Rad 80s lasers

So I got this new game called Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
It's basically the 1980s in video game form and it's probably the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity.
I don't know why I'm updating this shit.
Just go give Steam 15 bucks for it.
It's better than anything else I can do for you today.
Anyway let's do this shit.

So, a few days ago I posted about one of my pet peeves in fantasy world-building, the writer who thinks 600-years ago is the dawn of time. A friend who read my post raised an interesting point. “If the series you’re talking about is the one I think it is, I understand that the author comes from a conservative Baptist background. Maybe she built her world, consciously or not, on the assumption of a Young Earth...

>Doing that faggot world building shit
>not setting your story wildly in the future
why
bother
either set it way, way in the future or set it on some alien world where the concept of a year doesn't matter.
Only faggots say shit like "well the peace lasted 600 years"
DOESN'T MATTER.
Also what kind of boring fantasy world are you creating where there's peace for 600 years?
The Elder Scrolls series talks like 2 years without a major war or genocide is an achievement.
The "relative peace" of the Third Era saw the end of the world almost two times.
That's a relative peace.
You don't want to know what the world is like when there isn't relative peace.
HAHA REMEMBER WHEN DAGOTH UR ALMOST KILLED US ALL FROM THE RED MOUNTAIN?
I MEAN HOW DID HE GET AWAY WITH THAT?
Holy shit you don't get to read all the post on her shitty blog.
Gotta cross read that at some other website, yo.
This is really bad.
And hilariously the free sample is also cross posted on Livejournal.
Let's just smear this shit all over the place.

I was laying half asleep the other morning, the clock radio playing one of the local NPR stations (we have three), when I heard a story about the special office within our state’s department of motor vehicles responsible for making driver’s licenses for undercover cops.
The licenses are real, valid licenses, it’s just the identity that’s fake. The reason officers going undercover need valid licenses is so that the identity “holds up.” Right? If it’s a fake, the number and name on the license won’t be in the system, or the number won’t match the fake name. It would be a bit too easy for the bad guy they’re hoping to take down to find the undercover cop just by running a license.

Yeah.
Seems kind of obvious, really.

The reporter seems quite worked up that one of the federal agencies that obtained IDs was the CIA. It seems that when the first public information request was made, that the person responsible revealed which federal agencies obtained how many licenses. Which was a violation of the agreement that the office had with the feds. So there is a bit of a kerfuffle about that.
But I’m not sure why the reporter is so breathlessly wondering why the CIA needs so many false identities. 

Yeah yeah to beat your enemies you often have to become like them.
It's a theme fucking rad fiction covers a lot.
I don't know why anyone is shocked.
If you read the right books or played the right vidya you'd be well acquainted with this reality.

What is the big deal that the CIA has agents who need false identities? Has this guy never watched Alias, or Covert Affairs, or even the original Mission: Impossible?

Fucking seriously.
I prefer real Black Water SHIT myself as opposed to fake IDs.
You know, sneaking into their compound and putting a knife in their throats but that's just me.

One of my pet peeves as a reader is the story told in flashback. Admittedly, one of the reasons I dislike it is because, having been involved with several small press and fannish projects over the years, I’ve read, in an editorial capacity, a huge number of stories written by aspiring/beginning writers. And a beginner usually doesn’t understand how to use a flashback.

Aristotle is the one who said all the best stories start in medias res, or "in the middle of things", and so therefore a lot of the story is told through flashback.

The most common problem with the told-in-flashback story is simply that there is no dramatic tension. In the opening scene we meet a character interacting with some other people. The dialogue is often a bit of clever banter. Something happens in the scene which causes the main character to mention something that happened to him a long time ago… and in the next scene we are in that long ago time, and we watch the stuff happen.
The reason there is no dramatic tension is because usually the plot of the flashback portion of the story seems to place the main character’s life in jeopardy—except the reader knows that the character isn’t in real danger because in the opening scene set far in the future the character is alive.

That's why you flashback when you think the character is about to get axed and tell the shit leading up to the axing.
I mean fucking obviously.

• Opening scene in which protagonist gives the story’s ending away by saying something like, “This reminds me of the time I almost died because of an engineering mistake…”
• Several scenes of story in which the character gets into trouble because of said mistake, nearly dies, then survives somehow.
• Closing scene in which we return to the opening and the other characters say something along the lines of, “Wow! That’s some story. You almost died because of an engineering mistake.”

