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Dexter vs Dexter

As usual I have nothing more than a topic in my head to start this semi-literate ramble brainfart type endeavour and the longer I stay away from fallout 4 the harder it gets to breath. But I really enjoyed the dexter books hence the name of the blog. I also really liked the show and I wanted a somewhat side by side comparison, keeping the spoilers to a minimum.

The first book is called ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter’ and it’s essentially the basis for the first season of the tv show. Which I shamefully admit I watched before I started reading the books because I’m a pleb, there you go, happy now?

I do this a lot in fact, I watched the walking dead before I read the comics and then I read the novels but the comics came first so that doesn’t count. I watched the silent hill film before I even knew they were games, the same with the resident evil series. So all around I’m a big media pleb, ain’t life grand?

After the first season of the show it gets a little squiffy. In the first book it wraps up nicely, ok I lied there are gonna be some spoilers. But in the show it wraps up a little skew because in the show, he kills the ice truck killer but in the book he lets him live and he recurs later on in the fourth and fifth book and becomes somewhat of a pivotal character.

The book is a lot more morally grey since he doesn’t actually have inner conversations with his dead adoptive father Harry and instead communes with a supernatural entity inside himself which he calls the ‘Dark Passenger’. He alludes somewhat to this in the show but it’s done a little cack-handedly in my opinion because it’s brushed off as if it’s an addiction whereas the book goes full fahrenheit/indigo prophecy syndrome with fucking demons and voodoo and ancient Babylonian gods.

… Which I actually rather liked but someone obviously conked that on the head because it never really goes back to that in the book and the show gives it a wide berth for probably good reason, it begs beliefs I guess. Too tinfoil hat, Alex Jonesy I guess, I thought it was fun but I guess that was a rabbit hole that might have taken the books up the garden path and since I really liked the following books and I’m still reading them into book seven tells me it wasn’t all that bad.

The first things you notice between the books and the show, in the show he’s this bad ass judo serial killer who kicks the entire ass all the time for some reason. It was cool but in the books he is less John Wayne and more John Cusack… in con air, the film where he didn’t do much.
It’s not that I don’t like him being more vulnerable but I feel like a lot of the time he doesn’t get to be the hero of his own story and after like the tenth time he’s faced death but been saved at the last minute it gets a little annoying.
I mean I don’t begrudge it for using a device like that, I try my fucking damnedest to avoid that ‘ooh he’s about to be killed but then someone saves him at the last minute’ thing, but it’s like literally an unavoidable tension building device. I can’t really think of one of the books from the series where it doesn’t happen except the first now I strain my brain.

Another massive difference is the scope of the book, in the show we follow all these other characters like Batista and his sister Deborah as they have their own arcs but in the book it’s a first person narrative from Dexter’s perspective so these characters become window decoration. And this may sound like a criticism but when you’ve got a TV show about a blood spatter expert by day serial killer by night, I don’t really give a shit about how his friend’s love life is going unless it somehow connects to the serial killy stuff you know, it’s just fluff, useless TV show filler nonsense and the book cuts through it like crate paper to get to the good shit.

That being said the structure of a TV show meant that he had to kill someone per episode and the show handled that quite nicely, a little like the freak of the week supernatural/Buffy style. But in this case the monster was human. But even supernatural couldn’t keep that up and the books don’t even really try to have a murder per however many chapters. On average he’ll killer around one or two people a book, which is perfect because it really allows for a lot of emotion and tension and it really gets into the right frame of mind, it’s deliciously descriptive without making you want to gag like American Psycho levels of gore. It’s subtly macabre, casually sick and twisted, I love it ha-ha.

I think the biggest difference is that Dexter’s kids are fully fleshed out characters… somewhat in the book, whereas in the show they’re just flaccid annoying extras, in the book they have inner workings of their own. And spoiler alert, although there evil father isn’t in the books, what he left behind inside them is enough to make them interesting as they turn out to be just like Dexter. That being said, Lindsay hasn’t really gone into that aspect of their characters yet. Dexter has promised to ‘show them the ropes’ but he never seems to get around to it. He’s always so wrapped up in himself and his work and his ‘other work’ to really take the time and I can’t help empathising with that I guess.
Dexter is an animal and he deals with things as they come I guess, his own self interest and self preservation will always trump training his foster kids how to murder people.
In terms of where the story is going I think that’s going to be a big future problem because spoilers, his brother, the ice truck killer seems to take a keen interest in the kids and there may be a clash of who’s wings they’ll be taken under, Dexter being discernibly the lesser evil.

I genuinely love and get swept up in these books, I suppose in a scary way I and Dexter (Jeff Lindsay the author) have a similar inner voice and I love his style and his wit and the more and more I read the more influenced I get by his dark wit.

That’s fangirling enough for one blog haha, thanks or reading/.

 

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Green Sunday Chapter 3 Step right up (Raw)

Yeah you got me, too fucking busy playing Fallout 4 to do a proper blog so I just copied and pasted a chapter from my zombie novel, but come on, this game is like fucking crack, it’s better than just completely dropping off the grid like Jessie Ventura.

“I despise your killing, and raping”
“You’re… despicable”

“Are you, my judge?”

“It’s just… you should be punished”
“I’m going to chop off your arm, so are you ready?”

TJ sat on his bed half watching a kung fu movie he had on in the background, trying to learn kung fu from osmosis. He polished his sword, checking for minor imperfections left by the douche in the knife shop, before wiping it off. He lovingly slid it back in the sheathe placing it gently in a red trunk at the bottom of his bed.

