Sometimes I get ideas for stories that I know that I’m not capable of writing, so I don’t even make the attempt. My latest is a science fiction story set in the near future, but I don’t have a specific year in mind. It’s one of those “technology conquers or kills humanity stories,” but it’s not like a bunch of terminators murdering humans or computers making up their own rules and overruling the now helpless humans.
As I’ve frequently mentioned in the past, I have some limitations in my writing that would prevent me from doing a good job with a story like this. I’m not that good at writing descriptions, which would be important in setting up both the imagery and mood in the story. I’m especially weak with figurative language. I’m a very straightforward writer.
I also don’t know enough science lingo to make the story credible to its potential audience. Yeah, I could do some research, but I’d still probably mess up some stupid minor detail that I didn’t even think was important enough to check and end up ruining all suspension of disbelief from genre readers.
The future in this story wouldn’t look much different than what things look like now, and that takes care of a problem that some old science fiction stories have where the author envisions a specific visual setting for a specific date, and then we reach that specific date in real life and things don’t look anything like what the science fiction author described. Even the first Terminator movie said Skynet took over in 1997. I was alive in 1997, and 1997 was nothing like that.
Terminator? 2001: A Space Odyssey? The writers got those years completely wrong! What a bunch of hacks!! I don’t want to get burned by choosing the wrong year. To counter this, my story takes place in an unspecified time, and the future will look a lot like today but with a few dystopian differences.
Since my interests aren’t science oriented, I’d have to focus more on the social structure elements, setting it in a future where AI/technology is running everything (that’s not going to be shocking to any sci-fi readers). At first, everything seems great because everybody gets a universal living income promised by the corporate visionaries, and most people have easy lives at first.
You how it is with visionaries, though; they might have cool ideas, but somebody (sometimes it’s the visionaries themselves) always ruins the cool idea with greed and shortsightedness. With a cashless social credit system, corporations start controlling the money flow, the information, and even the news/history that people think they know. Most people aren’t even aware of how everything is being controlled, so this life is okay with some people, but for others, a very few others, who think they understand what’s going on, well… they can’t do much about it.
This would be typical sci-fi in that it plays with people’s fears of the future. Most people my age are suspicious of technology moving too quickly, and a lot of us are wary of stuff like A.I. (when we’re not falling for the fake pictures and videos). Plus, we really like water. Whether the stories are true or not (they probably are), people are concerned about water shortages and data centers that (allegedly) make those shortages worse. It just makes sense then to play up to those and other fears about corporations and A.I. in my story (that I’ll probably never write).
Yeah, yeah, yeah, my story sounds like nothing new. A lot of sci-fi stories have this basic premise, but most stories like this are action oriented, with some heroic figures battling robots or computer generated threats. Not this story. Lack of action is the downfall of many stories, so I’ll need to replace robot battles and explosions with sexual tension, humor, banter, and a good bar fight. That’s a combination that I can handle.
The two protagonists, a historian with forbidden information and a rebel who lives outside the social credit system, are opposite genders with opposing viewpoints about what to do about the corporate system. Of course, they become attracted to each other because of the intensity of their shared conflicts. Of course.
I guess nowadays they don’t have to be opposite genders. They could be same gender or even cross species, and nobody would even bat an eye when the sexual tensions rise. If anything, readers might roll their eyes as things progress. Yawn! This again?
If I really wanted to get readers’ attention, I could write a controversial multi-character ‘scene’ (you know what I’m talking about) that crosses genders and species and aliens. I could do it. I could write that. And I could actually make it good, maybe even great! But it’s not my thing. It’s not how I choose to roll. That’s one reason that I’m a literary nobody. That and my skills are limited.
Setting up that weird scene might be difficult anyway because in this future that kind of activity is rare: men and women generally don’t like each other (most of that due to corporate manipulation that intentionally pits every demographic against each other in order to make individuals less independent and more vulnerable against abusive corporate practices). However, the two protagonists work really well together in a couple high-stress situations, and we know what happens then, especially if both the male and the female are physically attractive, which they would be because I’d write them like that.
Next, I’d need some kind of bar fight. Bar fights aren’t mandatory, but they can be iconic. The cantina scene from Star Wars? Everybody remembers that, and the moments of violence didn’t even last long, but it revealed character. And there was some humor involved. And to me, the original movie will always just be just Star Wars.
A story like this needs humor too, so along with the banter I’ll throw in throw in the crazy conspiracy theorist because, you know, they can come across as kind of funny and crazy at the same time (you gotta believe me, man!). Conspiracy theorists are often right that the story being fed to the public is wrong, but then they get bogged down trying to figure out what actually happened.
Unfortunately, since most theorists don’t have access to enough information to correctly put the pieces of the puzzles together correctly, they end up committed to theories that are wrong and/or spectacularly stupid and therefore ruin their credibility completely, and everybody else feels even more strongly that the original big lies are true. And then their commitments to bad ideas comes across as funny to everybody else. That’s how it works, man!
In this case, the conspiracy theorist will be something artificially generated, like a talking cat or dog or weird looking alien type creature. The reader knows (or suspects) that the dog/cat/alien is fake because … duh… that’s what A.I. does (especially in the future, though a science nerd might have a better technical term for this). But the two protagonists are in some ways just as brain rotted from the environment that even they can be fooled and not suspect it.
We don’t find out if the crazy conspiracy theorist is helping or leading them to their doom at the behest of its creators until the end of the story (and even I’m not sure yet), but it will be hilarious with its commentary along the way. And then working the techno-alien conspiracy theorist into the… uh.. weird scene… THAT would be a lot of fun! I could write all that!
