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"My Eyes are Nailed, But Still I See"

My friend, writer-of-creepy-tales and ghoulie-rocker Brett Alexander Savory, has a new novella which he co-authored: My Eyes are Nailed But Still I See, published by Delirium Books. Here’s the blurb from its page:

Johnson Milhone’s mind is a world unto

itself—maybe several worlds. Therapy doesn’t penetrate, but nails do.

Leather doesn’t sew easily, and pigs don’t talk—but don’t tell Johnson.

Enter a world where spiders stalk sentient stuffed animals that may or

may not be carved from the flesh of family members who may or may not

be psychotic killers, slaves, and sadistic torturers. Find new uses for

lime green Jell-O and lose it as a viable dessert. Find new darkness in

Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum

and dine at the best table at the Fear Factory. Learn why you should only keep toothpicks

in the drawer if you really trust your mother, or your brother, and never—ever—fish in Scotland at Midnight. My

Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See is the culmination of an odyssey through a warped young

mind that leads one way, and then another, through gruesome imagery and psychotic

delusion to an ultimate truth you will never see coming.

(Hey, Brett! I think you should make “Never fish in Scotland at midnight” T-shirts!)

Brett has a deal with Delirium Press: if 200 or more copies get sold,

they’ll do a trade paperback run next year, which means the book will

stay in print. Since I like supporting my friends’ creative efforts and

enjoy a good creepy read to boot, I’m placing an order and also

plugging it here.

If you’d like a closer look at the book, the authors have provided an excerpt that you can download [PDF, 40K].

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Talibell Canada [Updated]

Update: Be sure to read the comments after reading the article, especially this one! — Joey


Joan at FreakGirlSpew (the blog also known as Freak Girl’s Pew) got an ad in her snail mail from Bell Canada. The ad, shown below, showcases the parental content filtering for Bell’s DSL service:

Photo: Bell Canada content-filtering ad.

(For the moment, let’s ignore the argument about whether it’s a good

idea to filter the internet to protect your kids.)

The text of the ad reads “You’ll do anything to protect your kids from

inappropriate content”, beside a photo showing a book with the

inappropriate content x-acto’d out. As you can see, the book isn’t

anything along the lines of The Hustler Anthology: Three Decades of Crotch or even Madonna’s Sex, but a biology

textbook.

Who’s Bell Canada’s ad agency, Ashcroft and Associates? Taliban Promotions?

If knowledge about the human body is to be considered “inappropriate”,

we’re all in deep trouble. If you’re a parent who freaks out over some

anatomy pictures in textbooks, I can say with reasonable certainty that

your kid will grow up to be one screwed-up puppy — I dated such people.

If you care to send Bell Canada an opinion, here are the email addresses to hit:

Remember, you’re more likely to get some kind of response if you spellcheck and use good grammar and etiquette.

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In "The Farm" and "IndieGameDev"

And now, some links to entries in the blogs I’m paid to write:

In IndieGameDev:

  • Chicks and Joysticks: a white paper on women and gaming written by the Electronic and Leisure Software Producers’ Association.
  • Valil.Chess: an implementation of chess using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Beta.
  • I Want NPCs in my Chili: How non-player characters add spice to a game.

In The Farm:

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A Blog About the OTHER Accordion City

[via Geeks, Guitars and Guinness] Metroblogging has added the city of my birth, Manila, to its roster. Go on and read about that wonderful, chaotic, glorious mess that is my hometown.

(A pity it’s not hosted on Blogware, but some other, lesser blogging tool.)

You can find more on Manila in its Wikipedia entry and the Philippines in its Wikipedia entry and its CIA World Factbook entry.

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Happy Birthday, Si and Richard!

Happy 18th (you can buy beer in Quebec and Alberta now!) to Josiah “Si” Adam! Also, happy birthday to Richard “crysflame” Soderberg (who has forgotten more Perl than I will ever learn)!

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MP3 Player that Plays Like a Cassette

[via Jamie Zawinski]

You’ve probably seen those adapters which have a 1/8″ stereo audio jack

at one end leading to a cable leading to a cassette-shaped thingy at

the other end. They’re handy for situations in which you have a

portable MP3 player that you want to hook up to your non-MP3-playing

car stereo or the old-school ghetto blaster at the cottage.

Here’s an interesting twist on that theme: Mobiblu’s DAH-220…

The MP3 player is built into the cassette-shaped shell.

The best thing about this player is its interface: it’s shaped like a

cassette and goes into to your cassette player, but it also behaves

like a cassette, user-interface-wise. It has sensors in the spindles so

you can use your cassette player’s “fast forword” and “rewind controls”

to jump from song to song. Want to record? Click the “record” button on

your cassette player, and it records audio data coming into your

cassette recorder.

Clever!

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This Headline from "The Onion" Made Me Laugh

Contemporaries Remember Hunter S. Thompson as Ravenous, Mutant, 40-Eyed Lizard Demon.