An amusing back-of-the-book blurb

Karl Hansen's books War Games and Dream Games remain influential, at least to me, because they were so rich and forward-looking in terms of technology, personal ennui, and cultural malaise. The main character opens the book as a teenager subject to vicious abuse by his infinitely wealthy parents and siblings, all the while observing long orgies in which said older relatives attempt to alleviate the tedium of their long, jaded lives with ever-increasing doses of drugs, perversion, sadomasochism, and the degredation of lesser peers.

The protagonist doesn't necessarily view this lifestyle as a bad one; he just wants to be on top, a victor rather than a victim.

The book blurb on the cover of the first printing, 1981, from Playboy Paperbacks, reads:

More real than life, more painful, and in the end, more beautiful. Hansen really goes for the jugular!

Exclamation points are de rigueur for book blurbs, especially in the 1980s.

The blurb was provided by Orson Scott Card. Yeah, the "gays are a domestic enemy destroying the fabric of our society, and Obama's giving aid and comfort to that enemy!" Orson Scott Card.

The cognitive dissonance is... dissonant.

PerlNotes? Is there such a program?

I started out on a castle spire, talking to a blocky, pixelated fellow who told me, in 1980's style white word ballons with half-millimeter blocky black borders, that this was a program called PerlNotes and that I should work my way down to the dungeons to uncover how the program works, write it myself, and make a million dollars.

That has to be the strangest dream I've had recently.

Deep into the brain-rotting experience that is LaTeX...

I spent most of today either at the library, or hacking on the print edition of Aimee, which will be the next book from Pendorwright Press. It'll be 168 pages long, and will incorporate the first two novels in the Aimee series (okay, the only two books so far).

I used the stock Palatino font set for my typeset of Sterlings, but for Aimee, which is more of a fantasy novel, I switched to the elegant Centaur typeface, which I absolutely fell in love with after reading Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places, and I think I got it absolutely right.

For the page design, I switched away from the Science Fiction Manuscript and went with the straight Novel style. This took quite a bit of relearning, but I think I've got it down just fine. At the very least, I'm not getting any errors.

One thing I'm bad about in book design, though, is covers. Any one got any suggestions? Recommendations for a good graphic designer?

Sadly, this gives us Mike Huckabee's Willie Horton

This morning, I woke to the horrifying news that four police officers in a suburb a few miles south of my own were shot dead while sitting in a café, syncing up their laptops and getting on with the day.

This evening, I learned that one side story to the whole thing might well end the career of Mike Huckabee. The alleged shooter, Maurice Clemmons, was in jail in Arkansas when Mike Huckabee, feeling magnanimous and merciful, let him go after 11 years of a 100+ years sentence, citing that the young man was only 17 when he committed the crimes. Prosecutors recommended against the release, saying Clemmons had repeatedly demonstrated a lack of psychological stability.

I kinda wish we'd had a better way of getting rid of Mike Huckabee. Even the Free Republic is saying he's toast. But, all the better for my cause: