I’m really glad Stephanie won Top Chef so I didn’t have to break Foxy’s TV. Mine is really heavy, and it’s in Candler.

The reader of “The Joy Luck Club” is driving me up a wall. Reading the only non-Chinese dad with a Chinese accent? Giving one of the husbands the single most annoying voice in the history of audiobooks? Mispronouncing and re-reading sentences right and left? Had she no producer? Did anyone listen to this drivel before it was published?

Up a fucking wall.

Inkheart is required reading for all podcasters, podnovelists, and out-loud readers of any stripe. The movie will probably suck because it has Brendan Frasier in it and they’ve already delayed it twice, but the book is excellent and provides clear, concise instructions for reading aloud. If you can listen to Lynn Redgrave read it, so much the better. She embodies every character so completely that it seems like a full cast recording.

So, to review for those of you yet to read it: taste every word before you spit it out, feel every character rise in your chest before you allow them to speak, and for the love of god, Scott Sigler, stop impersonating Miss Piggy every time you read a woman.

I totally agree with this.

Mike Huckabee is a crazy fuck. Marriage is “one man and one woman, for life?” WTF?

I’m currently listening to a crazy fucked up podiobook set in 2020 where all the gay people and IV drug users and anyone else who happened to contract HIV are isolated in a concentration camp awaiting their deaths. This ties in nicely with the Huckabee thing, and I’ve been thinking about both things together all day, mostly because the author insists that his alternate future story is a possibility. It’s very lyrically written, and you can tell that the author means well, even if he is a Mormon, but I have some basic problems with the plot. For example: 1) How did all the lesbians get HIV? 2) For that matter, how did every gay man in the US get HIV? 3) If the government “vaccine” caused the new virus that everyone is dying from, and the new virus is airborne, why isn’t everyone dead? 3a) How did a “vaccine” that kills people within 6 weeks get out of the trials phase? 4)If the media is consolidated enough to support martial law, how did a third party candidate capture the presidency? 5) Everyone in the camp dies within 2-6 weeks of arriving. How long is the incubation period? How long is the disease communicable? How did they get the disease all at the same time? The book was written in 1997, but that was still only ten years ago. It just seems like the author didn’t do enough research or something. Did he not even bother to read And The Band Played On? How did the government get so much better at killing people on purpose?

I’m probably putting way more thought into this than he did, but this is the first podiobook I’ve found that actually addresses gay themes. I wanted it to be much better than it actually was. Actually, that’s been my response to pretty much all gay fiction, so maybe I should just stop getting my hopes up. For people who control the media, we can’t do shit with the novel.

Also, he says “the gays” a lot which really bugs the shit out of me.

The Golden Compass has a bitchin’ website, as one would expect of a bitchin’ series. Also, I have a monkey daemon, which disturbs me.

It’s a Gibbon named Zotius, and its a boy, cause they didn’t ask if I was gay or not. You can go and tell The Golden Compass whether or not I’m like Ms. Coulter. Apparently, a Daemon is still malleable at my age.

Isn’t it awesome when you find the book you needed 7 years after you needed it? The current winner of this dubious honor is The Guide to Cartooning by Al Bohl. I’m reading it now because I’m working on an idea for a comic book that should be ready in about, oh, 7 years. The Cleav and I may even go to life drawing classes in order to make this comic book more comic bookly.

My senior show to fulfill my requirements as an art major would also have been helped by this book, which covers everything from caricatures on street corners to animation. I made a cartoon, and if I manage to run across the disc I burnt it onto I may afflict you with it at some point. My cartoon was about a girl who hated geometry class until her grandmother taught her to play pool. At the end, she may have become a superhero.

It’s a good thing Mr. Bohl recommends a screenwriting book.

So, Dumbledore is totally gay. There were hints in the last book, but I don’t remember anything earlier that would have given me the suspicion. And I totally think everyone is gay until proven straight, so I would be the most suspicious. In the last book, Rita Skeeter drops hints that Dumbledore’s relationship with Harry was inappropriate, working the whole homo-pedophile angle. And given the new context of Rowling’s comments, his friendship with Grindelwald does seem a little too intense for a straight boy. But here’s my problem with it, and with how I expect mugglenet.com to cover it:

1)No sex. Dumbledore, the smartest, most powerful, coolest wizard ever, wasn’t allowed to be a whole person. Why not? Did he channel all that energy into his magic instead? So now we have this cultural icon of a completely de-sexualized gay man, which is the only way America (and presumably Britain) likes its gay men. Dumbledore has become the 125 year old version of Will Truman.

2) Was Grindelwald gay? So that one rejection forced Dumbledore into the closet, never to be heard from again. Way to be healthy, asshole. Maybe Dumbledore gets action in Hyde Park on hot summer nights.

3) Because no one except the fanfic writers, and the more outside the mainstream ones at that, saw this coming, everyone is complaining that it was unnecessary, that it was a publicity stunt, that she should have just left him straight like everyone thought he was. Which implies that him being gay is the worse option. Everyone (in the broader, mainstream media sense of the word) says, “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” but really, they think that there is something wrong with it. It’s obvious from their sentence construction. If there wasn’t anything wrong with it, they wouldn’t have to tack that last bit on.