As I mentioned earlier, the two protagonists have conflicting goals. The historian wants to destroy the system. The rebel doesn’t like the system but doesn’t want it to just go away without a replacement system ready. As they rant to each other about their viewpoints, the historian argues that the system is evil and needs to be crushed at all costs while the outsider counters that masses of people would starve or be killed in the ensuing chaos if the system were to just vanish. The historian declares that no such system could be established without the current system gone first, and blah, blah, blah, the sexual tension rises…
Even though banter, bar fights, humor, and semi-adult content can cover up a lot of weak points in my writing, it might not make up for my gaps, which is why I probably won’t try writing something like this. Then again, trying it while relying heavily on my strengths and disregarding my weaknesses might be really fun to write. And if I went all-out on it, it might be really fun to read!
I’m not looking for validation about this. I’m just explaining my thoughts about writing.
How would all this end? Would the historian use her knowledge to destroy the system? Would the rebel succeed at preserving the system and helping people thrive within it? Or would they be led to their own doom by the techno-alien conspiracy theorist?
We’ll probably never know. These are just ideas, and some of these go beyond my limitations. For all I know, it’s already been written, but if it has, I bet it doesn’t have a weird sex scene in it. And if it does, I bet I could write a better one. But that’s just not the way I roll.
*****
I admire cartoonist Gary Larsen because he didn’t let his self-admitted artistic limitations prevent him from becoming one of the most successful comic strip artists of my generation. He found a way to make the combination of his strengths and limitations work. And then he retired when he wanted to. Great job, Gary!
*****
When I wrote my ONE novel, I stuck to my strengths and subjects that I knew about!
It’s the oldest story in the world, 1990s style!
Man meets woman; man falls in “luuuvvv” with woman; man gets blindsided by reality!
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is now available on Amazon !
Over the last few months, I’ve been writing more blog posts about comic books and old comic strips, and some of these have turned into my favorite recent posts. Unfortunately, I haven’t organized these comic posts as I’ve written them, so sometimes I can’t find my own writing (not finding stuff might be age-related, but I’m not sure because I’ve always been a little absentminded).
Speaking of absentmindedness, you should have seen my desk back in the old days. It was pretty bad. Now that almost everything is digitized, my desk isn’t so messy, but in the days of paper documentation? Yeesh! Piles of paper documentation, that’s something that I don’t miss!
Piles of comic books? I’m still a sucker to see what’s new.
COMIC BOOKS:
A Kid Threw Up at the Comic Book Show (It’s not gross. I promise!)
Old Man Reviews Manga: Vinland Saga Books One to Eleven by Makoto Yukimura
Jack Kirby: The True Creator of the Marvel Universe?
Why The Fantastic Four was once “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!”
I Took My Copy of The Incredible Hulk #181 to School!
Mag-NETT-o vs. Mag-NEET-o: The Magneto Supervillain Pronunciation Debate!
COMIC STRIPS:
Fond Memories of the Sunday Funnies
Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts, and the Five-Minute Birthday Party
Charlie Brown in Peanuts vs. Crash Davis in Bull Durham
Three Days of Mute… guest starring Mad cartoonist Sergio Aragones!!
Prince Valiant by Hal Foster: Too Good For the Sunday Comics?
Robin Hood: Men in Tights vs. Don Martin in Sherwood Forest
Happy Birthday to Everybody Every Day… starring Charles Schulz and Peanuts
Fond Memories Of The Goofs Who Ruined Christmas
When WordPress notified me of my 15th anniversary of Dysfunctional Literacy, I was almost ready. I missed my tenth anniversary five years ago because there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in my personal life. Most of the crazy stuff has resolved itself (not necessarily in the best ways possible, but still resolved) and has been replaced by other crazy stuff that isn’t nearly so crazy. At least it hasn’t been as crazy recently. And hopefully won’t be again for a while.
I like the variety of stuff that I’ve written on my blog over the last 15 years. Even though my writing style is somewhat (or very) limited, I haven’t limited myself to one type of blog post. I don’t only write book reviews. I write stories (that are mostly true). I write social commentary. I write about comic books and comic strips. And of course, I write book reviews, but now my reviews focus on old books because that’s what I like to read now (for some reason). The only thing I don’t write is poetry.
I respect poetry, though. I respect poetry so much that I don’t try writing it.
I wouldn’t say that the articles that I mention below are my greatest hits, but these MIGHT represent the variety of stuff that I write about.
Here’s the first segment from my first blog serial called “Long Story.” It’s about a long story that I wrote in high school. I originally wrote it (the blog serial “Long Story,” NOT the long story that I wrote in high school) in 2012, but this is an edit from 2020 with a link to the original.
Long Story: Teachers With Unfortunate Last Names
Here are a few other much shorter blog serials (if that’s your thing):
The Tale of the Almost-Expired Milk
Childhood Ghost Story- The Prologue
Awkward Moments in Dating: The Homepage
*****
Here’s a stand alone blog post. Even in 2013, I was making fun of George R.R. Martin not finishing A Game of Thrones. Haha!
Ender’s Game vs. The Hunger Games vs. A Game of Thrones
Here’s my novel The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Yeah, I say it’s a romantic comedy, but it’s from a guy’s point of view, so sometimes people don’t get the point. Most romantic comedies are about a woman with a chaotic life who falls for an extremely attractive man with an orderly life (or some variation). The Sunset Rises is instead about an average guy with an orderly life who falls for a really attractive woman with a chaotic life, and then hilarious chaos ensues. Of course, there’a a lot more to it than that, but I don’t like relying on spoilers, especially spoilers for something that I’ve written.
