When Elections Don't Matter

The grand contest between Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota for mayor of New York City wasn't so much "sound and fury... signifying nothing" as it was a big sucking hole of a non-issue. Not just in the staggering lead de Blasio held over Lhota but in how every issue supposedly framing the election was not something the mayor of this crooked city could or would ever change.

Taxes
New Yorkers pay the highest taxes of anyone in the country and for increasingly little return. Bill de Blasio campaigned on getting Wall Street pinheads to pay more, earning him the admiration of everyone scraping by - so about 99% - and a hilarious front page meltdown over at the New York Post.

But lost in all this noise was the fact that the mayor cannot raise taxes beyond a certain level. And that's a state law, not city. Not to mention the asshole bankers pulling down the big fraud bucks all either reside in Connecticut or list their primary residence as their vacation home in Aruba. Hell, there are people down in Mill Basin puling that second trick! It's a lot like Greece, where raising taxes on the wealthy doesn't even begin to get around the central problem of the wealthy refusing to pay taxes at all.

Stop and Frisk
This was the big one. Even bigger than the red-baiting and fake tax talk. And nothing will come of it. As Anthony "No Balls" Bologna should have taught everyone two years ago, the NYPD is already a straight-up fascist operation. Doing away with a tactic won't change their essential character - they'll continue to terrorize black men and pepper spray unarmed women as long as they exist.

And make no mistake, the NYPD budget is as sacrosanct as the DOD. New York City has more armed men in uniform than most third world dictatorships and for the exact same reason - the powers that be in this city are absolutely terrified of the peasants. Whoever is mayor has to see to the interests of those powers first, so even if de Blasio orders the cops to stop touching black men's junk they'll still have the broader mandate to keep everyone terrified.

The Subway Kittens
About a month ago, there was a huge delay in the subway system when kittens were found on the tracks. Everything shut down so they could be rescued, causing a lot of people to be late but come on! Kittens!

Except Joe Lhota came out and argued that the trains should have been allowed to run anyway. So that's the one upside to this election - the kitten-hating asshole lost.

Game Over

I didn't go see Ender's Game this weekend but I did once read the book. So here's a review that'll hopefully score me some more blag traffic!

The one thing that always confused me about Ender's Game was how everyone insisted the titular Ender Wiggins was some sort of tactical genius. Yeah, I know there's supposed to be some stuff about loyalty and friendship and the horrors of war and blah blah blah... But all I ever heard from sci-fi nerds is how clever the main character was.

So I read the book and his brilliant battle tactic? More dakka. Really. No feints, no deftly timed maneuvers, just "Ender smash!" Threw me a bit...

In fairness, while zero-g training, Wiggums figures out that his team can use their own legs as a shield for the opposing team's fire. Because it's just lazer tag and differentiates between vital organs and extremities. But this doesn't change the essential plan of four yards and a cloud of bullets. And he sticks to the same kill 'em all style all the way through, until he's vaporized the alien homeworld while thinking the whole thing was still just training. And the character bits in between all the shooting in a white room... it's thoroughly forgettable.

In fact, that's a good way to sum up the entire book. Not bad, at least not enough for me to work up a good rant. It just kinda sits there, like mayonnaise. Which shouldn't be surprising, being a Mormon's attempt at grafting Starship Troopers to The Forever War.

So then why is Endgame so popular in nerd circles? I propose it has nothing to do with the story or the prose style - which is godawful, though still not enough for a proper hate-down. No, Eddie Wiggles is a popular genre character because he is the embodiment of the common Waffentwerp fantasy - the smart dork triumphing violently over everyone and everything.

It's a distinctly teenage boy mentality. It's always the put upon dweeb and the triumph is always of some violent or martial sort. Luke Skywalker, Paul Atreides, that goon from The Last Starfighter - all nobodies who redefine themselves through violence and all beloved by the real losers out there. In Paul's case, he goes on to seriously question what his killing name has wrought on the universe but the fandom doesn't usually dwell on that as it gets in the way of giggling over all the badass wormriders. Badass is the whole raison d'etre of these characters - and Ender - as far as the geek hordes are concerned because being badass - wreaking tremendous, righteous violence - elevates one from the loserdom that is the common American male's everyday existence.

And finally, it's a fantasy because it supposes that "genius" in war is even a factor. Ulysses S. Grant, a truly great general, saved most of his genius for logistics while Robert E. Lee was off doing the romantic tactician stuff. Grant won. Napoleon packed the Grand Armee with as much cannon as it could hold, like the battalions of Gustavus two centuries earlier -

Okay, so More Dakka is a highly effective strategy. But it doesn't take a whole lot of thought. The stuff that does - insurgency, counter-terrorism - takes a little more smarts but then only a little. You'd think twelve years of irregular, asymetric warfare would have taught people this stuff. Osama bin Laden scored one heck of a tactical victory on 9/11, but he also believed in Allah. Not a Mensa candidate is what I'm sayin'...

But there's nothing badass about any of that. So rather than a film treatment of the long grind and moral ambiguity of warfare, we get Indiana Ford and Ass Butter acting out the power fantasies of a Mormon milquetoast. Go read up on the Thirty Years War or the Battle of Rivoli if you wanna know what military genius looks like. If you wanna see Ender's genius, do a Zerg rush in Starcraft.

Vampires Don't Suck: An Anti-Rant

It's Halloween! Rejoice, fuckers!

Well, technically the day before Halloween.The eve of All Hallow's Eve. But if I have to look at Christmas decorations going up already, ya'll get to suffer through a premature Halloween.

And what better way to suffer than with that most abused of folkloric monsters, the vampire? Ever since Anne Rice struck it rich with her yaoi fantasies, vampires have been getting squeezed through one cornball work of girl porn after another. It's a shame because the vampire retains plenty of good horror uses - in the hands of a competent writer.

So here it is, your Halloween 2013 guide to vampire fiction that doesn't suck!

Let the Right One In
Leave it to a Scandinavian to do a grim, uncompromising exploration of childhood. Protagonist Oskar has little to fear from blood-sucking Eli, at least when compared to the bullies at his school. And rather than turn into some stoic Protestant masochist, he seeks to strike back at the world that abuses him. And as it fits her own utterly selfish interests, Eli is happy to help...

Lost Souls

Anne Rice ain't the only one who can do gay vampires - Poppy Z. Brite's little dip into the genre is all the gothy homoeroticism you gals out there crave. But unlike Rice, she crafts a very un-romantic coming of age story out of it all. Her modern vampires travel the back roads of the south in a busted up van, drinking blood and booze in equal measure, and wreaking horrible life-destroying violence on anyone who crosses their path. They're the Near Dark crew after an extended stay in New Orleans, goth meets southern gothic. And there's not a moment of pity for anyone!

Carmilla
Before Vlad Tepes took the ladies of London by storm, Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu gave literature an equally sexual predator. Except his is another girl in one of - if not the! - earliest lesbian romances. The titular Carmilla has a sweet scam going, ingratiating herself into a noble family and slowly bleeding their impressionable daughter, in every sense of the word... It's a bit melodramatic compared to the rest of this list but it's also the shortest. And I know what really matters to you all.

Salem's Lot

When you write as many books as Stephen King, a few of them are bound to be decent. This not so little tale about Old World vampires descending on the New England town of Jerusalem's Lot is one such book - and in so many ways! On the surface, you've got a solid little horror tale full of vampires that are actually scary. But as you dig deeper, you see that King is a serious craftsman - the inversion of the Superstition versus Science theme that dominated the original Dracula, the misery and petty malice endemic to small town America, all conveyed in a style at once literary and familiar.

I Am Legend
No book has been adapted to screen so poorly so many times. From Charleton Heston to Will Smith, Hollywoood keeps trying to focus on the man and not the monster. Matheson not only wrote the definitive post-apocalypse survival tale, but turned the entire vampire genre on its head in a way that no other work has managed to deal with since. I won't just say it, as I'd be giving away a big part of the ending, but what do you think when you hear about a guy who wanders around while you're asleep, murdering all your friends and neighbors?

Sunglasses After Dark

Okay, this is a purely personal indulgence. The vamp slayin', face stompin' heroine of Nancy A. Collins ain't gonna be made into a movie anytime soon. It's not just too raw but too cosmologically confusing - Sonja Blue inhabits a world full of much more than vampires, slipping unnoticed among humanity in a manner Joss Whedon ripped off shamelessly. And neutered. But the Blue woman's breakout adventure is a rollicking good time of revenge, unapologetic monsters, and I swear to God a cameo by John Constantine!

So there ya go! The vampire books you can really sink your teeth into. And there's one more, but you'll have to wait until midnight...

Update:

Fiend has been revamped - har har - and re-released, now on the ereader of your choice! 

So come get your fang on!

And for all you luddites, check back here for details on a spankin' new Fiend paperback!

The Revolution Will Not Be [KERNEL PANIC]

I went back to Windows recently and the most shocking thing? I missed it. I missed being able to install things with just a double click. I missed making full use of the hardware on my machine. I really missed access to all those mods...

But most of all, I missed being able to just turn on my computer and do stuff. That's the one cardinal rule of software design that developers like to pretend doesn't exist. See, having to worry about those hessian end users gets in the way of all their posturing - in that it requires them to follow through on their claims of superiority. In five years of IT work, I've known all of one developer who had the discipline of a proper craftsman and she was perpetually worn down by having to carry the whole project...

I'm getting off on a different rant here. Point is, I used Ubuntu for years and, having returned to the Microsoft Kool-Aide, don't miss that open source stuff in the slightest.

This started in 2008 because I didn't want to switch to Vista and I couldn't afford a Mac if I wanted to. So I gave the whole Linux thing a whirl, burning a live CD of Ubuntu 8.10 and installing it on my 2003 laptop. It ran a bit slow in places but overall it did what I wanted without ever getting in the way. I got familiar with UNIX commands, tooled around with Python despite no programming experience, I embraced the whole open source revolution! What did I need to shell out a couple hundred bucks for a GUI just to use the hardware I already paid for anyway? And so what if it took some not-at-all intuitive process just to install anything?

That was my attitude until about a month ago, when I made the change from 9.04.3 to the latest version...

First install - Woops, looks like my system isn't 64-bit compatible. Should've assumed that...

Second install - Well that worked. Eew, is that the desktop? It looks like an iPad beta. Ah well, at least it's running smoother than that first try. Now to get back all my files and... Hey, why is everything read only? Why can't I save anything? Why can't I delete anything!?

What the frak is "/" and why are you checking for it!?

Third install - Piece a' crap, losing all my MST3K... Can't even keep up, runs slower than my 2003 machine... And now everything's turned read only again!

Fourth install - Aww hell no!

I can take a lot of abuse. I was raised by an Irish Catholic. But deprive me of Mike and the Bots? That shit will not fly.

So I went out and bought a new machine that was on sale. Pre-loaded with Windows 8. The "start menu" is obnoxious - trying way too hard to out Apple the Apple interface - but at least the damned thing works.

And just so it's perfectly clear, I did this entirely because of Ubuntu 13. I've got no complaints about 8.10 and 9.04 - go give 'em a whirl yourself. The best thing I can say about them is I never noticed a difference. For a brief period, Ubuntu really lived up to the dream of an open source OS that just plain worked, without expecting every user to be one of those Asperger's casualties who think everyone should know how to program in the command line. For moral reasons. Seriously, it's like Calvinists expecting everyone to submit to their own dull obsession...

"Use Linux because Micro$oft is teh evuls! No I won't tell you how - RTFM!"

And now, Ubuntu is trying to be the poor man's Mac. That's worse than suicide.

***Update: 10:31 am***

"You'll never miss Windows!" say the glassy-eyed cultists.

This is so much more interesting than that boring ol' BSOD...

Tea Party Terrorism

You gotta hand it to the Tea Party. From their humble beginnings as an astroturf non-movement to engineering the first government shutdown in two decades, they've risen to become the most effective terrorists to ever hit the United States.

And I'm not the only one saying it. Their latest shenanigans are still being spun as politics as usual over at the New York Times and other bastions of the muddling mainstream, but a quick perusal of the comments reveals the majority have quite had it with this anti-government jihad. For every dead-ender promising to donate to the campaign of Osama bin Cruz, there's a dozen pulling their hair out and an increasing number dropping that good ol' "T" bomb like me.

Because the Tea Party just did what all serious terrorists do - hit hard without a care for self-preservation. Like all those spoiled Saudis who crashed planes into New York and DC twelve years ago, the Tea Party orchestrated the current government shutdown strictly for ideological reasons. The reaction of John Q. Public wasn't a factor 'cause when you're running on faith - whether it's Allah or Small Government - the opinions of others are beneath contempt. At best they're a distraction, mostly they're a heresy. Just ask the morality cops in Riyadh.