TJ’s bedroom was the standard unashamed man-child room every man secretly desired but had taken away from them at some point by age or shame or usually a woman. TJ seemed immune to all; happy to like the things he’d loved all his life with only a slight sour tinge of regret rolling around on his tongue before he swallowed it down with some mountain dew.

His room was a fairly boxy affair in a reasonably sized two story house. He chose the room when he was a kid because it had one of those cool sloping roofs that had what was like a little skylight window that let in all the moonlight. And he could put posters on it too.

Movie and anime posters adorned the walls in no particular order from Dragonball z pride of place above his tv and ps4 to Cowboy Bebop over his bed the one where Faye Valentine had her ass facing out in those little yellow hot pants. Full Metal Alchemist brotherhood, Samurai Champloo and Attack on Titan and Berserk, his door hiding a slightly cute pink Elfen Lied calendar that was way out of date. He had a really cool Gantz wall hanging on the wall behind his desktop monitor that his mother sneered at, the tight black uniforms she thought looked sort of ‘bondagey’ she commented once. To which TJ, reddened of cheek quickly informed her that it wasn’t the case and it was his room and she should always knock before entering.

Then you had the various zombie related paraphernalia; you had your walking dead shirts and cap, Evil dead bobble heads, which made various chainsaw noises and spouted the relevant catchphrases when tapped. Original Night of the living dead and Dawn of the dead posters both signed by the Tom Savini, a return of the living dead tarman ‘action figure’, return of the living dead 3 playing cards, Shaun of the dead airfreshener, zombies on a plane travel sweets… you get the picture; ‘nerd likes zombies trope’.

His real pride and joy lay dormant in the red trunk, an assorted collection of crappy fantasy knives and cheap knock off kung fu weapons he picked up at various flea markets and gun shows that rolled through town. He didn’t really get much of an allowance to splash out on any one piece, or even a reasonably priced but painfully drab cold steel machete. And the thought of working some nine to five job just seemed antithetical in a world that he believed would be all teeth and rotten flesh by the end of the year.

So he just picked up what he liked the look of, not really knowing what he wanted or what he wanted them for. They were all basically tacky wall hangers, despite that his mother wouldn’t let him hang on his wall because they made him look like a ‘weirdo’. There they remained in that box or under his bed, ready to be viewed with a satisfied smile as soon as he looked inside his little man-crate full of toys. When he closed it he felt a little hollow thud inside and instantly felt maudlin, he stared at the bluing sky as night crawled out of the caves and crags to blanket the sky.

TJ’s house was in a fairly secluded part of town. The town itself was rural and mountainous, a small town lined by high trees and cliffs with a whole lot of nothing in between, think Twin Peaks meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nightmarish small town America in all its horrible banality and tremulous quiet beauty only ruined by its noisy stereotypical inhabitants.

He took to starring off into the trees, trying to imagine hordes of his dead facebook friends tearing through the undergrowth and him savagely cutting after them, sword flashing above his head like a hun on heat. Then he really started to think about them, their frozen stock photo faces, twisted and rotten coming at him through the trees and it was real for a second and he wanted nothing more than to buy a big gun and hide under his window drinking and peeing in the same bottle waterworld style for fear of moving. It came in waves and he settled back into his fantasy comfortable in the thought of its unlikely occurrence but also wanting nothing more than having his mundane existence upended by throngs of the flesh nibbling inclined.

Well what little life there was, he thought to himself as he stared off into those dark esoteric woods, if only they’d come then he could be who he truly wanted to be.

~

As always you can find the full chapter on inkitt by following this link http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507/chapters/3

Thanks for checking it out.

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Green Sunday Chapter 1 (Edited). Fallout 4 out tomorrow, goodbye world.

Ok finally paid to have the first chapter edited, this is just a cheeky re-release of chapter one, gonna be posting a lot more chapters this coming week from sheer laziness and my inevitable complete immersion in Fallout 4.

The wind blew through the cherry blossoms in the Sakuragoaka gardens. Musashi knelt and cleared his mind, letting his cares drift on the wind. He saw without seeing as he closed his eyes, his mind clacking in the dark of his dreams, igniting a small flame of consciousness. His thoughts wandered silently as he smelled the fires burning in the distance, food cooking in the next town over. Dogs’ barks travelled over the mountains as whispers in the cool evening air were ushered in by the coming night.

The ground he knelt on was soft, and grass stained his dark brown robes. He hadn’t washed for days or combed his hair. Cleanliness had become a pretence he didn’t much care for.

Suddenly the air became tighter and sharper as pinpricks brushed his skin. His eyes cracked open and let in some light as his mind came soaring back, like a demon hurtling into this world. A foot touched down on the grassy earth and sent shockwaves through the ground and then another and another and another and another and another.

Three sets of two … his eyes closed again as he listened. Three men or one six-legged demon. He’d only know when he cut it. They’d only exist when his blade touched them and then only for a moment after.

He took a deep, slow breath as they approached. Steel breathed out sharply as their swords loosened from their ramshackle sheathes. The air took on the smell of iron and copper. They approached from behind as Musashi meditated; their steel quivered as the light hit the blades.

His heart beat like the leather drum of a mighty ship approaching a certain destination. He fancied his attackers could feel it in the very ground they stood upon. The vibrations through their feet made them feel numb and light-headed, losing the tips of their swords to a strange feeling of giddiness as they got close to the kneeling man.

