Does it seem to anyone else that everything, and by everything I mean everyfuckingthing, has gotten significantly more evil and stupid recently? Like, just in the last couple of weeks? I probably just need to stay off the fucking Internet for, I dunno, the rest of my Goddamned life, but between JD Vance literally spreading a blood libel against his own fucking constituents, admitting that he’s lying about it but that it doesn’t matter, various developments in AI technology including an app that lets you have your own completely fake social media network, and whatever the merry fuck is going on with the North Carolina governor’s race right now, I just want to tap out of everything for a couple of weeks. I do not want any further news, thank you, and I would like consumer technology to simply stop.
Just saw a clip of the previous guy talking about how the audience was so completely behind him at the last debate. In public, he said this. There was no audience at the debate. No one pushed back on the claim. It’s just another fucking lie to toss on the pile; truth doesn’t Goddamned matter anymore, even the shit that we literally just saw happen a couple of weeks ago with our own damned eyes.
(I refuse to know what’s going on with Puff Daddy. Put him under the jail, or free Puff Daddy, whichever is more appropriate. Don’t tell me. Also, if Laura Loomer is pregnant, I’m going to kill the person responsible for me finding out about it.)
Brace yourself, by the way; Indiana is probably about to elect someone even dumber and crazier than Mark Robinson as our Lieutenant Governor. I’m so, so excited for it. We haven’t been obviously the worst in the country at anything for a while.
I do not like writing negative reviews of books. I certainly do it from time to time, and most of the time when I do I begin that review with a disclaimer similar to this one: in order for me to write a negative review of a book, it has to not only be bad, it also has to offend me in some way– generally by having some good qualities that might have made a good book were it not for all of the terribleness. Furthermore, I have to feel like I am capable of making the bad review at least moderately entertaining; sometimes more entertaining than I found the book.
I hated Nick Cutter’s The Troop. Hated it a whole damn lot. I can think of one book that I have reviewed here that I hated more, and one that I hated about the same amount. A third I read before I started the blog, and I’ll get to that later, but that’s about it.
I hated this book so much that about a third of the way through it I decided I was finishing the Goddamn thing just so I could write this review. I will never get those four hours back. Never let it be said I don’t sacrifice for my audience.
The Troop is about a Boy Scout troop and their Scoutmaster who get lost on a camping trip to an island in Canada, and imagine Stephen King’s Thinner, only it’s contagious. All but one of them die. It is a fucking terrible book. You are welcome, if you like, to stop reading now. I will be providing receipts.
Let’s start with the Stephen King thing. King is quoted on the cover, as you can see, and it is very clear that Thinner was at least partially an inspiration, although the focus on hunger and eating things that aren’t food and, oh, worms are differences from that book. King used to be one of my favorite authors, and still can produce a gem now and again, but he’s developed a disease lately where all of his characters talk like grizzled Vietnam veterans and all of his cultural references date from the 1950s to the 1970s. Nick Cutter is my age and he has no excuse for his characters to talk like this. The book refers to cell phones (he makes sure to throw in a bit where the Scoutmaster asks the kids if they really didn’t bring their cell phones, which were supposed to be forbidden, although he also didn’t bring his, which is unimaginable) and at one point refers to 2002 as far enough in the past that I have no reason to not believe this book is set roughly now. And yet:
This is a fourteen-year-old talking. Now, I don’t have a problem with a fourteen-year-old in 2024ish not knowing who Richard Simmons is. But Deal-A-Meal cards have not been commercially available sincethe nineties. His mom absolutely did not order him any, and he has never heard of them.
Or how about this contemporary cultural reference?
James Cagney made that line famous in White Heat, which came out in nineteen fucking forty nine.
Feel free to try and turn that description into a mental image, by the way. I can figure out what he’s describing if I try, but … Christ, man, there has to have been a way to have phrased it better than that.
Try and imagine a literal child letting this come out of their mouth:
Also, I’m far from convinced that “pinken” is a word.
I’m going to emphasize right now that while I do have a few of these images to hand (I spent some time griping about the book on a Discord while I was reading it), most of the time I’m just flipping through the book until I find an appropriate quote for a complaint. There’s something awful or stupid or incomprehensible on damn near every page.
