The Diamond Island

In the computer game Civilization 3, you can play a number of rulers during ancient times.  You can, for example, play the Sumerians and develop things like chariots and mining.  One of the civilization advances I found most interesting in that game was “worker housing”.

Basically, you develop the ability to concentrate labor into immense camps.  It’s the prototype of the company store idea.  Workers eat, sleep, and raise families in these camps so you can have them concentrate their efforts on building things you want your city to have.

See, the rulers didn’t have construction machinery to control yet.  All they had was physical labor.  The only way to say, build huge monuments to your greatness, was to find an efficient way to gather workers together and keep them moving at a large-scale, steady pace.  These may have been the first attempts at industry.

This is based on real discoveries.  For example, in Egypt they found the remains of large camps of worker housing that were likely used to build the pyramids.

Now that we have fossil fuel powered machinery and access to tremendous energy, we don’t need worker housing for industry.  Or do we?

I would say that advances have allowed industry to expand to a point where worker housing as a concept applies across a broader field of vision.  We might not need a camp of thousands of construction workers, but we do need cities composed of teams of workers and their associated support staff.  If you ever read Richard Scary’s What Do People Do All Day? You can get a sense for how complicated and interrelated each “worker” is.

I look at fast food places.  They exist to give people access to cheap, quick food.  In and out so you can gobble down something for lunch, or feed your family when people are too tired or time-stretched to cook.  Places like McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell exist to keep the workforce fed so they can be kept working as much as possible.

In other words, these establishments exist as a room in today’s “worker housing”.  Instead of building pyramids we’re mining coal, driving trucks, filing papers and cleaning restrooms to keep the industrial system going.

What’s this industry building, besides massive fortunes for a lucky few?  Maybe a kind of unconscious, worldwide tower of Babel.  Hrm.  I think I shouldn’t have eaten that last chicken soft taco.

This effort is supported by cheap, abundant energy in the form of oil.  An oil supply which has reached the peak of production and will now slowly recede like a tide.  Unless we start a new Manhattan-sized project and invent an entirely new form of energy that’s never been known before, that energy is going to disappear from the system.  Nothing we have will replace oil’s scale of energy and versatility — not coal, not nuclear, not solar or whatever else “process” we have on the blackboard right now.

What this means is the end of fast food.

When oil becomes scarcer (and therefore more expensive), the cost of petrochemicals will increase.  That affects the use of countless things.  Fertilizer and pesticides used to grow the crops that feed the cattle that go into your burger.  The electricity that powers the factory that processes the corn syrup in your drink.  The diesel that fuels the trucks that deliver the processed food packages used to make your burrito.  The feedstock used to manufacture the plastic of your large drink cup.

It simply will not be cost-effective to maintain networks of fast food.  I mean, I look at all the KFCs, Pizza Huts, and Subways and I see obsolescence gnawing at their foundations like a hungry badger.   The Happy Meal is going to turn into a high-priced collector’s novelty like an eight track tape.  Then it’s going to be something you get tired of hearing Grandpa ramble on about, all the way into a topic you learn about in history class.

That doesn’t mean some new form of worker housing won’t take the place of the current model.  We will always have oil, just not enough to keep the old model going.  Any change is likely to be a slow, gradual process.  We might even get really lucky and discover a new energy source to help with the transition into the post-oil age.  Whatever ends up happening, we’re in for some adjustments.

So enjoy your chicken-farm nuggets and processed slopper sandwiches.  The limits of growth inherent in the laws of nature are going to wipe out what decades of awareness activism couldn’t accomplish.

The new honeycomb hideout has an interesting feature in the backyard.  Our neighbor has placed a statue of Mother Mary on a pedestal, flanked on either side by golden angels blaring trumpets.  So every time I look outside, her head pokes above the fence to keep an eye on me, angels blaring away on their trumpets.  Talk about having a sacred and watchful eye on one’s self.

There’s a catnip plant for the kitties in the front yard.  Since we moved in it’s been taking off like gangbusters.  We give the kitties a leaf each now and then, but only as a special treat.  I swear, right off the plant the cats go right to their happy place and purr contentedly.  I mean, when you have Cat Town, after two years of haunted house duty, I’d be a honey tiger too.

I’m guessing that in a while the kitties will be adapted to the new wonder and begin bugging us with new ideas.  But for now I’m so happy to have them on a peaceful recovery.  Who knows how many zomboids and ghostaloos they lazored for us when the hell house was in full effect.

Mother Mary’s short duration personal assistant came by the other day.  She had with her a bottle of RC cola and a pack of ice.  Whoa, our haunted freezer refused to accept ice bags, as it was dimensionally not set up for anything beyond TV dinner sized.  She pours me a tall glass of RC on ice and pushes the sudsy spray right up to my nose.

“Close your eyes and sniff,” she says.

Oh man, I forgot how much fun it is to bring the suds of an icy poured drink up to your nose and let the bubbles tickle your spine.  It’s like a fizzy lifting alchemy, making your nose sticky and damp at the same time as the noise crackles in your ears.

