The Cool People

Cool people are those who respond to your opinions with condescension. Anything different from what they believe is ridiculous, pathetic, laughable or dangerous. I mean, they could even be right: you might have said something really stupid. But while you can handle finding out that something you were thinking is not true, they cannot. Their whole world view is based on them being right. While you might see them as a little hurtful and a bit annoying, they see you as a threat, because their truth is something they desperately cling to and any type of difference challenges their way of life.

You will usually meet them in positions of power. They are not enough of a sociopath to be top leadership, but they will be somewhere in the middle, telling themselves the story of how in control of their life they are. They clump together, because a tale is easier to believe in a group than by yourself. They drink together, they watch the same sports, they play the same games, they go in the same vacations, they have the same gods and the same rituals. Their information bubbles existed way before Facebook and while you might see them as ridiculous bubble people, they always fear you are carrying a pin to burst theirs. Cool people always know "how the world works" and to pretend otherwise would only mean you are not as savvy. Major changes leave them helpless and in search of a narrative that explains that away from their view of the world. Beware a former cool person for they are desperate.

They will applaud each other vigorously at every little success as they feel it's a validation of their own. Unfortunately, that means they will stand in the way of your success, as they feel it invalidates theirs. Cool people live on a narrow ladder, where everybody is clearly ranked on a vertical scale. Not being on their ladder makes them feel superior to you. Not wanting to be on their ladder makes them feel threatened by you. While you are exchanging information you possess, they only coerce it out of you in order to judge and rank you on their scale. When they are exchanging information is from a feeling of generosity, allowing you to know where the cool is; not being grateful angers them.

Cool people keep in touch. They cannot allow coolness to exist in different flavors. They maintain contact in order to synchronize their shared concepts. Socially it is easy for two cool people to communicate, because they are very similar. It is important to make other people feel not cool enough, because a cool person can't handle a conversation that doesn't follow a familiar pattern. While the problem is mostly theirs, they need to shift the blame onto others. They smile easily as a well trained skill, not an expression of how they feel. Smiles and laughter are tools and weapons for them.

Uncool people are essential to the well being of cool people. A careful dance of keeping people just far enough to indicate superiority, but close enough to make it visible to any outside observer, is essential to the lifestyle of cool people. While you either despise, pity or envy them, but you could easily do without them, they actually need you.

So how cool are you? I am not cool. I am better than cool. Me and my kind.

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Roses and Rot, by Kat Howard

This reminded me of The Call, by Peadar Ó Guilín, another very well received book I've recently read. It features a female perspective, fairies and an unapologetic dissection of the human soul. The Call is better, but still, this is a very interesting book I will also recommend reading.

In Roses and Rot, Kat Howard uses the world of the Fae as an excuse to examine the bonds between people, the toxic effects of self-centeredness, whether in a parent or in yourself as you try to achieve some of your goals at the expense of others, and how people have to sacrifice for what they love. Imagine a magical place where everything is offered to you on a silver platter, with the promise that the best of you will get... a golden platter or whatever. And there is always a price.

I liked the psychological aspects of the story. There isn't much else of it, actually. As I said, the magic is merely incidental as the book is about the struggles of artists and daughters of idiots. I would go as far as not calling it fantasy at all. I disliked the close similarity between Janet and the girls' mother - I won't expand on this for fear of spoiling it. Enough to say that Helena's character and sidestory felt like a training run for what could have happened to the protagonist if not for her sister, so in one fell swoop, two characters from the already short list of relevant ones are just shadow copies of others. Add to this a lot of other details that are customized for the lead and you start to suspect this is a very autobiographical story. I don't know Kat Howard so well as to say it was, though. I will quote from the book though: “These [fairy tales] will be more autobiographical in nature than the Grimms'.”

Bottom line: It was a heartfelt story and I liked it. It is also short and not part of a billionogy, so you can just read it and enjoy it. Less fantasy than psychological drama, though.

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Dark Run (Keiko #1), by Mike Brooks

Dark Run is a classic pulp space mercenary book. It isn't even sci-fi at its core. It could have just as well been a western, a pirates or a heist book, as the science and technology don't further the story in any meaningful way.

I don't have anything specific to say about the book. Mike Brooks uses an overused plot of a specialized team of renegades being double crossed and having to defend their honor and punish the responsible. The characters are pure cardboard, with no subtlety, and even the humor is weak. I mean, it's pulp fiction, the author did a decent job writing one. As literature, though, it's not something I could possibly recommend.

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The Summer Dragon (The Evertide #1), by Todd Lockwood

Sagas and trilogies be damned! The Summer Dragon was a really entertaining book and having it end as a mere episode in a larger story that hasn't been written yet is quite frustrating.