Let’s talk about how the book treats women. First of all, there aren’t any. Literally not a single line of dialogue from a woman in the book. One kid does think this about his own mother, though:
While you’re gaping at the “island women” quote, or the idea that, again, this represents a fourteen-year-old kid’s inner monologue about his mom, note that in the last sentence the author uses the word “even” when he clearly means to use the word “especially.”
And, hey, when women are mentioned, do they talk about their boobs of course they talk about their boobs:
And for the second time in a row, this leads me into another complaint: every single metaphor and simile in this book sucks. Every single one. If you see the word “like,” you have some bullshit headed your way. Two halves of a cored-out squash forgotten for days on a countertop? Is what her eye sockets looked like? What the fuck?
It gets worse. Here’s two in a row:
Is … is that what the sound sounds like? Like cockroaches “scuttling and shucking,” a phrase every middle schooler uses all the time, in a bowl of semisolid Jell-O? Are you fucking serious? And then, in the next sentence, the saliva in his mouth tastes not like the already-too-specific waxy leaf, but the chlorophyll in said waxy leaf.
What?
Occasionally he’ll throw in a random detail about the world that doesn’t need to not make sense and would be perfectly fine if he just quit trying to be so fucking clever, but we can’t have that:
I am neither a lobsterman nor a potato farmer, but one thing about lobstermen and potato farmers is that they are never found in the same Goddamn town. Potato farms aren’t fucking coastal! What the shit is this?
(This is the paragraph before the one about Mom up there, by the way.)
The scoutmaster is also the only doctor in their town, by the way. When the first guy with the skinny-worms shows up, Scoutmaster Tim completely inexplicably decides that the only way to help him is to perform exploratory surgery– easy to do in the wilderness!– which leads to this reverie:
If you were to make a list of random objects that might be found by a, remember, small-town Canadian doctor in someone’s stomach, would rubber bath plugs be the first thing you mentioned? I have seen rubber bath plugs, and they are large, and not easily eaten. And Baltic coins? Specifically Baltic coins? Seriously? Not just … coins? No, we’ve gotta be less realistic than that.
Also, I strenuously object to the idea that the way you get a toy car out of someone’s stomach, or a wedding ring, which might have sharp edges, is to make them vomit it up or shit it out.
Also also, he uses one of the kids as an assistant for the surgery, which … sure, that’s a good decision, and then naturally he catches the worms. So the kids lock him in the closet in the cabin they’re staying in. Which leads to this gem:
This one’s a twofer; we have bad writing (never complain about your own plot; that fourth sentence should have been snipped for redundancy and ridiculousness, and why the hell does it matter that he’s a doctor here?) and, while Tim is an adult and might have seen 2001, he’s younger than me, and thinking of his own inner monologue as HAL 9000 is just kinda weird.
Scoutmaster Tim is later killed when a tree branch falls on the cabin and somehow manages to crush his head.
You might be thinking I’m nitpicking. I realize that. But I want to reiterate that there’s something stupid or fucked-up on nearly every page of this book, and after a while you just stop extending nonsense any grace.
This is before I get to how graphic the whole book is, or how they take four pages to kill a turtle, or the animal torture lovely described in other parts, or how the book devotes three pages right at the beginning to talking about how terribly nerdy one of the kids is(*), or anything else that might require a content warning. I looked through Goodreads and that stuff alienated a lot of people, but that wasn’t my problem. It’s torture porn and it’s shittily-written torture porn. Naturally, I find myself more offended by the writing than the content.
(*) Hey, you think, this might lead to him coming up with a smart solution to something at some point! Nah. I can’t even remember which kid was the nerd(**). Kent is the big one and Shelley is the sociopath and the others are just kinda there.
(**) That’s not true. Of course the kid named Newton is the nerd.
Oh, shit, I forgot this one:
First, kids vape now. Second, no fourteen-year-old has ever described a cigarette as a “coffin nail.” Third, “confused in his thoughts” is shit writing.
One more absolutely beautiful piece of evidence of just how little editing this Goddamn book got:
This paragraph is embedded in the middle of Shelley reminiscing about drowning his mother’s kitten, which is just super and goes on for a few pages, but do you see the problem here? Johnnie Ritson is Johnnie the first time he’s mentioned and then his name changes. Nobody caught it, and nobody stopped to suggest using the name “Timmy” for the disabled kid might be a little too on the nose.