4) Mugglecast is a straightboy sausage party. They argue about things just to fill up time, they treat the only woman on the show like her opinion is shit on toast when their own opinions are also excrement on burnt bread, none of them is gay, sounds gay, or has gay friends. I expect the phrase “not that there’s anything wrong with that…” to be uttered innumerable times on next week’s show. Imagine 6 twenty year old goofball college nerds sitting around talking about their favorite subject, be it D&D or stamp collecting. These kids know EVERYTHING, obviously. I may sound a bit harsh. I do, after all, continue to listen to Mugglecast even though the last book is out and discussion by all sane persons who have lives is done. But I end up more annoyed and argumentative after listening to an episode than I was before I started, which is not my idea of the desired outcome of a balanced, interesting discussion. I don’t trust them to handle this.

So there it is. In my opinion, Dumbledore was a tragic closet case with a Machiavellian complex. I’m sorry I used Geraldo video, but it was what they had posted on Mugglenet. He’s the only person who thought this was “news.”

Short fiction is abundant in the podcast realm, both in the original form and old skool. That is, if you like mysteries, science fiction, or horror. Once again, genre fiction is the norm, dare I say the only, format to be found, except in a very few instances.

Escape Pod and Pseudopod are sci-fi and horror podcasts featuring mostly original, professionally written shorts from some of the best writers working in the field. They are paid, which means that the authors get ducats donated by readers, a la NPR. Because I am me, and not you, I prefer the sci-fi. The horror stories get really repetitively Monster-of-the-Week after 5 or 6, and I have a bank of unlistened episodes in that genre.

The sci-fi stories featured by Escape Pod are actually very good, with the caveat that you have to like sci-fi. When they feature the old masters, I am reminded of how misogynistic society used to be. Not only do I have to imagine a 2001 without 2nd wave Feminism, We also apparently were supposed to have already traveled to Pluto. Without women astronauts. Women still make the coffee in classic sci-fi.

I consider sociological changes to be the weakness of all science fiction because of this hangup on the science part. For some reason writers tend to forget the “fiction” part, which involves characterization and plot. When modern writers are featured, Escape Pod does a decent job of mixing things up. My only real problem with the selections is that they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with Mike Resnick. Maybe he just submits more stories than everyone else.

If you search for “tales” on Itunes, you get a lot of results. Should you check the episode list for those results, you will come to understand something about podcasting: This is amateur hour central. Anybody with a built-in microphone and an email address can start a podcast, but it takes a special kind of person to release more than one episode.

I lump The Secret World Chronicle in this category because it looks to me like the original authors, Mercedes Lackey and Steven Libby have given up on it, leaving their voice actor to continue the series. I include it in short fiction because so far there have been 41 episodes introducing new characters, without any sign of advancing the plot in a linear way.

Lots of people simply choose to record the classics and make them available for download. Any fan of Hawthorne, Poe, or Baum can read their work, since these are all in the public domain. I enjoy these, but once again there is the amateur problem. Some people simply shouldn’t be readers. One need only download a book from Librivox to get this concept. Try listening to one chapter of Moll Flanders read by a Yorkshire woman who does the voices, followed by the next chapter read by a blissed out Valley girl, and you’ll immediately understand. There’s a reason they call it voice acting.

The very best of the shorts isn’t an amateur podcast, it’s an NPR program called Selected Shorts. I listen to this one first, which is saying something, considering it’s released the same day as This American Life and Travel with Rick Steves. For one thing, the stories aren’t genre fiction. Character and plot are held above narrative devices like castles or space ships. There isn’t a twist at the end, unless it is a skewering line by Edith Wharton. They are read by professional actors in front of an audience (read: in their element). SS reminds me of the line between professional and amateur, and that even though Asimov was a great sci-fi writer, he didn’t know jack about women.

Caution: Here there be spoilers.

I have blogged my way to notoriety. Apparently, since adding pictures of Foxy partaking in a blow job shot, I have risen with meteoric speed up the google ranks, and now “blow job” gets five times more hits than “legacy center cult” ever did.

Also, I have read the Harry Potter, and it is good. I will not spoil you. I will not taunt you. Well, maybe I’m taunting you a little. I actually read it on Thursday night, starting at 8:30 and finishing around 5:45 am on Friday.  That’s not bad considering I was sitting in my computer chair the entire time. And staring at my screen. And wearing my contacts.

The book is out. Motorboat McKnickers is reading it. The New York Times has read it. It’s out. I am not going to do the search. At least not until I get home tonight, mostly because I still have 5.5 hours worth of work to do today. But knowing the Deathly Hallows is out there and available and within my grasp is really, really, really horrible. I could find it. I could read it. And I would be sitting at my computer for the next 10 hours, unable and unwilling to put it down.

I’m kind of a big Potter-head.

I will go back to work.

I will go back to work.