Author: Alex

Categories
ask a geologist geology

[Ask a Geologist] Moon Artifacts

Andrew asked:

Given ancient alien artifacts which take the form of giant stone cubes, made roughly fifteen million years ago, on an airless moon, what sort of information about them or their makers could a geologist infer from analyzing them?

All right, off the top of my head:

Age analysis:

  1. How old the rock itself is, via radiometric analysis, looking at zircons, etc. but this only tells you when the rock itself cooled. Which is of questionable use if we’re talking a sedimentary rock, since at best that will tell you the age of the parent rock. If it’s metamorphic, what radiometric analysis would tell you age wise really depends on the degree of metamorphism.
  2. How long the rock has been exposed on the surface. If we’re taking a moon with no atmosphere, then the artifacts could be examined for pitting/scarring caused by micrometeorites. As long as some measurement can be made as to the historical frequency of that sort of impact on the moon in general, then you could do some statistical analysis and get an idea of exposure time.

Why do we care how old the rock is? Well, if it’s a wildly different age from what it’s sitting on, that implies some interesting things. As does knowing how long it’s been sitting out on the surface, since those two numbers might be quite different.

Basic compositional analysis (here I’m assuming igneous or metamorphic rather than sedimentary rocks):

  1. Are there weird, unknown minerals? What about ones that are incredibly rare on Earth but common elsewhere? Particular sorts of minerals (eg Olivine versus quartz) will tell you about the type of melt the rock came from. Some minerals only occur in certain conditions (eg metamorphic minerals like silliminite) while others indicate a particular, very specific set of formation conditions (like diamonds). This is something you’d learn from x-ray diffraction.
  2. Textures will also tell you important things, like how rapidly the rock cooled, etc. Spinifex texture, fit example, tends to be seen in things like komatiites, which have a very specific melt composition and literally no longer form on Earth today. And all this you can do with thin sections. If you have a sedimentary rock, you can learn ridiculous amounts about the formation of the rock with thin sections, such as looking at generations of cement or weathering features.
  3. Even just looking at bulk oxide makeup (via something like xrf analysis) can give you clues about origin and formational conditions. For example, I used XRD analysis of samples from my vertisols to calculate mean annual precipitation during their formation in my master’s thesis. There is a ton of research out there about various sorts of rocks, formation or weathering conditions, and how that relates to their basic chemical makeup.
  4. At the very least you can use this to figure out if the rock is even native to the area. If there’s something really wild about the composition (for example, there are absolutely no impurities in any of the crystals) that could be a hint that the rocks were manufactured in some way rather than formed in natural conditions.

Visual assessment:
Just by looking at it even, there will be clues about how these things were–or weren’t–made. Tool marks? No tool marks? Or if you look microscopically using some sort of pocket scanning electron microscope, what will you see? Crystals cut cleanly in half? Evidence of flash melting, as if these were shaped using some kind of super heated plasma blade? Or were they made in molds, in which case everything would have crystallized perfectly flat against the mold surface? These visual clues might tell you the most about the makers of the artifacts.

This is obviously a non-exhaustive list. I’m sure there’s a million other things a geologist with a different specialization than mine could think to assess. But hopefully this will get you started!

Categories
Uncategorized

Warm Up For Winter Contest

And now a word from the lovely publishers of my steampunk series, Musa Publishing!

Enter daily to win one of 17 promotional paperbacks
 

Outlaws by William Weldy
Only A Hero Will Do by Susan Lodge
First Frost by Liz DeJesus
Glass Frost by Liz DeJesus
Trusting Sydney by Helen Hardt
Taming Angelina by Helen Hardt
Treasuring Amber by Helen Hardt
2012: The Rising by Joanne Hirase
Typical Day by Gary K. Wolf
Obsession by JoAnne Keltner
Stained Glass byMindy Hardwick
Grape Bubblegum by Beth Bowland

Dragon Drop by Jerry Ackerman
New Girl by Joan B. Flood
The Fox’s Mask by Anna Frost
Unforgettable You by Marci Boudreaux
Storm’s Fury by Nya Rayne

And one of 30 e-books:

