Hack part 1

Hack Part the One

I enjoy writing. To the point that I have two blogs, though I don't update either as often as I should like. Sometimes concentration is difficult – my attention span is so short.

Sometime back in the spring of 2005 I was watching 28 Days Later with a friend of mine. After she freaked out at the Church Scene, she told me about her grand plans whence came the Zombie Apocalypse. She and her friends had decided that they were going to hole up in the local Walmart Dawn of the Dead style. Really for them Walmart was the only choice. The local mall sucked donkey gonads, and it even did that poorly. The big box concern was the most logical destination for a bunch of geeky fucktards to flee for if the dead started coming to life. Never mind that all the other assholes in the city would probably have the same idea, this is their fantasy damn it! The other denizens can find their own big box store turned fortress.

This sparked an idea in me, to write a story about those people. The ones who made plans for the ZombPoc and then had it dropped into their laps. It was a fun idea and my plan was to write a 8,000 word short story. Maybe 10,000 words. And then see where it took me. I made fantastic headway and the writing took on a life of its own, to the tune of about 35,000 words by that summer. Then I lost steam and put the project aside.

Then I graduated from college. I live in Michigan, and our economy has been in the cesspit for decades. It hadn't improved, and has only since gotten worse. On top of that I have a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a Concentration in Ceramics, and a second Major in History. The History Major? I added it to the queue because I thought it would be more applicable to the outside world.

Heh. Stupid art fuck. Who let you leave home and play adult?

As I worked through college and being cheap and obscenely dull I had money 'saved' If you don't take into account the tens of thousands in student loans. With no real prospects or direction in the real world, I tried to decide what to do next while applying for Fed jobs in the region. After graduation I came across a copy of Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide.

Boom. I was inspired again. I began writing 2,000+ words a day seven days a week. Every day after the morning routine I would work on the first 1,000 words. When that was done I would get some exercise and otherwise enjoy my afternoon. Then dinner. Then around 8 or 9 I'd start working on the second 1,000 words. I looked forward to getting up and going to work every day. The story was a blast and the process of creating it was a blast.

Six months after I graduated I had 300,000 words of zombie uprising goodness following the travails of several groups of survivors for one full year following the apocalypse. I named it the Survivor Chronicles(i am shite when it comes to naming). I was proud of what I had done.

I thought I needed a story that long, as in college I had found Robert Jordan and other fantasy authors. Those men and women who create those giant doorstop volumes. This must be what the Industry was looking for me thought. They will see my work and pay me thousands and thousands of dollars for the honor of being my publisher! Now all I needed to do was decide what I was going to do with my newfound fortune.

Wrong.

As a Ceramics/History major, I have no real education in the ways of getting published. I just had to leap into the awaiting arms of Google and figure it out. The worst part for me was the crafting of the Query Letter. How do you take the whole of who you are, and your labor and winnow it down to a concise trio of paragraphs? And make all of that interesting? And sell this idea to a complete stranger.

Even now, nearly five years and additional five novels later, I don't have the foggiest notion. There is a feeling that my letters are hit or miss. But after a lot of thinking, something came out and my first twenty pages were on their way to Tor books. Even then I wasn't sure exactly what I had. One book? Or two? Would there be more? My story was an open-ended affair with no over-arcing plot element. There was no great evil to defeat. Just people surviving the apocalypse as best they could. Surely, foes sprang up. But there wasn't a built in ending. The series would last as long as my interest and imagination could hold out. Right now, all told the series a bit longer than the Lord of the Rings. Or about the same length as a single Robert Jordan(RIP RJ) novel.

Here you go Tor. Take it in! This was sometime in the summer months of 2007.

I don't know if it's a failing of the creative mindset to be able to construct and inhabit such grandiose delusions. Or maybe I was just driven by a naïve optimism. All while teetering on the brink of insecurity and self-doubt. They were like a pit beneath my feet. Tor books crushed my hopes with a single letter. For about a week.

It was a blue week as I climbed out of the pit and pushed forward.

I was at the time only aware of one zombie novel, and that was the afore mentioned Max Brooks' World War Z. Though I admit that I really didn't go looking, so there might have been dozens of zombie novels by then, and there probably were. There is only one overriding fact in my mind. I like zombies. Many of my friends share the interest. Someone must want to read this story.

