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Just a few of my favorite cyberpunk novels

• Snow Crash
• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive
• Trouble and Her Friends
• Islands in the Net
• Burning Chrome
• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow’s Parties
• Rainbow’s End

Anyone have any other recommendations?

The zombie apocalypse is coming.  It might be tomorrow, or it might be next year, but it’s definitely coming.  Are you prepared?

I’ve been working on a plan for survival for some time now.  I think I’ve got it nailed down pretty good now.  We’ll see in the upcoming year or two.

First, my assumptions.  I’m going with the worse case.

Yes, some folk may sneer at fast zombies.  They prefer the old-school George Romero style leg draggers, but why simply assume those stupid lumbering fragile corpses will be the worst thing you’ll face.  I’m preparing for fast zombies.  The Left 4 Dead I Am Legend style zombies.  Ones who were turned while alive and still have zoom left in those bones.

I’m also going with the infectious zombie paradigm.  Get bitten and you turn, simple as that.  Even a scratch could give you the nasty.  The epidemiology of zombiedom would be rough.  It’ll spread far and wide, with very few left untouched.  And those will be the smart and quick.  No immunity get-out-of-zombie free card around here.

And, worst case, the surviving people go a bit feral.  More than a bit.  It’ll all be survivalist rednecks and the like.  They may actually be worse than the zombies.

So, here’s the plan.

Soon as the outbreak gets a bit real, there’ll be an increased military presence.  If y’all see more than, say, ten military choppers in the sky, it’s time to bail.  Until then, hide in your basement, or in your neighbors basement.  Gather food, water, fuel, clothing, guns, and tools, both power and not.

Once the choppers show up, and I’m picking choppers as an arbitrary sign that y’all should be able to see, well once they show up, I’m making my way to Shilshole Bay Marina.  There are plenty of boats there, and we’ll need the biggest sailboats we can find.  If you can’t sail, well, you’ll have to learn.

We’ll nab the biggest few we can find, load up all of our supplies.  Hopefully the diesel tanks will be full, but if not, we may need to fill up.  Water too.

We’ll then head north.  Don’t look back, stay in the middle of the sound, and head north.  Up past the San Juans, past Vancouver Island, almost to Alaska.  There are a lot of small islands up there.  A lot.  And Fjords.  Plenty of remote places to hide and set up a lair.

We’ll find a nice abandoned island, possibly with a few structures on it, and a fjord with a dock.  Good for hiding.

Once we make set up, we’ll use that as our home port for….pirating.  Yes, the plan is to become pirates.

It’ll be tough at first, as most of the water traffic will be motorboats, faster than our sailboats, but once fuel becomes a bit scarce, the tides will turn, so to speak.  We’ll mount cannons on our deck (that’s what the tools are for, to make cannons.)  We’ll have cutlasses.  We’ll be good old-fashioned pirates.

Water traffic will die down, so we’ll need to do what all good pirates do when there’s not much fair game on the open seas.  We’ll pillage.  We’ll head to small towns here and there, chop our way through any zombie hordes, which should be easy ’cause you only get tens of thousands of zombies in small towns in the movies and video games.  Any survivors?  We’ll need to deal with them, but we’ll have surprise on our side.  Who expects real pirates.  And hey, maybe they’ll want to join us.

There should be plenty of ale and rum to be had.  Zombies don’t drink booze.  We’ll of course go after that first.  And salt pork.  And lemons.  Don’t want to get scurvy.

I think good old fashioned piracy is probably the best strategy for zombie-end-days survival.  Well, it’s at least the most stylish.

Yarrrrr!

Ok, this is getting ridiculous.
78 Minutes of summer?  Come on, Seattle.  I know you can do better.  I had such high hopes when we had the first sunny 4th of July in memory.

After this last winter, we deserve a little pity.  Maybe it’s the solar flares.  Maybe it’s Leviathan or the Kraken.  I don’t know and I don’t care.  I want a little bit o sun.

And here Minnesota is suffering through 120 degrees of apparent heat. I’d be willing to take 15 or 20 of those degrees.  Just for a little while.

Argh!