3.99 by Richard Satterlie
100,000 Midnights by Aaron Smith
A Company of Thieves by David Pilling
A Place to Call Their Own by L. Dean Pace-Frech
A Reason To Stay by L.S. Murphy
A Sense of the Ridiculous by Heather King
A Willing Spirit by Cindi Myers
Alaska Heat by Vella Munn
An Incident on MSR Tampa by SS Hampton, Sr
Apple of My Eye by Elizabeth Botts
Baiting The Hook by Mary S. Palmer & David Wilton
Between by Clarissa Johal
Black Widow by Lena Austin
Bring Me To Life by Scarlett Parrish
Captain Westwood’s Inheritance by Lynda Dunwell
Contingency Plan by Anita Ensal
Crazy Greta by David Hardy
Daughter of the Earth and Sky by Kaitlin Bevis
Deep Into The Night by Tracie Ingersoll Loy
Dragon Revealed by Nulli Para Ora
Enchanted Realms by Eleni Konstantine
Forget the Misteltoe by Lizzie T. Leaf
Her Goblin Prince by Thalia Frost
High Stakes by Chad Strong
ICE blue by Susan Rae
Identity Thief by Milo James Fowler
Keeper of Directions by L.K. Mitchell
Kojiki by Keith Yatsuhashi
Little Bird by Liza Gaines
Looney Dunes by Anne Skalitza
Masquerade by Sloane Taylor

All entrants are eligible for the Grand Prize Drawing January 31

Grand Prize 
Warm Up for Winter Basket
Snuggly Blanket
$20.00 Musa Gift Certificate 
Starbucks Coffee
Coffee Mug
Specialty Chocolates
 PLUS
 5 paperback books: 
Marissa’s Choice by Kadee McDonald
The Dominus Runes by Peter Lukes
Walking the Dog by Linda Benson
Love Lies Bleeding by Laini Giles
For his Love by Nya Rayne


 

 


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Winners of paperback books who reside outside the Continental United States will receive their prize in e-book format.

Categories
shakespeare

Jude Law in Henry V

Well, write this one on the calendar. I saw a production of Henry V that I didn’t like. This makes me incredibly sad for a lot of reasons, but most of all because it’s my favorite play and I desperately want to love it every time I see it. And I tried, I really tried.  It’s even more distressing because Jude Law played Henry, and I feel as if I really ought to like it.

But nope.

There were times when the play (and the cast) really did shine: the English lesson between Kate and Alice; Henry trolling the shit out of Williams and Fluellan; Fluellan forcing Pistol to eat the leek; and Henry wooing Kate at the end. The thing you’ll notice about that list is those are all the really comedic sequences of the play. And particularly the last scene, with Henry attempting to woo Kate, Jude Law and Jessie Buckley just killed it. I couldn’t stop laughing.

(Aside: This also reminded me that when the play is trimmed down for production, it’s often the more comedic scenes that get excised, particularly the ones that involve Fluellan…who I actually really enjoy.)

There was so much life in the comedic scenes. In contrast, it felt like that energy was completely lacking in the more serious parts, particularly the scenes around the battles. Now, I know battles themselves aren’t the easiest to stage (particularly not when we’ve all been spoiled by movies) but I’ve seen plenty of plays manage it and do so with a lot of tension, some recently. (*coughcoughCoriolanuscoughcough*) The acting felt very self consciously “Shakespearean,” and much to the detriment of the play. (This effect not helped by the costuming, which at times made me wonder if a renaissance festival had exploded nearby.) I didn’t get drawn into the story, and while I certainly wanted to laugh with Jude Law, I sure as hell didn’t feel like charging after him into battle.

I heard Jude Law was really excellent in Hamlet, and I can believe that very much after watching this. He’s got great timing and was at his absolute best when he was playing with the language…which is the sort of thing that serves Hamlet very, very well. Not so much with Henry, though, who needs to be courageous far more often than he needs to be clever.

Categories
tom hiddleston trip report

Hello from London

It’s been a busy, busy several days. I’m in London right now, more project stuff. I helping with this so much I can’t even tell you.

I also saw Coriolanus for a second time with friends. I’m glad I had the opportunity, since there’s so much more to pick out on a second round, particularly if you sit in a different part of the theater. Still impressed that Tom Hiddleston has brought such depth to Martius the prideful douchebag. Still want to write Aufidius and Coriolanus slash, but I just couldn’t swing the iambic pentameter. On second viewing, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen’s performance really leaped out at me more. There’s so much she does with just looks and very subtle facial expressions. But everyone in that play is good, we already knew that. (Rochenda Sandall is definitely my favorite part of the ensemble cast.)

One thing that did strike me on this go around was, like in Hamlet, just how much subtle funny there was in the play. What makes those lines funny is entirely the delivery–particularly since the jokes sometimes aren’t as apparent to the people in the audience today as they might have been back when the play was written. The timing and tone of it was all excellent. And it makes me wonder why Shakespeare movies often seem intent on sucking the bits of humor out of the play. It’s a nice relief from the feeling of impending doom inevitably comes with knowing the play is a tragedy.

