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The Amory Wars: An Epic Tale by Coheed and Cambria

May 9, 2010 / Benjamin Kenneally posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

I first stumbled into this story just after In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: III was released.

What a bunch of craziness. New prog-rock with an overarching story of sci-fi awesomeness, with a singer who looks like an angry mexican factory worker got attacked by a mophead and lost and sounds like Geddy Lee taught him all he knows.

Following the story was nearly impossible at that point. Some points in the lyrics definitely told you what was going on, but getting the overarching story was fucking impossible. Entire websites (which I pored over) were dedicated to dissecting the lyrics bit by bit and attempting to make a coherent whole of the thing.

Even better, comments and speculation show that the band may have changed the story based on ideas that the fans came up with as to what happened. If they liked the fans idea better than what they had in mind when they wrote it, they went with the fan idea instead.

Fucking brilliant. Crowdsourcing the plot of the story.

I went and purchased The Second Stage Turbine Blade shortly thereafter, and listened to all of it. A lot. I can sing all the songs along with both albums. Hell, I can pretty much do so with all their albums, now.

As the later albums appeared, I became even more impressed with their musicanship. Not only were they telling the story of Claudio, a young genetically made nanobot enhanced person (called an Irobot) and his fight against the corrupt government that killed his parents (as far as we could tell, anyway), but they were doing it with some damned finely crafted songs.

Then, the comic books came. The first set of comics started with Second Stage Turbine Blade, and showed even more of the story.

Strangely, later comics jumped ahead to Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV: Volume I From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. As a trade paperback. And how the fuck did they ever talk any record executive into allowing that to be the album title? Heavy psychedelics had to have been involved.

Then, the Second Stage comics died. We’re not entirely sure why.

Then, they restarted the comics as The Amory Wars. Starting with Second Stage Turbine Blade. Again.

The last album, Good Apollo I’m Burning Start IV: Volume II No World for Tomorrow, came out.

Then, the first album, Year of the Black Rainbow, was released.

It came with a big hardcover book that tells the tale of Coheed and Cambria, and their creator, and the start of the whole story.

It’s really rather good. Peter A David, one of the Babylon 5 writers, wrote it with the lead singer.

So, if you want a big-ass convoluted sci-fi tale of battles, love, and creepy enhanced people, this is the deal for you.

I just hope to hell that the rest of the story gets told in book form as well, or we’ll never make any damned sense of it all. However, it’ll still be fun to listen to.

Borderlines

March 16, 2010 / Benjamin Kenneally posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

Borders. The places between. At the edges of everywhere, you will find something interesting. Something akin to what is on either side, but somehow like neither thing.

In the physical world, borders are easy to find. They stand between countries, between cities, and between neighborhoods. Military bases, dive bars, wino hangouts, weird clubs…these are all the stuff of the borderlands.

On the internet, borders are harder to see. They tend to be places where cultures blend, since the physical realm is so meaningless here.

In the old days of the internet, the whole thing was a borderland. BBSs were the wild west of the digital world. You never knew what you mind find when you dialed in to one. Even now, borderlands can be found all over the net.

Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel strikes me as a borderland. Free flowing communication between people of all stripes. The only thing in common being a love for creativity. (Some of the posters there don’t even especially like Warren, which always amuses me.)

Amazing things happen on the borderlands. Cultures clash and mesh, idiotic ideas get bandied about (and sometimes brought to life), grand projects get undertaken, and friendships get made. These things happen elsewhere as well, but I always feel like they happen more often in the places between.

Tilted Forum Project is an old borderland. I hung out there often in the past, and still drop by from time to time now. The talk there is fabulous, and the community is great, but it’s gelled a bit as time goes by.

In some ways, Facebook is a borderland. As everyone uses it, there’s a ton going on there. You can bring together portions of your life that didn’t always co-mingle if you’re not careful.

In a similar way, the new My Outer Space might be a borderland. I only recently signed up, and it’s still getting together, so we’ll see what goes on there.

What borderlands do you hang out in? What magic spot where anything can happen do you point your address bar?

If you don’t have one, you should find one. Perhaps Wayne Coyne and the boys can help show you the way:

2009 Flaming Lips & Stardeath and White Dwarfs – Borderline from George Salisbury on Vimeo.

Better than Twilight, Part 6: Double Feature!!!

February 11, 2010 / uhwhat posted in Pat's Rants / No Comments

: Image via Wikipedia

My girlfriend, the incomparable and sadistic Joanna, pointed out to me the other day how much of a hypocrite I am by refusing to watch the Twilight movie. Therefore Saturday I watched it and have come to this conclusion: Just about anything is better than Twilight. I mean I’ve seen Uwe Boll movies that were better.