Todd Lockwood is mostly known for his fantasy illustrations, not writing, and Summer Dragon is his debut novel. It is an YA story, with a similar structure as so many others: young nobody discovers they have special abilities and are thrown in a world of mystery, wonder and danger, with adults being either weak supporting characters and/or villains, but done right! The heroine - yes, a girl - is thrown into a situation in which politics and culture are forcing her to either be completely passive and submissive or to take action by herself. She doesn't do it with superpowers, but with the knowledge she learned from her father and her own personal courage and ingenuity. In the end she does overcome some pretty insurmountable odds, but it never gets too annoying. If there is a flaw I have to talk about it is the fact that each chapter is written with the same hero's journey structure, with new tension added at the end and character building in the middle. The author is a bit too neat in following the writing guidelines.

I liked that the protagonist is a woman. This is, so far, a perfect feminist book, since she is fighting real issues, social, political and military, using her own skills and in the few situations where she is a love interest she doesn't automatically feel she needs to either reciprocate or condescend and insult her suitor. It is also a book about dragons, but she is the daughter of a dragon breeder, rather than a kid that suddenly discovers there are dragons or other crap like that. The world is not very detailed, but what is in the book is pretty consistent and has a lot of potential.

I don't want to spoil the book by giving details, but there was also something that I felt was a missed opportunity. In an already existing conflict a third party emerges, a super villain, if you will. It was the perfect moment to switch the real source of the "evil" and to reframe an existing war as something that no one participating really understood. As written, it is very difficult to understand why career military men locked in a prolonged conflict dismiss vital tactical and strategic information for silly things like religious fervor or personal greed.

Given the opportunity I would have immediately read the other books in the series. Alas, The Summer Dragon was released just last year and it's the only published book so far. If you want to avoid frustration, wait until Lockwood writes a few more books and then start reading the series. I have great hopes for it.

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Jack Glass, by Adam Roberts

There is a cover for the book that writes "Best SF Novel of the Year BSFA Award". I can only assert that it was either competing alone, that they give a prize to all contestants or that the British SF Association doesn't know what a good book is. Its worst flaw is that it is naive. First with its depiction of space. Stuff in the book would not have worked in the 80s, I believe, much less in 2012 when the book was released. The style of the prose seems to emulate works from the 50s and 60s and at first I wondered if it wasn't intentional, like a sort of parody or tip of the hat. Regardless, the book remains naive in almost all aspects, even those of the basic plot, which is not sci-fi, but rather whodunnit and escape from the room stuff.

That being said, Jack Glass is not a totally bad book, either. It presented some ideas that were rather fresh. Using convicts to prepare asteroids for colonization, for example, or having trillions of people living in the Solar System, not on planets, but asteroids and such, the idea that each of these habitats would create their own flavor of religion and culture. But other than these rare juicy details, the rest of the book is quite boring, predictable and bad. The clues to solve the mysteries, rather than being presented to the reader so that they can participate in the solving, are brought in by random plot events, like dreams. People that were supposed to be the best rationalists, Sherlock Holmes style, were being manipulated and educated by ordinary people that somehow knew and understood more. The laws of physics, psychology and sociology are being completely ignored.

Bottom line, a bad book from Adam Roberts, with the occasional hidden gem that doesn't really save the silly plot and ugly narrative.

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The case of the bitch and her mysterious disease

So, me and the wife were walking our dog in the park one Saturday evening when we saw this female German Sheppard mutt looking all lost and terrified. The wife, being the heart of us two, points out to me that the dog is probably lost and she looks terrified. Me, not being the heart in the relationship, just hoped her owners would show up. Well, one can't ignore one's heart, as my wife keeps repeating in the hope I am listening, so I end up attaching a leash to the dog's collar and heroically attempting to save the dog.

The plan was as follows. Step 1: take the dog to the vet. Step 2: the vet will know what to do. Additional info: the dog was walking really strange, was terrified of everything, but especially crossing streets and was bleeding from between the legs, occasionally appearing to try to piss and nothing coming out. Suspecting a car hit and maybe internal bleeding, I rushed the dog to the vet I know in the area, who also treats my dog. Imagine doing that with a 20 kilos dog who is afraid of streets, basically.

Step 1 went to shit when I realized the vet was closed at that hour on Saturday. I mean, nothing ever happens to dogs in the weekend, right? I tried calling pet ambulances, they all refused to come, claiming not enough capacity. Finally I called the wife to come with the car and drive us to a nearby non stop veterinarian clinic.

