David Barr Kirtley

Science fiction author and podcaster

Archives for August 2010

Retrospective on ’80s Cartoons – The Real Ghostbusters

by Leave a Comment

I think that Ghostbusters was the first movie I saw multiple times (five times) in the theater, and I was a big fan of the cartoon as well. It was called The Real Ghostbusters to distinguish it from a different, suckier cartoon called The Ghost Busters that was on during the same period and that had nothing to do with the movie. I remembered this being a pretty well-written show, but I was still surprised, looking over the episode list, to see how many of them were actually written by authors whose names I recognize (notably J. Michael Straczynski, Michael Reaves, and David Gerrold). There are three episodes I remember in particular, and I’m pretty sure that’s because these were some of the scariest ones I saw.

In the first of these, “The Thing in Mrs. Faversham’s Attic,” the Ghostbusters are called to the home of an elderly lady named Mrs. Faversham who complains of sinister thumping and laughter that emanates from her attic. The Ghostbusters investigate, and discover that the attic is impossibly large, and that every object in the attic seems suffused with malicious intelligence. Peter conducts a conversation with a creepy coatrack who demands that Peter bring him “Faversham.”

The Real Ghostbusters cartoon

When negotiations break down, the Ghostbusters attempt to flee the attic, only to find that the exit has vanished. It seems that the evil entity controls this space so completely that if it doesn’t want there to be an exit, there isn’t one. Fortunately the Ghostbusters are able to distract it enough with their proton beams that the exit reappears, and they’re able to escape.

But why, they wonder, would a being of such obvious power not simply follow them down out of the attic? After further questioning Mrs. Faversham, they deduce that her father had summoned this evil entity in hopes of bargaining with it for wealth, and when that hadn’t worked out he’d performed a spell to trap it in the attic.

The Real Ghostbusters cartoon

Eventually they’re able to trick it into manifesting itself, and are able to capture it in one of their ghost traps.

The next episode I really remember, and definitely the scariest one, is called “The Boogieman Cometh.” In this one, a pair of children attempt to hire the Ghostbusters to rid their closet of the “Boogieman.” Peter is skeptical, but Egon reveals that he too was once a victim of the Boogieman, who’s a sort of psychic vampire who feeds off the fear of children. And I don’t blame those kids one bit, because the Boogieman as drawn here still makes my skin crawl:

The Real Ghostbusters cartoon

The Ghostbusters eventually trail the Boogieman into his lair, an Escher-esque realm where gravity and perspective mean nothing, and which is full of doorways leading into the closets of the Boogieman’s various victims.

The Real Ghostbusters cartoon

I sort of wonder if anyone who worked on Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. had seen this episode, because there are a lot of similarities, right down to the climax — a chase scene that goes into and out of different closets and bedrooms.

The last episode I really remember is called “The Man Who Never Reached Home.” In it, the Ghostbusters have stopped at a diner when Ray encounters a man in a horse and buggy who asks for directions to Providence. Ray gives directions, but the man refuses to believe him. The man has been riding all night, he says, and yet he never seems to get any closer to home. He then flees in terror, just ahead of a mysterious cowled horseman, who rides off after him.

The Real Ghostbusters cartoon

A diner employee reveals that the guy in the buggy is Queg, a local man who disappeared over a hundred years ago and who reappears periodically, still trying to find his way home. Ray determines to help this poor ghost. The Ghostbusters manage to track down Queg, and Ray urges him to step down from his buggy. This leads Egon, who’s studying a ghost-meter, to remark, “Ray, I don’t think he can get down from the buggy. It and the horse are powerful class 9 spectres. Queg’s merely a class 6. He’s not strong enough to resist them.” I’ve always loved that line.

In the end, Ray convinces Queg to turn and face the rider who has harried him all these years, and Queg agrees. In a flash of lightning, Queg spies the face of his pursuer for the first time:

The Real Ghostbusters cartoon

“That’s my face!” Queg cries. “It … it’s me. I’ve been running away from … myself.” Holy shit, Real Ghostbusters. You just blew my mind.

