Phantomimic's Blog

My Review of the Fargenstropple Case by Lia London

8/30/2012

Meet Chief (of should I say Chef?) inspector Terrence Morgan who is recruited to come up to Bloome Manor and solve a most baffling and also seemingly trivial mystery involving the excitable Lady Chatterly. The good inspector thinks he will have this one nailed in no time at all, but little does he know that he is about to embark on an adventure that will have him bitten by ferrets, falling on ashes, singing to hounds, wearing ladies clothes, and pursuing a love interest.

This book is an interactive fiction co-creation by author Lia London and several collaborators. The twists and turns of the plot are as funny as the British-sounding names of some of the characters including Mr. Crumbfellow, Mrs Moulderswich, and of course Millicent Fargenstropple. Reading this book reminded me of the BBC comedies that I used to watch with my family on NPR. The Brits have always been adept at capturing in everyday language the nuances of the human condition ranging from the solemn to the silly, and the author does a good job of reflecting this here.

Lia should be commended not only for writing a great story and doing it very well, but also for coordinating all the moving parts of this interactive experiment. The book is well formatted, has a functional table of contents, and each chapter has a distinctive title, which is something I always like because it makes navigating back and forth among the chapters easier.

If you want to relax, and have a good time “The Fargenstropple Case” is the book for you!

0 Comments

Zombies: Myth or Reality?

8/30/2012

2 Comments

A lot of books, movies, and even video games employ the motif of the living dead. All of this is, of course, fiction, but have you ever wondered whether there is something to it? In the Haitian Voodoo religion zombies are believed to be corpses that have been reanimated through witchcraft by a sorcerer called a “Bokor.” These zombies are nothing like the ones shown in movies like “Night of the Living Dead,” but still their existence has always been the mainstay of myth and legend.

In 1982 the peculiar case of Clairvius Narcisse was brought to the attention of Drs. Nathan Kline and Lamarque Douyon. Narcisse had died and been certified as dead by an American doctor working in Haiti. The thing is that 18 years after his death he showed up in his village very much alive. He claimed that he had been paralyzed, declared dead, and buried alive. Then a Bokor disinterred him and made him work on his plantation. Drs. Kline and Douyon studied his case carefully and concluded that the man was indeed who he claimed to be.

At the request of Dr. Kline, Wade Davis, a Harvard graduate student in ethnobotany, travelled to Haiti to try to study what components go into the potions used by Bokors to make zombies. As a result of his studies he claimed that zombies were a reality and even put forward a scientific explanation of their existence. Wade found that one of the common ingredients in the zombie poison is the puffer fish. The internal organs of this fish contain a poison called tetrodotoxin (TTX). Although TTX can kill, in small amounts it can paralyze a person while they remain conscious. In Japan where a similar fish (the fugu) is a gourmet delicacy, there are stories of people that ate the fish prepared improperly, became paralyzed, and were almost buried alive after being declared dead.

So the zombification would work like this. The Bokor rubs his potion on a person’s skin or preferably into a superficial wound. If the right amount of TTX gets into the body, the person is paralyzed, declared dead, and buried. The Bokor must then unbury the person before he/she dies from lack of oxygen. The disinterred person is then beaten and fed mind altering drugs (notably the zombie’s cucumber: datura) to keep them docile. The whole process is reinforced if the person believes that he/she is actually being turned into a zombie. Davis published his findings and theories in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 1983 and in the book “The Serpent and the Rainbow” in 1985.

Unfortunately, scientists analyzing the zombification powders Davis brought back from Haiti did not find any TTX in them and could not elicit any symptoms of poisoning when they rubbed said powders into the skin of rats. This was followed by a series of attacks and claims and counter claims between Davis and his critics that left his theory hopelessly mired in disrepute, and no further attempts have been made to readdress it.

But Davis at least raised the possibility that what is called a zombie in these cultures is not, of course, a reanimated corpse, but rather a product of the synergism between mind and chemistry. This alternative is no doubt less satisfying for all the fans of the nightmarish beings that hunger for the flesh of the living in popular culture. But if you want horror and ghoulish things look no further than the world of nature. What would you think about zombie cockroaches?