He took one deep breath, taking in the last of the sweet smells of the cherry blossom tree, its pink petals falling as it swayed in the wind.  Musashi brought his sword forward in his waist wrap and turned the blade in its scabbard, pushing out his bottom lip as he did. His grizzled lower jaw cocked to the side as he felt the greasy stubble on his face with his other hand. He sighed a little as he slowly pushed up the hilt, gently popping the blade from the sheath with a slight jerking motion from his thumb.

The blank figures flapped slightly like the sails of a ship in a changing wind. They sprang to life, having come too close to turn back. Their fear pushed them onto this mortal stage to face blood and sweat and bone and will.

The vagabonds tensed their legs and took their stances, trying to gain strength from the earth. They swallowed and took their pride up like an iron flag and they bounded towards the old man resting his eyes in the cool afternoon. He listened to the gears of the world slowly turn, smelling the sweet and tart smells of the grass and the blossoms mixing in the dying evening.

Their swords were heavier than his and they bolted forward, shaking like they were held together with string. His sword was a dancing feather and cut through the air like a blossom from the cherry tree. His hand had barely touched it; his grip was light and nourished the blade with his will; it stayed straight and did not falter in the wind; it moved with it, flowed on it and cut it like a ship parting the waves. He felt a natural exhilaration for what was meant to be: men travelling towards their destinies, whatever they may amount to.

They set on him, their movements those of men underwater. His great eye saw all their movements but recognised them only as insignificant shapes in the dark depths of a boundless ocean. His mind only thought of cutting, his blade sharpened by his burning will, a searing desire to be seen by the ambivalent god of the moon and stars.

They scattered like leaves, their bodies wanted to be cut; they were made complete by his blade, a cut for each and each in place; not a drop of blood fell until it was ready to fall and Musashi sheathed his sword once more.

Suddenly, as if from the sky itself, a crack appeared and Musashi felt a foot on his shadow, a tightness in his chest, as if his guard had been penetrated by some unholy force; he quickly drew his sword again; it was already halfway out when he heard a scream tear through the heavens, a star falling with the force of the earth itself. It eclipsed him, like an insect in the wake of a great mountain.

“TJ STOP SCREWING AROUND IN THE YARD AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH!”

“MOOOM, I’M FILMING FOR YOUTUBE!”

“-AND YOU BETTER NOT BE PUTTING HOLES IN MY FENCE WITH THAT SWORD!”

“NO, MOM”.

TJ sighed heavily as he looked at the jagged cut in the water cooler bottle he had picked up on his way home from the local movie theatre it bled out over the unevenly cut grass as his fantasy faded into the corners of his mind. He scratched his neckbeard as he looked at his crappy mall katana sticking out of the fence, still twitching from the force of the swing. He must have let go when his mom called him.

He looked into his digital camera and sighed audibly into the vacant lens.

“Hey fat ass!” A nasal voice rang out from over the fence and TJ turned like Michael Jackson in ‘Thriller’. “Yeah you, neck beard, over here!” His neighbour leant on the fence like a crow, with a superior sneer sitting atop his pointy douche bag goatee. He looked like a hipster Ming the Merciless with a pair of poser shades dangling from his fingers.

“You better watch it, man. You almost put another hole in my ass with that pig sticker of yours. Hommie doesn’t play that. My exit hole remains an exit hole. Feel me?” His neighbour flailed his sunglasses in his fingers and tried to sound like a black guy.

“Err, wut?”

“What are you doing, man? No one wants to see some fat re-re in his mommy’s yard, cutting up bottles with a butter knife, when they can see handsome motherfuckers like me and my associates chopping on some real meat with some big… mmm weapons!” He smiled and motioned with his sunglasses at TJ’s camera and his bottle massacre. “We’ve got over sixty thousand billion subscribers, nigga. Wut chu got, like one-two thousand maybe? Some tight-fisted jackers fapping their flaccid nubby dicks over fat retards getting sweaty in extra-large tees.”

TJ averted his gaze as he attempted to jostle his sword free of the fence. His pits were wet and stinging, shame and anger swelling. He said nothing and shook his head from side to side trying to get his emo black bangs out of his sweaty face; he just took it.

“Stay off my fucking YouTube, asshat, and keep that mall sword crap in your pants.” His neighbour hopped off the fence, laughing. “Now where the fuck were we? Oh yeah.” He turned to the camera as it focused on his goateed, smug face, and put his sunglasses back on. He slicked his floppy black hair back on his head.

For the full chapter and to vote for Green Sunday in the Inkitt Vendetta thriller contest you can go to http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507?utm_source=contest_share #vendetta #amwriting

Thanks for reading and peace out.

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Hype… hype never changes.

I, like probably millions of other manchildren (and maybe actual children) are hyped as fuck for Fallout 4 which releases next Tuesday, by released I mean I get to wait half the day for it to install on my Xbox one -_-.
I just thought I’d have some fun rambling about it because I’m constantly in these facebook groups either bitching about New Vegas (I won’t shake that fucking tree here ha-ha) or laughing at people comparing it to modern shooter graphics.

I’m almost at a loss for the levels of fanboyism I’m holding in, sheer unadulterated pure uncut 100% Columbian hype.