“Have you been doing your exercises?”

Uh, like no.  Kind of been in emergency evacuate mode.  Still recovering.  She rolls with it, tells me I’ll be get back to my body awareness exercises once I’m ready.  In the meantime, she prescribes a musical training to supplement my psychic kung fu.  Says I have to complete the gaps in my wholeness.  This I won’t be able to get away from, she says.  I’m like, yeah cool, I’m committed.

She laughs.  All I had to do was say yes.  The rest will handle itself.

I guess so!  She’s got things to do, people to see, so we cut it short.  Outside, cicadas are chirring like nobody’s business.  I spot a discarded cicada exoskeleton on the exploding-with-growth tomato plant in the front yard as I wave to her.

Which is funny, because a friend of mine was just complaining about how cicadas keep showing up in the literature he’s been reading, as symbols of remembrance–days when one was young.  I do admit there’s something primal about cicadas.  But my youthful nostalgia evocative sound is trucks on a highway.  Sends me back to when I lived in a car.

And fizzy cola on the nose is also an evocative sensation for me.  As a kid I would run right up to glasses and yell, “suds!”  So maybe that’s the lesson.  Getting back in touch, after being in the hopper for two years.

It’s all about farm games.

K and I break out the tea collection and get busy organizing the life support system module number tea-oh-yeah.  My friend Snow would be modestly and politely moved by our devotion, as so Level 3 it is to her Level twenty-four forward-slash seven, know what I’m sayin’?

Side note:  I mean it.  When you’re that level, you are big dudette generous and make it look easy.  “Here, have everything you need to start.  Here’s a location on a map.  Get adventurin’ and maybe you’ll connect with ultra-power tea-ness your own special way.”

Back to K and I.  We’ve bought a number of glass milk jars from the local upper-cruster Whole Foods.  Plastic caps, but what the hey weeds have to make do with what they have right?  While we do have tea bags, our focus is on resealable containers of loose-leaves for mix and match.  Since I’m a honey-freak, I have my honey in the rough for getting my freak on.

Now K is pretty crafty.  We get tired of boiling the water the usual way, so she investigates a location on the map and we find ourselves with the bonus round—an electric teapot that rapid-boils water in less than five minutes.  Just fill with water, plug in, flip the switch, and pow.  Yes, this is very much dependency on instrumentality (not to mention electricity), but as I said this is the approach of the lightning age (which is very aquarian).

So now we can make large quantities of water for brewing tea.  When it’s cool we fill the jars and put them in the fridge.  Goodbye, buying high priced tea in the store!  I’m also a soda-fiend, so anything that alleviates my vice for soda varieties is good.  Water’s too boring for me, juice too strong, milk too bland and coffee too strong.  Tea gives me the watery goodness, and a flavor, so I can drink lots of it and not burn out.

Special bonus:  I tell Snow about this amazing teapot and she’s floored.  I give her the info hookup and I get the feeling she teleports one to her kitchen while I’m standing there talking to her.  Next week I run into her again and she tells me the thing opened up a new level for her in the tea-realm, allowing her to adventure in a new area.

The teacher shares what they know and maybe it’ll pay off in those hidden rooms you missed when you were fighting the tea ogre with squid tentacles back on level eleven.  When you hold onto that hunger for knowledge, keep striving with joy for what you do, it pays off.  Snow polishes that gemstone of a hankering she has a little more, while K and I get life support system bonus for more XP.  That’s what generosity does for you.

So what does this have to do with farm games?  Well, seems like on Facebook lately there’s been a surge in farming games.  You socialize with your friends, care for each other’s farms, raise crops and harvest goodies.  Mainly in the dungeon and dragons kind of reward cycle—you kill monsters so you can get better at killing monsters, only here it’s grow crops so you can get better at growing crops.

It’s a slight paradigm shift in games, I think, which bears careful watching.  Is this the seed that falls in the right ground at the right time, the spark that kindles a new way of thinking that will grow grow grow?

The thing is, there’s a growing interest in resource management games (SimCity, the Sims, Civilization, and so on).  The shoot-em-ups and the side-scrollers are still there.  But now you have a growing awareness of “Hey, it’s fun to farm.  To raise animals, plant corn, and build wells.”

Yes, the reality is hard work and thankless repetition.  But it depends on how you look at the reward cycle.  K and I are looking to be healthier and happier.  This formula (of many) is about the reward of having something we make that keeps us going without resorting to the kiddie pool that is mainline industrial food production for loyal, stunned workers.  For Snow it’s about a passion for the pursuit of what interests her.

Both operate under systems that farm games mimic to a degree.  You look for stuff, gather stuff, make stuff, improve your skill with stuff, and then the stuff benefits you.

Then you get into complex games like Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility, where you need to have good relationships with people to get the stuff.  There’s lots of stuff to master—mining stuff, cooking stuff, animal stuff, plant stuff, clothing stuff.  You’re in the realm of a community and the need to ration your time to develop the stuff you need.  The ultimate goal:  To be the best “stuff” person you can be, in this case the archetype of the farmer who are their own means of production.