Looking back, maybe it was a bad idea for a novel, but I like trying bad ideas sometimes, and I really like my one novel. That’s it. That’s the only novel I’m ever going to write. I’m no James Patterson.
Some people my age get nostalgic about the past, but there’s a lot of stuff that I’m glad has changed. Whenever I get anti-nostalgic, which really doesn’t happen very often, I write one of my Old Things That Are Tough To Explain articles. Here’s where you can find most of them.
About ten years ago, my older brother found the original drawings of a bunch of comic strips that he had published in our local small town newspaper in the early 1980s. His dream at the time was to be a syndicated comic strip creator, but stuff like that is a long shot for people like us with little money and no connections. Once my brother got married and started raising his kids, other things became more important to him (we all know the story).
When I ran out of his original Calloway the Castaway comic strips, I then started running his unpublished (and sometimes unfinished) Dummo Mouse cartoons. Even though the last of the Dummo Mouse cartoons aren’t inked, they’re my favorites, but I’ve slowed down posting them because I want to give each one a better introduction than what I’ve normally been writing for them.
For some of my older brother’s comic strips from the 1980s, see…
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1
Dummo Mouse and Friends: The Intro
There are a lot more categories and topics (such as Dysfunctional Book Reviews and comic books) that I’ve covered on this blog over the years, but my title claimed that this was going to be a short blog post, so I should hold myself to that. If you like what you’ve seen so far, look around some more, and if you really like what you’ve read… buy my book! I mean… ahem… if you really like what you’ve read, please buy my book (but only if you can afford it in today’s economy).
Censorship and book banning are two issues that never seem to go away. Everybody says they’re against censorship and banning, but books are still getting banned and/or censored, so somebody has to be pro-ban or pro-censorship. Sometimes people get the two concepts confused, but the difference is pretty easy. Censorship is when the content is changed, and banning is when a government makes the book disappear.
Sometimes I’ll censor my own stuff, usually profanity, because using the actual word detracts from the point that I’m trying to make. You’ll see what I mean in a moment. I’ve even self-banned a few blog posts that I’ve written because I regretted my words later. I’m not providing links.
Censorship/banning is kind of like the death penalty. A lot of people are squeamish about giving the government that kind of power, but every once in a while there’s a case where almost everybody agrees that THAT motherF***er needs to die.
See what I mean? I can make my point without spelling out the word. If I had spelled out the word, some readers would have focused exclusively on the word and not have cared about the point I was trying to make. Self-censorship can sometimes be effective.
Book banning can be a little extreme. When a government bans a book, the book then just disappears as if it never existed, kind of like most 1990s websites. A community deciding to get rid of a book in a school or public library is not quite the same thing, though, especially if you can just go to the book store and buy the controversial book yourself. We might disagree about what books should go into a public library, and there could be some awesomely vitriolic arguments over that, but maybe communities should have the right to make that decision, especially those people who are paying the taxes or whose kids are forced to attend those schools.
Sometimes censorship and banning are done in the name of…(dramatic pause) the children. I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to causes for children. Whenever charities claim to be raising money to help or save… (dramatic pause) the children, I get a little suspicious. After all, scammers are known for using children as props to get what they want, whether that be power or money. I understand why they do this. Who wants to be the heartless cad who says no to the children? But banning books isn’t the same thing as raising money. All you have to do for banning is to get rid of some of those weird or offensive books from the elementary or middle school libraries.
People from both sides of the political spectrum want to interfere with books. Conservatives sometimes want to censor/ban the ‘sexual stuff’ (you know what I mean), and liberals sometimes want to censor the racial stuff (you know what I mean). The ‘racial stuff’ tends to be old, and the ‘sexual stuff’ tends to be new. Liberals seem to be okay with changing the offensive content (What’s wrong with getting rid of racist content, you bigot!), and conservatives don’t want the overly progressive stuff in the children’s section (Why are you pushing this sexual stuff on kids, you perverts!).
I’m not a fan of ‘book banning’ (I put the word ‘banning’ in quotes because I don’t think of what’s going on in communities as really ‘banning’), but at least the book banners are honest about their intentions. The censors are sometimes sneakier, just saying that they’re only changing a word or two. Yeah, right. We know what that means. And we know what that leads to.
Changing the content of an old book that’s deemed offensive by today’s standards seems almost normal now. Usually it’s something that’s insensitive or downright offensive. I think of stuff like And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss, which had a few illustrations that were okay at the time it was published but were later considered offensive and have since been changed (to something less offensive to the people who were offended and something more offensive to people who originally were NOT offended.). Some of the original language in a few Roald Dahl books has been changed, including the word ‘fat’ which was then replaced with the word with ‘enormous.’
The word ‘fat’ is offensive?
When I was a kid back in the 1970s, I was made fun of for being a skinny stick just as much as the overweight kids were made fun of for being fat blobs. I think the issue now is that today there are many more people who are overweight than there are people who are underweight, so their opinions matter more. I blame the proliferation of cheap processed food. I’m not sure ‘enormous’ is a better choice of words either. ‘Enormous’ has several meanings. ‘Fat’ is just fat. Even a kid understands that.
Then there’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which has a bunch of usages of the word that shall not be named, not even in the context of the word that shall not be named being used. Some modern readers suggest that there should be a ‘safe’ version with a replacement word, but I don’t know. To me, old fiction is like a historical document. An old book shows you how people of any given time period thought through their own words and attitudes, not those of a historian who might have an unknown agenda. If you change the old book, then you change the history, and you give the crazy doubters (you know, the ones who doubt Helen Keller and the moon landing) the reason to doubt in the first place.