I then sent out more letters and samples. One at a time. To any Publisher who foolhardily took direct submissions from the bottomless sea of unknown hacks. TSR/Wizards by far sent the most promising letter with a 'No, but if you write something more in our genre, please think of us.' Or at least that's how I translated it. The letter left me feeling a mite more hopeful than I had been.

I still have that letter here somewhere I think. I kept them all as a reminder (mostly so I didn't forget and try again).

Oh well, by then I was already working on what would turn out to be Zombies 3 and 4. Each time rejection hurts a bit less and the effects go away all the sooner. I've built a shell of pessimism. I send letters with little exposed hope. When I open the responses, from those who have the courtesy to respond at all, I chant my mantra. That expected answer: Thank you for letting me see, but this doesn't work for me at this time. The bane of the struggling writer.

I've had the phrase repeated to me a hundred times or more now.

There are those who might suggest that one takes a more positive outlook and mindset. To expect that good things will happen. As if one could force their will on the universe simply by wanting something and expecting it. This is Magical Thinking. And it's utter bull shit. Ask any five year old who didn't get that pony that they asked for for Christmas.

All you can really do is keep writing and keep trying. So, I moved onto agents. I've since retired my zombie novels and moved onto other stories. Short and long. No dice. But I keep writing and submitting. All while working – mostly in between employment. An eight hour shift takes too much out of me and drains my focus. My creativity comes in bursts.

About that time, I had quite a job that I hated. HATED. For a company that I despised. I am fairly sure that remaining there would have driven me to a heart attack and an early grave. So I handed in my two week after over-reacting to some petty event. And there it was again, the chance to write and the forgotten desire to do so. Even with the uncertainty of being able to eat it was the best decision of my life. I quit, so there would be no unemployment. Back to living on savings!

The cycle began anew. Write, revise and submit. And be rejected.

A wonderful tool has evolved as I quite my job. Or at least it came to my attention. Independent publishing, largely with eBooks. Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Smashwords among a legion of others. My zombie novels have finally found a home. Once again my optimism was fired up and I jumped into a whole new maze of confusion. How much do I charge? I started high and then toned the price down, tweaking it as I thought about my problem.

My stories don't have professional editing, or cover art. I am a one man show. One who really doesn't enjoy editing at all. It's work, where writing is fun. The words just seem to flow on past my eyes, making it difficult to fix problems that are there in the prose. But it needs to be done and so I tackle the problem as best I can. Write, revise and submit.

And hope. There's always that fragile hope.

I'm a driver, I'm a winner. Again.

I cannot say for sure if the Universe loves me or hates me. I think that my being inspires some sort of twisted passive aggressive love-hate mania in whatever cosmic force that drives reality. Last march, my job disappeared and I found myself rather suddenly unemployed. This happened about a month after I first bought into the brand new Health Insurance plan. I was insured for a whole month!

There was of course the downside of things. No income. I did happen to receive unemployment benefits for a few weeks. I live in Michigan and the economy here has been in the hole for as long as I've been alive. I actually was employed on the strength of my sister's performance. She's intelligent and hard working and they decided to hire me as well. I'm a bit dimmer but driven to keep busy, and I took on every task that was thrown my way. I've written about the experience previously.

But they were re-organizing and my position disappeared. So it goes. The only thing that burned me was that the company kept a sleazy, unreliable... I have more

I took the time to read and write and work on other projects. I revised novels 5 and 6 and then wrote and revised novel 7, along with a double-handful of short stories. There were also loads of books and regular exercise. I re-discovered the joys of the local library. I built up my post apocalyptic survival library. All while looking for work elsewhere in the country. It felt great to be productive again. I was living on natural time, life was mostly good, if a bit uncertain.

My co-worker calls this delightful state of being “Pretirement” as she postulates that we'll never actually be able to retire so we might as well take advantage of our brief periods of unemployment whilst we're young. I do not disagree with this supposition, though I'm optimistic that one day I'll at least be able to get my writing career going to the point where I can support myself doing something I love. Still, I embrace my unemployment with glee, even as I try to avoid it.

Sometimes it feels as if the universe is giving me a taste of what life could be like. Like an extremely subtle demonic temptation. Sell your meager soul and live the dream of the hack novelist!