Oh, and the chairs still steal the show. I wish I could have had my picture taken with one. I was all set to make that incredibly awkward request, but couldn’t track down the right person to ask in the mess of people after the show. Sadness. I also did make the attempt to queue for the stage door after because I was so bereft after being kept from the chairs I thought that might fill the gaping void in my heart. But wait, that would violate my life goal of never actually meeting Tom Hiddleston! Fear not, gentle readers. The queue got cut off somewhere like 5-10 people in front of me. The fabric of space and time is still safe, as we passed quietly by like ships in the night.

London (but probably not Tom Hiddleston. Probably.) has now destroyed my right shoe. There’s a crack across the sole, and it made for an incredibly squishy and uncomfortable walk back to the flat from my dinner with Ingvar. (Ingvar showed me mercy this time and did not ply me with alcohol.) I think instead of buying another set of Pumas (though there is a Puma shop in London, I checked) I’m going to just go whole hog and get a pair of Doc Martens. I honestly think they’ll be more comfortable for all the walking I’m doing anyway. I don’t think the thin soles of Pumas have necessarily made the plantar fasciitis in my right foot worse, but I honestly don’t think it’s helping, either.

So tomorrow, there will be shoes. I am also planning to take the train down to Waterloo station for the sole purpose of taking a ride on the Waterloo & City line, because Ingvar told me that’s the deepest of all the lines (and it literally has only two stations) and that sounded kind of cool. I have a feeling it will be one of those things that sounded much cooler than it will actually turn out to be, but I’ll bring a book and look forward to riding seven thousand escalators up to the surface so I can blinking, step into the sun…

(Join with me now: Because there’s more to see than can every be seen, more to do than can ever be done…)

Also, you should know I have started a new writing project. Its title is simply Tea. And that’s all I’m saying about it for now. I’m just going to boil in my own amusement.

Categories
health things that are hard to write

The Year of No Sleep

I open my eyes and I’m not in bed. I’ve got a dark road in front of me, fields on either side, red, white and blue lights throwing shadows across the tarmac as they flash. My hands jerk on the steering wheel. My mouth tastes like death and regular Coke. “Shit. Shane? Shane? Where are we?”

My paramedic’s annoyed, barely awake himself, but he tells me where we’re going, where we are, where to turn. I get us there all right, followed by a drive down to the hospital at a much saner speed. The call’s a non-specific abdominal pain, everyone’s favorite. (Not.)The whole way, I see shadows move along the side of the road, keeping pace with the ambulance, black dogs and man-shaped things. I know better than to look directly at them now.

#

It sounds like a horror story, right? The start of a cheesy-ass horror story, which is honestly the only kind I’m capable of writing. It’s not. It’s a thing that happened to me. It was 2004, and I stopped sleeping for over a year.

No, that sounds too dramatic. I didn’t quite stop sleeping. I just stopped sleeping normally. Two or three hours a night at most, snatches during the day when I sat down for more than five minutes. I fell asleep at my desk at work. I fell asleep standing up as I leaned one shoulder against the wall.

At first, for a few weeks, I just felt cranky and exhausted. Then I felt strangely okay, like I’d hit some kind of point where I didn’t really need to sleep, except I’d close my eyes for long, dizzying blinks. Then I felt like I lived in a different layer of reality than everyone else, sometimes floating, sometimes crashing. That was how it felt, like being mentally untethered.

It’s strange the things I can remember from that year, because most of it is a blur and what I recall best is being constantly hungry, cold, and nauseated. I’d sit at my desk and shiver, and I was so hungry all the time I ate nearly everything in sight to the point that it made my stomach hurt. I particularly craved deep fried things, which then made me feel sick, so I’d shiver and think about vomiting. I packed on weight at a shocking pace. I felt dizzy, light headed, and completely disconnected from my body. I tried to exercise but had no energy. My eyes were always tired and heavy, itching.

I felt like I had been scrubbed raw, inside and out.

Some things I remember are like the incident above. I remember them because they frightened me into momentary, true wakefulness. I recall my boss catching me falling asleep at my desk. She called me into her office (well… cubicle) and told me as kindly as she could that I needed to make myself uncomfortable enough to stay awake or I was going to get in a lot of trouble. I remember hitting my head on my desk once because I started falling out of my chair. Several times I somehow got myself from a friends house or work to home with no memory of how I got there, just opening my eyes in the parking spot by my house. I remember laying under three or four blankets and shivering violently, unable to warm myself.

That’s really what I remember most vividly: never feeling warm no matter what I did.

The other memories I have from that time, I don’t trust. I had conversations that no one else remembered later. Friends would say things to me and I couldn’t understand the words. I watched television shows that didn’t exist. I saw black dogs whenever I drove. I glimpsed people and cats out of the corner of my eye and found nothing there when I turned to look, startled. I have several notebooks of half-paragraphs I wrote, which don’t make sense when I go back and look them over again. I hallucinated. I know I hallucinated, and that makes me doubt even the things I’ve already told you.