But I can’t help feelings a little bit iffy, I don’t know if it’s just because Fallout has become so mainstream over the years. For a title so niche to gain such mainstream appeal is good but also troubling to me, I hasten to add I didn’t play the original Fallout games until I saw Fallout 4 was being released and I needed an outlet for my building hype.
So I’m by no means an OG Fallout gamer, but I’m not a dirty casual either, I’m a console peasant who played his first Fallout game on a ps2, yeah it was Fallout BOS. I liked it because it was like Baldur’s Gate with guns and powerfist and it’s actually the first and only Fallout game where you got to play a ghoul.

After that I saw Fallout 3 come out and being a massive Oblivion fan it completely had me and had me bad, for months. I truly loved that game, the music, the atmosphere, the guns. Although overall it ranked as something of a letdown but as the constant apologist I blame myself for building it up so much something I’m desperately trying to resist with Fallout 4.
It was mainly the story and the levelling system I took issue with, coming out of Oblivion I found just putting numbers into a stat sort of unsatisfying as opposed to actually practicing the skill to build it up in Oblivion. Which I found more realistic; the more you swing a sword the better you get at it, but in Fallout it didn’t matter you just levelled up for completing missions and could spend skill points however you wanted even in skills you didn’t use.
But I had issues even with that system in Oblivion to be fair because I couldn’t resist once I had trained with one skill to the max to train with another until I mastered them all, which took some of the punch out of the game. The new levelling system for Fallout 4 looks pretty interesting and I’m actually really happy that it’s been streamlined and something that always annoyed me about previous Fallout games has been addressed.

Pistols, they never get pistols right, because you find one at the start and use it until you find some super mega blaster or some huge shotgun and then you never see it again but finally Bethesda have made pistols their own skill as opposed to just reducing it to small guns and big guns. So in a way they’ve streamlined it but also made it more intricate since every type of weapon not just its class has its own skill so you have a small guns skill but then an individual pistol/shotgun/assault rifle skill that focuses on one particular type of weapon with its own special attributes. Which I think is such a great idea because now you can literally make and use any gun you feel suits you best and your play style. Whether you want to be a long range sniper or a hip shooter pistolero or a shotgun surgeon. I think it’s just a great idea that gives every weapon a use and a purpose as opposed to just being something that clutters your inventory and is never used.

All games have their problems and they all reach a state of terminal velocity where they can’t satisfy the way they could at the start.

Also I had problems with the story of Fallout 3, not necessarily with the quality, I have taken to taking videogame storylines with a pinch of salt as of late, because they will always be secondary to fun gameplay and I’ve come to accept that. Waiting for an emotional rollercoaster of a game that Spielberg would be proud of is just too much to ask and games that try are hit and miss coming somewhere between tear jerking if a little tacky Last of Us vs. Engaging if completely insane pretty much any game by David Cage (Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit Syndrome, Beyond Two Souls) but I digress, I’ll get into that in more depth in a later blog probably.
The problem I had with the story is that there wasn’t very much of it, and that’s not to say they weren’t lots of quests and characters, what I mean were there were certain main quest lines that had achievements attached to them. And the problem I have with that is it just makes the game seem less fluid, less pick up and play, I liked how in Oblivion you could literally walk into any tavern or come across a stranger and be swept up in a harrowing quest and then get a piece of special equipment.
There are elements of that in Fallout 3 but I just felt like it was more rigid and a little less forgiving. But regardless of that I still found myself just exploring for hours completely ignoring the story for the most part. I spend probably 80% of my time on Fallout 3 just exploring and making up or piecing together stories from the surroundings and things I find and I think that’s a great strength of all Bethesda games. A lot of the times they just sit back and let the surroundings tell the story, they give the gamer the pieces and they have to put it together themselves which makes them that more engaged in the story.
That was just one thing I worried about looking over the leaked achievements for Fallout 4, they’re doing the same thing with the main story quests, giving them achievements for completion. I dunno, I just think money and the xp and the fun alone should be reward enough, but it’s just a pet peeve.
Another thing that worried me is the changes to the dialogue, it’s changed from a box of text where you select lines, to a more Mass Effect style dialogue wheel, now I see a lot of ‘genius’s’ and gaming hipsters saying this is Fallout ‘Dumbing down’ and to an extent when games fall into the mainstream there is a level of streamlining they go through to maximise their appeal like with Skyrim. But to anyone with common sense, the reason dialogue wheel replaced the text box is because we have a voiced protagonist for the first time in Fallout history and he only has so many words he can say, so unfortunately dialogue will be more limited.

Whether this improves immersion into the game or makes it worse I can’t say until I play it on Tuesday (More likely Wednesday, fuck took like a week to install eso and now I never play it -_-). I can’t say listening to Captain’s Shepherd’s monotone voice for hours on end with its varying inflection from anger to *shudders* flirtation increased anything but my threshold for cringe.

But this is Fallout, this is Bethesda, Bioware is but flies compared to Vigo!.. I mean Todd Howard.

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Green Sunday Chapter 2 This Charming man (Unedited)

This is the second chapter of my romzomcom novel work in progress Green Sunday, it’s currently in the process of being professionally edited but in the mean time I thought it would be fun to post an excerpt from the raw manuscript.
I just posted this as an excerpt because the whole chapter is about four thousand words long, which is just way too long for a blog. So if you want to read the rest you can on inkitt by following this link Green Sunday. 

An old TV sitting on a greasy looking shelf played in the background in a local greasy spoon diner on the edge of town. Accompanied by the sounds of knives and forks sword fighting and people taking value deluxe bites out of reasonably priced burgers and washing them down with complimentary milkshakes.