So we come back to the original statement in this post. I was offered a job as a driver full time running a route that I had occasionally covered during my last stint in their service. They hired me back. More pay. Different hours. No data-entry. I get to drive a car with a manual transmission – another topic previously hit upon, a skill that I picked up while working for this company.

Sweet! How fortunate!

I mean, I've already got some fun anecdotes. One dude in a wheelchair said that he loves me. I thanked him for that. I mean, there are other sources(beautiful women) whom I'd rather hear that declaration from - who hearing utter it might make my decade. But you take it where you can get it, so I thanked him and moved on.

But here we go. I do live in the state of Michigan. The weather is cold and we tend to get a lot of precipitation due to the fact that we're surrounded by lakes. In the winter we see this in the form of snow, sleet and freezing rain. I've come to realize a new functioning law in the universe. If I'm driving and there is a chance that it will snow or rain that night, it will snow or rain that night. Of the less than 10 days that I've been working, the weather conditions have been adverse for at least 80% of the time. But, Michigan, winter. Blah blah blah. This is all expected. A given. A fact of life to be complained about despite all the rest.

There were a couple incidents last night that really made me wonder if I offended creation by turning down some pact that I was just unaware of.

So far in Driving I've nearly been creamed by a cop car and have had a couple other close encounters to brag about. Part of the risk of driving at night. But yesterday, the universe re-introduced the ever looming threat of Deer to be the bane of my existence.

Deer. Louis CK is quite explicit about his feelings for them – and I feel that he has some valid points.

Last night, after leaving my third stop, I came across a herd of five does(a deer, a female deer) off to the side of the road. They were blocked by a tall fence that hemmed them out of some person's property and they see my car flying down the road in their general direction. As usual, they decided to break and run, right in front of my car, at the last second. - this is after long hesitation that allows me to come closer and closer. The company car that I drive is a Chevy Aveo. A Kleenex box on wheels. I don't need deer to throw themselves at me and crumple my ride. I missed the dumbest member of the herd by about three feet as it waited until the very last second to run across my path.

Luckily, I saw them early and was able to slow down. Fucking stupid deer. We need to breed wolves that can only digest white-tail deer flesh and set them loose on the herd.

Now for the figurative deer encounter. Same night maybe 4 hours later. My run was over and I had punched out and was driving home for the night while I was driving along in my own sweet ride – a white 96 Chevy Lumina that is somehow still able to start and drive, though a growing percentage of mass is represented by Iron Oxide. It's a round-town car, as it tends to vibrate uncomfortably whenever is passes the threshold of 60mph. I call it the Drift, and it gets mention in my Pharmacy novel.

Back to deer encounter 2. I was rolling along homebound on one of the main streets around 11pm and thinking about climbing into bed and going to sleep. Suddenly a car darted out of the cross street right in front of me. And then the driver stopped dead and froze, creating an impromptu roadblock and an excellent implement for an action movie chase scene.

Luckily my breaks still work, which surprises me, or I'm sure that Drift would have dissolved and burst into a ball of fire.

The silver lining? I wouldn't have to worry about paying my student loans back. Well, back to another evening of living dangerously.

Fuck you Brain.

Aliens is my all time favorite movie. Still. Even after twenty years further cinematic adventures that lead to encounters with hundreds(maybe thousands) more films. My best friends and I used to 'play' Aliens. My weapon of choice was the nine-barrel mini-gun from Predator. I was specific about the number of barrels that the weapon had as I imagined myself fighting off the swarms of warrior bugs.

I still have nightmares about the Aliens movies.

You haven't seen Aliens? Watch it. First watch Alien and then the sequel. You might even enjoy Alien 3. Skip Resurrection and the Aliens Vrs Predator drek that Hollywood shat out. Do try the AvP computer games, especially AvP 2 for Mac and PC. Alien is one of the Top Horror movies. Aliens one of the finest Action Horror movies. Each was made by a master director with a talented cast of actors portraying believable characters.

In short, they are fine cinema.