On second thought, don't...

But that would all just make the Tea Party just another bunch of ragheads. What they did - and I'm surprised no other global insurgents have tried this - was hit America where it really hurt... In the money.

How many people have been killed in terrorists attacks? A fair number but with rare exceptions like 9/11 they're people who are too poor or foreign to really count. And let's be honest, no one weeps over oil workers. And killing, while theatrical, just isn't how you make war on 300 million comfortable first worlders - especially if you don't have anything in the megaton range.

So what's a Tea Party jihadi to do... Why wreck the economy, of course! Conservative estimates place the cost of a government shutdown at about 1 billion dollars lost from the US economy per week. No, not "saved" because it started out as a Federal paycheck - just gone entirely. Since all those Federal employees won't have any pay to spend. Look for some shuttered Starbucks in Arlington!

But that's still small time, compared to what this is doing to the stock market. The financial press tried to downplay it this morning, claiming "cautious optimism" or something, but if you have an IRA like me you woke up to one hell of a drop. It's just gonna keep dropping the longer this shutdown lasts, which pleases the Tea Party jihadis right down to their secret keffiyahs!

"Green eggs and ham are haram! And so is healthcare!"

You can kill all the Americans you want and just get a shrug. George W. Bush killed over a thousand trying to turn Baghdad into a white collar suburb and still got re-elected. But taking our dollars, that hurts. It hurts deep and it hurts for a long long time. Those al Qaeda hicks with all their hollering and exploding are the Where Are They Now? of jihadis while the Tea Party managed to bring the mightiest empire in history to its knees. Not with suicide attacks or Ayn Rand madrassas or billions of Wahabbi cash on the sly, but by worming their way into elected office and then not doing a damn thing.

I tell ya, world class terrorists! All those yahoos in Syria and Pakistan could learn a thing or two from the Cruz crowd.

Trevor Kroger is the author of One Nation Under God, in which a similar crew of reactionary screwheads destroy America!

High & Low

Brooklyn is now the place for writers, if you hadn't heard, and that was the theme of sorts to the recent Brooklyn Book Fair. I skipped the main event, having suffered through enough readings of the same meandering yuppie angst, but I attended two events that gave a good picture of where this whole publishing thing is going.

Look! A metaphor!

First up, a panel of agents and editors in a big-box bookstore. A crowded, chummy affair with the Big Boys - who were mostly girls. Old girls, either young Boomers or aging Gen Xers. One complained that Brooklyn was so totally not the place for writers because she'd finally gotten a Manhattan apartment. MCing the whole affair was one of those professors you find in English departments who encourages you to put bad words in your essays and kinda looks like Stevie Nicks. She freely announced that most of the audience were her students - a collection of much younger girls with the stink of affected bohemianism and Jane Austen novels.

They went back and forth, sharing the little "secrets" about publishing that any fool learns in the first year of this dismal art. Be respectful, be professional, research where you submit, crap like that. It was the nuances that really stood out to me, the subtle nods of a class identity - like one editor who explained how he got into the industry by recounting his time at some Radcliffe internship as a student. "You pay five thousand dollars and get a job." And he hadn't worked at anything else since.

Then there was the disdain they held for anyone outside the guild. Meaning anyone who wrote and published outside their little Manhattanite world. I'd encountered the snobbery of literary agents before - a bunch of parasites who exist more out of tradition than any usefulness - but when someone brought up electronic self-publishing the panel turned cold. "I think there's a reason it wasn't published in the first place..." one of them said, dismissing the idea that an indie could ever get signed to one of the big presses. They clung to that stigma for dear life.

But more than anything, I came away with a sense of the careerism infecting everyone, panel and audience alike. Not the drive to get your stuff read - that's a healthy and natural sort of mania - but the settling into a job with prescribed dos and don'ts. Do submit the same tired yuppie dithering to all these fine New York publications with "New York" in the title! Do get yourself an agent and a ghost editor and all these other people who get paid to do what you as the writer should be doing already! Don't for the love of God have anything new or interesting to say!