At the time, I couldn’t really say why I stopped sleeping. I liked to blame it on the EMT work, which was bullshit. I only did between four and six night shifts a month, and the busy nights were rare. It was a load of stress, but I was maintaining all right. I just couldn’t ever fall asleep. I must have just been one of those people who naturally go to bed late and can’t get up early. (That is bullshit, by the way. I am more of a night person, but these days I manage to get in bed and sleep by midnight, and I get up by seven, no problems.)

And I didn’t tell anyone. Because I had everything going for me, right? I had a great job for someone with only a high school diploma. Sure, I was working sixty hour weeks, but I was making bank. I owned a house at the age of 23 and lived independently. I had money to throw around. And weren’t we all burning the candle at both ends? I had a busy social life, most of it centered around roleplaying and board games. If I wasn’t sleeping enough, boo fucking hoo. Catch up on the weekend. Everyone else was short on sleep too.

I was just too much of a pussy to handle a little sleep dep.

#

I started sleeping again suddenly, a few days after I learned I was going to be laid off, after the initial shock had worn away and I realized that my job really did have a set expiration date. That probably should have been my biggest clue. It wasn’t until years later that I was doing some research on depression and realized that might have been the reason behind my year of no sleep.

I was working sixty hours a week at a job I hated but was too afraid to leave because I feared losing the money. In one sense, I stopped sleeping because I knew that if I went to bed, I’d have to get up in the morning and go to work. It wasn’t until the end was in sight and I knew I’d be free of it–as terrifying as that was–that I started sleeping again.

It’s taken years for my ability to sleep to recover. It took years to get rid of all the weight I gained when I was trying to compensate for lack of sleep and emotional distress by eating. It took years to shake the unhealthy habits I learned during that time, and even today I still sometimes overeat to the point that it makes me sick. It took years to regain my ability to exercise.

Sometimes you don’t have choices about your job. You have to eat. You have to keep body and soul together. But one of the biggest lessons I learned from this experience was that if it’s a choice between a job you like and a job you hate that makes a ton of money, take the job you like. I know I did some good shit with my money in 2004, some stuff that I probably enjoyed at the time. Fucked if I can remember it now, because my brain was so completely fried by lack of sleep.

I think the more important lesson is that some things, you can’t just try to bull through and pretend that everything is okay. I don’t know how things might have gone differently, if I’d actually told someone how completely fucked up I felt. I can’t even really guess. But I like to think I could have arrested my slow-motion physical self-destruction.

I’ve never felt anything like it since, and I hope that I never will again. I hate the idea of anyone else feeling the way I did. It was, quite literally, a waking nightmare, one that I couldn’t escape because the line between waking and sleeping had blurred past all recognition.

And I want you to know if you’re going through something similar, it’s not just you going crazy or “not being able to hack it” whatever the fuck that means. It happened to me. I want you to know it’s okay to reach out for help. That you should reach out for help. And I want you to know that it can and will get better.

Categories
movie

[Movie] The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is super cute. But first I want to bitch about The Lego Movie. I keep seeing previews for this movie, and beyond the fact that the only funny bits involve Batman and Wonderwoman, it annoys me.

So the whole concept here is that the regular dude main character is “the special” who is foretold by prophecy to…I don’t know whatever. Now, I dearly hope that this is all going to be entirely tongue-in-cheek and at the end maybe the lego action chick will realize that prophecy is bullshit and she’ll save the world because wouldn’t that be different for a change. That would be amazing and I would go suffer through the unfunny jokes so I could watch it. But at this point I would bet you anything that the regular dude main character will discover he is actually super special thanks to everyone else telling him he has to be and the girl BELIEVING IN HIM. Because that’s how these things normally work and I’m SO SICK of the destined savior dude plot I can’t even begin to tell you how much. It just gives me flashbacks to Oz the Great and Powerful where the super competent witches of Oz just couldn’t get their shit together because THEY NEEDED THE MAN FORETOLD BY THE PROPHECY.

Barf. Barfity barf barf barf.

Okay. Now I can get back to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which did not feel me with vomitous annoyance.

Honestly, there isn’t that much I really have to say about the movie, other than it manages to hit all the right notes of cute, funny, heartwarming, and human without it quite seeming like Ben Stiller was going down a checklist to make sure he’d gotten everything. And to be honest, I’ve actually always liked Ben Stiller, and I liked him in this movie. He had a couple moments that played a little too hard for the comedy and came off a bit sour because of it, but otherwise I thought he was incredibly heartfelt.