Don’t miss the use of “stumblebum” in the last line there, either, another example of modern teenage slang.
Guys, I could keep going on for so much longer. This book is so fucking bad. But let’s close with this: remember that third bad book I mentioned up there? It’s The Ruins, by Scott Smith. It’s awful in exactly the same way The Troop is. Upon finishing the book, and before reading the author’s afterward, I commented to my wife that the only books I could think of (at the time) that matched this one in terribleness were Swan Song and The Ruins. And then I encountered this:
We had … I dunno, six fights in the building today? Let’s say six, it was close to that one way or another. One kid caught what I think is probably the worst ass-whipping I’ve ever seen short of Rodney King. I hope to hell the other kid is in jail right now. I don’t know why they don’t take you to jail when you attack someone at school; school is the only place you can just beat the shit out of someone and then expect to go home afterwards like nothing happened. This kid should be in jail. He should be there until he turns 18, frankly. But he’s not, because he attacked someone at school and not out on the street.
Go ahead; there’s six plus years of damn near daily blog posts around here. Hell, the running average is probably still more than one a day. I wrote a whole-ass book about teaching that you can look through too if you like. See if you can find another post where this kid needs to be in jail for what he just did is the topic. I can’t think of one. That rough of a day.
And I do not have a hard job, guys. I really don’t. There’s a lot of moving parts but I don’t have a hard job, not compared to what everyone else in the building is doing. And today was damn near too much for me anyway. I don’t know how the hell any of these people get up and go to work every day. I do know that there’s no way in hell I return to this building next year. Not if my life depended on it. Which means I get to start jobhunting again. There’s a chance to do the same job just in some other school but for various reasons (which I’ll probably get into eventually, but not now) is not as likely as I’d like it to be, so the best move is to start looking for alternatives now. Because I can’t be in a place with this rotted a culture any longer. I’ve never worked in a school this bad. Not even close. And I’ll make it to June, but I need to be gone after that, and if something good turns up before then I’ll jump ship. I’ll be burning this bridge for the last time, but I think it needs to be done.
(Then again, for fun, especially if you know me in the real world, think back over my life since graduating in high school and count the good decisions. Other than marrying my wife, there aren’t as many as I used to think there are. I’m actually not very good at this being an adult nonsense. I remember when I thought I was good at stuff; it was a while ago.)
And tomorrow I’ll get up and do it all over again. Six more days with the kids and then I get a couple of weeks off. I can manage this, I think. I don’t have much of a choice, one way or another.
My wife and son both had Friday off so I took it off as well, and the three of us have mostly lazed around all weekend, which is not something I’m going to complain about. We went to the zoo on Friday– and I strongly recommend going to the zoo on a Friday afternoon when a rainy morning and a weekday means that not many other people are out and about.
Which is fine. Because for the most part the world spent all last week going to hell– even beyond the obvious stuff in Washington, which I just don’t have the fucking energy to even talk about. Wednesday night, one of my co-workers at the furniture store died. He was in Indianapolis for his cousin’s funeral, which was enough of a shitshow to begin with, staying at his sister’s. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up the next morning. He was thirty-one fucking years old, and I doubt the cousin whose funeral he was in town for was much older.
Nobody is supposed to die in their fucking sleep at 31.
His roommate also works at the store. He told me the other night that the last thing Griff said to him was that at least his grandmother, who passed away all of a couple of months ago, wasn’t alive to have to attend the funeral of one of her grandkids. And now she’d have to go to two.
I can’t pretend we were super close. We were co-workers. I liked the guy quite a bit. But his funeral is tomorrow in Evansville and I’m not going, because I already have to be in Indianapolis for a conference from Wednesday through Friday and the con on Saturday and I just can’t squeeze in a ten-hour round trip drive today and tomorrow. But it’s got me fucked up anyway.
This post wasn’t supposed to be about Griffin. I meant to talk about video games a bit; I’m still trying to beat Dark Souls 2 (getting closer, especially if I decide it’s okay to ignore the DLC) and I haven’t played Spider-Man in like three weeks because I got abruptly tired of it like a day after my initial impressions post. The combat consistently annoys me and I’m not convinced it’ll get better. I’ll probably bring the PS4 with me to Indianapolis, though, so I’ll have time to play when I’m not at the conference.