Queg summons up the courage to face himself, and is then free, after all these years, to finally go home.

More on Colloidal Silver

by Leave a Comment

In reponse to my post on colloidal silver turning skin blue, John Willy writes:

I am taking colloidal silver for sinus congestion, etc., and it works great. There are no harmful side effects at all. It is completely natural. To turn blue, my doctor states that you would need to take 2 bottles of silver a day for 70+ years. I am taking a couple teaspoons a day for a few months.

Hi John. To say that something is “completely natural” doesn’t indicate anything about its safety. Many, many poisons, from arsenic to deadly nightshade, are completely natural. There are countless reports online from people who are much younger than seventy who have suffered severe adverse health effects (turning blue is just one extreme example) from taking colloidal silver. Most chronic conditions fluctuate over time, so it’s very difficult to say with any certainty whether one person’s improvement is due to a particular treatment or not. That’s why it’s necessary to do statistically significant studies involving thousands of subjects to establish whether a treatment actually works or not. I strongly encourage you to do more research on colloidal silver, as I think the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence suggests that it’s not an effective treatment.

Retrospective: Richard Garriott’s Ultima Series

by 2 Comments

Update: In March of 2014 I interviewed Richard Garriott about the Ultima series and his new game Shroud of the Avatar.

 
One of my favorite computer game series is Richard Garriott’s Ultima series, which at its artistic peak, from Ultima IV through Ultima VII, achieved the highest level of ambition and art that I’m aware of in video games.

Ultima 4 game art Ultima 5 game art Ultima 6 game art

I never played the first three Ultima games, but I know the general outlines. In Ultima, you have to kill an evil wizard named Mondain. He’s created a gem that makes him immortal, so the only way to kill him is to travel back in time to before he made the gem. In Ultima II, you have to kill Mondain’s protege/lover, the sorceress Minax. In Ultima III, you have to kill a demonic being named Exodus, who is actually some sort of AI machine who can only be destroyed by inserting into his body the proper Tarot cards, a la computer punch cards. So far it’s pretty standard RPG stuff.

Ultima IV is different. In that one there’s no big bad guy you have to kill. Instead, the main focus of the game is on moral self-improvement. As you journey through the game world, completing quests and acquiring items, you’re constantly tested on your adherence to eight virtues — honesty, compassion, valor, honor, justice, sacrifice, humility, and spirituality. Only a character who behaves in an exemplary fashion can successfully complete the game.

Ultima IV established a model that would be repeated in Ultima V and Ultima VI. Each game begins with you living your ordinary life on earth:

Ultima 6 game intro

You then encounter a glowing gateway which transports you into a magical realm:

Ultima 6 game intro

You are then presented with a series of ethical dilemmas, each of which pits two of the eight virtues against each other:

Ultima 6 game intro

The type of character you’ll be in the game depends on what choices you make. For example, a person who values valor above all other virtues will play the game as a warrior.

In Ultima IV, the final quest you have to complete is to venture into a volcanic labyrinth called the Stygian Abyss and retrieve an artifact called The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, a magical book that always falls open to the page containing exactly what you wanted to know. In true Indiana Jones fashion, claiming the Codex causes massive tectonic upheaveals, and a vast catacomb opens beneath the earth. The benevolent ruler of the realm, Lord British (an alter ego of series creator Richard Garriott), leads an expedition to chart this new environment, but his party never returns. In his absence, his aide Lord Blackthorn goes mad and imposes an absolutist interpretation of the eight virtues, e.g. be honest or have your tongue ripped out. You then find yourself, in Ultima V, acting as a sort of Robin Hood-style outlaw, trying to take down the system that your example helped inspire.