What does being a good farmer mean?  That you can court a partner and raise a family (and the game allows you to do this, ending only when it is the next generation’s turn to find their fortune), and you can also save the world (or the world of this game anyway)—your knowledge as a farmer revives the Goddess of the land and brings blessings back to the community.

You got that?  Your ability to beat things up here is worth zilch.  Your ability to be patient, adaptable and friendly can save the world for everybody!  Or allow you to have a happy home life—either as a farmer who just loves making bread for the Hek of it or as a family person moving things forward to the next spiral of that life that is greater than ours.

I’m living it a little, others are living it, and the games are representing it.  What level is your watering can skill yo?  Can you make perfect pickles?  How’s that ability to make butter?

I’m wondering what the next signpost will be to what’s evolving right before our eyes.  In the meantime, I need to get more and better skills, talk people up more, and get busy on the farm!

Because I think there’s a comprehensive picture here forming.

Okay, so like what the dame Hek is going on?  I’ll tell you what’s going on, total craziness, that’s what’s happenin’ yo.

The brand new trans-triple headed crossroads warp core is installed and calibrated.  The whole honeycomb hideout resonates with the sound of the rhythms of the grave, from the ground up.  The cats might as well be staying on a gigantic spaceship of peace and love with catgrass on the house.  Even the catboxes are ghost free and soothing to the rump.

Took me and K a while to recover from “stunned” and then the disorientation hit.  That kind of strange contentment that comes from breaking free of a conflagration-fulmination into blue skies.  At first you think you’re hallucinating.  But it’s true, it’s true, it’s dame Hek true ahroo!

Back at the controls, I’m thinking about Ariadne’s thread.  Yeah, we all need a grounding out technique to keep us from getting lost.  But what if the minotaur needed a thread too?  You know, so he could keep from getting lost to the outside world?  What you say?!  Monsters with a guidemap to jack us?  Hek-yeah.

It’s a two way street, coming and going, departure, return.  Aum.

And that goes for the divine as well as us human losers on this patch of dirt.  The living spirit looks to us to try.  Judging by that haunted house labyrinth I think some journeys are a one time only limited time offer.

I have the sense of answering the living spirit’s own prayer here, that there is a seeing up at the heavens and beholding earth.  How many people ever get to go to the moon and look up in the sky to see themselves, their home suspended above from what was supposed to be above for so long in our imaginations?

I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles.

We are the aliens, landing at a Mount Olympus near you.  Do we bring messages of peace and advanced technology, or are we coming to invade?  Are we bound by the prime directive when visiting Saint Anthony’s cottage for a cup of tea?  Whose outside world manifestation are we anyway?  Boxes within boxes, elephants all the way down.

The new living quarters are situated in a nice forgotten world, suitable for K, the kitties and I to recover safely from our ordeal in the crum-bum haunted house.  We’re puttering around the house, K and I, trying to figure out what to allocate our slowly increasing warp power to today.

I get a transmission from my way-out, surprisingly random Aquarius friend Mar-Jam, also known as “Goddess”, solver of prickly practical problems, and strangely clever girl.  She knows I’m a big-big monster, so I like a big-big bite.  Thus the three-megabyte image attached to the transmission of a tri-force shelf unit of impeccable usefulness in just the right dramatic moment.

Move heavy objects and do some more work on the new place’s layout, when we’re still recovering from the month long moving nightmare?  You bet.  We need more shelves and they need to fit this one area near the kitchen in just the dramatically appropriate way.  We’d be fools to turn down this mission, and all it’s attendant experience points (only true adventurers need apply).

We get to see Mar-Jam’s nifty living quarters (and we take notes on the controlled randomness obscurity circuitry we see), and her adorable little ones absorbing nutrients from the tidepool they are living in.  With the help of her handy other half we transport the goods to the Honeycomb Hideout .  They get rid of junk, and we make use of junk!

Everybody wins, ice cream on the house.

There’s some damage—cuts, aches and pains—all that good stuff from taking on such a mammoth task.  But the three shelving units plug into the hyper-altimeter retro space byway like they were meant to be there all along.  It’s then that we realize what has come to our humble abode:  Cat Town.

By some strange arrangement of the furniture, the tops of the tall shelves are a perfect place for the cats to hang out and survey the downstairs situation.  Frankee finds the secret route over the mountains first.  Then Michael, fat and ungainly monticore that he is, manages to attain heights I haven’t seen since he was a young monticore.  It’s unreal!

Of course, the shelves make perfect storage units for the china, extra dishes, and various assorted things we’ve been dying to unpack but couldn’t find the right disembarkment combination for.