“The Pudgiwara corporation said they were sorry for dumping the one thousand tonnes of toxic waste in the bay and they said they’d never do it again” The news anchor furrowed his brow sincerely before quickly moving on to the next segment “In other local news a young boy of fourteen was arrested after a prank backfired outside his suburban home. The boy; who is yet to be named for legal reasons, was tricked by his friends into believing that another biological outbreak like the one in Arkham, Louisiana was occurring. Police state the boys wore make-up and ragged clothing and pretended to be the undead. The boy fearing for his life retrieved his 22. Calibre rifle he received for his third birthday and slaughtered them all in his back yard”

“Hahahahahahahahahaha!” Incongruous laughter broke out and it seemed like all the knife and fork sword fights ended abruptly but the laughter went on regardless as the story played out in between mouthfuls of raw hamburger meat.

“The fourteen year old boy, then fearing for the fate of his family, went into his suburban home and strangled his entire family to death with a draught excluder”

“Hahahahahahahahahahaahahahaha!” A dirty hand, topped with dirty chipped nails scooped up a clod of hamburger meat from a bowl as he laughed.

“What’s going on out here?” A fat sweaty man in an apron and not a lot else came out of the back and stood quizzically next to a middle aged red head waitress with a face like a leather riding saddle.

“Some crazy guy, all he ordered was a bowl of raw hamburger meat and he’s just been sitting there eating it, then he just started laughing” The middle aged woman said, her face wrinkling up in places never before thought possible.

The fat man’s sweat patches grew under his apron; he started to look like he belonged in a sauna or in a tropical plant house as he breathed heavily.

“The boy is currently under observation at Hellspass psychiatric hospital” The man’s laughter began to run down like the motor of a car slowly sliding into park, a greasy hand touched the arm of his salvation army coat and the slow come down took a sudden bump.

“Hey buddy you’re freakin’ people out, can ya keep it down? People are trying to eat” The fat chef said in an apologetic tone as he furrowed his brow into painful ‘v’s, which seemed to stretch all over his slippery bald head.

“What’s that?” The man said without turning his head, a chunk of un-chewed hamburger meat falling from his mouth onto the semi-clean counter as he opened his mouth and turned his bloodshot eyes in his skull.

“I said-“

“I heard what you said”

“Huh?”

“I just can’t tell what I’m looking at” He picked his teeth with a dirty nail and sucked his gums, dislodging raw meat from his teeth.

“Look buddy, we aint looking for no trouble, I think you better just pick your sorry ass up and leave- right now!”

“Did you make this?” The strange homeless guy squeezed the hamburger meat in his hands, letting it ooze through his bony fingers. He had shoulder length mousey brown hair with a beard, completing the homeless chic, his features were thin and gaunt, dark eyes hidden under heavy lids. He wore a long olive drab army jacket that went all the way down to his ankles just barely hiding the fact he was wearing plastic bags tied with string around his feet instead of shoes. To complete the ensemble a threadbare shirt and pair of pants that looked like they were stolen from an old people’s home washing line. Printed across the front of the jacket was a name written in bold dark green lettering ‘CARPENTER’.

“What’cha talking about buddy? That’s raw hamburger meat, aint nobody ‘made’ it, drifters like you don’t belong here, it’s time for you to move on now!”

“You know, I used to be just like you”

“Get ou-!” A glob of hamburger meat cut off the chef mid sentence, the slimy gelatinous meat by-product getting in his eyes and nose. It felt like a fist made of lumpy snot hit his sinus wall and he felt disorientated long enough for the dishevelled man to kick a bar stool under his feet from his seated position. The chef fell forward as the stool hit his shins, tripping him; Carpenter rose like a jack in the box from his stool to slam the chef’s dirty face into the counter.

He pressed the chef’s face into the clean-ish off colour lime green diner counter spreading blood and raw meat and spit all over it, the chef strained dreamily as his skull was pressed against the hard surface.

“You know it’s rude to interrupt someone when they’re eating.” Carpenter, squeezed the chef’s head with his forearm pressed against it tightly, the veins on the chef’s head stuck out like rail road tracks, pumping hot kitchen grease. Carpenter took his other hand and ran his finger up from his face taking up some of the hamburger meat, getting under his nails, he sucked his finger.

He took the pressure off and sat back on his stool like he got up to get the salt and the chef stuck to the counter with blood and sweat and hamburger meat, peeled off and his unconscious body hit the linoleum floor of the diner like a sack of dried hams, parting stools and chairs and brows as he fell. The diner fell silent, food went un-chewed in open mouths, coffee cups shook uncontrollably, babies continued crying, the dishevelled man went back to watching the news and laughing.

~
If you’ve read this far you can check out the rest of the chapter on inkitt by following this link Green Sunday.

4

Ham on Rye

First I must apologise for my absence to my readers (all three of you), I’ve been deathly ill with some unknown pathogen and haven’t been capable of doing much more than playing payday 2 endlessly and coughing up chunks of lung.

With my return I decided to share one of my older Dahmer and Greg sketches, this was a guest piece by the guy who does the art for 3 Ring, the one and only Mike (Now Ike, there was already a Mike Golden in comics) Golden. And use it to address a current trend I’ve noticed or maybe it’s just me.