The Jewel Wasp hunts cockroaches and makes them docile (zombifies them) by injecting venom into their brains. It then leads the cockroach into a place where it will lay an egg on it. The wasp then seals the cockroach in. After a while a larva hatches from the egg and proceeds to eat the drugged insect alive!

You can watch the wasp’s grisly work in the video below. It is not anything that George Romero has dreamed up (yet), but it’s real!

***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.

2 Comments

Spotlight on Theater: The Bregenzer Festspiele

8/24/2012

0 Comments

Every July to August in the city of Bregenz in Austria the famous Bregenz Performing Arts Festival (Bregenzer Festspiele) takes place. The highlight of the festival is the opera performed on the massive floating stage off the shore of Lake Constance in front of 7,000 spectators. This year the opera “Andrea Chenier” by Umberto Giordano was performed. The breathtaking stage was inspired by the painting “The Death of Marrat” by Jacques-Louis David.

0 Comments

Is Your Reading Experience Colorful? I Mean That Literally.

8/24/2012

0 Comments

About 2-4% of individuals in human populations have a condition known as Synesthesia. The individuals who have this condition perceive a sensory stimulus with aspects of a different sensation. The most common synesthesia is the one where sounds or letters or numbers produce the sensation of colors. A person with synesthesia may perceive the number 8, for example, as “red” even though the number itself is printed in black. The nature of the condition varies from person to person, but it tends to remain constant within the individual throughout their life and affects both sexes to the same extent.

It is not known for certain how synesthesia occurs. Brain imaging studies have confirmed that in people with color synesthesia (synesthetes) some black and white images tend to activate an area of the brain called V4 that is involved in the perception of color. Also some studies have found anatomical difference in the brains of synesthetes, leading to the theory that their sensory systems are not isolated from each other as in most people, but rather that there is some degree of interconnectivity among the neural pathways that generate sensation. Other theories posit that everyone is capable of synesthesia, but only a few individuals develop it to a significant extent. It is known, for example, that people under the influence of certain drugs can experience synesthesia. Also people who have lost a sensory function such as sight can experience flashes of color in response to touch.

Whatever causes it, synesthesia tends to run in families, although not all family members will have the same type. More interestingly, however, there seems to be a higher prevalence of synesthesia among creative people like artists. There is also some evidence that synesthetes tend to have better sensory processing and cognitive abilities compared to regular people.

An interesting question is whether synesthesia is an exclusively human trait or whether it is also found among animals. A couple of years ago researchers identified a gene in mice called α2δ3 (alpha-2, gamma-3) that is involved in the perception of pain. Researchers created a line of mice missing this gene and found the animals had decreased pain perception because the pain stimuli were not relayed appropriately to the higher processing areas of the brain. However, when the researchers did brain imaging on these mice they found that stimuli that would cause pain in normal mice, activated the visual, olfactory, and auditory centers of the brain of the mice missing the gene. The absence of this gene made the mice see, smell, and hear things in response to pain, in other words: synesthesia!

Research into synesthesia is ongoing and in the future it may yield information that may allow us to better understand the inner working of the human mind. On the meantime, if you belong to that 2-4 % of the population that has synesthesia, I hope that reading this post has been a colorful reading experience!

***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.

0 Comments

Tim Burton's Great Short "Vincent" Narrated by the Master of Horror Vincent Price

8/17/2012

4 Comments

What do you get when the great art of Tim Burton meets the Voice of Vincent Price? Well, you get "Vincent" of course!

***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.

4 Comments

You Want to Be a Traditionally Published Author? Then Self-Publish!

8/16/2012

8 Comments

Getting traditionally published is tough. Most authors get stuck in the query-go-round and are never published, which supposedly means (adding insult to injury) that they are not good enough. A few do get selected to receive one of those ever shrinking advances in exchange for giving away the rights to their books for life and meager royalties. Then most of these few find out that very little resources are allocated to the promotion of their books and that they have to work as hard as self-published authors on promotion, but with the added disadvantage that they have a narrow time window for their books to succeed.