So, welcome to Cat Town, highest point in the downstairs living energy flow, with lots of space to plop down comfortably.  Plenty of great angles to rub one’s fur against, and also enough of a sunk-in effect to peer down if necessary or hang one’s paws over lazily.  I am sure it will only be a matter of time before cat beds, soft towels and other assorted comfy surfaces begin to accumulate.  Along with favored toys carried up to be ripped lovingly to shreds in the safety of alpine security.

But wait, there’s more!  It even comes with a bonus for humans too.  Within moments of plugging in Cat Town, K and I find ourselves inspired to do more work on the house.  The downstairs and upstairs bathrooms are cleaned, cleansed, and made fully pleasing to our mind’s eyes.  Unpacking galore!  At last we can open up both rooms to the cats, having arranged all things to our liking.

It’s like in a video game when you open up a whole new area of the adventure board.  Hey, I’ll take the bonus.  The cats are the happiest I’ve seen them since we smuggled them free of the haunted house under a blood red sky, and landed them in the new place with their eyes bugging out, hardly daring to believe it was true.

There is no place I know to compare with pure imagination.

My policy is not to talk about work, but I believe this is a suitable exception.  I’m not one for following my rules off a cliff I suppose you might say.  Mr. Punch, being an intriguing rascal, appears to enjoy stirring things up.

So.  Not one to easily forget the discovery I made of Mr. Punch in an earlier post, I bided my time.  The passing of time elapsed, and an opportunity presented itself to me in the form of a talent show at work.

I didn’t immediately recognize it as such.  Many folks where I work recognize that I have certain leanings towards the creative performance.  So it wasn’t a surprise when I said randomly, “Sure, sign me up.  I don’t know what I’ll do, but whatever.”

The show approached, and all I could think of was doing some unformulated comedy routine.  Meanwhile, the other volunteers honed their ideas and practiced what they would share with the rest of us at the office.  Heartfelt duets, piano-violin duets, funny duets.

Me, I had nothing.  And from nothing comes something, or rather, Mr. Punch came along and said I should do a show for him.  The folks at the office would love it, and I would get a chance to actually run a show.

You see, I’ve been doing a lot of Internet reading about Mr. Punch.  Not just to search for clues, but because I found the whole concept fascinating.  Perhaps I might actually become a “professor” one day!  That’s a person who is a Punch and Judy performer, by the way.  It has roots in the old days, when professors weren’t merely academics but also people with mystical or showmanship skills.

Okay, I have no funds right now, having spent all my reserves moving out of the haunted house.  There’s no way I was going to actually be able to buy real props.  Not with two days to go before the big show, where I was getting the feeling I’d be standing up on stage like a frightened Andy Kaufman, except it wouldn’t be an act.

So, I pored over Punch and Judy scripts and made one of my own.  Well, in true rip-off street entertainer style I snatched up a bunch of ideas from other professors online.  I decided on Punch, Judy, and the Constable, with the Devil for a chaser.  Memorized some classic lines and that was that.

Next, a makeshift stage.  Obtained some tall, stiff cardstock and taped it together.  Large enough for me to sit behind and raise my hands above.  A bit wobbly—wouldn’t it be hilarious if it fell down during the performance?  Well, that’s show biz folks.  I’d run with it.  The great thing about Punch and Judy shows is they are designed to be totally improvised and mobile if the situation calls for it.

Finally, the puppets.  Again, ripping off pictures of Punch characters from the Internet and printing them out.  I traced the outlines onto a fresh piece of paper and exaggerated the lines a little to make them larger.  Then I colored the faces and cut them out.  Taking four brown paper lunch bags, I glue-sticked the faces on to the bottoms.  When the bags are folded, the faces “face” forward and have a little motive ability.

For Punch’s stick I used a cardboard tube from a paper towel roll.

I practiced the voices and the lines back and forth for an hour.  Slept on it.  And then the next day I’m at work ready to go!  We are talking a dirt cheap, bare bones, never been done before by me, on the fly show.  Boy I sure hope I don’t choke!

Mr. Punch came through.  I did the work, and he had my back when the time came for him to show up.  There’s something primordial about puppet shows, and archetypal characters on stage that has a strong life energy of its own.  The show was a big hit, with people laughing at the stupidity of the paper bag puppets talking in funny voices.  The interactivity really makes the audience implicit in the story, while still allowing them to be particpationists (it’s all rote responses right….right?!).  This is what genius is made of.

I didn’t think I would be able to run all three side characters in the five-minute time slot, but it all flowed beautifully.  Judy boggled at the audience larger than she could cook for, so she decided to call in delivery (the office was having a lunch afterwards of Chick-Fil-A).  The constable was suitably outraged at Punch’s misbehavior.  And when the Devil showed up there was a nice chill down the audience’s spine, at the same time a hope Punch would get his comeuppance this time!

I don’t know when I’ll get to do a Punch and Judy show again.  It’s a tremendous privilege for Mr. Punch to come along and give me even one opportunity in life.  I feel as if I’ve participated in an ancient, honorable tradition and made people happy.

And that’s the way you do it.