In Ultima VI, Lord British has been restored to the throne, but problems persist. Strange new creatures called gargoyles have been emerging from the underground catacombs and wreaking havoc. The gargoyles even lure you through a moongate and attempt to sacrifice you in ritual fashion:

Ultima 6 game intro

Fortunately you’re rescued by your loyal friends. Ultima VI is subtitled “The False Prophet,” and it’s not initially clear who or what the false prophet is, but presumably he’s some sort of villain, probably a gargoyle. In Ultima VI, the earth is literally flat — you can sail to the edge and look over the side — and you eventually discover that the catacombs you inadvertently opened in Ultima IV lead all the way through the earth and emerge on the opposite side, where the gargoyles dwell. You then discover that the tectonic upheavals that created the catacombs are destroying their world, causing their cities to sink into the sea, and only a small island yet remains to them. It turns out that the Codex was their greatest treasure, and that you are the False Prophet who stole it from them, and that your sacrifice will save their world. Fortunately you’re able to negotiate a peace between humans and gargoyles, and to arrange for the Codex to be shared between them:

Ultima 6 game ending

In Ultima VII, you return to the magical realm of Britannia and immediately get caught up in trying to solve a string of ritual murders. You soon cross paths with Batlin, the leader of a new self-help organization called the Fellowship, who disdain healers in favor of willing yourself back to health and who promote their own ethical system as an alternative to the eight virtues. The Fellowship is obviously a satire of the Church of Scientology, right down to their leader Batlin, who bears a striking resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard:

Ultima 7 Batlin   L. Ron Hubbard

If you live in New York, you constantly encounter Scientologists in the subway stations offering to give you free “stress tests” which invariably reveal that you’re terribly stressed out and can only be cured by Scientology. Likewise, in Ultima VII Batlin administers a personality test to you, sort of a warped echo of the eight virtues questions, except in this test every choice you pick is the wrong answer and reveals deep flaws in your character that only the Fellowship can help you overcome. There’s a Fellowship hall in each town, and the members gather there each night and tell their stories. You quickly realize that all the biggest jerks in any given town are members of the Fellowship, and that their tales of how the Fellowship has helped them are deeply unreliable — for example, the town bully might talk about how the Fellowship has helped him to assert himself. The Fellowship also engages in scuzzy behavior like trying to coerce the poor into joining by offering charitable services only to its members. As with any cult, most of the low-level members are well-meaning dupes, but Batlin and the upper echelons of the leadership have a very sinister agenda — to use member donations to finance the construction of a black moongate that will allow the evil godlike being they worship to cross into Brittannia:

Ultima 7 game ending

Throughout the game, this evil entity, called the Guardian, talks to you in your head, playing cruel mind games with you.

Ultima IV, Ultima V, Ultima VI, and Ultima VII were true works of art and obvious labors of love. Ultima VII in particular featured just a staggering amount of detail. You could pick up and use just about any object in the game, and there were a hundred or more characters each with their own personality, daily schedule, and conversation tree. Unfortunately creating something like that wasn’t cheap, and Garriott faced the constant prospect of financial ruin if one of the games underperformed. He eventually agreed to sign up with his biggest rival, Electronic Arts (EA). Hints of this rivalry are woven into the plot of Ultima VII. The ritual murders are being committed by a couple named Elizabeth and Abraham (initials E & A), and the Guardian is exerting malign magical influence on the realm through the use of three giant monoliths — a cube, a sphere, and a pyramid (at the time, EA’s logo consisted of a cube, a sphere, and a pyramid). Unfortunately the merger turned out to be basically the end of Ultima. Future installments were rushed out the door to make a quick buck, and were buggy and disappointing.

I understand that the rights to the Ultima IP are so tangled that we’re unlikely to ever see another installment, which is a terrible shame. It would be great to play a new Ultima adventure that returned to the quality of Ultima VII. Failing that, it would be great to see more games that incorporated the sort of fully-realized world, emphasis on storytelling, and thoughtful consideration of ethical issues that made the Ultima games so powerful and unique.