I dunno. I got too much fucking serious in the world right now. For right now gabbling about video games is where my head’s at. At least I thought it was.
Very early on in Robert McCammon’s terrible book Swan Song the words “information computer” are used to refer to… a computer. The phrase is used by either the President of the United States or one of his close associates, as it is used during a scene in the Situations Room, which I thought was just called the Situation Room, but maybe things were different in the 1980s.
I was initially inclined to cut him a break. The book was written in 1987, after all, and that was a while ago. Computers weren’t in super-common usage, right, so a redundant phrase like “information computer” might have been something somebody said, I dunno.
Then somebody gets asked for their “computer number” later on, and it’s just like an ID number or something, and a third computer is described as being used to keep track of dates when people entered and exited a certain building, a task much more suited for a notebook.
I should not have cut him a break, as “computers” would only be the first item entered into a very long list of things that Robert McCammon does not really understand. And I only made it through a bit more than 300 of this book’s nearly nine hundred and fifty pages of garbage before checking out and putting the book on a shelf, never to be touched again.
The basic premise: World War III starts in the first fifty pages or so, as the Russians and the Americans and who the hell knows who else fires all of their nukes at each other, obliterating basically everything. The war happens because of Reasons, basically; McCammon starts in media res because what he wants is a book where everybody is dead.
The book is nine hundred and fifty fucking pages long, people, and fully half of that is dedicated to describing what people or things look like. The rest of it is dedicated to getting basic matters of fact, logic, narrative consistency or physics wrong. Two brief examples:
EXAMPLE PRIMUS! The President is a character for the first little part of the book. I thought he was actually rather interesting, as it’s clear right away that he feels (rightfully!) that he’s in way over his head and has no way how to prevent the terrible catastrophe that’s coming. That’s neat! Too bad that a few dozen pages later he’s killed when a flying bus destroys Air Force One, which isn’t called Air Force One even though that’s what the President’s plane has been called since the 1950s.
You may be wondering if you read the phrase “a flying bus destroys Air Force One” correctly. Yes. You did. A nuclear explosion somewhere sends a bus flying so far and so high that it hits and destroys Air Force One, but without the nuclear explosion itself affecting the plane.
EXAMPLE SECUNDUS! Several characters who survived the initial bombardment of New York City by being underground at the time are attempting to escape Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel. Radiation, by the way, is something that McCammon will have other characters talk about incessantly but wandering around Manhattan after it has been hit by several nuclear weapons is no problem. The Holland Tunnel is ankle-deep in water at the entrance. The characters are able to walk through it to escape. The water never rises above waist level.
So, two things about that: 1) the tunnel is, well, a tunnel, which goes under a river, which means that if it is ankle deep in water at the entrance the part that is actually under a river is going to be completely fucking submerged. Also, the tunnel is completely full of burned bodies and smashed cars despite having been basically the safest place imaginable during the bombardment. It’s clear that McCammon wants us to think the damage is caused by the bombs and not, say, panicking drivers, by the way, so he doesn’t get that out.
Ah, fuck it, let’s do an EXAMPLE TERTIUS! that will explain why I put the book down. Two of the survivors are a kid who is plainly and obviously a psychopath and his one-handed nutjob Vietnam vet mentor, both of whom escaped from a gun nut survivalist mountain compound that was basically being used as a timeshare for other gun nuts by the Vietnam dude. Don’t ask. A pair of people, a man and a woman, are walking toward the Salt Lake in Utah– a useful source of perfectly drinkable and not poisonous at all water, where it is logical that many people would gather after a nuclear apocalypse.
The nutjob and the psycho kid pop out from where they have concealed themselves under dirt trapdoors like fucking human spiders and slit the man’s throat. It is not clear how long they have been under there waiting. Many other dirt-people also pop out of their own dirt trapdoor things and begin offering the man and the boy money for the woman. The woman, who several weeks after a nuclear apocalypse is wearing a number of diamond and pearl necklaces, a thin T-shirt that reads “Rich Bitch,” no bra and, as it will be revealed later, no underwear either, offers herself sexually to the boy to avoid being gangraped. This is OK because the book helpfully lets us know that the man of the pair used to help her out by being her pimp. There are loving, detailed descriptions of her nipples.