Even though my daughter hasn’t turned out to be a reader for pleasure, my wife and I provided her with a wide variety of children’s books when she was younger. She had new books (well, they were new at the time), old books, a couple books that were considered progressive at the time, and even a couple books that would be considered problematic today (the uncensored old versions. I provide my family with only the good stuff). I don’t think she was damaged by either type of offensive book (despite the possible intentions of some of the authors).
If the local community decided to get rid of any of the books I enjoyed in the public library, I’d be annoyed, but I wouldn’t get worked up about it. I wouldn’t call anybody a fascist over it (unless they actually started burning the books). I wouldn’t protest or block traffic. I might write a strongly worded letter, but I’m sure nobody would read it or be persuaded by it. If the state decided to get rid of a book entirely, I’d go out and buy it just to see what was going on with it (unless it was written by James Patterson). When Stephen King self-banned his novella Rage, I bought a Richard Bachman (his pseudonym at the time) collection/anthology just to have my own copy of the story. That’s how I am.
In short, I guess I’m one of those hypocrites who claims to be against banning and censorship unless I’m kind of for it or don’t care enough about the book to get worked up about it. Hypocrisy isn’t the worst thing in the world, especially if we’re honest about it. Self-admitting hypocrisy keeps me from getting self-righteous about my beliefs, and self-righteousness is way worse than hypocrisy. I’m rambling. I guess I’m against book banning and censorship, but every once in a while, not very often, there’ll be that one book where I think to myself (who else am I going to think to?), yeah, that motherf***ing book needs to go away!
*****
For more Literary Rants (or rambles), see…
The Literary Rants: Must-Read Novels!!
*****
Dead Internet theory has been around for a while, and there might be something to it. Ten years ago, dead internet theory referred to the proliferation of bots and other kinds of fake accounts on the internet, but now the general public also has to deal with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). To me, this isn’t necessarily a big change. I’ve always suspected that a lot of the internet was fake, especially if an unfamiliar hot chick was contacting me directly. I learned early on that any hot chick who initiated online contact with me was in reality (if you believe in the ‘reality’ construct anymore) a hairy overweight guy living in his basement. Now it could be A.I. as well.
Even though the internet has always been partially fake, the internet itself isn’t entirely dead. Only part of the internet is dead. A lot of the internet is alive and well if you can ignore the dead stuff. I guess that’s the difference between the living dead (zombies) and the living dead internet; you can’t ignore zombies when they’re trying to eat your brains, but you can work around the worthless stuff online. Maybe you can’t avoid it, but you can work around it.
Youngsters staring at their phones can look like (maybe) well-groomed slouching zombies, but I can’t really blame them because I’m seeing more and more people my age staring like zombies too. I can understand the zombie-like youngster behavior because they were raised on phones and don’t know any better, but oldsters my age or older should (know better). Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they only look like they’re being hypnotized. Maybe those seemingly living dead scrollers are on the verge of discovering the cure for cancer, and I’m the only one who can’t see it.
Most of the websites I frequented in the late 1990s are gone now, wiped away as if they had never existed in the first place. Many of the bloggers that I used to read no longer post anything. Most of them probably gotten tired of blogging and have moved on to other endeavors. I hope none of them are actually dead, though as a statistical matter, the probability is that at least one of them is, probably way more than that. Back in my early blogging days, I was confident that the website content was being created by a human being who at least put minimal effort into it. Now the same content can be created by A.I. with no effort at all.
Maybe I’d be better off being a zombie too. From what I understand, you don’t have to think much as a zombie. You just follow your impulses and eat brains. Or you just follow your impulses and scroll. Either way, following impulses and eating and scrolling all day just sounds like a typical holiday. Maybe I should give up on books and just scroll. Maybe I should let A.I. write everything for me. Maybe I’d like being the living dead. Then again, I used to get bored on holidays. I don’t think I’d like being a zombie.
Even though a lot of online users lie or rely on A.I., I find today’s internet very useful, maybe even more useful than I’ve ever found it (BOLD CLAIM). For example, even with today’s level of potential fakery, I can buy and sell stuff much easier than a decade ago. In the old pre-internet days, once I bought a comic or a book that I liked, I kept it for years, not wanting to sell it because it would be difficult to buy back again. For 20-30 years, my book collection stayed the same, constantly growing around a core that remained constant. Now my collection is a lot smaller and constantly changing because I don’t feel the need to keep anything anymore because everything is easy to buy and sell.
Some online sales sites allow you to use A.I. to write the listings, but the A.I .writing always sucks. I take pride in writing my own listings and putting my own personality into each one, but maybe doing that is a waste of time and energy. People who buy my stuff do so because I sell cool stuff. They don’t care about my word usage and insights about the product. Despite my disdain for A.I. written listings, I’ll buy the item if the pictures are good and I actually like the item, so I don’t know why I’m wasting my time with unnecessary effort of writing my own descriptions. Aaargh, I’m just one of those rare fools who enjoys writing for the sake of writing.
The living dead internet’s usefullness is not limited to consumerism. The living dead internet has helped me to learn to type properly. Ever since I started keyboarding with a word processor back in 1985, I’ve been a two-finger typist. For the 15 years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve been two-finger hunting-and-pecking whenever I write something, but two weeks ago I watched a short online video about typing/keyboarding, and since then I’ve been typing almost properly. I mean, I’m not good at it yet. I’m slow, but at least my fingers are in the right position, and I’m not looking at the keyboard much either. Without the internet (whether it was dead internet or alive internet that taught me, I don’t know), I wouldn’t have been able to do this in such a convenient way.
Last week, I had a tune stuck in my head, a song that I had heard only a few times in my life, I think. With the help of the living dead internet, I was able to track the song to the 1932 movie Horsefeathers starring the Marx Brothers and then found the scenes with the song in the movie. The song is still stuck in my head, but at least I’m getting the words right now.
It might be weird that I’m watching dead people on the living dead internet, but at least these people used to be alive. At least, I think they used to be alive. It would really freak me out if I found out that these dead people I’ve been watching never existed. I wouldn’t be able to emotionally handle it. I don’t know how much of the internet is dead or has never been alive in the first place, but I know that I am alive and writing my own stuff. If I’m still writing stuff after I die, which hopefully won’t be for a while, then I’ll know that the living dead internet has gone too far. And I’ll be sure to let you know on this blog when it happens.
*****
Without the living dead internet, it would have been extremely difficult to self-publish my one-and-only novel and then find a place to sell it (other than from the trunk of my car).
Thank you, Amazon! And thank you, living dead internet!
An average man with a quiet life falls for a hot chick who brings chaos. Yeah, this was the 1990s for a lot of average men (and I think it’s like that today too)!
For more Dysfunctional Literacy (100% human-written), see…
The Tale of the Almost-Expired Milk
Dysfunctional Book Review: The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey
The Literary Rants: The Oxford Comma
Old Things That Are Tough To Explain: Playing A Game Called “Smear The Queer.”
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Reading some episodes of my older brother’s unfinished Dummo Mouse cartoons is almost like reading an old Silver Age Marvel comic book written by Stan Lee. Comic readers today sometimes mock Stan Lee for his (from their point of view) overuse of narration and dialogue. To them, the giant word balloons get in the way of the pictures (and action) and make reading feel like a slog. To a reader like me who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, the word balloons provided more value, giving us more to read and making the comic reading experience worth it (reading a comic book fully could take 20-30 minutes).
My brother, who bought a lot of that Silver Age stuff when it came out, sometimes used a lot of word balloons in his own comic strips. Maybe these word balloons get in the way of the illustrations. Maybe, but they also provide key information and characterization. If I have a choice, I usually choose a comic book or comic strip that overuses rather than underuses word balloons. Yeah, that’s a false binary, but you know what I mean.
With that in mind, go ahead and keep reading my older brother’s unfinished, unpublished Dummo Mouse comic strip from the 1980s.
*****
*****
Looking back, I think my older brother used the right variety of word balloons, but what do you think?
What would you you rather have? A lot of word balloons? Very few word balloons? Do you talk when you fight? Or do you talk to try to deescalate and avoid the fight? That’s… probably the best way to handle it. Stan Lee didn’t write too many of those. I don’t think Deescalation Comics would have sold many copies.
For more stuff about Dummo Mouse and/or Stan Lee (and sometimes fewer word balloons), see..
Comic Sunday: Dummo Mouse and Friend(s)
Dummo Mouse and the Daily Strip
At first glance, Helen Keller facing off against the United States space program might seem unfair. While Helen Keller had Anne Sullivan as support, the space program has had the backing of the United States government and military. That’s not exactly an even match up, but it’s not my fault that these two topics are paired up in the first place. From what I understand, youngsters today are skeptical about a lot of history that’s being taught, and I can understand why. With access to technology, it’s obvious how easy it is to fake events to make people believe stuff that isn’t true.
Two of the most popular alleged historical hoaxes seem to be those of Helen Keller and the moon landing, two potential frauds that I have believed in for most of my life. In fact, for most of my life I never put any thought into either of them. I even watched a couple of the Apollo missions while they happened. Since I was maybe 5 years old at the time, I don’t remember any of the details, except the Apollo broadcasts preempted my afternoon cartoons and I was a little bored. When compared to afternoon cartoons, everything was boring, even a moon landing.
Since I was born in the 1960s, I wasn’t raised on internet videos claiming that everything is fake. I mean, a lot of stuff might be fake, but I’m not going to assume something is fake just because internet videos (that are probably AI generated) claim that it’s fake. I will, however, allow for the possibility that some stuff that I grew up believing in was fake.
Since Helen Keller happened first, I’ll deal with her first, and, to be honest, I think it would be easy to pull off a hoax in Helen Keller’s situation. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy for Helen Keller to mastermind the hoax; it would be easy for Anne Sullivan (or one her handlers) to mastermind it. All the handler had to do would be to edit Helen’s writing, maybe feed her political ideas while she was being taught, use Keller’s reputation to get invited to high publicity events, and give her some high profile causes at the time, like communism and women’s suffrage.
And if people criticized Helen Keller, then Anne Sullivan (or the handler) could accuse the critics of hating people with disabilities. Or call them jealous. Or crazy. Or misogynist. Or conspiracy theorists (I don’t think that term existed in the early 1900s).
Believers of the Helen Keller story might ask: why would Helen Keller’s handlers fake/embellish her accomplishments? My question is: Why wouldn’t they do this? I mean, I know lying is wrong, but a lot of people think money and status are more important than honesty, and the people surrounding Helen Keller could have been like that. If you’ve been raised on social media like today’s youngsters and have seen the ways that people sell themselves for money and status, propping up Helen Keller as a genius is an almost benign fraud compared to a lot of modern antics. And if part of the Helen Keller story was a hoax, who in the media would have wanted to ruin a great story like that of Helen Keller? To some journalists, the story is everything!