The situation looked like this: female dog in heat (not internal bleeding) which was probably not hit by a car, but walks funny because she is probably not right in the head, first suspected to be 5 to 7 years old, but then age adjusted to over 8, erratically aggressive (although what aggressive meant to the doctor seemed to be a low growl of annoyance). Also, the doctor didn't know any shelters, groups that take care of lost dogs or anything like that. Surely no dogs get lost and found and then brought to vets. He had no idea what to do. So Step 2 went to shit when the vet told us the dog was not microchipped, was probably abandoned and, for all intents and purposes, was now ours, since no one adopts old dogs.

We decided to pay for some tests to figure out what is wrong with the dog and to keep her in the clinic, since she's a big unpredictable female dog in heat and our dog is male. We did that daily, paying a lot of money for it, until around Tuesday, when the doctors decided that the dog problems were probably neurological and that her uterus was malformed and probably would have caused the dog to die in the near future unless operated and removed. I was about to authorize the operation, too, and was thinking of names for the dog. Since our dog is named Tyrion, naturally she would have been Arya, but for the fact the dog was older, so maybe Sansa - she was traumatized and afraid of everything, too. In the end I was going for Lysa - since that was the older crazy aunt in Games of Thrones.

And here comes serendipity. A young woman comes to the clinic and asks if it is possible for dogs to run away from home in order to die. Apparently, her dog, staying with her parents, ran away from home and said parents were too horrified to tell her of that until that day. Stranger still, in the rare occasions that the dog was getting lost, she always returned home, which she now failed to do. No, the girl didn't look for found dog ads (which I posted all over the Internet), she didn't ask around in the park where the dog was lost (where I told just about every dog owner to spread the word), no, she just randomly arrived at the same clinic and asked this question. Of course, it was her dog we were talking about. No, lady, when dogs run away from home they usually go to the vet to get checked out!

So, if and when the dog will get operated or receive specialized treatment for her brain issues - which apparently she had since she was a pup - is the owner's business, and we only offered our financial aid in case it was needed. Happy ending, the dog is back with her owners, with some extra medical tests done and possible solutions for her future well being on the table.

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Samurai Jack is dead!

16 years ago, Samurai Jack premiered as an animated show where a honorable samurai travels through time to destroy the demon Aku, who has taken over the world and made it evil. With Genndy Tartakovsky's genius behind it, this tale of good versus evil never seemed too simple or too idealistic, something movies today and in the future need to learn. However, after only four seasons, the show was not renewed, leaving fans with the bitter sweet conclusion that evil will triumph if no one fights against it, especially in the world of movies and series.

And people fought and the series received its continuation... and its ending, a season 5 that ends in a glorious finale. What comes next is a spoiler for the last season and the show's finale, you've been warned.

Click to show spoiler

The fifth season was more mature than the rest of the show. Jack is a psychological mess, having lost his sword and having seen the last time portal to his own period closed by Aku. He has hallucinations of the people he couldn't save and that he felt responsible for. Moreover, he is hunted by a clan of highly trained killer girls who call themselves Daughter of Aku and wish to have Jack killed. Tartakovsky's creative talent is shown throughout, with beautiful worlds and colorful characters. Season five was a great season.

However, all good things have to come to an end, and the last episode of the season was also the last of the series. In it, Jack and his love defeat Aku, managing to go back to the past and destroying him. However, this felt even more bitter sweet than the ending of the show thirteen years ago. Good triumphs, but at what cost? Funny enough I felt bad for Aku who at least in this season was a complex character with a funny and creative side besides his ingrained evil. And what does that mean for the world? Instead of the weird creatures and civilizations that all seemed to successfully coexist on the same planet, we get the corporate magicless future that we see today. Damn if Aku's world didn't feel a lot more fun.

And yes, the title of the post is a quote from Aku, just before he is defeated. I hold on to hope.

For Entertainment Weekly, Геннадий had this to say: This is it. This is the definitive end, and it’s a great end. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve storyboarded it, and I think it’s super satisfying, and it should close the door for me for Samurai Jack. … Now, look, there’s 50 years between season 4 and season 5, and if somebody wanted to jump in and do some stories in between, but for me this is the end

Anyway, I really hope Tartakovsky comes with something new soon, something that is just as creative and just as actual as Samurai Jack was. He somehow made a show about a samurai feel futuristic. That's not easy. And even his most childish shows, like The Powerpuff Girls, were great. He will be directing Hotel Transylvania 3 next, but I really wish he wouldn't burn out and stick to movies, especially stupid ones like this, when his shows were the highlights of my youth.

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