As far as the plot goes, if you’ve seen the trailer, you know what the movie is about. But it’s ultimately the search for the missing negative as a stand-in for Walter figuring out how to actually get out there and fucking do things, which is the part where so many people fall short. (Seriously, we all know someone or have been the guy who said something like well, I’d write a novel if, or I’d go to Thailand if, or I thought about doing something but then I just didn’t…) But the point of the movie really isn’t the conclusion or the simple concept behind the story…it’s the journey that we go on with Walter.

Man, and it is beautiful. As soon as Walter gets out of the office, there isn’t a shot in that movie that isn’t just breathtaking. I think my favorite shot out of the movie is still the longboard scene in Iceland. Oh gosh.

The only real objection I have is there’s a scene where they drive away from a pyroclastic flow from a volcano. That always drives me batty. But I know it’s just me.

Categories
writing

Award Eligible Stories (Published in 2013)

Yes, it’s that time of year again, where I make googly eyes at you and hope you’ll keep me in mind for various awards. 2013 was a very good year for me–I have nine stories that are eligible!

Note: I had my first pro sale in 2010. I am not Campbell eligible, just in case you were wondering.

Legend
[LGBT] = Involves QUILTBAG character(s)
[★] = Personal favorite
[F] = Free to read

Short Stories  
Significant Figures from Strange Horizons (12/16/13) [★][F]
Stranger from Silver Blade Magazine (9/5/13) [F]
Breaking Orbit from Daily Science Fiction (07/23/13) [★][F]
Samsara in Waylines issue #4 (July 2013) [LGBT][F]

Novelette
Murder on the Titania from Musa Publishing (4/5/2013)

Novella
Do Shut Up, Mister Simms from Musa Publishing (11/1/2013) [LGBT]
Blood in Elk Creek from Musa Publishing (9/6/2013) [★][LGBT]
The Curious Case of Miss Clementine Nimowitz and Her Exceedingly Tiny Dog from Musa Publishing (6/14/2013) [★][LGBT]
The Ugly Tin Orrery from Musa Publishing (5/17/2013) [LGBT]

Thank you so much!

Categories
health personal

Not being bullshitted about my weight: priceless

Okay, I’m going to talk about weight loss stuff. If you find that kind of talk triggering our you just couldn’t give less of a shit, please skip this. I just feel like I have to be open about this stuff because it helps my peace if mind.

You probably already know I’m in the midst of an ongoing fitness/weight loss/help me I don’t want to get type 2 diabetes project. The summary is I used to weigh 275 lbs, now I weigh around 192. Which is actually less than I weighed when I started power lifting in high school. So I think the project has been a resounding success, but I’ve tried to keep it rolling since this isn’t the sort of thing you just stop doing.

For about the last year, my weight has basically stayed steady, though I’ve had some nice strength gains since I started weightlifting again. I did all my weight loss with calorie counting, which has worked well for me. I generally eat 1400-1700 calories per day, which is appropriate to my weight and activity level…if I want to keep losing weight.

Which I haven’t been.

So a bit ago I got frustrated and decided to try cutting my intake further to see if I could get my weight to start dropping again. A nutritionist I talked to a couple years ago had recommended trying that. I went down to 1000-1300 calories per day. Which peeled another ten pounds off of me before I got stuck again. And then I started having dizzy spells, stopped gaining muscle strength, and lost a giant whack out of my aerobic endurance.

Plus that was just a fucking miserable amount of food to be restricted to, to be honest. I looked at it and thought I can’t maintain this, I don’t want to, I feel terrible, what’s the point if you feel terrible?

Which comes back to something I’ve always said about losing weight…you have to be able to sustain whatever changes you make in your life. This shit isn’t something you just do for a couple of months and then decide it’s good enough. You have to even out at a place where you’re happy and can do it long term. Life is short. Eat the fucking cake.

So I went back to my old intake. As one might expect, I regained the last ten pounds with almost frightening speed. But now I’m back to gaining strength and I can once more run/ride for an hour or more and not feel like total shit, so I count that as worth it.

Yet all the calculations I did kept telling me hey, at 1400-1700 you should be losing weight. So I went ahead and made an appointment with a new doctor who specializes in weight management. Because why not, what’s the worst that could happen? A doctor could tell me I’m fat and need to eat less and make me feel like shit. Been there, done that.

Long lead up on this story I know. But I feel like I hit the jackpot.

This new doctor asked me about my physical activity and what I normally eat. She asked me about my family history, if I had thyroid problems, etc. And this is what just blew me away when all was said and done. She told me:

“We’re going to try a few things, like analyzing your BMR and body fat. But I need you to be at peace with where you are since you are already healthy. Genetics are a big part of this, and I need you to have a realistic goal and be okay with it.”