Faking the moon landings would be more difficult than editing essays and embellishing translations. More people are involved with the space program than there were with Helen Keller. All it takes is one Houston control egghead with a big mouth (and the ‘real’ telemetry data) to expose the fraud. Then again, nobody says that the entire space program is fake; it’s just the moon landings. They think it’s suspicious that nobody has gone to the moon since the Apollo program ended in the 1970s. We can’t seem to do it now. The telemetry data is missing. Moon rocks might not really be moon rocks. Who do you believe, the conspiracy theory crackpots or the government? It’s a tough choice.
I can see why skeptics think the moon landing is fake. A lot of stuff went wrong with most of the Mercury and Gemini missions. The missions themselves were successful, but the engineers/scientists had been off on a lot of calculations, and sometimes the astronauts were a little lucky to make it back alive. Apollo 11 had a lot of stuff with the lunar landing that had never been done before. I could see a situation where whoever was in charge (I mean “really” in charge) decided that the stakes were too high to take that kind of risk in a high profile situation.
If there’s a moon landing hoax (and I’m not saying there is), I could see the Apollo missions flying around the moon and using Stanley Kubrick’s (or whoever’s) footage to fool the general public that the lunar landing was successful. This could probably be done without everybody in the space program being involved. Once the astronauts were out in space, it might have been possible to hide what was going on from the public, including a lot of the people in ground control. And if anybody talked, well… there were always car accidents and plane crashes and suicides, and some people just plain get crazy sometimes, you know what I mean?
Believers of the moon landing might ask: Why would the United States government lie? My question is: why wouldn’t it? Failure to land on the moon would have been a disaster after all the money spent on the space program, just adding on to other U.S. problems. Vietnam. Race riots. Assassinations. Bell bottom jeans. I mean, the U.S. was taking a lot of losses. The moon landing was a great temporary victory. It brought the country (and even the world) together. It was a shared victory. Plus, the president at the time was Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick? Do you think Tricky Dick wouldn’t be on board with lying about a moon landing for the good of the United States (and his own poll numbers)?
Keeping a moon landing hoax a secret would probably require too many suicides and car accidents to be practical, though. Yeah, fear and money are both great motivators, especially when they’re combined, but the combination of both that the government would need would be enough to break NASA’s budget. Then again, that would explain why NASA stopped its space exploration program: it couldn’t afford the shut up money.
Who wins the battle of the hoaxes? Helen Keller or the United States moon landing? If you’re going to choose a hoax… I mean, if you’re bound and determined to pick a hoax, I think you have better standing with Helen Keller. You have a scapegoat (Anne Sullivan), plausibility, and motivation (money, fame, opportunities). If you want to argue about the moon landing, you have a government that you have to deal with. And if Helen Keller thought the Czar was bloodthirsty, wait until you see how old people react to the moon landing deniers.
Haha! Then again, seeing that reaction might just be why the youngsters question it in the first place.
*****
For more Dysfunctional Literacy, see…
G.O.A.T. vs. Goat: The Battle of Generational Slang
Old Things That Are Tough To Explain: Playing A Game Called “Smear The Queer.”
I tried listening to an audiobook yesterday, and it made me sleepy. I’m not going to say what the audiobook was because it’s a polarizing nonfiction book that might make the book itself more important to the reader than the topic of audiobooks. If I wrote about the book itself, I might get some outrage reading and outrage comments, but that’s not what I’m looking for. There’s enough outrage on the internet without my adding to it.
I chose the polarizing book because I knew that my brain would be interested in it. I didn’t want to try with fiction because I lose interest in most fiction when I read it now, so I definitely didn’t want to start with something that wouldn’t interest me even if I were reading it.
I generally don’t like being read to. I like hearing my own inner voice (not my outer voice; I sometimes get annoyed with my own outer voice) and putting my own inflection into the words and sentences that I see. I can’t stand hearing a reader put (what I think is) the wrong inflection into a sentence that neither of us have written. Plus, it’s a pride thing. I don’t need to be read to. I’m perfectly capable of reading this on my own. I don’t need anybody’s help.
I SAID I DON’T NEED YOUR HELP!
Ahem… anyway… I mean… I really don’t need help with reading… except maybe for science text… and poetry… and some big words.
One problem with audiobooks is that you can tell that the audiobook narrator is reading. I can listen to a lot of radio and podcasts because people are talking, and the inflections and interactions are more natural. The audio book voices I’ve heard so far are somewhat neutral and don’t sound natural, and my brain turns off a little. I’m not saying they’re like AI voices, but they could have been.
Sometimes I don’t mind hearing audio while I read, but the audio slows me down, unless it’s a detailed topic with a lot of unfamiliar specific words that my brain needs extra time for processing. Then I can stop the audio and reread myself. The audio book can also help with pronunciation. I’ll occasionally see a word that I know but have never heard pronounced, and I think to myself “So THAT’S how you pronounce this” or “I’ve been saying this incorrectly all my life, and nobody has told me.” I have some astonishing gaps in my knowledge.
I definitely don’t want to drive while I’m listening to an audiobook. I probably wouldn’t fall asleep, but I also wouldn’t pay close enough attention to catch all the important details (in the book). My driving record is almost spotless, but that’s because I pay close attention, not because I have quick reflexes. Honestly, I’ve been lucky a few times too. I don’t need audiobooks to distract me. I’ve got my surroundings and my brain for that. And listening to books could add to the distraction… if I don’t fall asleep.
