Open Hatch

So, I thought: “I’m sick of trying to come up with a unique domain or corporate name.” (and yes, I want one) - “Maybe the computer can tell me a good one.”

I googled “Brand name generator”. I found this site. I typed in my full name, my “core value” (caring, of the limited choices given), and my “main goal” (world leadership, of the limited choices given). I clicked the submit button (”what brand are you?”). I didn’t like what it gave. It wouldn’t even be coherent to a pharmacist or transformer. I tried some other variables for a while, then discovered that I can just resubmit the same data and it gives random new results. Does it even have a formula based on what you give it, or is it all random? I tried a few reposts of the same data, until it spat back this:

A new name and £100 million saved!

retardo

Your brand will be unique because this denotes:

market leading responsibility

Yes. Retardo. That will be my brand name. That is _just perfect_.

NOT.

[This blog entry is rated PG-13 in the United States, or if you live in Canada, PG, or in Ontario, G.  Forget it if you live in Europe.  Your whole continent is Unrated.  Australia or anywhere else, I don’t know, but g’day mate!  If PG-13 may not be your thing, I recommend something else - maybe this short film at my film blog (it has questions for children!) - but not this.] 

This collection of articles details many world-renowned scientists’ predictions for scientific advancements in the next 50 years.

They hearken back to the internet and the human genome as examples of amazing things we never would have imagined.  But I’m thinking, who ever used the internet for much anything?  And what did the human genome ever do for me?

But some of the scientific predictions look pretty good - look at the categories!  Oceans, psychology, sex.. in the future, we can all look forward to sexual advances!  And gazing into the crystal ball of technology.. hmm.. I’m not sure I should have seen that.

My name is Alex.  I like innapropriate jokes.

(depending) 

After purging myself with the following screed, I had an idea.  Blogger allows you to set up a secret email address to a blog, which, if you send to, will generate a blog post from whatever email you send.  I think I have seen some blogs that incorporate this functionality in conjunction with programs that create what would seem like a rational english post but is truly only an algorythmically created robot message advertizing some service [yes, reading the next article I will link, some people abuse human-created content from others by outright stealing blog posts through xml newsfeeds, and mixing their little spam messages into the posts!]  Well, certain of email addresses in my administration have been DESTROYED by spammers.  Who send shameless messages.  And sometimes outright useless gobledy-gook.  So let’s at least have a public record somewhere to display all the shame of it.

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This is a one-page script archived in .pdf format here. 

Here are three new shirt designs, one of them inspired by this holiday.

From the first one you may ask, and no, I’m not all against that.  And these are all in, and link to, my new t-shirt gallery that I’m having a lot of fun making.

This short film from this script I wrote here is now posted at my new internet film blog, here.

I ran accross this site that lets you design and sell t-shirts. I get a 10 percent cut of whatever they sell that I’ve made. Thar they be. After designing one and then adding other designs to my account, I discovered that they all show up in that there flash object thingy.

This was my first design - PLAIN WHITE. This was my brother’s idea. I am a thief. Get Ethnic. Validate your inner whiteness. If you happen to be white. Or even not.

Author: Orson Scott Card
LOST BOYS
HarperCollins/HarperTorch Reissue Edition January 25 2005
First publication in 1992 by HarperCollins
Mass Market Paperback, 544 pages
ISBN 0061091316
$7.99 US dollars
Amazon - Barnes and Noble - BookSense - Author’s book page

As a long aside before my own actual review, I’ll lay challenges to someone else’s review, Terry L Jeffress (in the review archive at AML), faux paus though it might be, 14 years ago though it was:

Jeffress’ review

Jeffress says the ending to this story is anticlimactic. Simply put, he’s wrong. Well, except that’s his view. Except that his opinion is wrong. (I’m being facetious). Though I’m not sure what kind of ending Jeffress would have liked. An ending that erases some things that happened in the story? For those things to have never happened? The story itself hinges on matters of life beyond mortality, and the final lines of narrative boldly present the main character’s assurances of resolution that will occur in the next life. How very important is that point which Jeffress missed.

Jeffress also asserts that Card “Doesn’t introduce the suspenseful elements that play on the story’s resolution until well into the novel”. No, they were there early, along with some really great and subtly disturbing foreshadowing. Jeffress also apparently missed that.

And not enough horror? The behavior of some people in the story was quite horrific enough - and this wasn’t a gore or slasher film (I mean book - I see every scene in the book in my head though, as a film) - it was suspenseful. To complain against the book’s form one would have to complain that it isn’t suspenseful enough. And it was very suspenseful.