If you’ve never been the fat kid, then you have no idea how it felt to hear that. It was like a fucking choir of angels singing from heaven. (And she loved my joke that, well, that sucks, but in the pre-modern world I would have been set.)

Because this is the shit you get, even from doctors a lot of the time, this idea that you should be able to hit a certain weight on the scale that correlates nicely with your height, and if you haven’t it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough. Entire fucking industries are built on this lie that if you don’t look like a film star, it is your own fault, and it’s entirely within your power to change that…if you just buy into their product.

Well, that’s not the way it works. And just hearing a doctor tell me for once that she wanted me to be realistic and be okay with myself almost made me cry. That never happens. You tell yourself constantly that you’re are okay the way you are, that this is just how you’re put together. But having someone else confirm it for you feels like pure magic being injected into your heart.

I wish I could bottle this woman and send her to every chubby kid (and grownup with an inner chubby kid) in the world. Sometimes there isn’t anything you can do, and you have to be okay with that. You have to be happy with you.

Now the hard part is, as always, going to be hearing her beautiful voice over the constant background drone that says I just don’t want it enough.

Yeah, well you know, when I was a kid I wanted to be a unicorn too.

Categories
movie

[Movie] So, about 47 Ronin

All right, so let me tell you about this movie. Once upon a time there was Keanu Reeves I mean a kid named Kai in Japan. He was half-Japanese and half-European and had been raised by the Tengu so he totally has magical powers no really you just read that correctly, I didn’t mistype. Just that sentence right there makes me deeply uncomfortable for a multitude of reasons (you should check out the racebending post about it) but I think what weirds me out the most is that he’s literally a (I am very sorry for using this phrase) “magical half-breed” trope personified and made inexplicably the main character of 47 Ronin. Despite the fact that technically he’s not even ronin (being, you know, not a samurai) and that the real main character of this thing ought to have been Oishi (played fantastically by Sanada Hiroyuki).

BUT ANYWAY.

So all the samurai in Akou are out hunting down a kirin (I think?) because it’s been, I don’t know, leaving massive piles of kirin shit all over Lord Asano’s lawn and that just won’t do because the Shogun is coming to visit. Kai helps kill the kirin and everyone is a douche to him about it. We see a fox with one brown eye and one blue eye and I sure hope you like that close up of those eyes because you are going to be seeing it a lot.

The Shogun shows up with Lord Kira (Asano Tadanobu, perhaps better known to nerds as Sir Not Appearing In This Movie Hogun in Thor) in tow and I’m not event certain why. But you can tell Lord Kira is evil because he smirks a lot and appears to be a patron at the same clothing store that supplies all villains of sentai shows with clothing made out of slightly cheap-looking metallic fabrics. And he has a woman with him who has messy hair and wears a shiny green kimono-ish but not really thing and DUDE LOOK AT HER EYES. NO REALLY. LOOK AGAIN. REPEATEDLY. CONSTANTLY.

This woman is the fox in human form, and she’s a witch. She’s also played by Kikuchi Rinko, doing her best Helena Bonham Carter impression. Her witch powers include:

  • Crazy, prehensile CGI hair
  • Turning into a piece of fabric and flying around the room like a demented magical carpet (but okay, this one looks pretty cool)
  • Being unable to stand up without exposing at least one of her legs up to nearly the hip because SHE IS A WITCH AND THEREFORE SEXY SEXY.
  • Making even the act of saying hello seem like a bad touch is about to happen
  • Turning into a really terribly animated albino dragony thing at the end and getting stabbed by magical Keanu Reeves.

Apparently Lord Kira is at Lord Asano’s house because there’s going to be some kind of samurai combat contest thing. And he has a magical giant suit of armor with a huge sword that he pits against Lord Asano’s champion. Only the witch does something to Asano’s champion so instead Kai steps in and just embarrasses everyone by losing (despite being taught by the Tengu to KILL ALL THE THINGS) and not being a samurai, so he gets the crap beaten out of him.

So then the witch and Kira use a magical spider that poops purple hallucinogenic fluid to make Lord Asano hallucinate and attack Kira. This is a massive no-no, so the Shogun orders Asano to commit seppuku. And once that’s happened, declares all his samurai ronin and decides that Mika, Asano’s daughter, will marry Kira. Mika is TOTALLY IN LOVE with Kai, though, because of course she is, and she has a thing about wearing coats with weird collars over her kimono and I don’t think they dressed like that back then.