That being said, today we’re doing a double feature of vastly underrated B-Grade vampire movies from 1987. First up? Near Dark.

Near Dark tells the story of Caleb (Heroes‘s Adrian Pasdar), a farm boy that falls for a lovely young woman who happens to be part of a group of nomadic vampires lead by Jesse (played to the hilt by Lance Henrikson). Caleb soon finds himself in over his head this these brutal gypsy/biker/vampires.

The story is pretty straight forward: Forced into this vampiric family, Caleb has to deal with the wanton destruction and death that Jesse and crew leave in their wake. Eventually, with the help of his father, Caleb is cured and goes after the family to save the woman he loves.

Near Dark is truly an underrated movie. Excellent practical and make-up effects (Bill Paxton with his face torn up was so realistic that he played a prank at bar during the filming) totally cancels out the lack of budget. Unfortunately, when it came out, it was overshadowed by another vampire movie that hit theaters that year: Lost Boys.

Now, I’m sure everyone reading this has seen this movie, so I’m just going to cover the important bits. The plot of Lost Boys mirrors that of Near Dark, at least superficially. It’s a classic “boy meets girl, girl is part of a family of vampires, hilarity ensues” story, but one thing sets this one apart from so many other shitty movies: it knows it’s B-Grade. Bad jokes by The Corey’s totally lighten the mood are are supplied regularly any time it needs to be lightened. I mean, come on, who can’t love the “Bloodsucking Brady Bunch” joke?

So,why are these better than Twilight? More realistic vampire families. Unlike the Mormon analog of the Cullen’s in Twilight, both of these movies show the monstrous relationship that would occur within a group of vampires. Don’t forget, these are animals, and both vamp-fams in these movies act more like a pack of wolves rather than the propagandist perfection of Twilight.

Next time: Here there be Werewolves!

Weekend Fiction: The Comeback

January 22, 2010 / uhwhat posted in Fiction / No Comments

Via Wikipedia

Between the holidays, work, illness, and a killer 30th birthday party for Joanna, I’ve been a little slack in putting together the weekend fiction for the last few weeks. To make up for it, I’ve got a bunch of goodies and a new addition to our regulars here in the Weekend Fiction zone.

First up, a holiday gift from J.C. Hutchins called In the Nick 0f Time. It contains previews of not 1, not 2, not even 10 books. No, it previews 12, count them, 12 titles. Now I’ve read several of these and stories by some of the other authors and let me tell you, after reading this preview, I really feel the need to go to the bookstore.

Second, there is Hub Magazine, a free weekly e-zine with stories, reviews, and features such as interviews and in depth looks at different fiction. Best part? They’ll email you the new issues.

In podcasts, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Escape Pod have released a ton of excellent new stuff, but if I had to pick one from each, I’d say The Narcomancer, The Blessed Days, and Union Dues – The Threnody of Johnny Toruko. Speaking of sci-fi, The Clarkesworld Magazine Podcast put out 53+ minutes of awesome entitled The Things, a retelling of The Thing from the Thing’s point of view.

Also in podcasts, our buddies at Variant Frequencies put up the full version of Failed Cities: Hath a Darkness (link will work when there site gets back up).

And if you haven’t read it yet, we have a new story from Christopher A. Helton called One String at a Time.

And now, our new feature: Public Domain Goodies. Each week we’ll pick a public domain story or novel that we think are good reads. Why public domain? Well, that’s a another article entirely.

Anyways, this week’s Public Domain Goodies is Arthur Machen‘s The Great God Pan. Published in the 1890′s it was panned due to it’s depiction of sex and its decadent style, which puts it right up our alley. It’s also a good one to compare to Dracula since they were both published in the same era and are very sexually charged compared to other stories of the time. If you are also a buff of Horror Lit like myself, this was an important work that influenced H.P. Lovecraft who in turn influenced pretty much every horror since 1930.

That’s it for this week, but we could use your help. There is so much good stuff out there that we can use some help wrangling it, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to let us know.

2010: The Year We Make Trouble

January 4, 2010 / uhwhat posted in News / No Comments

Woot! It’s our month-aversery, and I think we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. We have regular readers, a small but growing Twitter and Facebook following, and thirty some-odd posts, so we are averaging on a day. When you consider we normally don’t post on the weekends and had 2 weeks in holidays, I’d say that’s a good job.

This beg’s the question: What’s next?

Well, here is the plan:

Columns

Mondays: Benjamin Kenneally’s Broadcast Domain – a techie’s take on storytelling.

Tuesdays: Pat’s Rants – There is always something pissing him off, and he’s going to tell you why.