Further - The stories are set in a universe not unlike our own. There is no Utopian society. Mega-corporations are extremely powerful and influential in both political and every day life. People are greedy and selfish, they are noble and brave, or cowardly. Just like they are now. It is implied that there is no global government, the world is broken up into alliances and nation states. These work with the Mega-corporations as humanity spreads out into the stars. Actually, no government, beyond the corporate government, is ever seen. The characters work with the corporation. Even the Marines seem to be an arm of the Company.

Space travel is slow. Humanity generally seems to believe that it is largely alone in the galaxy, as no other species are mentioned directly in the movies. At least nothing intelligent.

We do have a Colonial military force and military starships, so there must be some hostile force out there. Their weapons are a primitive high tech. No lasers or phasers, they use slug throwers and explosives and fire as their tools of death. They pack body armor and knives, feed on cornbread substitute, wear video cameras and ride around in armored vehicles of questionable value. The Marines, are bad hombres and masters of foul language.

I so wanted to be a Colonial Marine as a kid.

Now to the Aliens. Imagine an eight foot tall carnivorous insect with a black exoskeleton razor sharp claws and teeth. It can run down humans and tear them in half, climb walls and ceilings. The best part? They have sulfuric acid for blood. Slaying one just might kill you in return. They work as hive force and are utterly fearless, but are at the same time very intelligent and are able to change tactics to suit the needs of the battle. They can see in the dark, so there is no place to hide.

Frightened yet?

One last thing, the most terrifying of all: They use other animals to breed. The Aliens are insects, with one queen that lays eggs and the rest are drones. The life cycle is such: Queen lays egg → Egg hatches into parasites called facehuggers → the facehuggers scuttle about and find a host, attach, implant the egg and then falls off and dies → the egg hatches and the chest burster erupts into the world → the chest burster grows at amazing speed.

The aliens don't care what host they use. Human or animal. How they managed to get into space is unknown, they just have. The Corporation is interested in the species. But I won't give anymore spoilers away. Watch the movies.

So, I've had a reoccurring nightmare over the years. The cast and setting are always different, sure, it's like a rebooted film franchise that uses the same general story – I'm in a place that has been infested by Aliens. Either facehuggers, for the really bad dreams, or drones in the less intense ones. Usually it is at night and often in a strange building. One bad one involved a mansion that was infested with facehuggers. They were crawling everywhere.

This time, I was outside an enormous stone building(1/4 mile wide and long, 10 stories tall) at night. Captain Janeway from Voyager and I think my friend Ryan – both in full Colonial Marine gear. What did I have? An empty rifle. I swear, all of the firearms I laid my hands on (about 20 of them) were empty. Didn't have any full magazines, but I had a knife. Thank you brain for that, you gave me a knife to fight against aliens that bleed acid.

And that's the gist of it. There was a lot of running through dark corridors in the basement – which was a lot like a factory with metal grated floors, large machinery and tons of fog/mist/steam.

What does this say about me? I'm optimistic and pessimistic in the same breath. In the dreams I refuse to give up and keep running and fighting where I have to, even when it is hopeless. And I know that it is hopeless. But I push forward regardless of my chances. Because it beats stopping.

In Greece, people use large wooden horse to get into Troy. In Michigan they use horse to get out.