Fundamental problems aside, the movies themselves are awful for the most part.  Like the Batman franchise, the people at the helm have no clue about what to do with the material.  It’s dysfunctional, all over the place, amateurish attempts at audience manipulation.

Despite a pretty detailed (if simplistic) world in the books to draw upon, the movie-makers seem unable to work with the material.  They are simply unable to craft scenes that get to the heart of the plot, let alone draw out nuances implied in the text.  A lot of time is spent throughout all six movies watching scenes thrown together without logic or understanding.

Unless you’ve read the books most of the scenes are extremely confusing.  Half the time I was wondering what was going on or what the significance was of what had just happened.  So much looked like filler that could have been cut out.  That’s not an endorsement.  If you need recourse to the books to understand the film it’s a poor adaptation.

I don’t buy that there’s too much to fit into a movie.  You could literally tell the story of all seven books in one movie.  People want to believe all of it is important, but it really isn’t when you are talking the short-term medium of the film.  You want the whole thing made visual, clamor for a TV series.

Given that we have a film a book (and two for the finale!), not only is it possible to fit in the essentials but more than a few nice touches.  It’s possible, and it’s been done before for other adaptations.  These movie-makers just aren’t up to the challenge.

This isn’t a manifesto or a detailed analysis (I just ain’t that interested), but here a few major goof ups from each of the films that illustrate what I’m talking about.  I’m not even going to touch the theme that some of these ideas are pretty basic Dungeons and Dragons awfulness, that’s fish for someone else to fry.  I’m assuming that you at least buy the world as it is even if it doesn’t please you.

Spoilers are a-comin’ in, ahroo!

HP & The Sorcerer’s Stone
Too much time is spent getting us into the world of Hogwarts and not enough developing the main conflict (the race to reach the stone).  For example, once it’s established that the letters are going to keep coming until Harry goes to school, move on to the next scene people.

Instead we get a ridiculous scene where Harry’s foster family somehow manages to go to an island lighthouse just off the coast and hole up there so we can go through this again.  Never mind the believability, this just wastes time.  The point was made very well clear the first time that Harry’s Destiny is ON.  The Call To Adventure doesn’t take fifteen minutes for goodness sake!

The time they wasted on that could have been used to shorten the movie (and improve the pace) or make room for a longer scene to allow themes to develop better.  I’m biased, but for example they could have put back in the deleted scene with Snape.

It’s an interesting scene because it demonstrates his incredible knowledge (and it’s a clue for viewers as to the identity of the “prince” in movie six), as well as drives home the point that there’s something about Harry that is personal to Snape—look how close the man gets even as he applies realistic skepticism to the fanciful image of Savior Harry.  It’s a character “tell” as well as a good lesson.

HP & The Chamber of Secrets
In the first film, a hostile giant troll roamed the halls of Hogwarts without getting jacked by all sorts of magical defenses one would think the professors in a magical society would have.  We can fan-wank (that is, imagine given our meta-story knowledge) that “the man with two faces” being in a professor’s position disabled those, allowing the troll free reign.

In this movie we have a gigantic snake-like creature roaming the halls turning people to stone.  At least, I think that’s what was happening.  One wonders why the basilisk didn’t poison the victims for good measure, but Voldemort (in the form of Tom Riddle via mental possession of Harry) isn’t exactly eating with both hands here.  Which makes me wonder how he’s still alive, because crazy people tend to make mistakes in high-stakes games.

Anyway, it’s hard to imagine a gigantic snake moving through the halls without somebody else noticing.  Even more so in a restrictive environment where Harry can’t walk through the halls at night without the risk of someone giving him detention.  This thing is gigantic (maybe sixty or seventy feet long), and not exactly quiet or likely to leave things like wall hangings or furniture intact as it slithers about.

I think the basilisk is made huge because Hollywood movie-makers equate size with power.  The basilisk really should have been a lot smaller.  The strength of the tooth Harry uses on the book is in the poison, not the size.  Really, you have a poisonous monster that can kill you if you look at it (or petrify you if you see the reflection), does it really need to be that size and stretch all credibility?

Go to YouTube and watch what constrictor snakes only fifteen feet long do to guys trying to capture them on nature shows.  Now imagine that if it bites you or you look at it you’re dead.

HP & The Prisoner of Azkaban
There’s a scene where Sirius Black, the super evil second-in-command werewolf to Voldemort, shows up to initiate The Big Reveal of the film.  He’s really a good guy who was framed.  Lupin, the new tutor for Defense Against The Black Arts and Harry’s new trusted friend, has been protecting him.  And he’s also a werewolf (but a different kind).  The real bad guy is rat-tooth man who has been masquerading as Ron’s rat all along.  For fourteen years.

Got that?  All of this is revealed onscreen so fast I could barely understand what was happening.  Other than a vague hint that something is amiss with Lupin, and the sudden additional screentime of Ron with his rat familiar (the function of rat familiars is never explained), there are no hints to any of this throughout the entire movie.

No sooner does Harry start to comprehend that his new friend has deceived him (like all the other adults) then the movie drags to a halt, as the plot has to assimilate these new developments and make some sense of them.