When I read, I do lots of follow ups, going back to the previous paragraph or previous pages just to make sure I’m following everything mentally. I can’t do that when I’m driving. Even though there’s not a lot of traffic where I live now, I don’t want to take the chance. All it takes is one rewind and I could be on the wrong side of the road or inadvertently steer the car off a cliff. Everybody I know would understand if I accidentally drove off a cliff. They would probably think my mind had wandered and then my car wandered too.
Just so you know, I wasn’t driving when I listened to my first full audiobook. I was sitting in a comfortable chair. Then I dozed off. Then I woke up, figured out approximately where I had last paid attention, reset the audio, and did some some chores while I listened, and then my mind wandered, and I had to reset again. Then I turned off the audio, finished a couple chores, sat down, and read the book on my device for a couple minutes before I remembered that my eyes prefer pages over screens.
I think I like the idea of listening to audiobooks more than I like listening to audiobooks. There are still a lot of books that I want to read, but it’s probably bad for my eyes to read as much as I do. My vision has gotten a little worse over the last couple years, so I’d better tone it down with the reading, especially on screens. I think audiobooks could help me out, and they seem to work for a lot of people, but they won’t work for me if I keep falling asleep.
*****
Enough about me! What do you think? Do you prefer reading or listening? Do you prefer books or screens? Have you ever fallen asleep while listening to an audiobook? Have you ever fallen asleep while reading an actual book?
I made my first poor financial decision when I was in the fourth grade and took my copy of The Incredible Hulk #181 to school. Nowadays, a decent copy with no folds or wrinkles or pages missing can be worth thousands of dollars. Back when I bought it off the comic book rack at our local Kwik Shop, it was just another 25 cent Hulk comic book. It was kind of a fun issue because it was a three-way fight between Hulk, Wendigo (a Canadian combination of Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman), and a new Canadian superhero called Wolverine. I think Wolverine was sent to contain the fight between Hulk and Wendigo, but Wolverine just made the situation worse. I don’t remember for sure. It’s probably been 40 years since I’ve last read this comic book.
I was already into comic books then, especially Marvel, almost exclusively Marvel. Marvel Comics were far and away superior to any other comic book company back then, even DC. Yeah, Marvel has plummeted, but back in the early 1970s, Marvel was doing some crazy stuff, and a lot of it was pretty good.
I had brought a lot of comic books to school that day, and I was passing out a bunch of stuff that I had bought that week. Spider-Man, Daredevil, Captain America, Avengers, Fantastic Four, and… Man-Thing. I even took my Incredible Hulk #181 with the first full-issue appearance of Wolverine. I probably lost thousands of dollars just because of the minor reading damage my comic sustained from that. Nobody knew that particular comic book would end up being worth a lot of money. Wolverine seemed like a second-rate (maybe third-rate) character. Even when he joined the X-Men later in the decade, nobody thought anything of it because it was a new version of the X-Men and the old team sucked (at least the sales sucked). It was probably close to five years before that new team became ‘X-Men-level’ popular.
It wasn’t the Hulk comic with Wolverine that got the attention that day, though. It was my Giant-Size Man-Thing.
Man-Thing was one of those crazy Marvel titles from the 1970s. Man-Thing was a swamp creature (who of course was a former human), kind of similar to DC’s Swamp Thing, but I don’t want to get into the differences because there are probably only maybe three people in the whole world who care about that now (back in the 1970s more people cared about that). I’m pretty sure Swamp Thing was first, but nobody ever bragged about having a Giant-Size Swamp Thing.
Since fourth grade was over 50 years ago, my memory of this quick incident probably isn’t that clear. My teacher Ms. Tyler was young and blonde, and she was going to get married over the summer and come back with a new last name. That’s all I remember about her. That and she was very interested in my Giant-Size Man-Thing.
When Ms. Tyler heard me announce that I had a Giant-Size Man-Thing if anybody wanted to see it, she bolted to my table to see what I was talking about. She looked really concerned. She probably thought I was going to do something inappropriate. I think she laughed when she saw the comic book (I might be making that part up), but she grabbed it and flipped through the pages and gave it back to me. For a while, I wondered why she chose my Giant-Size Man-Thing to inspect instead of the other comics.
Sometime in high school, I suddenly understood. Maybe I should have figured it out sooner. I’ve always been a bit naive. People have called me a late bloomer. Sometimes I say stuff and don’t know the interpreted double meanings behind what I say. Now that I seem to be more aware of such things, I’m careful not to discuss my Giant-Size Man-Thing in public. With today’s sensitivities, if I speak publicly about my Giant-Size Man-Thing and people don’t know the context, I can get either arrested or propositioned.
I know that teachers need to be aware of what’s going on in their classrooms, so it was good that Ms. Tyler was keeping up when she heard me talking about my Giant-Size Man-Thing. I confiscated far worse when I was a teacher, but I never had to deal with a Giant-Size Man-Thing. By the time I became a teacher, Man-Thing no longer had his own comic book.
Some people think that I was foolish to sell my copy of The Incredible Hulk #181 in 2006. It was a decent copy (despite my taking it to school in fourth grade). Even though I would have gotten a lot more for it if I hadn’t taken it to school that day in fourth grade, I’m happy with the price that I sold it for, and I needed the money. Yes, the comic is worth a lot more now than it was in 2006, but I don’t need the money now like I did back then. I still have my Giant-Size Man-Thing, though. It’s not worth nearly as much money, but maybe it should be. It’s a better comic book, with better art, better story, and more pages.
