My fury level is about 9.4...

For the past two freaking weeks I have been trying to get information from the venue where Jonathan Coulton is supposedly appearing this weekend. I called the venue and nobody there could tell me what I really needed to know: was the Saturday night show accessible (which is, of course, different from "suitable") to minors?

They finally emailed me back my answer today: the Sunday show is 21 and up, but the Saturday show is not, but, oh, sorry, the Saturday show is sold out.

Fuck, fuck, fuck! You could tell me this TWO WEEKS AGO when there were still tickets available? Goddamn it, I was so hoping to take Yamaraashi-chan.

Aarrrgghhh. This is not how I want to spend my morning. Dammit, I should be fired as a dad for screwing this up like this.

My stress level is through the roof already. An accident on the 1st Avenue bridge and a bizarre decision by the local steel recycler to transfer their empty rail buckets across West Marginal Way during morning rush hour extended a normally 25 minute drive to a full 90 minute drive. I turned around at the recycler and drove around the holding station to 1st Ave and I must have hit every flamin' light.

At least I do not need coffee. GRRRRRR..... Mad, mad, mad, mad.

Cute Girl Chaser

Okay, after all that ranting and raving, life calls for a chaser. On Boing Boing, they usually provide something called a "Unicorn Chaser," a cute picture of white and fluffy unicorns to try and ease a disturbing (in the goatse sense) image.

Well, I needed a smile this morning, and bless my RSS feed for introducing me to Ruby Rocket. Yay for fangirls in cosplay!

Review: Wynd Temptress, by Kathryn Anne Dubois

Wynd Temptress, by Kathryn Anne Dubois (2003, Ellora's Cave) is one of those stories that's sat on my hard drive for ages and I finally got around to reading, because I was bored yesterday and stuck on a bus for a long time without my laptop. I regret having read it.

There's a modest infodump in the beginning where we learn that it is 2150 and the Earth is recovering after The Psychic Wars, in which the normals and their tame psis are now hunting down and trying to control or eliminate any remaining telepaths. Forty years earlier, the Psychic Wars ended with the death of the super-telepath the Tyrea, who apparently lit of nukes and otherwise trashed the planet in a "if I can't have it nobody can" spasm as he went down.

The Tyrea left behind three daughters (convenient that, but I've written worse), whose names are suggestive of wind, fire, and water. Each of their "romance" stories is told by a different author, starting with Dubois's tale of "wind," Jezermaih, and the man sent to assess the risk she presents, Adam.

Adam is a telepath, retired from the PSI Agency (an extragovernmental agency that all governments agree is necessary to stop the Continental Council, a renegrade group of telepaths trying to breed the next Tyrea, from succeeding), called back to duty to assess this greatest risk they've ever known: a child of the Tyrea, now living in Alaska. In chapter one, Adam tells us his plans: he'll kidnap Jezermaih and take her to one of the agency's Sekret Bases, where he'll interrogate her as roughly as necessary to determine her risk level. Oh, and Adam's favorite tool to accomplish his mission? Rape.

Yes, it's that kind of story. It's presented as a romance. He does kidnap her, whisks her away to his Sekret Agency Base (which is in the middle of a vast Alaskan plain but somehow has power and a five-star suite of romantic bedrooms and jacuzzis and a heated swimming pool), ties her down, strips her naked, and molests her with his hands and mouth. She manages to get free, bashes him on the head with a lamp, and ties him up to try and get the numerical code on the ignition of his SUV so she can get out of there. After confessing to the reader that she's not brave enough to actually torture him with a knife or a strangulation rope, we get another sex scene where she "tortures" him with frustration. He gives her the wrong code, she runs to the SUV, he takes advantage of her absence to get free and again they reverse their situation and he's again taking advantage of her immobility.

It's not just awful. Dubois is a competent writer, a little expository, but no David Weber. It's ugly. The characters' "love" that they achieve by the end of the book is presented as an ultimate state of being. Moral of the story: Somewhere out there is the perfect man (buff, exceptionally well hung, cooks a perfect meal, and has money), and if he has to rape you for you to figure out he's perfect, eh, so what's a little rape?

She should have killed him in chapter three.

Wednesday's Brain: Two small heaping chunks o' stupid.

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Transhumanism and religion, the incoherency zone...

Every once in a while you come across something time and again, and each time it just leaves you scratching your head. For me, it's the constant confluence of mystical, Self-obliterating ("Self" capitalized deliberately) religious practices with ideas of post-human Selfhood. Which is why I'm left scratching with both hands as I read Spiritual Transcendence in Transhumanism.

I know I'm deep into word salad^[?] when I read lines like: "We are very quickly arriving at a stage where both religious indulgence and scientific achievement are being hyper-saturated. If indeed such a stage of human development as the Singularity could be realised, then what would our questions be?"

WTF does "scientific acheivement is being hyper-saturated" mean? I speak a pretty mean pomo^[?] myself, and this is just beyond me.

And when he writes, "There is dogma in both religion and science, one of conviction offered by experience and the other of surety offered by concordant experimentation," he has lost my interest. Surely, the "surety of concordant experimentation" is received by experience: it doesn't happen in a vacuum and without observation; the results of experimentation lead to consensual conviction by providing utterly reliable consensual experience. To me, that's not dogma, that's a posteriori valuing the products of science because of their reliability. The fecundity of science in actually alleviating human suffering, far more than religion's classic role of excusing it, is a wonderful side-effect.

To my eyes, this article is little more than a "See? My pet theism and my pet futurism agree!"