 What kind of shitty writers writes like that?
Most of my stories involve flashbacks at some point and I can fucking guarantee no one has ever said "this reminds me of that time I almost fucking died."
Usually no one is telling the story, either. It's just someone thinking "oh hey I remember when I almost got my fucking head blown off."

It took me years of reading those stories or complaining about those stories before I finally realized what was going on. What is the most common way people are taught to write either informative essays in school, or to make presentations in either school or business: 1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, 2. Explain it in detail, 3. Reinforce their memory by summarizing what you just told them.

>Read a successful author like William Gibson
>virtually nothing is outright explained to you
>it's all inferences or clever foreshadowing/self references
>most common review on plebeian websites: I DON'T GET NEUROMANCER NO STARS

Our collective memory can be frightfully shallow.

Take, for instance, an on-line discussion I was in recently where there were people who weren’t aware that not that many years ago it was illegal to be gay. By which I don’t just mean that the notion of gay marriage didn’t exist, but that if the authorities found out you were gay, they could send you to prison. I had to tell them of an acquaintance who had been arrested for indecency back in 1970 for kissing his boyfriend in the wrong neighborhood...

I think a lot of Asian countries have the right attitude.
That would never happen in most of Asia.
Even the civilized parts of Asia.
Not because they'd kill you for being gay or anything but because no one, gay or straight, shows affection publicly. I think that's a good attitude to have.

It happens to the best of us: trying to write is a complete bust, and when you try to read your brain just can’t seem to hold the thought from the beginning of a paragraph to the end. You can’t concentrate, but you’re not sleepy, and so you wind up either surfing the internet or surfing channels.

>not writing while barely conscious
do you people even know what the fuck you're doing?
I don't write until I've been combating sleeping pills for at least 2 hours.

It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my friends were very fond of. I had read a couple of his short stories and thought they were good, but he hadn’t really wowed me...

1986 and you're 26.
2013 and you're keeping a blog and are part of a fandom.
I was -1 in 1986 and somehow I've matured beyond "the fandom".
How does that shit work?
You were born in 1960.
You got to see the 80s.
You were in your prime in the 80s.
I don't know if you know how fortunate you are.
And this is the legacy.
You probably met William Gibson or some shit when he was just getting started
and this is how you use the opportunity.
All the writers and people I give a shit about are either retired or dead.
And you were right there.
I have to research this shit like a scholar.
And you got to experience it all by the sheer serendipity of your birth.

After the convention, I tried to read one of the books. It was a collection of his short stories, which included the couple I had read before. They weren’t bad by any means, but after reading a few in a row, an unsatisfying feeling was developing. I sat the book down, not quite sure why I wasn’t enjoying the reading.
A few weeks later, I picked it up again and started on the next story. Again, the story itself was well written and interesting. I read another, then started on the next after that and, well, a few paragraphs in I realized that same feeling of wrongness was building up.
I did eventually finish the collection, but it took a few months, reading only a few stories at a time. And by the end I couldn’t really say that I’d enjoyed them all, but I also couldn’t put my finger on their shortcomings.
The other book was a novel. A novel for which he had won a lot of awards. It was based on one of the short stories in the previous collection. And the short story in question had been one of those I had enjoyed more than the others. Plus, I had friends who swore this book was a masterpiece. And it had garnered all those awards, so it had to be good, right?

Sounds like it could be William Gibson--
50000 paragraphs later and it's Orson Scott Card.
Don't give a shit, then.
I challenge any of you cunts to read New Rose Hotel by William Gibson and not conclude with "greatest short story ever written."
It's like 7 pages.
You know, 3 less pages than this fucking abortion of a post this guy just wrote.

Wednesday Reading Meme

OH BOOOOOY. 

What I Just Finished Reading

Forever in Blue by Ann Brashares, the fourth Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book. Devouring this re-read at an impressive rate, frankly.

Bro
what the fuck
are you doing?
Come on.
You're a man.
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants?
Are you a fucking girl?

What I'm Reading Now

Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares, the fifth Sisterhood book and The One Where They're All Grown-ups. It's set ten years after the fourth book, so all the main characters are about to turn 30.

Bro come on you're not making a case for yourself.
I'm reading EVE: The Empyrean Age right now.
Manly and scifi.
All about them jump clones m8
Anyway I'm going to bed. Gotta teach some psychology and sociology deep in the bowels of this school that I think is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Filled to the brim with non-Euclidean geometry that would destroy your mind if you even began to comprehend what madness lies within.