Hollywood loves the surprise ending, but they nearly always fail because it isn’t the audience that should be surprised.  It’s the characters.  Movie-makers always focus on the audience instead of the characters.

HP & The Goblet Of Fire
My favorite WTF moment is in the beginning of the film.  You have a camp of what must be tens of thousands of wizards with their families and friends.  If I understand the context it’s an international grouping so you are bound to have all sorts of people with different points of view, life experiences and magical training.  The magical arena must be seating at least fifty thousand people.  All the big dude dinners of the magical world are there, including Dumbledore.

As near as I can tell, a half dozen Voldemort supporters (called death-eaters) attack this gathering with what look like crappy fire bolts.  These thousands of wizards run screaming home as the camp burns up in flames.  There’s a panic, but only Harry gets trampled into unconsciousness (without any physical or psychological after-effects from such a traumatic experience).  The death-eaters then disappear without taking any casualties.

Nobody talks about how six wizards terrorized thousands without a scratch.  If it was just the section that Harry was in, why isn’t this portrayed?  Not that this would explain how they escaped without a scratch or why everyone panicked, given that the magical world is so violent and random.  It makes no sense at all.

I mean, at this point in the series are we supposed to be taking all this as fantastical metaphors of some kind?

HP & The Order Of The Phoenix
Two-thirds of the film is used to build up a repressive, insane bureaucrat as the villain.  The students band together and train to learn magic despite the bureaucrat’s attempts to crush them (without any interference from parents, faculty or the slight majority of bureaucrats who voted Harry “not-guilty”).

When the big moment of confrontation comes, the community doesn’t band together to remove this madwoman from power and put her away.  Harry and Hermione lead her into the forest where she conveniently disappears.

Do the efforts of the students mean anything?  No.  They neither defeat the madwoman nor show off their new skills (and foresight) fighting off a Voldemort attack.  Do the efforts of the madwoman lead to tragedy when the students are unprepared, showing how one must not surrender to repression?  No.  It’s all filler.

The movie might have well started with Dumbledore and Voldemort fighting, then ended with Prime Minister Whats-his-name saying, “Voldemort is back!”

HP & The Half-Blood Prince
Traitorous Malfoy lets the bad guys past the now-activated magical defenses into Hogwarts.  Okay, Trojan Horse idea done to death but it works.  Malfoy’s inner struggle might prove interesting if they focus on it.

Nope, all about young lust for half the film.  And letting the bad guys in is all part of the cunning plan to let the death-eaters see Snapes kill Dumbledore.  Because Voldemort, being enough of a chess player to beat the chess challenge in the first film, does not understand the concept of sacrificing pieces to set up a checkmate.

Lets see, most powerful good wizard dead.  Second most powerful on bad guys side (or at least pretending to be and thus needs to stand by while atrocities are committed).  Near as I can tell just Miss Crabapple, The Mini-me Magician, and a handful of no-liner professors left.  Students are totally unaware and vulnerable.  Bad guys have run of the place.

Do the evil death-eaters, led by crazy woman who kills people at the drop of a hat go on a rampage?  This is their chance to wipe out all the students and professors unsympathetic to their cause.  They should have a list of the dozen or so people they’d spare, given that Malfoy and others have been observing events at Hogwarts for six years now.

Do they take this opportunity to loot for powerful magical items and destroy any parts of Hogwarts not suitable to the new Voldemort order?  Do they even take Harry Potter with them as a prisoner?

No.

They blow up the dinner hall furnishings and burn Hagrid’s hut for dramatic vandalism appeal (which comes off as funny, not tragic, because Hagrid is always an un-serious character and thus the butt of jokes).  Then they depart.

This is never explained.  There’s no excuse for this kind of plain lazy movie-making.  We aren’t talking about Critters 2:  The New Batch!  I mean, to explain why they don’t go on a mass murder rampage, all you have to do is have the following occur:

Random death-eater: “Crazy woman whose name begins with a B, I sense the dementors are coming.  We’d better split, sister.”

Crazy woman whose name begins with a B: “You’re right.  Even though we could take on fifty thousand wizards in the fourth film, I feel an intestinal grip coming.  Lets leave it for the next two films.”

Sadly, Hollywood continues only to be able to make good movies by accident.  But all is not completely lost, stay tuned.

While the starship Snipe rests in dry dock, getting it’s superstructure and engine stress points repaired, I’m on some much needed psychic shore leave.  Still lots to do, in a generic survival kind of way.  K and I are moved  in to the new honeycomb hideout, and have physical object issues to work out with all of our stuff.  But the new place is welcoming us in and it’s as if we never left our beloved neighborhood before the haunted house jackup.

My mental brain calibrations return to a less terrified “all guns-blazing” mode.  And I go through the task of setting up my creative work center all over again.  I know I have chip-lights going off on projects all over the place.  The panic is part of the process, so it’s cool.  This is a good energy to have bugging me.  K and I go to a bookstore and buy some reading material.  At the end of the day, we just need to sit on the Puff Couch and read, with cats all together at peace loafing on the slack vibe.