Strategic Freebies

by Leave a Comment

So on Saturday I appeared alongside Saladin Ahmed, Laura Anne Gilman, and Blake Charlton at Borders bookstore in New York. This was a very last-minute thing, and details were being worked out right down to the wire. Initially Blake had asked if I’d be interested in joining him at the end for a group signing. I said I’d be happy to, though it seemed to me pretty unlikely that anyone would actually have something they’d want me to sign. It occurred to me that maybe I should just bring a few books that I’m in and give them away, since then there’d be at least that many people with something for me to sign. Then it occurred to me that The Living Dead 2 is coming out next month, and that if I gave away copies of The Living Dead, that would not only give me something to sign, but it would also give me a chance to promote The Living Dead 2, and maybe some of the people who got a free copy of The Living Dead would be motivated to purchase the sequel. Even though The Living Dead is a massive tome, copies of it are relatively cheap on Amazon ($11), so I ordered half a dozen. My first thought was to just give one to the first six people who came up and talked to me at the signing, but then it occurred to me that probably the first people to approach me would be my friends and acquaintances, and it seemed a little pointless to be giving away free books to people who already know me pretty well. So then I hit on the idea of offering the free books only to people I don’t already know. At the close of my reading (it ended up that I did a short reading in addition to the signing), I explained that I had six books I was willing to give away to people that I didn’t already know, and did anyone matching that description want one? I counted off the first six people who raised their hands, and encouraged them to approach me afterward for their free signed book. That worked out really well. I got to meet a number of new people I wouldn’t otherwise have talked to (including a successful author and a book editor’s assistant), I got a copy of one of my stories into the hands of six new readers, and they all got a free book that includes not just me but lots of big-name authors as well. And sure it cost me money, but when you compare the cost to say, buying a round or two of drinks, it seems pretty reasonable, especially considering how infrequently I do signings.

Forgotten ’80s Cartoons – Bionic Six

by 1 Comment

Here’s another quite good cartoon from the ’80s that almost no one seems to remember — Bionic Six.

It’s about a seemingly normal family who secretly moonlight as superheroes. The backstory (as explained in flashback in Episode 10) is that the father had secretly been transformed into a bionic superhero by his scientist pal, then when the rest of the family was injured while on a skiing holiday, the father had no choice but to make them all bionic too:

bionic six cartoon

Their powers can be turned on and off, and only last a certain amount of time before having to be recharged. The family consists of a father and mother, their two biological kids — a boy jock and a girl airhead — and their two adopted kids — an African-American science nerd and a Japanese-born martial arts enthusiast. There’s also a robot gorilla, but the less said about him the better. This was honestly never my favorite show growing up, as I always found its relentless cheerfulness somewhat cloying, but it does have its moments, and I just re-watched some of the episodes I remember most vividly, and I think I’d have to say that so far this show actually holds up better than any other old cartoons I’ve tried to go back and re-watch.

In one episode, Eric, the jock, gets scouted by the Yankees, and is invited to New York to compete for a baseball scholarship. Eric has always been a local sports star, but he quickly realizes that he’s badly outclassed here. In particular there’s a phenomenal young athlete named Corky who goes out of his way to mock Eric’s ineptitude:

bionic six cartoon

Eric gets angry and rationalizes to himself why it’s right that he should get to use his bionics to compete, and soon he’s blowing Corky out of the water. Later Eric finds Corky crying. Corky apologizes for acting like a jerk earlier, and confides that his parents have scrimped and saved their whole lives in hopes of giving him a better life, and now that he’s blown his one big chance at a scholarship, he doesn’t know how he’ll ever face them. Eric feels terrible, and ultimately turns down the scholarship in favor of Corky. This was for me the best and most memorable story in the show. Eric had something he desperately wanted, he had to make a choice about whether to cheat or not, he rationalized his behavior in a fairly sophisticated way, then later a supposed villain was revealed to have hidden depths, and the situation became even more morally ambiguous than it had at first appeared, giving Eric an even tougher choice to make.

Speaking of this episode, I find it a little hard to believe that whoever animated this scene wasn’t enjoying himself just a little too much:

bionic six cartoon

Yeah, so Bunji just rescued his sister from an oncoming train. Why, what did you think was happening?

Another episode I remembered really vividly is one in which a wealthy heiress challenges the Bionic 6 to a test of wits, since she feels that their success is due entirely to their superpowers. The heroes have to navigate a mansion teeming with traps and puzzles, all of which are somehow related to Sherlock Holmes stories:

bionic six cartoon

It’s a fantastic premise which the episode itself unfortunately doesn’t really live up to. Mostly the heroes just battle robots who have only the most tenuous connection to anything in Conan Doyle. (The “hound of the Baskervilles,” for example, is a sword-wielding werewolf.) The episode is nonetheless pretty memorable, and did make me curious to read the stories whose titles were mentioned.

