PopSugar Reading Challenge Book 31 or The Horror, The Horror

I completed another book on my challenge list. I read something that scared me, In the Dark: A Horror Anthology edit by Rachel Deering. 

I discovered this anthology at Baltimore Comic Con. It was one of the first things I saw and I hesitated to buy it since it was $50 but I knew pretty quickly that I had to come back to it. It's gorgeous with a ribbon to mark your place and a lovely smooth texture. People greatly under appreciate the sensory experience of physical books.

My favorite stories were The Unseen, Famine's Shadow, All Things through Me, When the Rain Comes, In Plain Sight, Not All There, Shadows, Doc Johnson, Lost Valley of the Dead, Gestation and Inside You. While we all have favorites, there was nothing in here I didn't like. Even the history of horror comics at the end was incredibly interesting.

I think my favorite thing was that it was numbered. I'm hoping to see more of these in the future. A big thanks for putting this one together.

Why Are the Dead Still Walking?

I watched an episode of The Walking Dead with BF last night. I did my best not to be an askhole and follow along but there was one thing that always bugged me. Why are the zombies a continuing problem?

If they follow the basic rules of decomposition, the decaying flesh would eventually lose functionality to the point of rendering the zombie immobile. Soft tissue would be the first thing to go like the eyes and brain. Eyes are self-cleaning organs so with cells regenerating or doing anything helpful, most zombies would be blind in a matter of days.

Even if Walker #3 has glasses, he lacks the instinct to swat away the flies who want to lay maggots in that nice soft tissue. Territorial stray dogs might attack them and even some birds might figure out the blind ones are easy pickings.

There’s also the vast amounts of bacteria living in our bodies. The idea of vampires rising like started from the swell and release of fluids by unembalmed dead. If you’re in a hot and humid enough location, zombies are going to pop like rancid balloons from hell. If you’re guts have blown, the zombie will be knocked to the ground and possibly immobile since a lot of what keeps our joints moving and together is soft tissue.

Other environments are just as bad for walking necrotic flesh. Deserts would dry out and slowly mummify the tissue. It also poses the possibility of cooking what’s left of the brain. Freezing temperatures would freeze whatever water remained in the tissue making them rigid and slow.

Even if I focus on the poppable zombies of TWD, Georgia has animals. They’re not exactly stomping around Atlanta for most of the show so why aren’t bears, cougars, and aggressive stray dogs picking these bastards off? Where are the bugs going after the soft tissue?

Even if they are wandering around Atlanta, it’s still freaking Georgia. The streets make for nice corrals to light ‘em up, either with guns or Molotov cocktails. The fire should destroy the tissue at least rendering them immobile and cooking up what’s left of the brain at best. We’ve established they’re not smart enough to stop, drop, and roll.

Also, how did this even become a thing? Most developed nations are pretty on their shit about rare diseases. Even if the zombie virus started in rural Africa, it’s not going to spread to the entire world. How many Americans who never left the continent got Ebola? 0.

All zombie viruses in the mythos start as blood borne. Even if it turns airborne, it doesn’t turn people until after their dead. Even if it’s an air born virus that turns people upon infection, most countries haven’t forgotten what quarantine is. If someone is visibly sick coming in to a foreign country, they don’t get to stroll around the airport. Customs is going to have some questions.

Even if the zombie virus started in the U.S. (and Fear the Walking Dead makes me think otherwise), there are cops, multiple branches of the military, a freaking government agency dedicated to disease, and how many universities and hospitals available to work on this shit? At least some of those people have to be competent when a national emergency is declared. Can we please write a script where someone, anyone, has seen a zombie movie and has common sense? Sure it might only be 90 minutes but it’d be an interesting, realistic 90 minutes.

How Did I Get to Alone?

I have struggled with depression off and on for most of my life. Sometimes it's worse than others but more people need to talk about what ails them so that healthy people can better appreciate what we're going through.

Regular people don't understand how much this illness does to people. It's more than just a 'bad day.' It robs you of the ability to feel joy. It saps your energy and puts such a spin on your mental state that you're not in total control anymore. Because it's such a personal feeling and experience, it is a very isolating illness.

Depression is isolating not only because of how it makes you feel but how it makes the people around you feel.

A lot of people don't want to get that close. They know you have a problem but if they acknowledge it, they might have to deal with it. They don't want to know what you're dealing with.

If you try to tell the wrong person, you figure it out pretty quickly because they shut you down. They deny what you're trying to tell them, dismiss it, minimize it. They jump through a lot of socially acceptable hoops to ensure this doesn't become something they have to deal with. They want no responsibility for your mental health.

