Entries from December 2007 ↓

I’ve blogged about Jeff Vandermeer before. His City of Saints and Madmen didn’t just blow me away — it helped me understand that 500 pages of insane twisted effulgence can be beautiful, touching, human.

Anyway, I’ve got a guest post on his blog! My entry is part of a promotion that Ann Vandermeer is doing for Weird Tales, whose helm she’s recently taken. Ann accepted one of my stories for her magazine, proving, once again, that it really isn’t possible to die from happiness, no matter how violently happy you might become.

Jeff and Ann were two of my instructors at Clarion, and the week I had with them was so transcendently amazing that I still haven’t found a way to express it in words. There was one memorable ten minute period where Jeff sat me down and described, in more or less perfect detail, everything I wanted to do and be as a writer, all of my worries, needs, dreams, foibles, thoughts. It was like he was reading my mind, except he found stuff in there that I didn’t even know about. It was one of the most stunning, illuminating moments of my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

ps … Two of my fellow Clarionites, both fantastic writers, have guest posts on Ecstatic Days as well: Peter and Caleb. Check them out.

I spent a ridiculous portion of last week trying to write a capsule bio of myself, for a story that’s going to be coming out next year. I say ridiculous because it really shouldn’t take very long to write a hundred words about yourself, should it? And yet I labored over this thing for five days and five nights, and at the end of that tortured process, all I had was this:

Lapsed Cannibal is a computer programmer by day and an aspiring writer by night. He owns a beagle. Under various pseudonyms, he has produced such enduring classics as “Oliver Twist”, “Gone With the Wind”, and “The Bible.” He grew up in the 80’s, though advancing age and nostalgia have recently begun to soften and in some cases eradicate his contempt for that empty, misbegotten era in our cultural history. He subsists entirely on absinthe and the blood of his enemies. For complicated personal reasons that he does not wish to discuss, it is his dream to one day harness the power of bananas to solve Pi. He is 25 years old — or was, at some point, he thinks. Or maybe not. Really, it’s all a blur.

I think this is why I tend naturally to writing fiction. I’ve generally got nothing factual to say.

Sigh.

The 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons is coming out next year, and the geek community is all atwitter with anticipation, derision, or complete ambivalence. I’m with the breathless anticipation crowd, in no small measure because some of the rules in the current edition are really kind of broken — not mechanically broken, just monstrously unpleasant to play. Things like grappling and detecting magic and turning undead — stuff that’s so ridiculously complex that most rightminded players avoid them whenever possible.

But not all players, alas. There are some who insist on grappling everything, or knowing exactly what schools of magic are emanating from every faintly enchanted bauble they come across, or turning every zombie cockroach that skitters across their path. These players are the bane of DMs everywhere.

You kind of have to humor them, of course. But that doesn’t mean you can’t dream:

Or:

Or:

If someone were to come up to me in the street and ask me what makes Unix so damn cool, I’d point them to the yes command. Here’s its man page (OS X version):

YES(1)

NAME
    yes -- be repetitively affirmative

SYNOPSIS
    yes [expletive]

DESCRIPTION
    yes outputs expletive, or, by default, 'y', forever.

That’s right: the only purpose of this thing is to spit out the letter y, over and over again. Try it. Find a Unix prompt somewhere and type yes. You’ll get this:

y  
y  
y  
y  
y  
y  
...

… ad infinitum, until you stop the process. If you type yes no, you’ll get this:

no  
no  
no
no  
no
...  

There’s something beautifully zen about the pointlessness of yes¹, and something sublimely perverse in the documentation’s insistence that the optional argument be an expletive — not a word, or a phrase, or a thing-that-must-be-repeated-for-no-apparent-reason. No. Specifically, an expletive. The only thing that would make this command more awesome is if it actually enforced this restriction:

$ yes flowers  
yes: Invalid expletive

$ yes rainbows  
yes: Invalid expletive 

$ yes puppies  
yes: Stop wasting my time, asshole

$ yes poopy  
yes: Insufficient expletive

$ yes cacapoopydoodoo  
yes: Infantile expletive

$ yes crap  
yes: Closer, but no

$ yes fuck
yes: Yawn. How pedestrian.

$ yes George W Bush
George W Bush
George W Bush
George W Bush
George W Bush
George W Bush
George W Bush
...

If I were a computer science teacher, my first programming assignment would be to implement yes in Java, just to impress on my students how arbitrary and pointless life can be when left to its own devices. If I’m feeling particularly nasty, I wouldn’t let them use loops or recursion.

I feel an evil laugh coming on.