GalacticMu

Negativity has been popular on the intertubes since, oh, it started – like, the first ARPANET test packet sent from one military base to another read:

- – - *** TEST *** – - – SILENT RUNNING SUCKED AND YOU’RE A FAG IF YOU LIKED IT – - – *** END TEST*** – - -

 I scan all the popular scifi news sites¹, and for the most part, I do this because they are devoid of a lot of personal opinion.  My cross to bear in this lifetime is that while I love science fiction, I can only take small doses of fanatic nerd-boy commentary. In particular, the mean stuff².  And lately, there’s been a lot of it, at least where I’ve been reading.

And while I won’t make this personal, there is in particular one big resource that spreads as many negative rumors as they superficially try to clear.  For example, let’s talk about Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.

What the fuck is going on with Dollhouse?  Well, I’ll tell you: nothing unusual.  Except, dear reader,  for the small issue of the internet deciding that production of Dollhouse was fucked and by fucked I mean doomed.  What began as a legitimate “Uh oh, is Fox going to do this to Whedon again?” snowballed rapidly into a few of the major scifi sites gleefully crowing about the imminent failure of the entire show. Like, in gruesome, excess, speculative detail.

At first I was swept up in it.  Poor Joss!  Here they go again, every single decision being taken from him, his vision being trampled, his choices ignored – someone start a betting pool for the program being canceled before it even airs.  But then, as many of these posts as there were, there were rebuttals from Whedon himself saying, “Look, don’t worry kids.”   And indeed, I began to ask myself, do I truly understand how television works?

Suddenly, I started reading the reports of Dollhouse‘s doom with a kind of critical doubt.   Two questions arose for me:

1. Is this a normal part of the show-making process, only just now revealed to us to be an irritating back-and-forth of changes and reversals?
2. How much of this disseminated negativity is making its way back to the studios and paradoxically dooming the show?

Indeed, even an offhand remark from one of the shows actors (Tahmoh Penikett) joking about confusion over the show’s plotline was immediately twisted into “EVEN THE ACTORS DON’T UNDERSTAND SHOW – DOLLHOUSE DOOMED!”  After reading both his commentary and the blogs’ responses, I wonder: whose side are we fucking on? Are we turning into a social version of America’s Funniest Home Videos ball-to-the-crotch routine?  Don’t misunderstand me – I think Joss Whedon is fallable.  He’s just a dude, he fucks up sometimes and I don’t think his involvement with the show makes it free from criticism.  But it hasn’t even aired yet.  But since when do we, as fans, actively encourage the failure of one of our own?  Not to get all Heisenberg on you, but the more you discuss failure, the more it seems likely to happen.  Wait, that’s not Heisenberg, that’s the Golden Rule.  Or no, wait.  You know what I’m trying to say.

¹The notable exception is io9 – man, those kids need to get off the fucking Adderall.  Quantity over quality, eh ladies?

²I know it seems all hand-in-hand, like with science fiction comes seething, pent-up geeks, but I find myself wondering if like, wine-nerds sit around on message boards telling other wine-nerds that they are retarded faggots for liking beaujolais.

∞I’m listening to “Forever Young” by Alphaville and realizing what total fucking nonsense the lyrics are – “I don’t want to perish like a fading horse”???!?  That can’t be right.

It’s been shame that has kept me away from the Dear Diary of web-logging.  But, like that maggot cheese that everyone is so delighted in reporting on lately, I find myself wanting to share it with you all anyway.  Raise your glass of larvae-infested, putrefied cheese and toast with me to… Stephanie Meyer.

Yes, that Stephanie Meyer.

The only statement in my own defense is that I was sitting in the airport when I finished my only book on hand (Man Plus by Frederik Pohl – fun, but awkwardly retro writing) and went to go purchase a magazine.  Paper magazines, which you may or may not be aware, are now the same price as a fucking novel.  Which are expensive.  With this knowledge, I, with great embarrassment and guilt, purchased Twilight.