In one episode the family’s scientist pal opens a time portal and sends them on a mission to discover the source of the radiation that wiped out the dinosaurs. (Just FYI, the dinosaurs were not actually wiped out by radiation, but it makes a good cartoon.)

bionic six cartoon

So anyway, a few of the villains infiltrate the expedition, and one of them sneaks a laser gun through the portal. In the ensuing scuffle, the gun is damaged and falls to the ground. At the end of the episode, the scientist muses that they never did discover the source of the radiation that killed the dinosaurs, as the camera lingers over the forgotten laser gun, which is still beeping and sparking. I always found that immensely creepy and cool.

On that note, these old cartoons are full of directed-energy weapons. I guess it’s a matter of science fiction tradition — ray guns and all that — as well as convenience — you can’t really show bodies being shredded by bullets in a children’s cartoon, and these energy weapons all seem to do about as much damage as being slapped with a 2×4. But given the ubiquity of energy weapons in all the shows I grew up with, it was a bit of a shock for me to discover how unlikely they actually are — even if we could harness the power of cold fusion or antimatter, it’s just not clear how you could possibly generate enough energy inside a handheld object to make any sort of laser pistol feasible.

The finale of Bionic Six is called “That’s All, Folks,” and it’s full of fun meta touches. At the beginning, the heroes are watching an awards ceremony for a retiring cartoonist. But then the cartoonist goes off script in a Kanye West sort of way and reveals that he’s being forced into retirement by an uncaring studio so obsessed with focus groups that they’ve lost all perspective on what makes cartoons cool. (Yeah, the fact that this was the last episode of a canceled series is probably not coincidental.) The cartoonist then opens a glowing portal in the air and vanishes from the stage. The heroes eventually end up following him into an alternate dimension where everything behaves like in an old Warner Bros. cartoon:

bionic six cartoon

At the end of the episode, when the heroes are all safely back in their own world, one of them muses along the lines of, “You know, all the inhabitants of that cartoon universe didn’t know that they were just cartoons. It makes you wonder, how do we know that we’re not just cartoons too?” They immediately dismiss this as absurd, while outside their home goofy-looking cartoons critters scamper into view and start holding up signs saying, “Goodbye!”

My Picture Book for The Last Unicorn

by Leave a Comment

So my friend Keith just posted a thing about watching The Last Unicorn for the first time. That’s one of my favorite movies, and one I’ve rewatched countless times. My parents read me the novel on a camping trip when I was four years old, and then we saw the animated movie in the theater. I was so taken with the film that afterward I spent all night making my own picture book of it, which I still have. It’s 25 pages long and tells the whole story from beginning to end, though some of the illustrations are fairly abstract and I don’t know if anyone besides me could decipher what they’re supposed to be. Here are some of the better ones:

Warning: Last Unicorn Spoilers.

“Stay where you are, poor beast, for this is no world for you. Stay in your forest, and keep your trees green, and your friends protected. And good luck to you, for you are the last.”

Man, drawing horses is hard.

I got a little confused here. I knew the unicorn had temporarily ended up with multiple horns, but I couldn’t remember whether it was two horns or three. After some agonizing, I went with three. Dammit.

“My lady, you deserve the services of a great magician, but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.”

Unicorns? I don’t see no unicorns. Just this lovely young lady. Well, back to my cave.

Oh yeah, now I’m a unicorn again, sucka. Get back in that ocean before I give you the last magic-horn beat-down.

The unicorn resurrects Prince Lir (not to scale).

Sympathy for the Devil Anthology

by Leave a Comment

Here’s the latest anthology from Night Shade Books, Sympathy for the Devil, edited by Tim Pratt and featuring another fantastic cover by David Palumbo.