Which was really driven home when Professor Nicks-a-like pointed out a success story sitting right there in the audience. A student who submitted essays to one of the muddling New York journals and was now signed to release her memoirs. We all look over - and she can't be more than twenty-three. How do you write a memoir when you're only twenty-three? Why would you write a memoir when you're twenty-three and why would anyone with any self-respect read it!?

Now the next event - self-published authors in a poetry shop. As soon as I walked in I started having flashbacks to Zinefest but this crowd proved much better than those neo-luddite screwheads. For starters, they all bathed. And more importantly, they were all driven to be read by more than the same homogeneous peers over and over again. The crowd was decidedly more mixed, in age and race - this panel even had a black person talking! A sharp contrast to the white and gray of the previous event.

They had just as much disdain for the upscale crowd too. I heard "gatekeepers" thrown around a lot and it was impossible to miss the feelings of bitterness among the panel. Still, they didn't sit around kvetching in a coffee shop at the injustice of it all - they just went ahead and got their books out! Of the two available on a table next to me - alongside stacks of gay erotica - were a YA novel about Icarus' girlfriend and a courtroom drama re-imagining of the three little pigs. The latter by the aforementioned black lady, Marie Guillame, who displayed an admirable mad-on for marketing - "Facebook! Twitter! I read my own book on the subway!"

While there's a grasping desperation to the self-published crowd, they're also the only ones I encountered concerned with the actual craft. Writing is an entire life to them, something they eat and breathe and shit every day. The Big Boys are all careerism, about as adventurous as Mormon accountants. And any claim to meritocracy is undercut by the fact that it was this crowd that published everything from James Frey to Snooki.

But more importantly, seeing such extremes of modern publishing really highlighted how homogenized the mainstream publishing world has become. It's made up of people who all went to the same workshops at the same colleges and are now all on a first name basis with the same agents and editors. It's a closed world that can't produce anything new or interesting and more importantly doesn't want to. The New York Times Book Review will never be a place of divisive ideas - whether in the books or the reviews - because then neither writer would get invited to the right parties. This isn't an all-consuming passion for them, it's just a lucrative bourgeois day job. 

Give the indies their due. As terrible as a lot of self-published books can be, the people behind them mean every misspelled word.

Trevor Kroger is the author of One Nation Under God, another indie self-published novel you should buy from Amazon or Smashwords!

An Inside View from an Outsider

"People are the same all over." It's one of those truths that's much more hideous than you'd think. You have to get into the specifics - "People are shameless all over" is a good one, or "People are clueless all over." And it's as true as only the really horrible stuff can be.

Take the recent mayoral campaign. NYC is looking for a new mayor, if you hadn't heard. I sure hadn't until I got here but New Yorkers have this delusion that everybody cares about them. That's for another time though... See, there's a bit of a fuss being made because the winner, Bill de Blasio, has a black son. Not the usual sort of fuss - usual by "Real America" standards - but everyone is whining that Little de Blackio is the only reason his pop won the primary.

This isn't surprising coming from the local Republicans, whose whole deal is just straight up hating blacks. I'm serious, they ain't shy about it up here. But what's surprising is how popular the black son meme has gotten over the past week. Outgoing mayor Bloomberg himself even accused de Blasio of running a racist campaign - because you know white billionaires are the experts on these sorts of things. Never mind that de Blasio emphasized labor rights in a town that still has unions worth mentioning. Never mind his opponents were an alienating technocrat and Carlos Danger-Dong. He only got votes because his black son appeared with him in a commercial!

And that's cheating!

"People are idiots all over!" I hear you say. Well yeah, and that's their argument too. "People" - implicitly black people - are so dumb they fell for de Blasio's trick. Because if people were rational they would have voted for [insert preferred candidate here].

Now on a substantive level, there was something to recommend both de Blasio and Christine Quinn. Where the former sounds better on labor rights, the latter has solid experience in government rather than just in activism. But the Quinn campaign was run like an afterthought, sending volunteers on hikes around the Burroughs with pamphlets to hand out regardless of actual ability. It was a very closed affair and if you wanted to be in on the higher levels you had better have been there to begin with.

The de Blasio campaign, in contrast, went out and engaged. His people talked to the voters like they were people and his campaign managers encouraged that sort of dialogue. Come election day and more people have a better immediate experience with de Blasio then Quin and you can fill in the rest...

"People are idiots" is a popular refrain when things don't go your way. Just don't forget that you're "People" too.