It’s become quite ‘trendy’ so as to say mainstream or socially acceptable to mock Christianity and creationism and Catholicism and all that jazz. This is not to say I have anything against them being mocked, quite the opposite as you can see from the strip, I did it myself.
I feel any and all beliefs should be rife for scrutiny and parody at all time without exception.
I personally consider myself an atheistic Satanist but that’s a long story in regards to why I don’t call myself an atheist anymore, which is tangentially linked with this but a bit too much of a digression, don’t want to hurt that flow.

I think its fine and necessary to mock all beliefs and anything that isn’t nailed down including and especially atheism, which is why Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park will always be heroes of mine for leaving no stone unturned for parody and having the balls to carry it through.

I think I may have touched on this before when I talked about the Isis cake thing, but I do think there’s a reticence in the left or at least the social justice left to criticise Islam when they’ll happily mock Christianity and get a million retweets on twitter.

But if you criticise Islam you’re instantly a bigot and a racist and you deserved to be hounded off twitter. If you criticise feminism you’re a misogynist, if you criticise blacklivesmatter you’re a racist again. All these labels are just there to squash discussions and to not have to debate their points logically.

But that’s not really what I’m trying to get at, the overall point I’m trying to make is that mocking Christianity has as a result of it becoming socially acceptable it’s become boring and meaningless, oversaturated. It would be like making a pedo priest joke, everyone’s heard them all. There’s not bite anymore, I guess with this new wave of social justice warriors I’ve garnered a new found respect for Christians. I don’t in any way believe in objective morality but after seeing the depravity and solipsism of moral relativism, I can appreciate the goal of seeking moral objectivity despite it obviously being impossible.

I think to myself if I had kids who would I prefer them to be brainwashed by a feminist or a Christian? I come up with Christian every time. I mean there’s not a lot of difference really, both will tell them they’re broken pieces of shit that need this overbearing force in their lives to get right with. Both will tell them only through them can they be saved and both will say anyone that disagrees with them is an idiot or a bigot. But the Christian will at least instil them with some sense of morality even if it’s for a completely ridiculous reason when the feminist will just ask mindless obedience to whatever scattered ideal they have at the moment.
Maybe if you gave social justice and feminism a couple thousand years more it would be a better or a more solid religion than it is but right now it’s all over the place.

I think that’s way with all culture to be honest, once it becomes mainstream and socially acceptable is the point it stops being edgy and it stops making the point it made before. Christian beliefs if you truly believe them literally are silly, let’s face it but allegorically they’re not that bad, a lot of the book is pretty inconsistent and is relative of the time for most of the bullshit about justifying slavery, I’m by no means being an apologist for Christianity but moreover the most radical of Christians are just fucking annoying, they don’t blow (usually) blow your shit up or cut your head off on camera or try and get you fired from your job and destroy your life for disagreeing with them on the internet.

So to me hating them seems like a waste of energy, I don’t agree with them, I don’t support them; I just think it’s better than tumblr. The bible is better than tumblr there I said it ha-ha (I’m full of shit, I’ve never read either). I just can’t summon the energy to hate them when there are forces amassing in power that are far more insidious than some 2000 year old Jew zombie cult. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like someone smacking an old donkey. It’s like how it’s sort of socially acceptable to be racist and sexist towards white guys, even among white guys, these people, these sjws think they’re counter culture. They think they’re not mainstream, they’re edgy and hip, they couldn’t be more wrong, they couldn’t be more mainstream, they are the establishment and the sooner people realise that the sooner they’ll fall apart.

Forgive this dazed sickness induced rant, just been rambling incessantly from one abstract point to the other incoherently and I must put it to a stop right now and get back to trying not to die.
Peace out!

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First review for Green Sunday chapter one

In a bit of a shameless quid pro quo back scratching, Florian has done a lovely review in thanks for the review I did of his story Wayward Salvation. So you know it’s completely unbiased and subjective haha.
It’s a nice review, I think he did a great job and captured it nicely but take it with a grain of salt because he’s a friend.

Thanks again Flo, don’t forget to check out his story Wayward Salvation and of course Green Sunday.

Katanas and Cheese Graters

Green Sunday chapter one reviewed by Florian Maier
Let's be honest, whether we like it or not, the Zombie Apocalypse has been done to death. From films like the legendary 'RomeroTrilogy' and TV-shows like 'The Walking Dead' to books like 'World War Z' and video games franchises like 'Dead Rising', there have been so many incarnations, they could fill the coffers of any zombiephile to last them several lifetimes.

Let me take you aside for a second, and let's look at the bigger picture: a fresh take is needed.

Yes, we've had self aware zombie comedies in forms of our 'Shaun of the Deads' and 'Zombielands', and not to forget a hammy teeny love-story/comedy called 'Warm Bodies', but none have been particularly daring, at least for modern standards, when it comes to the setting or story department. 

The gist always is: 'Zombies happen (for whatever reason), modern society as we know it crumbles and someone (or many) must step up to do stuff, or just survive, or keep their humanity intact, or all things at once..' 

Sound familiar? No? Well, then you've probably never seen 'Dawn of the Dead', or the remake.

'Green Sunday' is not only a fresh take on the whole Zombie Apocalypse shebang, it also  dares to abandon the gritty seriousness of more recent incarnations for a return to Romero-style satire and humour.

Now I know you probably think this is going to be about the Zombie Apocalypse, but to be precise, the Apocalypse has happened, and passed. Turns out our shambling friends were no match for the Military  leaving a lot of disappointed teenagers and zombie themed web-shows in the wake of the disaster. 