The world of Detroit is akin to a planetary nebula. That's where a star about the size of our sun goes through its final death throws, expands to the size of a red giant, kicks off a ring of gas and dust and then finally collapses into its final form, a white dwarf. White dwarfs are cold and dim(relatively) remnants of extremely dense matter (they're the size of the earth with the mass of the sun) that no longer work as nuclear furnace. For all intents and purposes they're corpses that have retained some body heat. Detroit is like this. I think. Detroit, burned bright for most of the last century and now it's a remnant. While the suburbs seem to expand outwards forever. But it all looks about the same. Cookie cutter extruded mass of suburbia. It is a strange thing, we in America consider ours to be a melting pot culture. We are a microcosm of humanity. But when you get down to it, any city built in the last fifty years looks exactly the same as all of the others. Block after block, this maze runs. If you were to fall asleep in one of the suburbs of Detroit and awake in the outskirts of Indianapolis, I doubt that you would notice. We are diverse homogeneity, and I hate it. Our cities tend to grow more and more uninteresting with each passing decade. What brings this on? I got to spend the weekend in Troy Michigan, doing Data Entry for a pharmacy that was switching software. I spent 17 hours transferring patient records by hand from the old system to the new. Then afterwards I got to see a little of Troy. Worst Vacation Ever. The Onion has a wonderful story titled something like 'College Senior hopes she can turn love of Data Entry into Career in Data Entry.' Wonderful Satire. But for anyone who doesn't know, data entry is simply taking information from one source and inputing it into a computer database. It can be described in a word, Tedious. If I had to look forward to a future of Data Entry, I think I would open my own veins. If I had to The pharmacy was an interesting place, as these things go. They seem to have moved recently and were in a rather disorganized state. Fine, that makes the environs that much more interesting. A bit of clutter is nice and homey. Even if such isn't the ideal way to run a business. But as the weekend passed, the crew got things slowly squared away. It is a strange thing to drive two hundred miles and find things are similar to my own corner of the state. The Pharmacy in Troy seems to use the same distributor as does the two I've worked at here in town. So they have the same stickers on the same medication bottles. The drugs arrive from the distributor in the same dark blue, light blue, green and grey bins. One difference was somewhat cultural. On the west side of the state, it's a haven for Conservative Religious folk endemic in our nation. Christians mostly. Where they have religion at all, most are protestant. Black, white and brown seem to be the most prominent groups. The Troy Pharmacy was mostly, as was implied earlier, of folks who hailed form the Mid East. English and Arabic seemed to flow together, just like with Spanglish. Evil made the statement that it is disconcerting to hear a sentence almost entirely of one language that seems to flow around a single word from the other. They are like tantalizing scraps for an outsider to try to piece together the conversation from the bits and pieces that you understand. But anyone has heard Spanglish is familiar with the concept. Fascinating how two languages seem to inhabit the mind together. As someone who is unilingual, I wonder how multi-lingual folk engaged in the exchange decide when to flit back and forth. When do you decide that the German word for Panties isn't good enough, so you have to drudge up the Swahili equivalent? I would love to know how these choices are made and how conscious they are. But as someone who absolutely sucks at memorizing (I'm lazy and a language is made up of tons of sounds and their meanings that need to be memorized), I doubt I shall ever have the experience myself. Back to the office. It was a basement, a dungeon. Large and spacious, but lacking windows. I do love having natural light, it makes me feel human. I was lead to a cubical, mostly empty except for a chair and a computer. With a brief description of what I needed to do, I was left alone with a stack of papers. Behind me was a fellow who was listening to what seemed to be a religious broadcast. About Jesus and Islam. I'm not sure if it was pro-Christian, or trying to get Christians and Muslims to work together. From what I heard, it sounded like a little of A, while maybe trying to convert Muslims. The Preacher was performing a monologue about how important the prophet Jesus is to Islam, and how many Muslim kids are named after him, and maybe how the grass is greener over in Christianity. Has anyone else had an experience like this? Luckily I had my iPod. Oh iPod, you are one of the greatest inventions that humanity has yet devised! So, Data entry is how I spent my days in Troy. With a bit of religiosity and Metallica smattered within. How about the evening? We had a fine dinner of Olive Garden. I forswore the never ending pasta bowl, or whatever they call it. The food is of course tasty. But you can get it anywhere. According to Google there are at least three in the city where I reside. It'd be like visiting New York and patronizing Pizza Hut. Just get out, walk down the block, and find a good local restaurant! Though, I have no clue what sort of food Troy/Detroit might be famous for. There are a lot of Middle-Eastern folk, so Mediterranean food and Indian are my best guesses. - In our defense though, We're cheap and we had a gift card for Olive Garden. Free food isn't something Evil or I often turn down. Evil and I stayed at a place called the Candlewood Suites. Which was both awesome and lame. It's a hotel aimed at long term guests, and comes with a full kitchen, living area, and bedroom in each suite. Pretty damn cool, if somewhat old. Our suite had an aged television and a video-dvd player, which I expect is about par for the course. The kitchen is fully stocked with utensils and the inn offers a washing service gratis, as well as the free video lending library. But at the same time they seem to be rather laid back. Kind of how I would imagine a youth Hostel to be. I visited the video library, an eclectic collection of dvds and vhs tapes. I don't know who put it together, but they REALLY liked Steven Seagal. Vern has nothing on these folks, Though mostly it was Golden Era Steven Seagal. And I had already seen all the movies. Then there were the mysterious Bollywood tapes. They were encased in a plain white cardboard slip-case and had equally plain text on some tape denoting the name of the film and the major players. Tempting as these mysteries were to explore, I ended up folding to my inner historian and choosing The Assassination of Jesse James ETCETERA, a historical docudrama about said man and event. Three hours long it was, so I never got to the part about the assassination. Only that James and the people around him were fucking dicks. That was enough for me to hope that the Yankees would come back through and put a torch to that part of Missouri. Sunday saw more data entry – followed by pay and release. Freedom to leave Detroit. Judging by the traffic flowing out from the city, I am not alone in that sentiment. Most people were flying out of the city, like it was infested with zombies and on fire to boot. 80MPH+. Swerving like mad. One fellow we saw barely slowed down when they got off the highway and onto a ramp. It was good to be free of the city and on our way back home. Next week, Travers City Michigan.