Mika gets hauled off to live with the guy who effectively murdered her dad, which could potentially be some interesting character development for her, but instead we just know she’s having a bad time because Kira’s servants make her wear heavy eye makeup and blue-tinted fake eyelashes. Oishi (who was Asano’s chief samurai but enough about him let’s talk about Kai some more!) gets thrown in a hole for a year and then…dragged out. Because reasons.

After being released from the pit and no doubt smelling terrible, Oishi stops at home just long enough to get his son Chikara and have a beautifully understated and tender scene with his wife, then ride off to go get Kai. Because we can’t do this without Kai. Obviously. He hasn’t been in the movie nearly enough. Kai has been sold into slavery on Dejima because reasons. As Oishi arrives at Dejima, he runs across that dude you saw in the previews, you know the one with the whole body tattoos that makes him look like a skeleton, and asks for directions. Well, take a nice long look, because this thirty seconds is the ONLY time you will see that guy, despite the fact that he appears in the trailer and on the fucking poster.

I think Kai is supposed to be somewhat mad, indicated by Keanu Reeves staring at Oishi a little more vacantly than normal. Oishi manages to snap him out of it and then they run away together, cunningly using the fact that apparently oil lanterns are like poor man’s plastique.

And then all the ronin meet up! Yay! Except they don’t have enough swords! Boo! Oishi leads his men to a village of sword smiths so they can get some there, but Kira’s men have inexplicably taken over the village and we learn Kira’s evil plot is to take over Japan…somehow. Kai kills the shit out of everyone to impress the other ronin, and then takes them to the forest of Tengu, because if there’s one thing we all know Tengu have, it’s swords. (…actually no.) Oishi gets tested by the Tengu, where they show him some illusions of his men getting killed to try to force him to draw his sword, but he refuses. Kai shows off he has magical Tengu powers, I’m sure this won’t come up later at all.

Then there are swords! Yay! All the ronin gather again, accompanied by music that is pure desperation given audible form. They decide to try to kill Lord Kira when he goes to his ancestor’s shrine, but it turns out it’s a trap. The witch sets everything on fire and flashes some leg, and the lovable fat ronin gets shot full of arrows, after which he shares a scene brimming with manpain with Kai and Oishi and then expires.

The ronin decide they’re not going to give up. They write down their grievances and all sign their names and add a drop of blood. Including Kai, who is now apparently a ronin because one of the guys who was a dick to him at the beginning of the movie has given him a second sword to carry, and samurai all carry two swords and aggggggh. But anyway, they find a troupe of actors who have been hired to play at the wedding Kira will have with Mika’s fake eyelashes, and since everyone in the world thinks Kira is a dick even though as far as I could tell he hasn’t done anything but secretly betray Asano and make some really questionable fashion choices, they agree to help the ronin sneak in to his castle.

The battle scene is actually pretty cool, I’ll give them that. Up until the witch turns into a dragon thing that Kai has to kill using his super special magical Tengu powers so he can save Mika. Oishi kills the shit out of Kira, which was a relief to me because at this point I’d half expected Kai to show up out of nowhere and save him and do the deed the way they’d been playing him up as the most important character ever, no really. But no, Oishi cuts off Kira’s head and all of Kira’s samurai simultaneously shit in their hakama.

The ronin go back home with Kira’s head in a bag. The Shogun is annoyed with them, but lets them all commit seppuku instead of hanging them like commoners. Which they do. And just to remind us what the most important bit of the movie is, all of the close-ups and focus is pretty much on Kai and Mika, because fuck the ronin, we’ve got a love story with the unnecessarily added character.

And done.

So, I kind of figured the movie would be bad, but I decided to see it anyway because I thought it would be super pretty and bad. Well, it was super pretty, but the pretty did not outweigh the badness. It was the little things, like the awkwardness of some of the English lines when contrasted with the fluidity of hearing the Japanese actors speak names. The editing was even. There were a lot of little scenes that felt random, like they didn’t fit a narrative that seemed cobbled together. (And why did so many of the night close-up shots look so dang grainy?) The scenery was beautiful but the CGI monsters were distracting and looked mostly terrible.

But it was really the huge things, like the way Oishi again and again got shoved out of the spotlight that really should have been his so we could have even more emphasis on the barfalicious love story between Mika and the character who was added to the story because maybe Hollywood thought audiences couldn’t handle a 47 Ronin movie if all the ronin were actually Japanese. It was the way the final scenes of the movie were stolen from the titular ronin, making it about Mika and Kai’s vow to find each other in the next life instead of the incredible determination and sacrifice of the ronin and their deaths.

That made me so. Angry.