Of the few who don't happily leap toward denial, you have to decide how much you let them see. What can they handle? What can you count on them for? Did you make a mistake picking them?

Getting support from people who can't see the depth of your struggle often makes it worse. They offer suggestions but they're the suggestions of people who don't understand the bad days can last for weeks at a time. Positive words and kitten videos don't cut it when you're contemplating what's tying you to this earth. How do you explain to someone their off bad day is sometimes the best you can hope for?

What happens if you let someone see how deep the rabbit hole goes and they can't or  won't deal with it?

They've never 'casually' contemplated suicide. Which method hurts less? Which has the easiest cleanup? How do you make sure you're found? Ridiculous reasons to ignore the urges like a new movie, unread book, or upcoming holiday. How can you make them understand?

You can't.

They can't handle your negativity in their life. They don't believe you really want to get better. They get sick of the impotence of being unable to help. Worst of all? Some just don't care.

Rather than risk adding all of this to your burden, you keep it to yourself. You get burned by the uninitiated enough times, you eventually stop asking for their help. Why ruin a relationship by giving that person the chance to do something you won't be able to forgive or forget?

You already feel alone in your experiences. Sometimes it's easier to try to bear it alone than feel abandoned by your supports.

PopSugar Reading Challenge Book 30 or Seven Wondering WTF Is Going On?

For a book with a number in the title, I chose Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher. I saw it sitting on my friend’s shelf and thought it looked like fun. Everybody’s gotta be wrong sometimes.

From the cover and general description, the premise is great. The last troupe of superheroes, the final supervillain, and one ordinary citizen who just became super himself. I expect Tony to be the main POV character but we don’t really spend that much time with him overall, and that was a huge problem.

Christopher was trying to tell too many stories: Tony, Blackbird, the Cowl, Sam & Joe, the Seven Wonders, and a few others. Because there were so many different narratives going on, none of them were very deep. We weren’t able to go deep enough into Aurora, Dragon Star, or Cowl’s mind to get a good picture of them as characters or find out what they know. It also disrupted the narrative flow to jump from character to character. We’re following the cops and now we’re switching to Tony and now we’re switching to the police chief.

What was almost as distracting as the ricocheting narrative? Never know anything! I was able to make some educated guesses in the beginning but toward the end it got more and more convoluted. I’m dealing with issues from a dozen characters and nobody can know what the hell is going on at any point in time? I wonder if this is how amnesiac characters on soap operas are supposed to feel.

By the final 100 pages, I was only still reading because I wanted to see what would happen with the plot. I wanted to see if, by some dues ex machine of epic proportions, this could be tied together. If 90% of the remaining characters died, I was fine with that since I had no investment in any of them.

Austin Grossman did a much better job of telling a superhero story with Soon I Will Be Invincible. There were 2 POV characters and it worked pretty well. Christopher was trying to do all the subplots of Game of Thrones with none of the depth and it didn’t work. Mildly entertaining but not worth the amount of time I wound up putting into this book.

What Should I Be?

I’m not sure what I’m going to do for Halloween this year. I was originally thinking a feminist Hulk but that requires more pieces and makeup than I can really afford to buy. I need to come up with 2 costumes for 2 different parties. Here’s what I’ve got available to me:

-Victorian widow
-Pirate
-Vampire
-Serial killer (they look just like everybody else)
-Stand-up comedian (they look like everyone else except broke)
-Cereal killer
-(Fallen) Angel
-Death/victim of higher education
-Catholic school survivor

Last year I was the color purple and the year before that I was a witch. I might be able to pull off a fae but it’s reachy. I have a bunch of RenFest stuff but that maybe be a little overdone since our RenFest wraps right before Halloween. There’s a little too much of me to love for me to be comfortable as the TARDIS or Lolitapool all night.

I could do a ‘spirit of Halloween.’ I could reuse some of the same pieces I used for the witch but I want my costume to be a bit more straight forward this year. I did a conceptual costume last year.

I’m leaning toward the pirate for one weekend and the widow for another. The widow will require some makeup but I should be able to pick something up at the drugstore. I’d have to make my face very pale but I’ve already got the rest of the makeup for both looks.

Men's Rights Get It Wrong, Again

I already learned what happens when you post something accurate about GamerGate and MRAs on Twitter but what happens when you post it on Reddit?