Lastly, I just don’t see how playing affections for children is any abuse in storytelling, and I disagree that such affections should necessarily fade for teenagers (which has nothing if little to do with this story). That complaint is really off-target. News Flash: people love children. Or they should. Children are naturally compelling. If properly portrayed. Which they were here.

Jeffress concludes by recommending the short story version of this tale. Well, good for that, at least. This story is published in Card’s short story collection book Maps in a Mirror, also in reprint by Orb Books (an imprint of Tor), published January 1, 2004. I don’t doubt the short version is also very good, though I haven’t read it, and I suspect I would end up recommending both.

Here is a favorable review I entirely agree with, by one Stephanie Name.

Now, my own review -

I give my highest recommendation to read this novel. In fact I would love to see it turned into a film. It is in turns flabbergasting and unbelievably good, harrowing and glorious. It also has some moments I thought were really darkly funny.

It tells the story of a young Mormon family that moves to North Carolina for the father’s new job programming video games (for the Commodore 64, which Card provides many authentic descriptive touches of. And from first-hand knowledge, I think. Several Christmases ago my dad bought me a Commodore off eBay - yeah, I’m a retro gamer - and one of the bonus books sold with it had a programming article written by Orson Scott Card). The boss at the father’s company and two other characters at his work provide some boggling fodder for unrelenting and unbelievably low conflict, which the father handles in ways only the rarest of men could pull off. But that ain’t all of it. There are some _nutso_ people in the local Mormon ward, and also the children’s school, who provide some outrageous antagonism, which although there was little redeeming about those characters, aside from the fact that they may not be bloodthirsty neo-Nazis, and also perhaps because these are characters any of us may have met in everyday real life - rendered to me as downright darkly comic.

Depending on your view. I know people who can hardly stomach that; making it an apparently “love it or hate it” story. Clearly I fall on the side of loving it. But the characters aren’t all either far off the deep end or upright as a Saint. There are characters anywhere between the long spectrum of crazy and sane.

Speaking of crazy, I love the grace the story lends to the theme of how indistinguishable craziness can be from religion. Well really in fact, don’t religious people believe some strictly not rational things? As an example, there is nothing logical in supposing a resurrection.

But how many outright wicked opponents can you cram into one story and have the main characters fend them off with brilliant wit, perfect justice, and without inflicting any counter-harm? I could spoil it with a more specific answer but I’ll just say that here, Card’s answer is “a lot.”

And the real heart of things comes through the children in the story, I would say especially the increasingly withdrawn oldest son in the family.

As the book’s cover blurbs and copy let on, the story is also set to a backdrop of boys in the city disappearing one by one.

I will set up expectations. When I said glorious I meant the ending, which - despite but also because of everything else that happens in the story! - left me in a blubbering and astonished stupor. I picked up several of the clues in the novel as to other happenings - which were simply rending to know without the story outright telling - but I did not see that one coming.

But do not skip ahead to read the ending of the story.

The rest of this review is spoilers unless you have read this novel.

Here’s a kid who sees ghosts and helps them solve their unresolved problems. Was that tale around before this? Because this was around before Shyamalan.

[Addendum since first write: Card says when he heard of the premise of The Sixth Sense he at first refused to see it because he realized it meant LOST BOYS could never be filmed. You know what I say to that? Rubbish! So many stories and films are so like each other but have suceeded enormously despite. The comparison will be made (in fact it could be made favorably in pitching it to producers - producers on the whole tend to only want to do something that has “already” been done! - producers do not think like audiences.) - but the comparison will be then be thrown out the window for everything else greatly different between the stories, and because your story has ten times the heart. No diss on Shymalan’s work; I love his film and it has a lot of heart. LOST BOYS has more.]

What I predicted right: Gallowglass would try to pull (successfully or not I didn’t know) something creepy, and the Butler (the landlord’s father, rather, tending the house) did the crimes. I knew Stevie’s friends were really the spirits of the lost boys. I knew the moment when Stevie disobeyed his father and didn’t come to the table when his father rushed out the door, and I knew that he then went out back and got lost like the other boys. I knew he was a ghost when his mother was trying to touch him to test his temperature, and he wouldn’t go near her. As I said, it was rending to know that while the characters didn’t. And what left me in a blubbering and astonished stupor was the fruit of Stevie’s unshaken courage.