The backstory here is that I have been superficially following this Twilight obsession almost exclusively because many of the blogs I read.  Yes, once again, I blame blogs.  Anyway, as an adult who reads YA fiction (for the record: I think the Harry Potter books are just okay, Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series is pretty good and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy is canon) I paid some attention.  Matthew Baldwin’s review in particular caused me to chuckle with delighted dismissal.  In  summary: romance novel – minus sex + nearly pointless vampirism = Twilight.

And then I read another blog, one I won’t link to.   In it the writer seethed about the negative impact the books will have on fragile-minded teen girls.  It teaches girls that stalking is acceptable behavior from a man!  And that it is thrilling to have your boyfriend want to kill you!  In a good way! Blah blah blah, I didn’t really pay attention because I’m a misogynist.

Anyway, there I am, standing in an airport where I am surely to escape the eyes of anyone I know, purchasing the book.  Because I had to know!  Which was it: was it a comically embarrassing attempt at ‘literature’ or a manual for abusing women?

The answer if of course both!  Delightful!

I can’t add much to the masses of criticism for the books, other than to make a few personal points.

•  Based on Baldwin’s report, I expected no less than 642 uses of the word “exquisite”.  Sadly, I noted only in the realm of two uses.  However, the point he may have been trying to make is: but damn, this woman is repetative.  Once she latches on to an adjective or an adverb she gets lockjaw. So instead of 642 instances of “exquisite” we get probably literally 50 instances of remarking that Edward – the vampire heartthrob – having marble skin, or skin like marble, or marble-cold skin, or a cold, marble chest, or cold marble coldness marbleness.  Likewise how many times he is simply described as “perfect.”  Sigh!  Perfect!  I ran out of adjectives for cold and marble.  I need a rest.

• As many have noted, I can see how the teens are wack-a-doodle over these books.  They’re broody, moody, vaguely sensual and chock full of forbidden things like lying to your parents and dating the undead.  For the rest of us that have actually experienced sex, they’re pretty boring.

• The vampires are, for all intents and purposes, not vampires at all.  They’re Supermen.  Do they have to drink human blood?  No, they just prefer it.  Does sunlight/crosses/garlic/stakes repulse them?  Nope.  In fact: sunlight makes them “LITERALLY SPARKLE”. Meyer made sure to include the word “literally” in the actual novel in case we mistook her thin narrative as metaphorical.  So, they avoid sunlight to avoid dazzling humans with their glittery beauty.  Like unicorns.  They are impossibly fast, impossibly strong and to make it the most delightfully hyperbole-saturated book ever, many of them have special superpowers like mind-reading or precognition.  Oh, and also: they’re rich.  Alright, alright, I’ll fuck them already, jeesus.

• The main character, Bella, is intolerable.  In what I think was Meyer’s clumsy attempt to make Bella someone the average teen girl could relate to, she instead made Bella improbably klutzy (really: every time Bella leaves the house she either falls on a heap of razorblades or rams her head into a crowbar – you think I’m joking, I know) and argumentative.  Everything she does is counterproductive.  In fact, the entire final showdown that results in Bella’s near-death is the direct result of Bella just not telling someone what was going on.  Listen, teen girls of the world, if a mean vampire threatens to kill your family unless you submit yourself to him, a tip is to TELL THE WHOLE POSSE OF SUPERHEROES YOU’RE HANGING OUT WITH.  Dude, delegate the problems, and in particular, delegate them to friends of yours that are immortal supermen.

In penance for giving the Stephanie Meyer machine $8 of my money, I will make sure my next few book purchases are for authors I actually care about.  In fact, I’ll buy extra for friends.  Because I don’t know how else to make things right.  When the second book gets made into a movie the madness will start all over again, and then repeat with the last two books.  My only hope is that the actors will look haggard and dumpy by the last two, like Ralph Macchio suddenly got in the Karate Kid movies even though supposedly no time had passed between them.

This is the first I’ve heard of it, but I came across a trailer for a Tim Burton, how The Matrix should have been, LittleBigPlanet mashup:

Yes? No?

6:13 AM:

Thought for the day: you don’t really feel like a monkey until you shit in the shower.

WHENEVER AM:

I have no idea at what time events unfolded, so I’ll dispense with that crap.