Also, the nutjob spends a lengthy monologue ranting crazily about how the people in the cool camp nearby with supplies and such won’t let him into the camp, which is why he has to live as a dirt-person, and then transitions seamlessly into screeching about how no one can keep him from getting what he wants, as if he has not just described someone preventing him from getting him what he wants.
Nope. Done here, thanks. Bye, book. I found out later, reading other bad reviews, that there is a 7-year jump later in the book, because sure, why not. This is easily the worst book I read this year– the bits I describe are only the lowlights of the first 300 pages; there are examples at least once a chapter of something that makes no Goddamn sense at all. Don’t read this, ever, and shun anyone who says they liked it or it was good.
I was going to write the Star Wars review tonight, but instead we went to my kid’s Christmas pageant. The highlight of the Christmas pageant was the kid who pissed himself on the risers right there in front of God and everybody, no doubt ensuring a lifetime phobia of performing in public.
I have said this before, both on this blog and elsewhere: if you are ever compelled, as a writer in any medium, to create a scenario where your characters are complaining about how dumb your plot is, it is probably time to stop and think very carefully about what you are doing. If you are writing a show called Iron Fist, about a man whose job it is to be the Iron Fist, and the very first line a character says upon meeting him is “You are the worst Iron Fist ever,” you may be doing something wrong. It is possible to write a good story about a hero who is terrible at being a hero. But if you do that, then that’s what your story needs to be about. You can’t have a hero who is terrible at being a hero and have your story be about something else. The fact that he or she is terrible is going to take center stage and ruin everything else.
Enter Iron Fist, whose writers clearly do not read my blog. This post is unnecessary in a whole lot of ways; it took me a while to get through all thirteen episodes– mostly because, again, the show’s awful– and everyone who binged it right away has already weighed in on how bad it is. They’re all right. But maybe there’s someone out there who isn’t attuned to the geek press all that much, but reads me for some reason. Someone who might be saved.
Please don’t watch this show.
And this doofy shit is the main reason why. Now, let’s be clear about a few things: there was a lot of fooferal when the show hadn’t quite come out yet about the fact that Marvel cast a white guy as Iron Fist instead of racebending the character and casting an Asian person instead. I am sympathetic to those concerns, to say the least. But even if you’re going to cast a white guy as Iron Fist, because the comic book character is white, Finn Jones is just about the worst possible choice to play the role. He is awful; awful in every way, he is written to be awful, and the man himself does nothing to corral or channel(*) his character’s intrinsic awfulness. There is nothing Finn Jones does in this show at any point that is convincing. He cannot do kung fu, he cannot emote beyond an infantile shaking rage, he absolutely cannot spout anything even vaguely resembling Buddhist philosophy (and I choose the word “resembling” quite deliberately) without sounding like a hipster doofus, and he never once comes off as heroic. Iron Fist is a sulky hipster doofus with PTSD and all the emotional stability of a ten-year-old. He is awful.
So is every other white man on the show, by the way. The show can’t have anyone keep a personality or a set of motivations straight for more than an episode at a time, and there are never ever ever any consequences for anyone’s actions, to the point where there are giant holes blown in one character’s dojo’s ceiling at one point so that machine-gun ninjas can drop through (don’t ask) and those giant holes and broken windows and such are never mentioned again. Characters display magical powers in one episode and then forget they have them. Characters are killed, thrown into fish tanks in someone’s home, then never mentioned again.
You could cut every white male character completely out of the show and nothing of any significance would change, at all. They are, all of them, awful.
Let’s talk about these three: I’m having a hell of a time getting the HTML to cooperate, so forgive me, but these three are the only thing that makes the show even vaguely watchable. Jessica Henwick, who plays Colleen Wing, should have been playing Dani Rand. Or, alternatively, you could grab this drunken-master badass here– his name is Lewis Tan and he actually auditioned for the park– and have him play Danny Rand. Between the two of them they are responsible for 100% of the interesting fight scenes in the show. Every single one. They are also both better actors than Finn Jones. Wai Ching Ho also returns as Madame Gao, and she’s amazing for every second she’s on screen even if her character’s motivations (and abilities) are more than a little bit of a mess. The fact that the show had these three people in it and more or less ignored them so that Jones could whine about how tough it is to be white and immensely wealthy and oh also one of the best martial artists in the world but MY PARENTS ARE DEAAADD!!!! It’s terrible. But I think I said that. I think the only thing that could redeem it is if I watched it again, liveblogged every episode, and then turned it into a chapbook to sell on Amazon and made a million dollars.