Looking back, I can’t believe that I was so cavalier with my comic books. I can’t believe that I took them to school and let my classmates read them. Nowadays, I’m careful with all my comic books, especially those from the 1960s and 1970s. I’m very careful with my old Giant-Size Man-Thing. And if I ever get another copy of The Incredible Hulk #181, I’ll be very careful with that too.
*****
For more Dysfunctional Literacy, see…
A Kid Threw Up at the Comic Book Show
Harry The Dirty Dog vs. Dirty, The Hairy Dog
Everybody seems to agree that season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is pretty good. Critics that usually hate everything from the last ten years are saying it’s good. Some of those critics are even saying that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is great, that it can save television. The worst that I’ve heard is that the show is good, but since everything else on television/streaming sucks, it just seems great when it’s really just pretty good. Considering how everything is so polarizing today, it’s good to see something that a lot of people can agree about.
So let’s ruin all that with some fake controversy.
Season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was based on a short story called “The Hedge Knight by George R.R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire (commonly known as A Game of Thrones, but if you call it A Game of Thrones, some purists will get mad and try to have you removed from social media platforms). I first read “The Hedge Knight” in a fantasy short story anthology that compiled short stories from various fantasy series of the late 1990s, Legends edited by Robert Silverberg.
Because I wanted to read a new fantasy series in the 1990s but wasn’t sure where to start, (even back in the 1990s, there were too many fantasy series getting published at once to keep track of), I decided to try the short stories in this book and make my decision from them. After reading this short story compilation, I decided to just read The Lord of the Rings trilogy again. There was nothing wrong with the short stories. I just wasn’t willing to commit to a bunch of long novels because of them.
I’m not going to give a synopsis of either “The Hedge Knight” or A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms because you can get that everywhere else. I’m here to give you my opinion without any proof that I know anything more about the topic than anybody else.
Here’s my review of “The Hedge Knight” by George R.R. Martin:
“The Hedge Knight” is a decent story. I liked it.
That’s it. That’s my review.
Here’s my point. If HBO-Max can make a really great show (according to the critics) out of a good but somewhat mediocre story like “The Hedge Knight” (‘mediocre’ isn’t an insult! I actually finished reading “The Hedge Knight,” so that mediocrity puts it above 90% of what’s out there, but it is ‘mediocre’ compared to the other stuff that I finish)… ugh… I just lost my train of thought.
How did a decent but nothing special story inspire such a highly-acclaimed season of a television series? First of all, the show stuck with the source material. That usually helps. Sometimes television/movie writers think they know better than the original writer(s) of the source material and make a bunch of unnecessary changes that actually ruin everything. That didn’t seem to happen with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had a bunch of details/scenes that weren’t in the original story “The Hedge Knight,” though. Maybe these scenes/details/flashbacks were in other George R.R. Martin stories (I haven’t read the other Dunk and Egg stories), but they weren’t in “The Hedge Knight,” but that’s okay because these scenes were actually good. Plus, the acting was good, maybe great.
This seems to be circular analysis. What made A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms so good was that the writers and directors made good decisions and the acting was good. That’s all you have to do in life, make good decisions and be good at what you do. I could save the world with that advice.
If HBO-Max can make a really popular show out of a somewhat mediocre story like “The Hedge Knight,” then it could make a really awesome series from a great Conan story like “Red Nails” or “Beyond the Black River.” by Robert E. Howard. That’s just the start! There’s so much literary material out there that’s way better than George R. R. Martin’s stuff, but he’s getting a lot of attention. Again, nothing against George R. R. Martin (except that he led people on for far too long about ever finishing A Song of Ice and Fire).
I kind of want shows/movies based on George R.R. Martin’s books/short stories to be successful because I like the genre. Even though A Song of Ice and Fire is considered fantasy, I think of it as sword & sorcery, a sub-genre that usually combines a medieval setting with adventure, sorcery, horror, and scantily-clad women who get themselves or are put into dangerous situations. “The Hedge Knight”/A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was more like a basic legendary tale without a lot of the elements that go into sword & sorcery. It reminds me a little of the old pulp short story “By This Axe I Rule” by Robert E. Howard, another good sword & sorcery story without sorcery/horror elements.
Both “The Hedge Knight” and “By This Axe I Rule” are set in fantasy/sword &sorcery worlds established by these authors, but neither of these stories rely on the sword & sorcery elements. The protagonist Dunk/Duncan in “The Hedge Knight” struggles with living up to the ideal standards of a knight while the protagonist Kull in “By This Axe I Rule” struggles with his limitations as a king. One key difference was that Robert E. Howard was unable to get “By This Axe I Rule” published because of that lack of fantasy elements. He chose instead to rewrite it as a Conan story with a different title “The Phoenix on the Sword” (which I don’t think is nearly as good, but a lot of Conan fans disagree with me), adding the necessary sorcery and horror to get it published in Weird Tales magazine in the early 1930s.
Enough of this! Season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is waaaaayyy better as a television series than “The Hedge Knight” is as a short story. If television can do something this good with a story as mediocre (it’s not bad, it just doesn’t stand out), then there’s no reason for movie/television adaptations of good/great books to suck.
So if you ever need an example of where a movie/television series is clearly better than the book or short story, go with season one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms over “The Hedge Knight” by George R.R. Martin.
For more Dysfunctional Literacy, see…
What was the deal with…? Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner
Robert E. Howard’s Letter to Two Nerds in the 1930s
The Only Real Conan Is The Robert E. Howard Conan!
Old Man Reviews Manga: Vinland Saga Books One to Eleven by Makoto Yukimura
Dysfunctional Literacy 