Ninjas. Oh Ninjas. where have you gone?

The Ultimate Ninja 1986

I have been watching ninja flicks since I was a child of seven. Ever since I heard the older (and thus cooler) kids talking about how totally sweet ninjas were (really, that's how I got into Voltron too). They could do things like run across a forest floor that was littered with dry leaves and twigs without making a sound. That's really all I remember of the conversation. But I was hooked.

Ninjas, hell yeah! I watched a lot of crappy ninja flicks as a kid. And I still have a soft spot for the genre today. This is why we are here now.

Opening splash music sounds like it was ripped off of Star Wars. Just to get that out there right off the bat. It sounds like they took two separate themes from the original trilogy and slapped them together.

And that seems to be a theme for this movie, The Ultimate Ninja.

Two movies mashed together. Two different casts. They were probably made in separate decades. Did someone say muddled? Well they should have. I don't know why they felt the need to pin these movies together. But, I don't understand the workings of the film industry.

It opens up with the leader of the Red Ninjas praying and working the forms. Notice, he's a blonde dude of possible Scandinavian origins and he's wearing a headband with a picture of a Ninja right in the middle. On one side of the Ninja are the letters NIN and the other? JA. Reminds me of the SNL commercial selling this Every time the headband was splashed across the screen, I giggled like a small child.

Red Leader then ambushed by a group of Black Ninjas. The Red Ninjas' mortal and eternal foes. Red Vrs Black. Checkers. Ants. Ninjas. This dichotomy represents a truth that is common in our lives. The Red leader is murdered and the Black Ninja Statue is taken by the Black Leader. Then comes Charles, the Second in Command of the Red Ninja Brotherhood.

Chuckles helps fight off the evil Black Ninjas, but he's too late. His master has been killed. Now he's been named the New Red Leader. Mind you, there only seem to be two Red Ninjas, they have a Master/Padawan relationship ala the Sith Jedi. He is given the task of retrieving the statue. A little plastic nick-nack with the word Ninja written across the forehead. If you collect both statues, Black and Gold, you gain Real Ultimate Super Ninja POWER! Zam!

The rest of this half is the Red Ninja slowly killing the Black Ninja's minions one at a time as they're sent to assassinate him. Finally leading up to the show-down. This seems to be more of a traditional ninja movie, one where the warriors have awesome mystical powers like invisibility, a sixth sense, and teleportation. Effin sweet!

The entire thing smacks of a short, and one that I'm hoping was intended to be in part humorous. I hope so, as it is so absurd I would like to think that the filmmakers intended the jokes to be there. I mean really, a ninja wearing a headband that said 'ninja'? That's the kind of thing I would have worn when I was 8 (I did have the Karate Kid headband of awesome at one point - came with a shirt).

Now we cut to movie number two. It's not a really ninja movie. It's a lame kung fu film. With some 'clever editing' and voice dubbing in a single scene, the two movies are spliced into one. Actually at times, until the end it seemed like they had edited together three different films.

Lame movie two has a fully Asian cast. Not sure where from. IMDB says Hong Kong, and some of the names are Chinese. But others look more Thai. Maybe it was a a collaboration in the art of FAIL.

