Book Dragon is reading - FaceOff, edited by David Baldacci

2. In The Nick Of Time [John Rebus vs. Roy Grace] by Ian Rankin vs. Peter James

I want to call this a nice little morality play but I’m not sure that’s quite right. Guy’s on his deathbed, insists on making a confession of the time he got away with killing someone back in the sixties during the Mods and Rockers riots.

Well of course you don’t just take someone’s word for that so Rebus has to head down to Brighton and follow up on this with Grace. As it turns out, our confessor got it mixed up and didn’t kill who he thought he had; instead he disabled someone else who is quite eager to make an ID.

The morality play part comes in when they head back up to Edinburgh to get that witness confirmation. The confessor has had a miraculous remission of his cancer and wishes to recant his words to Rebus now that he has a future to lose again. It is of course far too late for that now. As the cops noted earlier, had he confessed the guilt gnawing at him back then he would have served his sentence by now. How much that might have distorted his life away from the now in other details is not touched upon.

I would be tempted to look into the stories of Peter James more except the way Grace’s assistant Norman Potting kept flirting with Rebus’ assistant Siobhan Clarke put me a bit off that idea.

Book Dragon is reading - FaceOff, edited by David Baldacci

3. Gaslighted [Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast] by R. L. Stine vs. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

I dreaded reading this because I am not a fan of horror. It is a genre I am perhaps oversensitive to, one that lingers with me for days if I am lucky. A couple of years ago, for example, I read a short story by George R. R. Martin, “The Monkey Treatment” in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection. That one gave me difficulty sleeping for a few weeks after and some of the imagery still haunts me.

In the case of “Gaslighted” it was not so bad. I was not affected by it like a horror story but still found much of it to be a difficult and unpleasant read because, as the title suggests, Aloysius Pendergast is indeed being gaslighted and that is almost always distressing even when I don’t know the characters concerned.

I was disappointed by this story not being really Aloysius vs. Slappy, in that Slappy’s appearance here is entirely as a figment invented through the true villainous doctor’s experiments in memory manipulation. Although being a horror anti-fan of course I have not read any of the Goosebumps books. Maybe this is true to Slappy’s usual presentation. But I had been looking forward to seeing such an excessively heroic character as Pendergast take on the evil machinations of an actual ventriloquist dummy.

Pendergast’s own exploits recounted here put me in mind of a reel of rejected X-Files plots, perhaps for being too outlandishly extravagant. I could not help but hear his speaking voice as played by David Hyde-Pierce, which I side might be fitting for this urbane, lethal, super strong albino FBI agent from New Orleans. I was a bit curious to read more of his adventures but am wary of how they might shade macabre enough to fall into the horrific. Plus despite a strong sense of adventure showing through it seems like he may just be a bit too perfect to be a satisfying read - this being why the narrative of his series was so plausible as the fantasy trauma retreat it was being presented as.

I also feel a need to mark hesitance regarding this character being from New Orleans. A place regarded in American folkloric and media culture as a source of dark magic and sinister happenings, it is not surprising this deliberately exotic albino FBI agent should hail from there but it is discomfiting. As a trend in fiction, as though that region is having its history washed away and re-purposed into the national mystery zone. Basically, African American culture and others raided for mysticism to fuel the adventures of white characters.

Futility

LiveJournal and Dreamwidth are so desolate, I think I have seen more than one person refer to them as ghost towns. Even though I have contributed to this by having so little to say for so long, and not saying what there was of it here, I'm not happy about this. The two of them are to my mind the best-structured of any sites I have tried which might bear the label 'social network'.

Flaws, sure. But at least they are structured in a way that supports blogging or journalling and gives me some control of what happens to the post afterward and who can access it. Even though I mostly only post public anyway.

I have decided therefore to go all cargo cult about this. If I post more, talk more about what is going on in my life and thoughts, then I can pretend to myself this will have some sort of encouraging effect on the wider internet and these sites could live again.

This is an excellent plan.

Of backlog

Last week I had occasion a couple of times to be shelving and tidying near where a small group seemed to be studying medicine. As far as I could tell, this group was being led by a black man and something about his voice reminded me of the character Jar Jar Binks from the Star Wars prequels. I couldn't say in what way, as I can't think of any particular detail to pin that on.

I had known that that character was acted and voiced by a black man, but being reminded of the character 'out in the world' put me thinking about how that role was essentially caricaturing and putting up as comedy the speaking voice of many black men. It was not a wise design decision, I reckon.

What I did on my weekend

Today was perhaps a good day, although not what I anticipated. I ended up spending about three hours playing games in multiplayer which I had not planned. First, a while playing Alien Swarm again with Ami and Grace, the latter of whom I have rather missed (I do not miss Ami because I have daily contact with her still, which is good). That started out as a test effort to get a three-player game of Secret of Mana going, but this seems to be an unattainable goal. Instead, we defaulted to freely available space marine squad shooting up swarms of aggressive alien bug-things.

It was wonderful to get to hang out and laugh and have fun with friends again. I missed it a lot and hope I will be able to make more time in my life for this, that more opportunities for repeating the experience will be available.

Later, since we can't get a third player, Ami and I started our Secret of Mana game over again with the new circumstances in mind. Also fun times, and conveniently allowing me to see how the plot began instead of joining it partway through like I had last time (there was not much plot).

In betweentimes I worked some more on the database of books and stories I have read that I have been building for ill-defined and scarcely considered reasons. But at least I am potentially learning new skills in the process.

Yesterday was also not what I expected. I woke in the morning to find Avast had reported a virus in its scanning and recommended a further scan at boot. I let it go ahead with that, forgetting how long those take, and was consequently without my computer for 7 hours. This meant conversations had to be carried out via the far less comfortable medium of my phone. I ended up planning out some meals for - hopefully - the next week, and also started rereading through Berserk to pass the time. Currently am at Volume 3 and aim to stop there for a while. I'm aiming to be a bit more flexible in my reading in the future, but that is not something I can dive right into, and I have "things to do" meanwhile.

Losing such a chunk of November first also put a damper on any aspirations I may have had to participate in NaNoWriMo, although I'd not entertained any idea of actually attaining 50,000 words anyway. I still might try and manage a burst of writing, which I'd like to do regardless of the month.