Sympathy for the Devil Anthology Tim Pratt

This book includes the story “MetaPhysics” by my good friend Elizabeth Glover, which first appeared in Realms of Fantasy and which was her first fiction sale. I suggested it for inclusion in this book (via the online recommendations page) only to learn later that about four of my friends had already done the same.

Also, the acknowledgments page for this book cracks me up:

Forgotten ’80s Cartoons – Inhumanoids

by 1 Comment

So I just got an email from my friend Josh, who I haven’t seen since high school. He and I went to Day Care together when we were little kids, and he remembers my early Cats in Victory books, and mentioned that he once bought an Inhumanoids action figure that I made. I’ve been meaning to post something about sadly neglected ’80s cartoons, and his email motivated me to write up an entry on Inhumanoids. It’s not really “forgotten,” since it still has fans and fan sites and stuff, but I definitely get a lot of blank stares when I bring it up, whereas everyone remembers He-Man, Transformers, ThunderCats, G.I. Joe, etc.

Inhumanoids is basically G.I. Joe meets H.P. Lovecraft. It’s about a team of scientists who wear power armor suits and who battle giant indestructible subterranean monsters. Incidentally, it has got to be one of the scariest children’s cartoons ever made. I’m astounded/eternally grateful that this was ever shown on Saturday mornings on American television. By far the scariest thing about it is the dinosaur-headed monster “D’Compose,” who has an exposed ribcage that he can swing open and shut in order to imprison hapless humans against his pulsating mass of internal organs:

D'Compose Inhumanoids

He also has a corrupting touch that can transform anyone into a giant zombie monstrosity who shrieks, “I am one with D’Compose!”:

D'Compose Inhumanoids

D'Compose Inhumanoids

D'Compose Inhumanoids

Seriously, I just re-watched this scene (toward the end of this clip) and it still gives me the creeps.

There was also a plant/slime monster called “Tendril,” who’s basically a dead ringer for Cthulhu:

Tendril Inhumanoids

He wasn’t as scary as D’Compose, but it was kind of creepy how any part of his body could grow into a whole new Tendril monster if you weren’t careful. Actually, given how overt the Lovecraft influence is here, I wish someone would’ve clued me in to that — I could have discovered Lovecraft fifteen years or so before I actually did.

The leader of the Inhumanoids is Metlar, though I always thought he looked pretty lame — sort of a werewolf in scale mail. He’s really powerful though, and ages ago the non-human good guys were able to imprison him by having two guys with an electromagnetic superpower just start blasting him, and not relent for thousands of years, since he’s indestructible:

Metlar Inhumanoids

I always found that really disturbing too, the thought of these two guys straining for countless years to keep this horrible monster at bay, both of them knowing that they’ll never be free of this obligation, never have any sort of life except standing in this cave, striving with evil, knowing that if their concentration or willpower ever flags, it’ll be the end of everything.

…Or so they think, because it turns out that the mad scientist Blackthorne Shore is able to learn enough about these guys’ electromagnetic superpower to be able to construct a power armor suit that gives him the same ability:

Blackthorne Inhumanoids

His sinister plan is to manipulate the Inhumanoids and achieve global conquest. Though what always disconcerted me most about Blackthorne wasn’t his evil schemes, but his mastery of science. I mean, imagine you’re these two guys who’ve been blasting Metlar 24-7 for the past few eons, and you have to keep doing it because you’re the only two who possess this incredible superpower, but then you find out that some mere human who’s an inconsequential 35 years old or whatever has come along and put together a freaking machine that can do everything you can do, only better. For whatever reason that plot development always gave me an almost vertiginous feeling about the potential of technology that was just as scary as the giant monsters.

Kzin Faceplant Video

by Leave a Comment

So I’ve never been big on home movies, but I do have some footage of my cats the day we brought them home from the pet store. Here’s a short clip which includes Kzin executing the most epic kitten faceplant of all time:

KzinFaceplant.mov

I’m afraid that in all the intervening years, Kzin has yet to do anything that tops this.

Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Reading

by Leave a Comment

So a lot of people have been asking to see some video of the reading I gave at the Library of Congress when I was in high school.