TJ, our protagonist, is one of those disappointed teens, a tubby neckbeard with an affinity for cutting up plastic water bottles  in his Mom's backyard with a mall katana. 
His loud mouthed neighbour, Zed, runs one of the aforementioned web-shows and brings his audience (and us as the readers) up to speed on how things are now, of course hinting (or rather hoping) the Apocalypse will return so he can finally show off his automated killer cheese graters some more (yes, you read correctly, cheese graters) instead of having them tested on toothless zombie 'stumps' in his backyard. 

TJ, meanwhile seems content swinging about his swords and imagining himself as a samurai in feudal Japan. So, why is he our main character again? Well, who doesn't like a lovable loser and underdog? I sure do. 

Right from the title of the chapter you will notice that 'Green Sunday' relies on its humour, and it's far from toothless packing a real bite (obvious pun intended). I must honestly confess however that the humour may not be for everyone, since it does not shirk away from being vulgar and upfront. Don't get me wrong, it's funny, and I Iaughed and smiled all the way through. 

Besides its off-beat humour, its writing is visual, the opening being a prime example for this. I'm a huge fan of visual and descriptive writing and found it to be one of the things that lifted it up from seeming like your run-of-the-mill piece of fiction published on the web. There was one point when the tense seemed to change abruptly but that is easily forgiven since the story flows off the page like a zombie oozes pus.

Overall, I found it to be an entertaining and not to forget refreshing read. To some TJ may seem a bit passive as a main character, but we're so spoiled nowadays by our quirky hyperactive and not to mention whiny emotional main characters that we have expected these to be the norm making it no surprise whatsoever when the protagonist does something badass or brave. 

Needless to say, the story shows off its potential right off the bat and the author definitely knows what he is doing and how to tinge his universe in satirical comedy. To quote John Hurt here:

"We can expect great things from you."
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Wayward Salvation review

Some shameless friend promotion here, you’ve seen Florian’s art pretty much all over my blog, he’s the artist for Jeffrey Dahmer and Greg and Bat Country. His quirky style and dark, dismal themes are definitely up my alley.
He’s been a mate since uni but now the uppity twat thinks like every other twat on the planet that he can write too ha-ha. Well let’s just see about that as I review his preview chapter for a sort of offbeat sci-fi drama called Wayward Salvation… CUNT! 😉

Straight out of the gate you can tell this is his first attempt at writing something like this and like all newborn’s the first steps are the trickiest and result in a few bumps and bruises. But there’s an obvious natural aptitude as these wrinkles are quickly ironed out and the tension and the atmosphere is built quite easily even for something that was quite benign. I thought it worked really well, putting you in India’s perspective and her heightened sense of emotional vulnerability.

The first thing that threw me because Florian literally told me nothing about this and he only confessed to writing anything a couple of days ago was the sci-fi theme. And to be honest it seems a little off as I’m reading this and it seems to be a drama and then it turns out Lora, the love interest, is like an alien cat person.

And I literally messaged him and was like ‘Dude is this furry porn?’ to which he told me it wasn’t so I was like ‘Ok then’ and continued reading.

I really found it, I hate to say it; ‘Tantalizing’ the description is really great, some of the similes suck but that’s what a good editor is for but the atmosphere is great and I found myself getting really swept up in the sci-fi romance aspects.

It reminded me a little bit of Mass Effect and romancing Tali Zora, this exotic alien woman, of which the captain isn’t even sure if her body is compatible with his for sex or whatever ha-ha. So you not only have this dynamic tension of the standard ‘Will they won’t they’ love romance scenario, it’s almost like ‘is it even feasible’ because you love who you love but as Fry found out in Futurama; you can’t fuck a mermaid.

Overall I think the tension is built nicely and he really captured the awkwardness that surrounds forming a new relationship, just telling someone how you feel about them. My only criticisms despite what I mentioned about Mass Effect, is that I don’t really get the relevance of the sci-fi back drop. You could literally replace this with any other back drop, steampunk/cyberpunk/fantasy/zombies. I realise I’m being over-critical and this is just a preview/introduction and the initiation of probably a pivotal relationship in the story.
Regardless not a lot happened or was hinted at but again just a preview.

The romance was very believable and frankly fucking hot ha-ha. I’m a little reluctant to say I wish it had gone further ha-ha, baka hentai right?

Fuck you Florian, fuck you! Blue ballin’ motherfucker! She could have at least fingered her ha-ha!

It fumbled a little with perspective which is a bit of a no-no, we go from India’s perspective then it switches mid-paragraph to Lora, which editor’s usually pitch a fit over but could easily be corrected.

I really got into the chased romantic elements and I can see how it could really be exacerbated in a sci-fi setting. Some of the exposition was a little blunt and hackneyed, it could have been a little smoother but it worked for the scene overall in terms of setting the parameters of their relationship and individual back stories.

Overall I really liked the emotional aspects, the description put me in the room enough to feel the sexual tension and want to push further and the sci-fi back drop makes me want to read more to see how it ties in with the overall story.

All in all I’d recommend it as one to watch unfold, a great first attempt Flo you pervy old sauerkraut muncher.

If you want to check it out and drop it a review on inkitt, the three people that read this blog, have at it haha! http://www.inkitt.com/stories/34780

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Green Sunday; Ramblings of a Zombie Apologist

I know the first instinct you have when you hear ‘zombie horror’ to the most cynical of hipsters is to utter a collective angsty yawn. But give me a break. I’m writing a zombie story, Green Sunday is a for lack of a better term, coined by Shaun of the Dead a RomZomCom. Just give me a chance, come back! Hey! It’s nothing like Walking Dead!… Hmm that may have backfired.
Well for the people that got through that and are still reading which is probably all of three people, I thank you and now I shall begin my zombie apologetics.