• Could not sleep at all last night.  A nurse had warned that the massive jettisoning of icy liquid through your bowels drops your core temp a little and to keep plenty of warm clothes on.  She wasn’t kidding.  I’d have these terrible fits of shivering followed by angry hot flashes.  This kept me up most of the night.  Near morning a headache and nausea kept me up.
• Got to the endoscopy clinic and found out that my plans of having my mother take photos of me all tubed up wouldn’t see fruition: no non-patients allowed due to the high volume of other patients lying around.  Boo.  Instead I was in a room with three other people (an older woman and a middle-aged man) while we were asked about allergies.  I said I was allergic to having giant cables inserted into my ass.  I’m lying, I just shivered and whimpered.  Also: the male patient made eye-contact with me several times, which I found rude.  Not just because we were going to have colonoscopies in a few minutes, but because at 7am I expect you to keep your eyes off my face, fuckwad.
• My nurse had a lisp.
• I warned my nurse I was nauseated and later when she was inserting my IV and I sort of belched and sighed ominously she asked teasingly, “Did the needle bother you?  And with all those tattoos?” to which I had to refrain from giving a snotty answer.  Don’t be snotty to your endoscopy nurse.  That’s good advice.   I reminded her that I said I was nauseated before.
• After being wheeled into the endoscopy room and hooked up to oxygen, she asked me what music I’d like to listen to during the procedure.  I said “Classical, piano, something like that.”  She put Enya in.
• After my doctor was 10 minutes late the nurse’s fangs came out and she did a hospital-wide page.  I was surprised.  One time at the dentist they rigged me into bite-blocks and a dental dam to prepare for filling cavities and then the dentist left the room for 20 minutes.  TWENTY MINUTES.  That shithead better have been resuscitating kittens or something, because that was some serious torture.  Anyway, after the nurse paged the doctor showed up.
• I love my GI.  He’s a good guy.  Better a rad doctor who is running 15 minutes late than a shitty doctor on time, am I right or am I right?
• I learn that I won’t be getting the sedation I got for my last colonoscopy, I’ll be getting a lighter, conscious sedation.  My anxiety level goes up.  I say, “I’m anxious.” They assure me the drugs are still fantastic.  They are right.
• I remember gripping the side of the gurney at some point and grunting in pain and then the nurse running over with another syringe and then things getting really fucking awesome and fuzzy.  The great thing about the drugs is, I don’t even recall the pain.  Even during it I vaguely recall thinking, am I faking this?
• I start to come around again a little during the biopsies.  Since I can see the TV they are watching the proceedure through, I see this little alien claw head snapping at what looks like bubblegum and pulling away in little red bursts.  It was pretty and mesmerising.  Of course, as soon as I realized it was the biopsy tool chomping pieces of my colon, a little of the magic is gone.
• I don’t remember anything until a different nurse is coming into a recovery area and telling me that I need to try and fart.  I ask her, “Like, just let it out, or bear down?”  “Oh, bear down,” she says emphatically.  “Now’s your chance to really let ‘em rip.”  I don’t have the sobriety to tell her that’s what I normally do.
• I hear patients on either side of me ripping gigantic, cartoonish Bog of Eternal Stench farts and must smother myself with my own pillow to keep from laughing.  What’s really getting me is that one of them, the woman, is making sad little noises each time like she’s horribly disappointed with herself for farting so loud (SO LOUD!) and then the man on the other side gives these hearty sighs, like he’s working out.  I, in another impossibly rare turn of events, can’t get one out to save my life.  I let out a few totally silent, tiny wispy ones, but that’s it.  The nurse actually comes back in and encourages me again, and I tell her I don’t think I need to.  She presses on my abdomen and looks surprised.  “Huh.  No gas.”  Yeah.  I’m a damn miracle.
• My GI comes back in and says, “Okay, I don’t believe this, but you have a perfectly healthy colon.”  I gain new respect for him making such a cruel joke.  It dawns on me that he’s serious when he hands me the printout of my guts and says, “If I didn’t know for sure you had Crohn’s disease, I’d say this was a healthy woman’s gut.  Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”  I am in total shock.  Joking aside, I thought I’d be lucky with some thickening of the wall, maybe a few active lesions.  Was crossing my fingers that I just didn’t have any polyps or clear fistulas.  But a healthy colon? Wow.