Okay, not really, but here it is anyway:

ScholasticAwardReading.mov

Yeah, that’s right, unlike some seventeen-year-olds I might name, who’ve accomplished absolutely nothing in their lives, by the time I was seventeen I’d already racked up an impressive series of writing awards and publications, all of which had me totally convinced that I was going to be rich and famous by the time I turned 30.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Ahahahahahaha. Hahaha.

Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, so anyway I won this Gold Award in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and they invited me down to DC to give a reading at the Library of Congress. Seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime, so I made the trip. So I get to the place, and they inform everyone that due to the large numbers of readers there’s going to be a strictly enforced time limit of five minutes per person. My story was pretty short, but even so there was no way I could read the whole thing in five minutes, so I pulled out a pen and started hastily crossing out large sections of the story — basically I had to trim it down to just the climactic confrontation.

The story, BTW, was called “Recreational Suicide.”

So I read my story (quickly), and then later I got a letter asking if I wanted to buy a videotape of my appearance. It wasn’t cheap — something like $60 — but I figured this was something my grandkids would probably be dying to see someday, so I ordered a copy.

So the tape arrives, and I pop it in the VCR, and I watch this girl start reading her story, and I’m like, “Hey, that’s not me.” I had sort of expected that the tape was just going to be of my reading, but actually it was the whole hours-long session, so I’m fast forwarding and fast forwarding and not seeing myself, and this went on for a long time, and every once in a while I’d get curious and actually play the tape and listen to one of the readings, but they were all boring high school kid crap about their stupid feelings blah blah blah with nary a cyborg or evisceration in sight, and finally I get to my appearance and start playing it and …

Well, you can watch it if you want. Basically the tape cuts out right as I’m starting and picks up again moments before I finish. I don’t know what happened. Maybe they ran out of tape right in the middle of my reading, and then spent several minutes looking around for a replacement? Whatever, out of all those dozens and dozens of kids, I’m the only one who got mostly cut out. There’s less than a minute of my reading, which at sixty bucks works out to about a dollar per second of footage. So I hope you enjoy it.

Blake Charlton, Laura Anne Gilman, David Barr Kirtley in NYC Saturday

by Leave a Comment

So the Blake Charlton appearance on Saturday is a go! Also, he’s kindly invited a few local authors to share the stage with him, including me. I’ll be giving away a few copies of The Living Dead and probably reading something very short. Definitely swing by if you’re in the neighborhood — 4 pm (note time change) at Borders Bookstore at Columbus Circle.

New Author Photo – August 2010

by 1 Comment

New author photo:

David Barr Kirtley Author Photo August 2010

Today it occurred to me that I could probably use my Macbook’s built-in camera to record myself performing my stories. I tested it out, then started experimenting with different backdrops (bookshelves, blank wall, etc.). I dragged over my lamp to try out some dramatic lighting for reading a horror story. I accidentally ended up with this lighting here, which I thought looked kind of cool, so I snapped a few pics using Photo Booth, and I liked this one enough to throw it up on my site as my new author photo. Some people were giving me crap recently because my author photo was from way back in 2007, so I hope you’re all happy now.

Laurie Santos How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality

by Leave a Comment

Here’s an interesting new TED talk on YouTube: Laurie Santos: How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality.

It seems that the human brain is structured in such a way that we are irrationally opposed to accepting losses, whether on our stocks or on our houses, and this way of thinking has contributed to the financial collapse. In fact, people will give wildly varying answers to the same exact scenario depending on whether the question is phrased as a potential gain or a potential loss. The question is, do our monkey relatives share this same cognitive deficit?

Laurie Santos How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality

Roger Barr

My grandfather Roger Barr passed away early this morning at the age of 98. He was my mom’s father, and was my last surviving grandparent. He was being cared for by my uncle Steve (his son) and aunt Denice — both medical professionals — and was still sharp and good-humored in his final days. Yesterday […]

David Barr Kirtley

David Barr Kirtley is the host of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, for which he’s interviewed over four hundred guests, including George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, Simon Pegg, Margaret Atwood, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. His short fiction appears in the book Save Me Plz and Other Stories.