(*) So, Iron Fist’s powers come from channeling the power of his “chi” into his fist, making it Like Unto a Thing of Iron, as the comic books used to say all the time and the TV show never does. TV Danny can’t do that. I have quite a few Iron Fist comic books, and even more where Iron Fist isn’t the main character but shows up, and I swear to you that Finn Jones does more wanking about his chi in this thirteen hours of show than Iron Fist has done in his entire forty-year history as a comic book character previous to the show coming up. Comic book Danny Rand’s powers just work, basically whenever he wants them to. TV Danny Rand’s chi must be balanced, charged, recharged, harnessed, centered, purified, unblocked, hell, every verb in the English language gets applied to Danny’s chi at some point or another; I’m surprised he never has to Smurf the fucking thing. And hearing him talk about it never stops being ridiculous. Mostly his powers just don’t work, and mostly his powers don’t work because, in one way or another, he’s an embarrassment to his order and to his job. He’s the worst Iron Fist ever. Really.
Spent the whole day behind the 8-ball, because on my one day off this weekend I went to the zoo with my wife and my son instead of spending all of it planning for this upcoming week of classes. We had a stellar time at the zoo, too, probably the best visit to that particular zoo that I’ve ever had. And now I’m sitting on the couch coughing up a quick blog post rather than researching methods of teaching measurement and conversion between units (because we have an entire four-week unit coming that I have no material for, which is going to be awful,) which is what I probably ought to be doing, and also instead of hanging out with the aforementioned wife and son, which is what I want to be doing.
I have absolutely got to find a new job. I don’t want to teach anymore; I don’t want any of this– not the lesson planning, not the grading, none of it. I haven’t called a single parent this year, because fuck it. I can only think of two or three occasions during my entire career where it made any damn difference and it’s not going to this time either. I need to sit down and seriously crunch some numbers and figure out just how much of a salary cut I can handle and still stay solvent, because I can’t do this anymore. I need a goddamn job that I can leave at work and not bring extra shit home to do every single day. Enough of this crap.
Very early on in Robert McCammon’s terrible book Swan Song the words “information computer” are used to refer to… a computer. The phrase is used by either the President of the United States or one of his close associates, as it is used during a scene in the Situations Room, which I thought was just called the Situation Room, but maybe things were different in the 1980s.
I’m having a hell of a time getting the HTML to cooperate, so forgive me, but these three are the only thing that makes the show even vaguely watchable. Jessica Henwick, who plays Colleen Wing, should have been playing Dani Rand. Or, alternatively, you could grab this drunken-master badass here– his name is Lewis Tan and he actually auditioned for the park– and have him play Danny Rand. Between the two of them they are responsible for 100% of the interesting fight scenes in the show. Every single one. They are also both 
better actors than Finn Jones. Wai Ching Ho also returns as Madame Gao, and she’s amazing for every second she’s on screen even if her character’s motivations (and abilities) are more than a little bit of a mess. The fact that the show had these three people in it and more or less ignored them so that Jones could whine about how tough it is to be white and immensely wealthy and oh also one of the best martial artists in the world but MY PARENTS ARE DEAAADD!!!!
It’s terrible. But I think I said that. I think the only thing that could redeem it is if I watched it again, liveblogged every episode, and then turned it into a chapbook to sell on Amazon and made a million dollars.
Spent the whole day behind the 8-ball, because on my one day off this weekend I went to the zoo with my wife and my son instead of spending all of it planning for this upcoming week of classes. We had a stellar time at the zoo, too, probably the best visit to that particular zoo that I’ve ever had. And now I’m sitting on the couch coughing up a quick blog post rather than researching methods of teaching measurement and conversion between units (because we have an entire four-week unit coming that I have no material for, which is going to be awful,) which is what I probably ought to be doing, and also instead of hanging out with the aforementioned wife and son, which is what I want to be doing.
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