• I get home and eat two semi-soft boiled eggs with salt and pepper and it is the most delicious thing I have eaten in my entire life.

I of course haven’t gotten the biopsy results back yet, but with no visible signs of, well, anything, it is safe to assume they are all clear.  Oh, and there’s always bad news: in the past, the GI has recommended that I get a colonoscopy every 5 years, but recent research has changed this to every two years.  Yerg.

5:12 AM:

This is predictable.  I picked up a headcold yesterday and woke at 3:30 this ‘morning’ totally unable to breathe out of my nose and doing that sleep-apnea thing where I wake up gasping for air while lying in a pool of my own saliva.  There’s also a great deal of drainage making its way to my stomach, so I’m belchy and nauseated as well.  This is going to be a fucking long, long day.

Liveblogging continued after the jump!

Well!  Things are very exciting in these parts, by which I mean the upcoming colonoscopy I get to have in a few days.  It’s not really a surprise since I need to get them with some regularity due to my disease, but I thought that some folks might like a walk-through of what it is like to get one.  Because you will need one soon too!  You are older than you think!

Basically, there are two kinds of colon look-sees.  There is a “sigmoidoscopy” which means the doctor uses a camera to view the first two feet of the colon.  A sigmoidoscopy does not require the patient be knocked out and is often done when just a light screening is needed (for example, you’re getting older but you don’t have any symptoms of anything wrong and there isn’t a lot of colon problems in your family), sort of like a dental cleaning as opposed to actual dental work.

Then we have a colonoscopy, which requires sedation due to the discomfort of the procedure.  A long camera (the endoscope) is inserted into the anus and then explored all the way up to where the large intestine meets the small (about five feet total).

It’s time for me to have a colonoscopy because of a three reasons.  I only needed one reason, but I waited until I had three.  I’m difficult.  Anyway:

1. People with Crohn’s Disease are at high risk for cancer and polyps and need to get colonoscopies about every five years to be safe.  It has been longer than 5 years.  I’m not gonna say how much longer because I’m embarrassed.
2. New research is showing that cancer and/or polyps start showing up about 18 years after Crohn’s onset and it has been 19 years since I think my symptoms started.
3. Back in May I had a Crohn’s event that I thought was a bad flare-up but the doc thinks was actually a micro-perforation of the bowel (this was news to me).  This really shows that we need a new baseline of what my bowels are doing down there in the dark, in secret.

So, no-brainer.  Time for another colonoscopy.

The thing is: I’m terrified of the prep process.  I hate it.  So!  To distract myself, tomorrow I am going to be live-blogging the whole event!  You read right!  GalacticMu will be returning to its regularly scheduled programming in the next week or two, but until then, please tune in tomorrow and the next day for the most exciting colon-blogging on the internet.

Like many scifi nerds I have a low tolerance for fantasy.  I’d like to say that it’s just the repetition, but science fiction isn’t exactly summer’s eve fresh, if you catch my drift.  Leesa remarked that all too often it reads like a romance novel with ancillary sorcery, and I think she’s right; if you take the science out of most science fiction you’d have a broken storyline, if you take the magic out of a fantasy novel, you have… a novel.

On the other hand, I think The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are neccessary reading for anyone, anywhere.  Plenty of smack has been spoken of them (the cool have always delighted in toppling the giants of the past) and I don’t have a lot to say about those people – fools walk the earth, I can’t deny it.  Furthermore, and lending somewhat less credence to my love for Tolkein, is my enjoyment of what can only be described as bad fantasy.  It’s like watching a sitcom or eating tatertots with nacho sauce for dinner: I never meant for anyone to see me do it, but there it is.

My point: newly debuted television show Legend of the Seeker, baby of Sam Raimi (hello, Xena!) and author Terry Goodkind is exactly what I mean when I curl my lip and say “Fantasy?”  I mean, this is Hulu.com’s description:

“In a distant land, Richard Cypher discovers his true destiny as he, a mysterious young woman, a wise old wizard and a magical sword are all that stand between the evil tyrant Darken Rahl and his quest for total domination. “

Whoa, whoa, wait a second.  There’s a handsome, young, well-meaning pauper lad, a mysterious and physically stunning young woman, an aged wizard and some kind of enchanted sword?  And an evil tyrant with the word “Dark” in his first name?  I don’t get it.

An aside: I keep reading the name as “Drunken Rahl” which impresses me, and then I catch my error and am disappointed.

I am but a lowly forest lad, building things for charity.

Anyway, this is what I’m thinking, as I am sure you are: please.  Just… stop.  Why are you doing this to yourselves?  I mean, you’re the sorority girl at the party getting wasted on Long Island Iced Teas and then puking on herself.  You’re an embarrassment but worse you’re a cliched, predictable, dime-a-dozen embarrassment.

Boobies.

And then I started watching the show.

And oh god, is it terrible.  And delightful.  A kind of hysterical, overseasoned superfantasy top-heavy with slo-mo and dramatic CG, it is that glistening pink donut encrusted with sprinkles that makes you say “I can’t, I’m a grown-up,” and then you’re cramming it into your mouth, icing smeared over your face and hands while onlookers queasily retch.

I guess I would pay to see a 7-foot tall man holding a chicken on his nethers.

Bruce Spence?!  Is that you?   Dear god, man, you were the Gyro Pilot in Mad Max, what are you doing here?  Bruce Spence who played the role of The Mouth of Sauron (a scene that should never have been cut from the theatrical release) in The Return of the King, or one of the Strangers in Dark City?

Oof.  Well, here’s my advice: if you’re home sick or pretending to be sick or maybe want to be sick, you can do worse than to sit around and watch Legend of the Seeker.  I recommend laying in a nearby store of strong liquor, a bowl of popcorn, some cherry cordials and holy shit is that Haldir from Lord of the Rings?  This show is knee-deep in LOTR sloppy seconds!  Anyway, it’s pretty, it’s confusing, it’s not like you have a huge holiday to prepare for in the next two weeks, so watch up.

Legend of the Seeker at Hulu.com

A text message I just received from an old friend in my hometown:

“Google pole dancing robots when you can.”

Let us, for a moment, disregard the fact that the pole dancing robots have been making the rounds on the internet lately (unfairly called “bonerkillers” at Gizmodo of all places!) or that imploring someone to “Google” something no longer inspires even a half-hearted twitter (or a Twitter for that matter).  Let us instead bask in a world where a tiny little piece of metal and plastic sends me a message of such delightful literary brevity from a friend hundreds of miles away with whom I used to sneak nips of Jamesons with while at work (oh give me a break, we were baristas, not bus drivers).

If you’re still interested, here’s a link to the abovementioned pole dancing robots.  Be warned: the video is overlong, of poor quality and plays some terrible music.  Still still interested?

I could spend time writing about the essence of Los Angeles, but luckily Geoff Manaugh already did it for me:

“The whole thing is ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous city in the world – but everyone who lives there knows that. No one thinks that L.A. “works,” or that it’s well-designed, or that it’s perfectly functional, or even that it makes sense to have put it there in the first place; they just think it’s interesting. And they have fun there.
And the huge irony is that Southern California is where you can actually do what you want to do; you can just relax and be ridiculous. In L.A. you don’t have to be embarrassed by yourself.”

Not a single word of this essay is untrue.

From the delightfully, functionally futuristic bldgblog.

me:  I made a potato soup, but I hate it.  I’m throwing it out.

Hal: You are?  That doesn’t seem like you.

me:  It doesn’t taste like anything and I’ve gone back and added so much crap to it, like vermouth and truffle salt and herbs.  It still doesn’t taste like anything.  Sometimes you have to know when to walk away.

Hal:  Like the Kenny Rogers song about cooking.

me:  Uh.

Hal:  “The Gambler.”

me:  Right, but, you’re trying to tell me that’s about cooking?

Hal:  Yes.

me:  So the lyric, “know when to fold ‘em” -

Hal:  Is about eggs, yes.