Wednesdays: Tony Smith’s Harmonic Vicissitude – Band nerds get revenge with Tony in charge of our music column.

Daily Themes

Mondays: Tech – Good tech, crap tech, useful tech, story tech.

Tuesdays: Film and TV – bkI is taking on Hollywood, baby!!!

Wednesdays: Music – Get your soundtrack on.

Thursday: Wildcard – We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Fridays: Fiction – Original fiction and where to find the best free fiction on the net.

Coming Soon…

More Original Fiction – More fiction from our group of irregulars and some folks you haven’t heard from, yet.

More Reviews – Movies, music, books, you name it, we’ll review it.

Serials – Continuing stories, some written specially for bkI, not to mention the fact that we are unleashing Texas Noir on the world with the serialization of The Brotherhood of the Hand by Pat Humphreys and Chris Helton.

2010 is going to be a good year, boy’s and girls. Be sure to stick around.

Original Fiction: Lure by P.A. “Pat” Humphreys

December 25, 2009 / uhwhat posted in Fiction / No Comments

Yeah it’s Christmas, and we are running a Christmas story. However, its not your normal one. Based on a very short flash fiction piece, this is an amalgam of lots of things running through my head, like the season finally of Dexter and a comment that I am not real big on Christmas.

Ok, well, I’m not. It’s very commercial, industrial, and reeks of false cheer. I do enjoy the holiday though. I love making merry with friends and family and that’s what the holiday really is to me.

But I also write really fucked up stuff as a way to deal with the bleakness of winter in Wisconsin, so here is “Lure” by P.A. “Pat” Humphreys.

Remember folks, there is always a bigger fish.

»Read More

Altered States

December 14, 2009 / Benjamin Kenneally posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

From the early times of man, humans have used states of altered consciousness to attempt to enhance their ability to tell stories. Shamans used drugs, fasting, dancing, and whatever else they could find to open a channel to divine inspiration. The inspiration they received was in the form of stories of the creation of the world, or wise tortoise and foolish scorpion, or where the sun goes at night.

The tradition has continued into modern times. The writers, painters, and poets of Victorian age France used absinthe to pave the way to their storytelling muse. Hemingway used vermouth-free Martinis and “newly discovered” Daquiris to find his writing spirit. The songwriters and admen of the 50′s floated in on a veritable barge of cocktails. The writers of the 60′s used psychedelics. Hunter S Thompson appears to have used anything that would work and he could find.

It’s my belief that another fine age of altered states is coming upon us by way of technology. Technology is more involved in storytelling at this time than in any era (that we are aware of) thus far. From the fact that this blog is being prepared right now on a desktop computer, to the digitization of the comic book industry, to the CGI effects of Hollywood filmmakers, technology is bringing stories to us.

I think soon, technology will be bringing us to the stories.

Do you remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? I always loved them as a kid. It made you the star of the adventure, and increased your attachment to the protagonist immensely. Sadly, the suspension of disbelief always got a little broken as you hurriedly flipped to page 114 to see what happened when you tried to hide behind the rock while the dragon breathed fire at you.

Ebooks don’t have to have that problem. Ebooks can react to what you are reading, as you are reading it. In a choose your own adventure Ebook, when you choose to hide behind the rock, you could just click the link, and go right on reading. You could be greeted on the new page by the sound of the dragon breathing fire at you!

With the eye tracking technology we have at this time, you could actually read an entire book and have sound effects that match the action be emitted by the book the entire time. Chirping birds and the soft trill of a nearby brook as lovers meet in a secret glen. Honking horns and cursing taxicab drivers mixed with the sounds of a thousand people going about their daily lives as the gumshoe’s internal monologue follows him down a busy New York street. Whatever it might be.

Virtual reality always sounds hokey to people. They forever imagine bulky headgear and tactile bodysuits that show images unworthy of a Pac-Man arcade game. I have a feeling our glide into virtual reality will take place through an ebook reader, and the realm of sound as we read. I could be entirely wrong, but it seems so logical to me. Bring out the foley artists!

Steps into the virtual world revitalize the imaginations of the audience, which often leads to an incredible era of creativity. Maybe enough creativity will lead to the invention of true virtual reality gear. I’d love to see entertainment move to the level of the interactive book from Neal Stephenson‘s The Diamond Age.

Only the future can get us there. Until then, I’ll check out more cocktails on Drinkhacker and see what inspiration hits me for next week.

Guilty Little Pleasures

December 10, 2009 / Anthony Smith posted in Art, Fiction, Writing / No Comments

Amazing Spider-Man #62 “They’re not comic books. They’re graphic novels!”

