Super Saiyan Zimmerman's Valley

Editohyeahyoufuckersprobablywantsomemusic:
Usually I would say like, ignore whatever crappy video this is but this is actually just some guys vacation footage of Switzerland I think? Anyway it's just perfect. Everything is fine.

Doubledit: THAT WAS FAST
I'm so bored I can't sleep.

I want the full implications of that to sink in.

I'm too. bored. to sleep.

It's summer, you see.

This used to be a good thing. When I was a kid summer meant going to my dads and sitting on my ass playing videogames and watching movies and eating barbecues like a real American.

I had no desire for summer this year. I think I wrote about this last summer too. Fuck. Who needs a break. School was just getting interesting. Sure, finals sucked but they don't actually take long and then hey, you get to get drunker than any man has ever been and shout about molecular orbitals.
If there was an available class I could take right now, I would be all over that shit. Let me teach that shit. I will show up in a tie.

But...instead, I'm stuck sitting on my ass playing videogames and watching movies and eating barbecues and it has begun to LOSE ITS CHARM.
Maybe I didn't really register how much of my life revolves around education. Apparently the answer is "most of it, dunkass". Now that I've lost that, the framework of my very existence, my life has begun to fall apart.

I wish that phrase didn't have so many connotations attached. I meant it figuratively, but in a better way than the way it is usually used. What I'm trying to say is imagine my life as a scaffold, and this salt shaker here is my university, which is a startlingly appropriate term when you really break it down, and when you knock it away the scaffold begins to LOOK lady if you didn't want the lecture you shouldn't have picked an open-air table at this cafe

I am temporarily personal-responsibility free, and it is hideous for reasons I do not fully understand.
I mean, I have videogames! I'm sitting on Dragon Age - just staring at it and for some reason I can't bring myself to put it in the Bawks.


The days of the week suddenly blur together into a meaningless jumble. Oh, it's Tuesday? Who gives a fuck. What significance is that to me. Today will be just like tomorrow.
My sleep schedule is the most fucked of all. I try to set my alarm but it goes off and I just stare at it. This thing is beeping at me, and I know that that beeping is supposed to signal that it is time to get up but...without external impetus the signal loses meaning. I have literally no reason to get up that I wouldn't be creating solely for the sake of having a reason, and that thought wearies me.

Shit! When you type late night expostulation down it suddenly sounds incredibly depressing! I'm aiming more for philosophical musing than depressing murmurs.

Now, prisoners and depressed people and hibernating animals use this to their advantage. Turns out if you really try, the human body can sleep for way, way longer than you probably should be able to. You can while away a solid two thirds of a day in a drowsy stupor if you want to - and I certainly have - but while that's okay in truly desperate times when I try it now a tiny voice tells me that I'm wasting a perfectly good summer that I really ought to be grateful for.

So, guilted out of intentionally wasting summer, I just sort of putter around the house internet all goddamn day.

(Turns out that this consumes approximately shitall calories, so I don't...actually...need to eat that much, either.
Which fucking SUCKS! I love food! Cooking is a huge time sink! So lately I've been making my one real meal fuckin' worth it.)

Without any sort of linear guidelines, my schedule....isn't one. What schedule. What needs doing.

This is what an old persons life is like.
Oh my god. What an absolutely horrifying thought. Hopefully it's more exciting in a haze of dementia, or at least a stultifying fog of old age.

Right now, of course, I have to get my brain-obscuring fog through some other means.
My current drug of choice is staring blankly at Firefox and just slapping my F5 key like a lab rat who just figured out how to make the pellets show up.

Oh, and sleep deprivation.

Like I said, typical rhythmic life has gone out the window. It doesn't help that the days have gotten freakishly long, either. The sun doesn't truly set until 9pm.
Today I went to bed at ten in the morning and got up at six in the afternoon. Breakfast was last nights dinner (again), and I spent the majority of my "day" reading about pre-charged pneumatic air rifles and their many uses. Also, learning the history of IKEA.
So...I get up whenever, and I go to sleep whenever, and I eat one big meal a day, and I spend my days in either a bemused idle haze or suddenly fierce furrowed concentration.

I'm either turning into a monk, or a monk seal.

The most interesting part of my day is interacting with other people still on the alpha timeline.
For example, my roommate will say goodnight at 11 and sleep until her alarm goes off at 5 so she can do something retarded like exercise in the mornings. To her, it's the next day. To me, it's just been a busy day of looking at the internet. She hates it.
You really feel disconnected when everyone else has already had their Tuesday and you're only half done.

I've decided to just start my clock at whatever time I get up at every day. Whenever I get up, my internal day declares it to be roughly 10am, an appropriate time to start a day. People really love it when you greet them with a Good Morning! at four in the afternoon. Breakfast is whatever thing I first eat. Dinner is whatever thing I eat last before I go to bed.

The weird thing is when people start drinking. To them, it's a party after a long day of work or study or whatever the fuck regular people do. You know, a casual evening cocktail, and then later they go to bed.

Except for me, it's roughly "noon", give or take an hour.
So that's an interesting start to my day!
"We're getting drunk!" "What? Are you crazy? It's not even twelve o'clock!" "....It's six thirty."

Now typically, I like to end my nights of debauchery by flinging myself head first into the nearest My Own Bed available, sleeping through the potential hangover period and waking up fine late the next morning. But now, I'm not actually tired. So I have the unpleasant experience of sobering up throughout the "afternoon" period of what real people would call the early hours of the morning.

Getting drunk in reverse is not as fun as you'd think.

Then, it's back to the internet for...many things.

Having the house to myself throughout the night/morning (my evening/night waitwhat) is fun though, and this whole "sunrise" thing people have been telling me about for so long has turned out to be actually pretty neat. Birds wake up along a two hour period from four to six, and cars start driving past by five.

Which is my 11pm.

By around 7am to 9am alpha I'm fairly tired and the internet has run out entirely.
(My bandwidth during this time, by the way, is usually fucking stellar. I could torrent the nation if only I had a single thing I was interested in.)
It will be another hour or two before regular people get up, but even though I wouldn't mind making the push to hold out and get truly nocturnal I usually crash and sleep, finally ending my yesterday hours before people start today.

Actually, crash is the wrong word. I don't wearily drag myself to bed and fall asleep immediately.
More often than not I'll actually just arbitrarily declare it "probably time to sleep, right?" and then lay in bed watching my curtains slowly glow brighter until I drift off to the sound of everyone just starting to get down to the business of my tomorrow.

So basically, summer is a giant load of crap and I'm utterly fucked when it's time to be a real person again.
This is bullshit, you're bullshit, and everything is bullshit.

Wind On Fire

The Wind on Fire Trilogy is one of the best young fantasy series I could recommend.
I'm in the middle of rereading the second book right now and it's a wonderful and strange feeling, to re-experience the actual book and my initial memory/feelings (and subsequent reading/feelings) at the same time.

I think the reason the Harry Potter books were so beloved - not just enjoyed, but loved - was due to the fact that they grew up with us.

This only half means the characters aged as we aged - although that was significant.
I mean the writing style, the seriousness of the plot, the interactions of the characters, the subject matter, all got progressively more....adult, as we did.
I mean, the first one is sort of a "tralala yerawizardEri, ever flavor beans" and the third one is "hey, there are actual dark wizards around" and the fourth one is where things start going "hey, woah, holy shit", and the fifth is "oh my god fuck" and the sixth is "fuckfuckfuck" and the seventh is just a soundless, agape O-shaped mouth.

So that metaphor was stupid.

The Wind on Fire trilogy is a much better and condensed example of works growing up with the readers. It's one of the few book series that I would actually want to space out throughout a young readers life, on a scale of months if not years. (Other series, I hear you asking me to support my argument, include Ursula LeGuinn's Earthsea [from, say, sixth to eighth grade] and honestly maybe even His Dark Materials, just for the emotional content requiring maturity [not, of course, to insinuate with great age comes great maturity. In these examples I am {as I am entitled to do on this blog} assuming the hypothetical person we are discussing is merely a copy of myself.] in order to be fully understood)

Ah, been a while since I let one of those triple-bracketers out. Must be this rereading of old books. I'm a sentimental old man.

Each book is just so different, so changed, so perfect for its specific duty.
The rarity of three separate and specific things working harmonically, carrying a thread of characters and story throughout, just makes you appreciate it all the more each time you change books.