There’s recently been a huge debate as to whether “dark” YA (Young Adult  fiction dealing with bullying, rape, violence, sex, incest, cutting and so on) is appropriate for the teenage crowd.  It all started with this Wall Street Journal article (why the WSJ is covering this topic is another discussion).

Seriously?  I totally can’t comprehend why parents go into denial about what it’s like to be a teen.  I remember what it was like.  Maybe it’s because I don’t have kids, but I do remember.  And I’m, ahem, in the age range of parents of today’s teens.

Here’s what I remember:

• Bullying.  It was rampant if you were different.  Gay, a nerd, poor…whatever.  If you became a target of a bully, or even worse, a clique of kids, life could be hell.
• Abuse.  Emotional abuse or physical abuse.  (I was totally lucky here, my parents totally didn’t abuse me.)
• Divorce.  I wasn’t so lucky here.  My parents split when I was entering that age range.  That put a lot of strain on them, and, well, shit flows downhill.
• It was the start of the ‘latchkey kid’ era.  Both parents were forced to work to make ends meet.  Kids were raised by the television, or by their peers.  I was lucky here, one of my parents stayed at home.
• Neglect.  In some cases, parents had ‘stuff’ going on in their lives which prevented them from sufficiently raising their kids.  I wasn’t so lucky here, as the divorce and other issues had a serious impact on my later years.
• Alcoholism.  Some kids had alcoholic parents, which caused some of the above.  Alcohol became an example of a coping strategy for some.
• Sexual Abuse.  Rape, incest, molestation.  From people I’ve talked to, this was more common than was let on.
• Basic Teen Angst.  Hormones.  Sex.  Romantic feelings.  Grades.  It’s all there.
• Body image issues.  Leading to anorexia, bulimia and so on.
• World Events.  Seriously, there was a lot of anxiety by a lot of folk in my younger YA years that we would be wiped off the face of the earth by world war III.  We weren’t sheltered from that.  AIDS also appeared on the scene.  Yah it was a ‘gay disease’ to adults, but honestly, it was a guaranteed death sentence if one even came near a gay person.

I’m sure there are many more concerns kids had to go through that I didn’t hear about. From what I can tell, as I actually talk to people who are just out of their YA years, this stuff hasn’t gone away.  It’s worse.  We’re afraid we’ll be wiped out by terrorism.  We’ve had a war going on for a decade.  More parents need to work, leaving their kids to be raised by the internet.

 How do kids cope with this stuff?  As parents seem to be in total denial, and media targeted towards teens tends to be a bit candy coated,  I’ve seen and heard of stuff like:

• Dissociation.  Kids deny their emotions, their bodies, even deny their identity, leading to self-abuse.  Eating disorders, cutting, stunted emotional growth.
• Psychiatry.  My mother often sees teens in her psychotherapy practice.  Parents bring them in to deal with behavioral issues.  More often than not, according to my mom, it’s the parents who need guidance, not the kid.  The teens are just being teens.  Adolescence is crazy, but kids grow out of it if they get good role models and such.  Often, parents also throw prozac, ritalin, and other psychiatric drugs at their kids.  Some kids were/are even institutionalized for things like homosexuality…
• Runaways.  An obvious solution for abusive or neglectful parents.  Not surprisingly, a huge number of runaways are gay.  I volunteered at Lambert House for awhile, a drop-in center for LGBT youth.  The stories of parental abuse, and even abuse on the streets were chilling.
• Violence.  Seems we’re getting lots of messages that violence is a valid strategy for dealing with lives problems.  Makes ya wonder, although there are also studies that show that exposure to violent media doesn’t cause violence.
• Crime.  Some kids cope by taking their frustrations out on society.

So seriously.  Why are so many parents so opposed to exposing teens to media containing positive coping strategies for all this awful stuff.  “Dark” YA fiction is that media.

Some examples…
 Harry Potter lost his parents and was neglected and abused.  And he was ‘different.’  What’s the message of the series?  There are other folk like you.  Being different can make you strong.  Good friends will support you.  All very positive.

 Heathers?  Abuse.  Dissociation.  Bullying.  Violence can end badly for everyone involved.  Get your head out of your ass and hang out with your real friends.

 I guess the one thing we shoulda been taught back then.  Denial is not a valid coping strategy.