Heard that before? It is the usual alibi grown men (and women) give to their friends when caught with a comic book collection. There is usually some teasing involved, some good-natured and some not, which usually follows up with the guilty party blushing with embarrassment and quickly stowing away whatever trade paperback he or she happens to be reading.

My question is simple. What is so wrong about enjoying a romp through a comic book?

Let’s see if I can guess the answers. Usually, the first response is very straightforward…comic books are for children. My reply would be also rather direct.

You’re wrong.

Quite simply, there is some rather complex concepts being thrown about in your average comic book. Let’s take a look at the comic shown, Amazing Spider-Man #62. First seen back in July of 1968, this happens to be the oldest original comic book I have in my possession (reprints don’t count). The general synopsis is rather self-explanatory. Super-powered boy meets super-powered girl. Boy fights girl. The two find that they are both on the same side, fighting only because of some misunderstanding. Boy and girl go separate ways. The typical formula for having one hero show up in a cross-over in another hero’s storyline. At least, that’s what is on the surface.

But wait, there’s more. Medusa, as it turns out, is really on a scouting mission, to see if society would be able to accept her as she is. Spidey is worried about how to win back Gwen Stacy after seemingly betraying her father, with the both of them too heartbroken to be able to speak to each other. Norman Osborne is slowly going mad as memories of his past life as the Green Goblin slowly begin to surface after suffering partial amnesia. A company executive tries to manipulate first Medusa, then Spidey…all for the sake of publicizing hair spray. Finally, Medusa rejects society, regretting the fact that the human race is just not ready for the likes of her.

What do we have, then? We have a story about seeking social acceptance, betrayal, heartbreak, madness, greed and regret. Not bad for 20 pages of graphic art.

The colorful graphics and flashy art may pull in the kiddies, but it is the intricate plot hooks, far-reaching story arcs and subtle references to real life that keep the grown-ups entertained, too.

So, don’t be ashamed of those comics, err, I mean graphic novels, in the corner. Break out an old one and give it a fresh reading. See what lies beneath the gratuitous imagery. You might be surprised at what you find.

Rant: Looks Like Tuesday is Horror-ble at bkI

December 8, 2009 / uhwhat posted in Pat's Rants / No Comments

: Image via Wikipedia

«BEGIN RANT»

I realized the other day that a big chunk of my contribution to bkI content has been “horror”: I have 2 articles about vampires and our tag cloud contains HP Lovecraft, horror, vampires, Robert E. Howard, and Pseudopod. The first thing that crossed my mind after that was “I bet these people think I’m one of those weird horror guys,” which was quickly followed by “Do I care?”

For the record, I both am, and am not, one of those guys.

See, when people ask me what I write, I say I’m a non-genre specific genre writer. In English, that means I jump genres for fun. I try to write stories I want to read, and I want to read Horror.

…and Sci-Fi.

….and Urban Fantasy, and Crime Stories, and Noir Mysteries, and-

Well, you get the idea.

I’m just on a horror kick is all, writing-wise, mostly because of my Twilight rants. However, I watched the director’s cut of Payback the other night followed by Monsters vs. Aliens, and I’m worried I’m getting behind on my Deadpool comics.

I don’t understand people that limit themselves to a genre. There is too much stuff out there, good stuff, and your genre prejudices are going to get in the way of that. One of the best Sci-Fi stories I ever read was written by a Horror writer. My Favorite fantasy stories were written by Sci-Fi writers. One of the best Comic Book movies was directed by a guy that broke out thanks to Horror, and the next movie I want to see is a theater is Steampunk directed by a Crime guy.

Life is too short not to leave your comfort zone. You wouldn’t want to die without ever leaving your home town, not even for a vacation, would you? I sure as shit don’t, so I moved 1200 miles away from home. Yeah, it’s a little drastic, but even just a trip to the zoo in the city is a good enough change of pace for most folks.

Variety is the spice of life folks. I dare you to try something different today, be it a different hat, trying sushi, or just having one non-diet Dr. Pepper just to remind yourself what you are missing. At the very least, it’ll just make you appreciate life just a little more.

«END RANT»

bkI Wants To Know: What Are You Listening To?

December 8, 2009 / uhwhat posted in Music / No Comments

Tomorrow we are talking about music, and we want to know what you are into at the moment. We’re not talking your favorite bands of all time, but what are you listening to a lot lately? Why are you listening to them? Did you just hear about them, or are they an old favorite with a new album? We want to know, so put it in the comments, tweet it (we’re @badkarmaink), anonymous email, whatever.

Tomorrow we’ll haul them out into the open to share with everyone.

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