The first one, The Wind Singer, is a fable. Possibly even a fairy tale.
It's a journey story, it's a fantasy novel in which there is set a stage and a cast of characters and we learn about the history and the past and everything is told in simple terms and...has this dreamy quality about it that you just accept. No, not accept as in you acknowledge and read in spite of - I mean it has that matter of fact statement of the incredible style in the manner of American tall tales (i.e. "Well, what I reckon I need is a gun, said Pecos Bill. So he invented himself the six shooter.)
The children go on a journey. There is a goal of salvation, an evil to oppose them, a clear delineation of good and bad, a diverse cast of characters.
Everything is so simple - not stupid, not small, just simple. There is only one of everything. The mountain is The Mountain. The desert is The Desert. People who are good are All Good, and those who are Evil are Pure Evil (and, may I add, downright unsettling).

This is not to say that it is a typical tale, of course. The Wind Singer is lovely and original. It is beautiful and captivating and it ends happily and with closure. This book could exist alone, and ought to for the young child who reads it.


Because Slaves of the Mastery, the second book, tears it all down five years later. With terrible beauty. The City and its People burn to death. Are enslaved. Are marched across the land.

It makes the world so much bigger. There are other, greater evils than The Greatest and Only Evil. There are other cities, other lands, other peoples, and they need slaves. Characters who were toddlers are now fully fledged young identities. The older among them are that much closer to death.
Characters who were teens are now young adults.
And all that that entails.

Slaves of the Mastery is the best of the books, simply because of the level of wonderment that comes from seeing this (beautifully rendered, fully functioning) two dimensional world and its characters suddenly get fleshed into three full dimensions.
New characters who are perfectly shaped to interact with these updated older characters are introduced. Unchanging concepts are, of course, challenged. Changed.
And behind it all, built upon the vague allusions of the first book, the real trilogy-wide storyline begins to take shape. We are given glimpses of the great and terrible future.

It is a time of exciting adolescence, of death and love and fight-dances and dance-fights. People die.
(It is worth noting here that the author of this book has written some other examples of this sort of thing.)


People we cared about die.
And people we hate, with good reason, die!
And some people who don't die, grow up and kill!
Or love.

I read the first Hunger Games book (with no small amount of apprehension, due to everyone reacting exactly the same when I asked them about it), and the whole time I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being instructed to feel strongly about something that didn't quite deserve the amount of emotion it was asking of me. It was a strange feeling, no doubt, but a highly specific one. It was too heavy handed in its emphasis that this was the thing I should be feeling contempt or horror or enthusiasm or hope for, and this was the thing I should be feeling at this time.
Several times I was reminded of a scene that paralleled the Hunger Games in Slaves of the Mastery, that managed to accomplish similar things with less everything and more skill. It spurred me to reread this series.

The best thing is how different it all feels, compared to the first one. Everything is ambiguous, and heroes behave poorly (but not in a heavy handed way, merely in a natural progression of events way) and -even worse- sometimes the evil is calm, compassionate, and rational. Sometimes the evil is beautiful and compelling.

The whole book is beautiful and compelling. But still....young adult, of course. Always with that grain of sand.

I mean salt.



The third one, Firesong, is exactly that.

I have no words for Firesong.

People die. Everyone dies.
Everyone also lives, of course. Because it's that type of book.
There is less time dilation, it pretty much picks up from the end of the second book - but then again, it follows all the way to the end of everyone's lives.
Everyone.
Characters from the second book that were picked up are changed as thoroughly as those from the first book were changed in the beginning of the second.
Everyone is older still.
Good and evil are totally ambiguous, and the style of telling even more so.
Back comes the dreamlike quality, in which our protagonists(?) drift through a world of incredible art and wonder, back comes the travel through a magical land with a cast of strange characters, but along with it comes the sobering reality of the second book.
If book one was the seed, and book two was the tree, book three is the house the tree was built into. And the fire the tree was burned in. And all the influences the tree has had.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to follow multiple lives throughout a trilogy of books of startling literary difference and somehow come out with an ending that is satisfying?
Sure, it's heartbreaking and gorgeous and final, but it's perfect. It fits, god damn it.

I'm so excited to finish the second and read the third book.
I'm so terrified.
Really. I'm apprehensive. I mean, how often do you reread the Amber Spyglass? This is not light reading. There are going to be tribulations. I know what the outcome is going to be, and I am still wary.

Read these fucking books.

(Holy shit man I just watched half of Gladiator again. Oh man.)

its important for you to remember, when cooking...to use food

This magical girl has won my heart

Each one is better than the last.

They are all amazing