Picked up this awesome huge volcano picture book for ten bucks.  I’ve been on a volcano kick for the last few weeks, imagining the explosive power and brilliant glow of molten earth.  I swear, bargain books have some of the best overlooked books ever.

I decide a good search on the internets would be to find out what happens when a person falls into lava.  I mean, what really happens?  As I type in “What happens when a” into the gooble-gobbler search box, it suggests “volcano erupts”, followed by “girl loses her virginity”.  Whoa, the things on people’s minds and the free form associations with nature shows.  What is going on in the collective unconscious that I’m picking up?

Turns out finding an answer to this person-in-lava question is harder than it looks.  I really have to search with the sensors to find a second hand story about a geologist who fell up to his waist in lava accidentally, and was pulled out quickly by a friend.  He suffered third degree burns and lived to walk again (with a hint that he’d lost the ability to have children, ouch).

Mind you, he was wearing one of those heat protection suits.  If I understand correctly, the difference in temperatures caused a thin layer of lava to cool around the body, absorbing heat from the outer layer of lava preventing the flesh from burning immediately.

I see a lot of speculation that a person would die almost immediately from the heat, probably float on top of the lava (density issues, like swimming in a salt-saturated body of water), and combust into huge amounts of smoke.  The flesh would shrivel up (the body’s liquids blasting out as steam) and probably explode (because of the fat), the bones charring straight to ash.

I learn about convection.  That’s when hot liquids or gases make currents that spread their heat into the environment.  Lava is so unbearably hot convection would burn you up before you reached it.  Never mind the poison gases and crippling ash emanating from it.  Wow, the force of nature contained within the molten earth is unbelievably sublime.

I’ve always been fond of volcanoes.  Part of me finds the vein of clues within Pele compelling.  But my current interest is spurred along the lines of some of the things my friends have been talking about.  Much as horses was a theme that was roaming the fields a few months ago, now it appears that volcanoes are the new symbol.

There’s the aspect of psychological force building up in the deep depths and erupting forth (violently, with tremendous force).  There’s also the part that relates to creative process, with the ejected contents providing new land to live upon and plants to grow in.  And there’s also the facet to personality, having a charisma that is intense and awesome in scope, much as a fountain of magma can draw attention.

In the external world it can stand for events that overwhelm us with their gigantic power.  The popular image of human sacrifice to volcanoes comes into play.  Human being marries deity in the literal sense, ka-fwoosh.  Taken down a notch it can be any personal tragedy or self-sacrifice that traumatizes the soul.

What happens when a person falls into lava psychologically?  Destruction of the ego, of the self-image.  The raw truth of one’s innermost interior being burns the consciousness to the crisp.  You might recover from a brief contact, but with a deep scar.  Total psychic immolation would mean you descend into darkness and only a greater, living spirit power can draw you back from the depths.  But this is getting into scary stuff, where the real possibility exists your pieces of the psyche (ashes) will remain at an elemental level.

Elemental as in, if you reduce all the biological processes to chemical processes, what you are left with at the foundation of all life is dirt.  That is, matter.

Out of matter come shapes, and one of the most fundamental is the stone.  When the lava has cooled you are left with rock, which chips, breaks and is worn into shapes.  The stone has been a symbol of the deepest self for a long time.  But we’re talking geologic time here when it comes to natural processes (even though lava itself can cool within a human being’s lifetime).  A person might have to endure a time of unconscious cooling and shaping before assuming a proper psychological shape.

Which is an emerging from the unknown.  Then, one day, a person finds you and goes, “Wow, what a cool stone.” and puts you in a pocket to take you home.  It’s as if the human image of ourselves is something that happens to us, appears to come from the outside, when that body has been formed from dirt itself in a much longer and mysterious process, moving up the chain from matter to chemical to biological to psychological once more.

I’m staring at the volcanoes and listening for the clues, just for the Hek of it.  Past the awesome force and cyclic transmutation, at the emptiness of nothing from which all that heat-matter and liquid-matter is spilling forth from.

What happens when a person falls into lava?  The unnecessary stuff burns away and you’re left with you.

Went on a walk with the parental units and K.  The last month and a half has been hard core beat-down, on the outside world stage as well as the personal stage.  There’s a lot of decompression and decontamination procedures to go through.  Our meditative walks together help massage out the bad brains.

I spot a robot at the top of this hill under someone’s raised porch.  “Hey check out that robot,” I say.  K says, “What robot?  That’s a mermaid.”  After a few minutes of everyone seeing different things and wondering whether reality has shifted underfoot, it dawns on me this is one of those weirdo random whackazoid encounters of doom.  I switch positions and see next to the robot is a red-haired waving mermaid.  The trees and the way the hill is situated combine to make it hard to see both at the same time.