The reason I wrote this story is two-fold, I wanted to write a zombie story, but every motherfucker wants to write a zombie story, especially every crazy motherfucker like me that wants it to actually happen. But I wanted to write it from the perspective of someone like me, someone who wants it to happen. I thought this might help me understand why I want that and why that’s crazy. I realise it’s a state of cognitive dissonance, I want the zombie apocalypse to happen so I can use my collection of sharp pointy things and have a blast but I also don’t want it to happen because I like not having to cut my friends and family into bits because they’re trying to eat me and more importantly Fallout 4 is coming out next month. Maybe next year.

Zombie stories are tricky because essentially they’re too easy, you can’t write a story just about zombies. Zombies are just an inciting incident, they’re just a framing device for what is essentially a disaster movie and overall a character drama. It’s not about the zombies it’s about how the characters react to the zombies. The zombies aren’t characters, they don’t have back stories or motivation, they’re just flesh eating monsters that could be replaced by nearly anything; Aliens, flesh eating penguins, fish men, the world’s worse case of herpes.

They’re not important to the story except as an obstacle and to be honest people like watching people kill people, they don’t really want to see people killing animals and with aliens that’s sort of a grey area. There must be something in our brains that just prefers to watch people die, harking back to the coliseums.

So why choose zombies if they’re so overdone? For that exact reason. I wanted to write a story satirises the oversaturation of zombies into our culture and to mock from the inside people like me. Nutters that are preparing or at least fantasising about it really happening. Saying something is overdone is just a way of trying to lower the market value so you can do it when no one’s paying attention and come out the omega hipster, like me ha-ha. No.

I’m a writer nothing is overdone if it’s done well, everything can be turned on its head, when someone has an expectation that’s when they’re the most vulnerable to have their expectation completely levelled and you have them by the seat of their pants.

I wanted to write a zombie apocalypse story that wasn’t really about a zombie apocalypse and to mock zombie apocalypses and this spate of summer teen movies like Hunger Games just a bit. So I thought instead of making a straight up zombie apocalypse story or a post apocalyptic story, I’d write a post-post-apocalyptic story.

It’s always been the case that the most far-fetched thing about a zombie apocalypse is the idea of it actually happening or indeed ending the world. Even an air born virus probably wouldn’t end the world, it could kill 80% of the worlds’ population and would definitely change the world but it wouldn’t end it. So how could a virus spread by touch/bite spread so quickly, and how could it overcome every army/police force/pmc of the world? Or indeed happen in a country like America where ‘There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass’ as Isoroku Yamamoto Fleet Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during World War II is according to wikiquote is misquoted as saying.

But obviously I don’t live in America, I live in England, but we still have armed police and despite what you may here about our gun laws, we still have guns, knives, cricket bats. I set it in America essentially to mock America and open it up a wider audience. America is always rife for parody as it has the delightful habit of taking everything to its greatest extreme. Although this ‘prepper culture’ has spread to the UK, it started and it lives in the US. And really for the story to work it needed an isolated are and although there are small villages (like the one I’m from) and lots of open spaces and countryside. I wanted a small mountain town to really capture the isolation possible even in a semi-thriving small town.

Ok I realised I’ve been waffling around the point, the story is I suppose a little more like Dead Rising the videogame. I.e. This shit is done on purpose, it’s not an accident or a virus, this is an isolated incident done for a specific reason. Not as a test but for fun.

Green Sunday is named for the main character, Sunday is sort of a modern homage to Red Sonja, and before I start pandering telling you how she’s a ‘bad ass/asskicking’ woman and the quintessential and much sort after ‘strong female character’, I posed her as more sort of a Don Quixote character or a Sherlock Holmes. She’s the main character but as a whole She is left a mystery and the story is told through the eyes of her cohort, her Dr. Watson; TJ.

That way I felt that she could remain a mystery and through TJ she could be this tough character but waves of softness could be intermittently shone on him from time to time for a potential romance (I say potential because I’m in the process of writing it and I’m not sure Sunday really likes him, sometimes I have a scene planned out and it goes down a completely different path which better fits the character themselves).

Waffle fit yet again, tangents, tangents everywhere! The story is about a zombie game show, I got it out, there it is. Beautiful isn’t it? Not really *Shakes head*.

Ok so the generic ‘Sinister Corporation with ties to the government’ moves into town and seals it off to play their own little internet zombie game show. So it’s basically Battle Royale meets Dead Rising or Resident Evil. I’m trying to capture the irony of the main characters being zombie obsessed Youtubers caught in what is essentially a zombie internet reality show. And they have to fight for their lives over three gruelling days of bloody violence.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I’m having a hell of a lot of fun writing it, the zombie stuff is always good fun, with a feckless neckbeard fanboy character propelling the story and lots of crazy people brought into the town to fight and rich assholes paying to hunt zombies, it’s a delicious clusterfuck of gore and black humour.

The first ‘beta’ chapter is up for you to read on inkitt, I’ve proofread it but it’s still away with my editor, so hopefully within the month I can re-upload it after it’s been professionally edited and then move onto the next chapter.

Follow this link Green Sunday to read the first chapter and review it and tell me it sucks ass just read it ha-ha.

See ya.

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