Why. Why, 47 Ronin. All you had to do was suck just a little less and I would have come away not feeling like I’d been robbed of two hours of my life and ten bucks of my money. Had it not been for Kai, this movie could have safely joined Onmyoji in the “campy historical fantasy film” box in my brain. But no. You just had to give us another shot of Mika and Kai staring at each other while the soundtrack tearfully begged us on its knees to care.

ETA: Well, this explains why the thing felt so disjointed. Even a lot of the dialog.

Categories
writing year in review

2013: Writing Year in Review

Written This Year

Novels: Still zero. I’ve been plugging away at King’s Hand, but with my other projects that had actual deadlines and finishing up grad school, I didn’t manage to finish anything novel length. Ugh. However, I did full edits (content + line editing) on both Throne of Nightmares and Fire in the Belly so I’ll be ready to throw myself headfirst back into query hell next year.

Shorter Stuff
Flash: 4
Short Stories: 5
Novellettes/Novellas: 5

Other: I wrote a 12-page screen play, just to see if I could. Well, I could. Working on another short screenplay now.

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return: 5 stories, one of which I wrote this year, four of which were older stories I no longer believe in.

Best/favorite story of the year: Tie between The Curious Case of Miss Clementine Nimowitz (and her Exceedingly Tiny Dog) and List of Items in Leather Valise Found on Welby Crescent. Apparently the way to my heart this year is through very long, silly titles. But I like Clementine because it’s a silly story with a painful heart, and I like List of Items because it’s a story with a painful heart told in an odd way and I’m still astounded I got it to work.

Magic Spreadsheet Wordcount: I started tracking on the magic spreadsheet on June 24. Wordcount is at: 208,559, days in a row written at: 189. For wordcount, I give myself credit on rough draft writing (both original and fanfiction, not that I’ve written much fanfic lately) as well as blog posts. I also give myself 250 words of credit for each chapter of a novel I edit (or completed short story) plus new content wordcount if I’ve had to add a new scene or anything to the piece.

Publishing
Queries sent: 86
Rejections received: 66
Pending: 10
Most rejections received: Just for this year, Silver Fish with 8 rejections; The Heart-Beat Escapement isn’t far behind at 7. Total (and not counting novels because they cheat) Stranger wins at 20 rejections before Silver Blade Magazine accepted it for publication.
Total earned: $1102.86 which is a number I find rather stunning. With going to cons and having bookmarks made, I’m still definitely in the red when it comes to the writing “career” but not nearly as much as I have been in the

Published this year:

  1. Black Smoker Hero from SQ Mag, which also win second place in the Story Quest short story competition. (Technically this was published January 1, but since SQ is Australian, they are one day in the future relative to me.)
  2.  Significant Figures from Strange Horizons (12/16/13) –and a podcast version!
  3. Do Shut Up, Mister Simms from Musa Publishing (11/1/2013) [BN | Amazon | Smashwords | iTunes]
  4. Blood in Elk Creek from Musa Publishing (9/6/2013) [BN | Amazon | Smashwords | iTunes]
  5. Stranger from Silver Blade Magazine
  6. Breaking Orbit from Daily Science Fiction (07/23/13)
  7. Samsara in Waylines issue #4
  8. The Curious Case of Miss Clementine Nimowitz and Her Exceedingly Tiny Dog from Musa Publishing (6/14/2013) [Amazon | BN | Smashwords | iTunes]
  9. Murder on the Titania from Musa Publishing (4/5/2013) [Amazon | BN | Smashwords | Kobo | iTunes]
  10. The Ugly Tin Orrery from Musa Publishing (5/17/2013) [Amazon | BN | Smashwords | Kobo | iTunes]

Slated for 2014: 

  1.  A World of Speculation from Lakeside Circus
  2. The First Bone from Stupefying Stories 
  3. Hyperion from Scape
  4. And Still Champion from The Lorelei Signal
  5. List of Items in Leather Valise Found on Welby Crescent from Shimmer

Stories put online this year: 

  1. Entangled
  2. Utar the Radish Farmer

Goals for 2014: 

  1. Shut up and write.
  2. Finish King’s Hand. NO REALLY I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
  3. Finally get representation nailed down for at least one of my novels. Pretty please?
  4. Finish up birthday story for Mr. TH; got it done a bit early this year. Fix the one from last year since I’m still not happy with it. Work on getting both sold, donate money, etc.
  5. Proposals for three more novellas for Musa, then write them.
  6. Write at least one brave, difficult, strange story that makes me weep at my keyboard.
  7. Just write more in general. My productivity was down from last year, though I certainly sold more! Which has me pleased. But I’m also running short on pieces to send out, so I need to replenish my stockpile.
  8. Complete at least one screenplay of some length good enough to be submitted to… something. I don’t know. I have to do some research on how the screenplay thing works.