Someone asked why feminists are angry. I said that if you consistently have your point dismissed, ignored, or redirected so no man actually has to think about his power and, gods forbid, change his behavior, it's frustrating. Then you have groups like GG and MRAs whose sole purpose is the antagonize feminists rather than do good in the world, you start to get a little angry.

I have read multiple articles about GamerGate and MRAs from pretty reliable sources (Washington Post, NYT) and I fail to see any good they're doing. Those sources also do some impressive things like actually citing their research rather than spouting off facts and expecting everyone to take them at face value.

I also made sure to note that I have had personal experience with both of these communities and none of them have been pleasant. I posted something positive to Ann Wheaton on Twitter while she was under fire for saying something not positive about GamerGate. Despite do nothing to provoke any of these individuals, I got several antagonizing tweets. In the world of GamerGate logic, supporting their enemy means taking up a sword for their side in battle. 

"So what you're saying is your opinion on gamergate and MRAs is formed by listening to people that already hate them talk about them?

MRAs have opened shelters for men and continue to push for recognition of male rape and domestic violence victims despite opposition which extends all the way to outright criminal violence and shootings.

Gamergate has achieved significant reforms in ethics policies at many major journalistic outlets as well as raised literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for everything from funding female game developers to anti-bullying and anti-suicide charities.

The people telling you that both are the devil incarnate are literally racists, pedophiles, and rapist defenders like Sarah Nyberg, Arthur Chu, and Leigh Alexander."

"MRAs literally can't even try to talk about lowering the catastrophic suicide rate among men without large groups of feminists flooding the venue with death and bomb threats, blocking the doors, attacking people trying to get in, and pulling fire alarms to shut the whole thing down.

Which side is really the one that tries to make life harder for anyone who dares disagree with them here? The side that tries to open shelters, or the side that shoots peoples' dogs for sheltering male DV victims?"

I asked both users to show me proof of their evidence. If there's anything both of those groups seem to love, it's throwing out facts without citations and expecting everyone to take them at face value. If you want to change my mind, the burden of proof is on you.

I have yet to see anyone in either group defend their side without resorting to vitriol and ranting. They're consistently bad listeners and incapable of find fault with anyone on their side. Both groups have horrible reputations and it seems very well earned.

PopSugar Reading Challenge Book 29 or Name of the Whatever

For a book over 500 pages, I read Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I’ve had several friends sing me the praises of this book and, at 722 pages, it fit the bill. The description on the back is pretty vague so I didn’t really know what to expect. Based on the hype all my friends gave it, I foresaw an action packed story with a lot of adventure and interesting characters. I really should have known better.

I’m going to preface this by saying I’m not a big fan of high fantasy. There’s A LOT of new rules that have to be established very quickly in order for you to make sense of what’s going on. Is it just humans or are there other races/sentient species like elves, orcs, etc.? What about dragons, minotaurs, unicorns, and other beasts? Is magic common place? Is there more than one kind of magic? Do some people have inherent powers? Is the societal structure/hierarchy based on medieval British aristocracy or something totally different? How different is the geography and the weather? What about the monetary system? How do people travel? How many different languages do I have to use context clues to decipher?

I prefer urban fantasy since you go in with a lot of the fundamentals already established. You don’t wonder if Harry Dresden will get around by flying carpet or talking horse. Is his favorite bar run by a half-Orc speaking Caeldish? No. It’s contemporary Chicago. He’ll drive a car, have his American dollars in a bank, and his favorite bar is run by a human. To conform to contemporary society, most beasties have to keep a low profile so they’re not taken as a given.

While not the most complicated fantasy novel out there, I definitely had to shrug and fake it more than a few times. Overall, Name of the Wind was a well-written and entertaining book. It drags in some places but that’s the most negative thing I have to say about the book. So why didn’t I like it more?

The hype. Everyone I know who has read the book said it was amazing and I had to read it. They all said this with the same sort of near-crazed reverence in their eyes.  That should have been a warning. It didn’t have the action I expected or the cast of characters I was anticipating. I spent most of the book waiting for something more interesting to happen. Kvothe is a good character with an interesting story but I still don’t see what the big damn deal is.

It finally picked up in the final 75-50 pages but that was a long slog. People are saying the second book is better but writers need to stop using the first book as a staging ground. I almost quit after the first 100 pages because I had no investment in the book, the characters, any of it. If it's going to be a slow progression, people need to stop selling it to me as the pinnacle of fantasy literature. 

Let this be a lesson. Even if you love a book, don’t overhype it. I'm in it enough to finish the series but I'd have liked it more if everyone else had loved it less.