quonset huts into a sustainable community. Things had grown quiet in the base, and one of the men living there wanted to go back to his home to claim some personal belongings – gold, diamons and cash, mostly. Everyone in the community told him not to do it, that things like that weren’t valuable anymore. Still, he insisted and left with his wife the next morning. He never came back, and the rest of the community sent out a search party, of which I was one member. We caught up with him and tried to make a convoy to escort his car back to the base. Unfortunately, he crashed into some debris and was infected by the zombies so we had to leave him. The dream flashed forward again, many years into the past. The community’s descendents had turned the base into a self-sustaining small town and no one ever left the gates. The zombies had become something of a legend. Nobody believed in them anymore. They knew there was danger outside the massive town walls, but weren’t sure what kind it was. As the dream ended, a small group of townspeople were planning an expedition.

I had someone tell me once that all of these zombie dreams pointed to my own subconscious sense of frustration in my life, that I was basically stymied and felt like I was one of the walking dead: going through the motions but not really living life. That makes sense to me. Kind of an undead midlife crisis? I don’t know. Maybe. All I think about is getting the hell out of Mississipppi, so maybe there’s something there.

I have a wish list of cities I’d love to move to:

1) New York, NY

2) Seattle, WA

3) Portland, OR

4) Austin, TX

5) Los Angeles, CA

6) San Francisco, CA

But how to get there? I don’t know. I think that realistically that I’ll probably be here at least another year with the economy doing what it’s doing, but if a solid opportunity came along I’d be gone in a heartbeat. In the meantime, I’ve got my zombies.

Check out “Out of Control” a video by Reggie Watts, a Seattle-based musician, actor and comedian who’s apparently quite hot online but, like so many other things, I’m just now discovering him. I ran into a little bit of his act on “The Yes Men Fix the World”, a documentary about Culture Jammers The Yes Men, in which he has a bit part as a terminally-ill Exxon janitor who wants to be rendered into biofuel. Oh well, take a listen to this. I think you’ll dig it.

Be sure to watch that aforementioned documentary  as well. The Yes Men cause trouble for large, ill-behaved corporations by pretending to be their spokespersons and spouting off all sorts of mischief to the media. The documentary as a whole takes a page from Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”, operating on the thesis that a completely unfettered free market spells disaster for most people, and using the Yes Men’s pranks to illustrate the same. Definitely worth a look.

Just some random links culled from my daily Twitter Feed:

Pro-abstinence, anti gay adoption, married TN state senator admits to sex w/22 y/o intern, taking nude photos of her. http://twurl.cc/1c5l

Today I saw a miracle man/On tv cryin/Such a hypocritical man/Born again, dying. http://bit.ly/1a2k3K

Mississippi: victim carjacked by Bikini-clad 24 year oldhttp://twurl.cc/1c5r

It was in Bali that I punched my first monkey. A cute, furry beast it was…http://twurl.cc/1c5u

How did I miss this? That Peter Pan fetishist in Florida got married (w/pics): http://twurl.cc/1c5v

“Kong: King of Skull Island” movie coming.http://bit.ly/cZ595

Abstinence-Only lunch programs ineffective at combating teen obesity (The Onion): http://twurl.cc/1c5w

Cool interview with comic book artist Steve Bissette:http://bit.ly/E3QgK

Marilyn Manson: Internet Tough Guy. http://twurl.cc/1c8g

Hilarious Bill Maher “ad” – Is your home safe against black intellectuals? http://bit.ly/USF0t 

(New working link – for now!)

Check out this guy’s goth mancave (video)http://bit.ly/6RQZc

Actual gameplay footage from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. http://bit.ly/DrN3k

You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/mattstaggs. My updates are locked. Unfortunately, this is the only thing that keeps out the spammers and d-bags. Feel free to request to follow me, though.

J.C. De La Torre on mythology in speculative fiction

Guardian piece on Shaun Tan

Earliest Wodehouse satires discovered

Cronenberg to direct Don DeLillo’s “Cosmopolis”

European futurists dream up e-book applications

Are we entering a new “age” of sci fi?

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Mongolian Death Worm

Nice piece on Val Lewton’s “Cat People”

“Jonah Hex” movie already looks like shit, and this is just the poster