The story goes as so. Twenty years ago the bad guy named Rodger kills the protector of a town. In the battle, he allows Rodger's children to flee. Now, twenty years later, one of the sons is finishing his kung fu training in a land far away and is intent on finding his lost siblings and avenging their father.

Rodger has since settled down to a cozy life of charging the villagers 'rent' and hanging with his bitchy wife. Most of his minions are trained in kung fu, and they're rather dickish bullies who try to have their way with the villagers. Hijynks ensue. And rather lame battle scenes where the thugs beat down on the villagers and try to rape them and what-not. This is after all what thugs do.

The main hero in town is the martial arts teacher's daughter. Mostly she's passive and unwilling to lift a finger. Then strangers start appearing in town. The first is an older dude with receding hair. His Kung fu is ok, but he gets a beat down at the hands of the Heroine, if that's what she is. Difficult to tell.

Then a big bald dude appears. He's about a head taller than the other men and he fights like the stereotypical American in these movies (he resembles an Asian Yul Brynner) basically he soaks up damage and hits hard while employing moves that would make Hulk Hogan shed a tear of joy. He appears to possess psy-powers. I guess. It's implied when he keeps pointing at his head to the sound of strange music, but they don't really seem to have much effect.

They don't explain why the strangers are about. They just show up and leave randomly.

Finally, the original hero character arrives in town. And the lame sounds of frozen meat Foley effects fill the air!

Well, you can watch the rest.

The final high point of the entire film, the unintentional hilarity aside, was the single female breast. Just the one. You really only see it from the side. Yeah, sometimes I think like a 15 year old with scrambled Skinemax.

Beer Fest!

Beerfest. Where people drink beer and listen to bands play. A straight-forward and simple plan of action one would be compelled to believe. And they would be right. That's all a beerfest really is. Founders seems to draw two types in particular. The Bros – as there is beer, add that to the fact that there are other Bros to rape, and you get a feeding frenzy. Group two is the Hipsters. Since the festival seemed to be infested with non-hipsters(the Bros as well as others) I'm wondering if the Hipsters are only showing up out of a sense of irony.

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I don't drink. No reason why, I just don't. And I don't have a passion for music. I like music, even love it at times. But there's no burning desire to ensconce myself in front of a stage and press my head against the loudspeaker until my ears bleed. I'm perfectly content with canned music since, unless I'm dumb it doesn't damage what little I still have left of my hearing.

The bands ranged from OK to interesting, what I could hear. Eventually the music was droned out by the noise of conversation. There's that buzz that it becomes when hundreds of people are talking at once and the sounds cease to be meaningless and become noise. Often background noise. When I notice the buzz, it begins to freak me out. The hum is unescapable and wears at my fragile mind.

The noise makes even brief attempts at conversations rather self-defeating, which kills the mental stimulation that I need. Something to think about please. So, I begin to daydream about seeing epic Street Fighter style battles between the Bros and Hipsters. It's great. Just imagine seeing a Hipster yell Haduken! And throwing a ball of energy at a Bro. Fun times.

So, the concept on most levels is rather dull for a non-drinking hermit like myself. The only real draw? People watching. And a truer definition: Oggling Girls in their summer clothes. As I recall, scantily clad members of the female sex is a regular theme here on this blog. Comic con? Girls cosplaying. Rennfest? Girls cosplaying. I am a broken record. But as a creepy old shut-in, girls in revealing outfits are rare indeed in my usual domain. I'm forced to head out into the world to see them in their natural habitat.

This is worth the venture.

Note: Leering and drooling, are not socially acceptable behavior. Just passing on the hard won wisdom.

What else is there to say? The attention whores show up in droves to these events. Much like the cosplayers at nerdier events. Actually, exactly like cosplayers. The most notable was the Ent. See pic below. But others were the hula-hoopers. Dunno how they fit in, but there was a booth renting/selling hula hoops, so it can't be a new phenomenon. Founders Fest was a strange sight, and I am on the fence whether or not I enjoyed it fully.

Even Further adventures in bad Cinema. shoot me please.

I find it confounding how often I see the hyperbole 'wurst m0vie evar!' tossed about the internets in articles at various sites. The most recent stake that has been brought to my attention being a cracked post about the only martial arts movie ever made in Ireland, a flick titled Final Deviation. So he wanted to write a funny article about a poorly conceived and executed film. Unfortunately, I couldn't laugh along. Worst move ever? Not remotely. It doesn't even approach the title of worst Martial Arts movie ever(Man, have you seen Steven Seagal's recent work?).