We all laugh at the absurdity.  Who (or what) posts technological and magical beings along the meditative route people take?  That’s just how it is when all you get is the Spanish Inquisition.  Robots to the left of us, mermaids to the right.  Here we are, stuck on one side or the other, unable to pass between the guardians of the change in consciousness.  Except this time I figured it out and we saw both sides.  And laughter, the fool, comes along to take us back to the beginning, to our roots.

The haunted house closes it’s doors today sometime after 5 PM, and then that strange and terrifying ordeal will be gone forever.  My folks wanted to take pictures of the Chucky doll and us waving bye-bye to the house, but K was like, “No way.”  We flushed the evil toilet for posterity and laughs, but the monstrous apparatus was strangely subdued, it’s poltergeist-like slamming sounds hardly detectable.

A large spider has taken up residence in the sliding back door, spinning a long tunnel-like web, probably two and a half feet in length (the web, not the spider!).  We decided to leave it be.  Somehow, a yucky looking spider with dried insect husks gives this empty, smelly, and disorienting place character.  I tried to open the secret door, but the ghosts were having none of that.  The creaking noises and dust seemed to increase as if to say, “You’re done dude, just go.”  I understand.  Sometimes it’s better not to know.

I decided to strangle the spooky gift bag in the kitchen (sorry Hexe Witchiepoo!).  A gift bag that had alarmed so many people by playing at random times (including K).  Even though the battery should have died years ago.  It seemed appropriate.

We delivered a note to our neighbor on one side of the haunted house.  Her friend, with strangely diseased-looking hands accepted with politeness.  I was like, whoa, is this whole neighborhood full of halloween characters and we just didn’t know it because we didn’t see it?  Now that’s just darn creepy.  If I look at it, victims and skulkers living in the same deserted cul-de-sac.

I shoot off a firecracker.  Time to move on.

K and I moved a veritable buttload of George Carlin micronized “stuff” for the last ten days.  Detaching all cables, ectoplasmic ghost tentacles, and gravitational psychic suctoids has been a real pleasure I can tell you.  Tractor beaming it out of the haunted house while the ghosts gnash their teeth and scream and cry, Wild Thangs style, “oh please oh please don’t go we’ll eat you up we smash you so”, is an exercise in self-pyro-flagellation.

How many twisted ankles, auto-inject splinters, cloudy day sunburns, phantom mosquito bites, miniature cuts, blunt skin scratches, smooshed toe blister, achy-breaky muscles hit points you got?  Well, looks like K and I ain’t down and out yet, though wow what a slow ride, take it beastly.

But the alcohol saints have been keeping us in plenty of in-between meal snacks.  A little muscle relaxant goes a long way in keeping the insanity people and android soul creamulators away.  I’m using my soulsword on full power, banishing those demonoid phenomenons from Chucky doll’s foul orifice (which one?).  Maybe the alcohol saints are loving the spectacle.  Who will challenge McCoy in THIS day and age, eh?  Luck of the Irish I suppose, with a heap of K’s fatalistic viking plunge ahead with all-out Excalburt whammo.

The animals are all over the place right now.  Last night while driving home a load in the trans-dimensional hatchback Micro-blue, a deer with horns crossed the street.  During the day there’s tons of hawks everywhere, looking for munchy mouseguts or delicious bird nuggets.  If you can’t see them, you can sure hear them screeching like the cartoon in Hawk The Slayer!

Driving through traffic on the way to the store for the umpteenth time to get lightbulbs, or cleanser, or any number of post-haunted house tidy-up you can’t remember because your brain is on auto-pilot, I heard the baying of a goat.  It’s a freaking two road with two lanes each multi-hyperspace bypass full of droids in cars, for Goodness sake.  It must have been in somebody’s vehicle, but I didn’t see any vehicles but four doors and minivans.  Chaos!

On UFO Girl Hill, the rabbits were playing with each other, jumping and prancing about while munching on the rarified fairy grass that surrounds the hill.  Chippie was maneuvering about, collecting seeds.  And huge yellow damsel-fly like bug was waiting for us on the door handle.  Can you dig it?  BUG city.  As in bugging out and calling it even, bugging out and losing your marbles, bugging off because this house for dwarfs and dimensional shamblers just ain’t got it for us no more.

Still, K and I have gotten a few walkies in around the magic lake.  Bats everywhere eating the bugs buzzing our skulls.  We found their lair, and its a perfect spot.  Heating and cooling all in one, water, bugs, all the whole nine yards.  These bats are batty batty batty!  They are getting down, they are rocking the mike, they are eating their faces full of bugs!  Eat them all up yum, dudes and dudettes, we’ll keep walkin’ on and bring ya the summer BBQ livin’ is easy howlaroo.

The cats have been transfered, and are taking the new honeycomb hideout well.  The lack of haunted house doom agrees with them, and how!  New bed, new rest, deep sleep.  I dreamt K and I had climbed out of a sewer-cave, ancient forgotten waterway with a sack full of dimaonds.  Everyone was wanting to know how we did it, where we were.