My Life Is More Boring Than Your Grandma’s Power Knitting Sessions

This is inevitable. Once you actually settle down and start doing actual work, interesting, witty, insightful things/events/people rarely enter into your sphere of influence. And this is one of those points. Mostly I’m just writing. A couple of freelance jobs have cropped up which will help with some bills, but still probably won’t adequately pay the rent, which means that karmically, the rock on the ring for the girlfriend just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I am painfully aware of this, but it’s a small price to pay in the long run, I think.

End, Damn You!

The unicorn story (Which, as usual, has a sucky title, God, I’m hopeless…) is at long last nearing completion, and is about 30 pages bigger than I had initially estimated, which always seems to be the way it goes with me. It’s being one of those difficult children. You know the kind; on the one hand, it constantly misbehaves, doesn’t necessarily do what you ask it to, and you suspect that it might have a case of attention deficit, or slight mental retardation. But in the end, it just might surprise you as it proves to be autistic and excelling at music or math or something.

This story is one of those ones which is taking much longer to write than what I’m used to, and when I go back and read previous passages, depending on my mood on any given day, sometimes I don’t like them, and sometimes I think they’re pretty cool, which is why I’m scared to touch them as usually I only operate on my editorial instincts when they’re sound. On these rare occasions where even my own brain can’t make up its mind about whether it likes the writing or not, I just wait and see. The usual response is that people like or dislike things that I didn’t even see, so this is probably shaping up to be another one those stories that might not be a particular favorite for me, but that seems to strike a chord with other people. I don’t get it, but then why should I? I just wrote the damn thing, I don’t have to read it…

She Ain’t Lesbian But She Likes Little Girls

Since the Open Space anthology people are asking me to submit another story, I’m giving myself a deadline of about a month to see if I can crank out my next short story, one based around Jen and her attempt to track down a serial killer who goes after children. I won’t go into too much detail, because I’m sure at some point I’m going to be ramming this down people’s throats, but I’m torn right now between having this story take place when Jen was still hanging around with Frank & Michael in university, or during her “lone ranger” years when Frank & Michael had already gone to Singapore. Part of my head keeps telling me I might be trying to cram in too much “cool continuity” with the other stories by linking it in with Frank & Michael. The other part of my head, irrational writer part that does things ’cause The Muse Says So, keeps insisting that whether I intend it or not, Michael is going to be going along for a ride, because every Buffy needs a Xander, and Michael is it for Jen. And besides, Michael just wants to go along anyway, so if I throw the party without him, he’ll just gate crash.

Anyone who says the neat thing about writing is the total control you have over your characters’ lives has never tried writing with pig headed characters who do what they please.

There Is No Spoon. There Is No Plot Either…

I was initially really, REALLY looking forward to the Animatrix series as an ubercool presentation of the ubercool backstory behind the Matrix, but after watching the first episode, Second Renaissance, Part 1, I’m beginning to scale back my hopes and settling for ubercool anime.

The biggest problem I have with this story is the presentation of the story itself. I’m not sure how much of that is the fault of the Brothers Wachowski (Who wrote it) or the director (The guy that did Blue Submarine 6) but I’m taking serious issue with the way this story is being told.

On the surface the premise of this first animatrix episode is pretty cool; a historical document, ostensibly pulled from the Zion archives detailing the genesis of the Machine War that brought humanity to the battery-supply state it is in The Matrix. But the anime itself is trying too hard to push a message or be “political” with its liberal use of iconic images from religion and historical moments of oppression. The plot is that humans have no respect for the machine workers, and that gradually, as AI grows more sophisticated, the machines begin to resent the lack of respect and one day, a machine, BR-166-ER rose up against its human owners and killed them when they wanted to shut it down, citing its actions as self-defense and having the same basic survival prerogative that any sentient creature has. From there, riots begin, humans join the cause for protection of sentients, and the machines are forced to retreat to Africa, where they form a nation known as “01″, and begin to slowly take over the market with their incredible advances, eventually ruling the stock market and devaluing the currencies of the human nations. The story ends with the application of 01′s entry in the United Nations being rejected, and I think we can all guess where it goes from there in Ep.2.

But it’s those entirely too self-consciousness images that bug me. For instance, all the machine laborers are built as humanoid. You have these Fritz Lang Metropolis-esque moments with legions of robots marching off to work. You have INCREDIBLY archaic looking images of scores of robots using cables to pull up bricks to construct a pyramid, and don’t tell me that there’s no similarity there to the Egyptians and Hebrews. Then when the robot rebellion begins, there is a Tianemen Square style shot of a robot protesting in front of a huge tank that gets run over. There’s even the aping of the famous Vietnam photo where a robot with its hands tied up has a gun put to its head and gets shot. Shots of piles of robot bodies being dumped into a ditch, a la the Nazi holocaust. Even a “gang rape” sequence where a robot in human skin, like a terminator, has her skin ripped off by a bunch of guys and is tossed to the ground before she’s decimated. And towards the end, when the pair of 01 ambassadors is pleading their case with the U.N., they are a male and female robot, holding hands, with the female robot holding an apple in her hand, some kind of pseudo-Adam & Eve reference.

First, it bugs me that if we were to make machines, we’d make them human shaped and have them build pyramids the way we had to 6,000 years ago, instead of building them like sentient power lifters and cranes, which would make more sense, one incredibly powerful machine that could independently life huge blocks of steel and masonry, as opposed to thousands of small ones that have to tow a block up a slope with glorified ropes just seems more logical to me.

Second, I guess I think that the Brothers Wachowski may be taking themselves too seriously. What I liked about The Matrix was that it was essentially a comic book ride, fun and adrenaline pumping that had some “serious” elements in it, usually just quick references to actual philosophical texts (Like Neo storing his pirate software in a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation) or just broaching on the topics of what is real and all that stuff. I liked that approach in that they seemed to realize they were doing glossy SF/Chop-socky/wire-fu that was supposed to be fun, BUT, they laced it in with some actual thinking here and there that would compel the curious to go off and do more homework. It was kind of like lacing popcorn with a little bit of smart drug.

With this first episode though, they seem to be really pushing the whole “Folly Of Man” thing by making humans out to be these totally paranoid, fearful types with no tolerance whatsoever. It
‘s very skewed so that the machines are always reasonable people that try to present rational, peaceful solutions that man irrationally rejects and responds to with violence, so that we’ll feel the machines are completely justified in retaliating, just that they took it too far. Suddenly the fun stuff is taking a back seat and some kind of pseudo-political agenda is being pushed, and that bugs me, because it’s overt and not subtle at all. The Matrix asked questions, and then left it up to you to find answers if you wanted. Here, we’ve got a definite message being shoved down our throats, and it’s done pretty bluntly, with little room for debate.

*Sigh*…

I guess they can’t all be winners… Still I was hoping that since this was coming from the brothers themselves, they’d stick to the winning formula as opposed to getting all preachy and ethical…