Final Deviation, just in brief, is about an Irish martial artists(He resembles an angry primordial Alex Winter) who returns home from Asia to try and rebuild his life. Before he left home in the first place his father was murdered. It involves a powerful magnate and his thugs. A reasonably pretty girl with large breasts who is coveted by the Magnate's son/nephew/whatever. The town they live in features a martial arts tournament, for which the locals are die-hard fans. Don't get me going on the Monk. I don't know which order he was from, but he's clearly Irish Catholic. White beard, long brown robes and all. But he still becomes the Kung Fu Bill's mentor.

Basically, it's like the director took a script written in Hong Kong for a movie set in China, and then just nominally replaced everything with an Irish veneer and called it good. The acting is bad. The dialogue is extremely lame. The entire set up is absurd. Really, a Catholic sect of Kung Fu monks? The movie is pretty damned bad all around and is well worth a write-up on Cracked. I was actually rather pissed off that my source of self-inflicted pain, Netflix, didn't carry this monstrosity. Oh well, it is available for the moment on Youtube. In 9 parts. Look it up.

Now, Final Deviation is a sad sight to see. That people spent so much time on such a poor quality product is depressing. This being said, it doesn't remotely compare with the likes of say TNT Jackson. A 70s Blaxploitation-ChopSocky movie that seems to have been cast on the basis of 'she was a Playboy playmate! She has tits! She's gorgeous!' The rest of the details would take care of themselves.

Detail number 1: TNT, like every other Blaxploitation star of the era(with the exception of Foxy Brown who studied Bar Stool), knows Karate. According to the script. The luscious Jeannie Bell didn't know karate from kumquats. Did I mention that she was a Playboy Playmate and sported an awesome rack? This is important, they have a topless fight scene(in which between cuts her panties magically change color and cut several times). But that's OK, the light skinned dude that they got to be her stunt double had a decent grasp. In Final Deviation, the star was a capable physical performer, his poor acting aside. They didn't need to put a Chinese dude into Brogue Shoes and a Grandfather shirt to cover for him.

The rest of TNT Jackson is over the top and ridiculous, as one should expect from a low budget 70s Blaxploitation flick. It is thoroughly enjoyable for what it is and makes a good movie night feature if you have the right crowd in the proper mindset.

TNT Jackson, the failure pile in a sadness bowl that it is, still stands head, shoulders and balls over the movie that I rate the all time worst. Dark Havest 2: The Maize. I at one point got it into my head to watch the bottom 100 in the IMDB's worst movies list. Dark Harvest 2 was both the beginning and the end of that experiment. I was done, game over, to hell with this idea. I even watched two packs of the Mill Creek 50 movie box sets. You know, the ones where they slap 50 public domain movies onto 12 dvds and say 'here ya go, that'll be $15!' Yeah. I did THAT to myself. I'm like an EMO kid with my constant cutting, only the scars run far deeper. Dark Harvest 2 broke me of that habit. Mostly.

Watch the trailer.

Did you see that? That should have been the director's cut of the movie. At 2.5 minutes long they managed to use up all of the dialogue and action from the script, and they still had to pad the fucking thing out by another 97.5 minutes. 97.5 minutes of corn. And people running through corn. With a 10 minutes interlude dedicated to the protagonist digging in dirt, while the implied villain sneaks up on him. 10 minutes! Did they use every single frame of footage that they captured?

As of 6.16.2011, Dark Harvest 2 as 1928 votes on the good ole IMDB. 322 of of the people who voted gave the movie 10 stars. All I can think of is wow, that cast and crew has a lot of family members. Because nobody else, who has seen this movie, would honestly give it more than a 1. And the 1 rating only because negative numbers aren't possible. A handful of kind hearted folks rated it a 2. The rest of the people to voice their opinion must have been voting 'ironically'. Or just hitting random numbers. This is proof that Democracy doesn't work.

Or maybe they were responding to the trailer. The trailer is a solid 4. Perhaps even a 5.

Why did I pay money for that? It still pisses me off.c