So why in the world would anyone want to submit themselves to this process?

As it happens there are valid reasons to go the traditional route when publishing. For example, the print market is still very large and traditional publishers can provide a strong distribution service for print books. Also a traditional publisher will handle many aspects of the publication of a book freeing authors from having to deal with this. However, the problem remains that unknown authors are a question mark for any potential publisher. There is no way to predict whether their books will be successful, and publishers are reluctant to offer authors any deal that is not overtly slanted in the publisher’s favor. So what can authors do about this?

Believe it or not, the answer is self-publish!

How can this be? The idea is that if an author self-publishes, works hard at promotion, and readers like their books, they will develop a fan base. An author with a fan base wipes out a lot of the risk for traditional publishers who will have hard numbers to make their decision based on the author’s self-published books’ sales. In fact publishers may come knocking at their door, which will leave authors in a much better position to negotiate a contract that is more beneficial. In a recent article on Forbes, David Vinjamuri made three predictions about the future of publishing. Included in his third prediction is that traditional publishers will use indie publishing as their “little leagues” choosing authors who are successful in the arena of self-publishing.

Some people still bring up the argument about the “stigma” of self-publishing. They claim that authors blow their chances of getting traditionally published if they self-publish. This argument is a canard. Money has no stigma. If you demonstrate you can sell, no publisher will reject you because you are self-published.

Successful self-published author Hugh Howey, whose book “Wool” will be made into a movie, put it in the following way in one of his posts:

There is no better way to break into traditional publishing than self-publishing. Period. End of story.

So there you have it. Nowadays to get to those two different places you take the same road. Do you want to bypass the traditional publishing establishment? Then self-publish! Do you dream about getting traditionally published? Then self-publish!

Are these interesting times or what?
***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to you e-mail address. Please click here.

8 Comments

Do Goodreads Reviewers Lower the Rankings of Books on Amazon?

8/9/2012

13 Comments

I want to address an issue that I have been thinking about. On Amazon the ranking of books takes place according to the following system:

5 stars: I love it.
4 stars: I like it.
3 stars: It's OK.
2 stars: I don't like it.
1 star: I hate it.

However, consider the ranking that is used at the website Goodreads:

5 stars: it was amazing
4 stars: really liked it.
3 stars: liked it.
2 stars: it was OK.
1 stars: didn’t like it.

So here is the issue. The “average” rank in Goodreads is 2 stars (“it was OK” is in between “liked it” and “didn’t like it”). This is because the Goodread’s scale is skewed. The “good” side is covered by 3-5 stars, while the “bad” side is compressed into 1 star.

I have seen that some reviewers that post their reviews on Goodreads often post the same reviews on Amazon. The problem is, for example, that an “OK” 2 star ranking on Goodreads is not the same as a 2 star ranking on Amazon. A 2 star ranking on Amazon means the reviewer didn't like the book. Similarly, sometimes I have been left scratching my head when I read a positive review on Amazon and then see the reviewer gave the book 3 stars (it's OK). Often after checking I have found that the reviewer has posted many reviews on Goodreads where 3 stars mean they like the book. I know that the meaning of the stars in both websites "pops up" when you move the cursor over them, but I think many reviewers that are accustomed to the Goodreads system often don't take this into account.

I am not saying that one system is better than another, but there is a reality. If you go to the major book blogs you often find that they require a minimum rank of 4 stars on Amazon (not Goodreads) to consider featuring your book when you do a free promotion. Each day 3,000 books go free on Amazon and the competition for advertising space is fierce (unless you pay for it). So if we go by this “rule” you can see how ranking books on Amazon using the Goodreads scoring system can lower the ranking of books and create problems for authors. This is especially true in the first few months after publication when a book is vulnerable to swings in the rankings. Just consider that to neutralize the effect of one 3 star review (bring it up to 4 stars) you need one 5 star review. To neutralize the effect of a 2 star review you need two 5 star reviews. And as we know, unless a book is an overnight sensation, getting reviews is slow, hard work.

Of course I realize the above is an oversimplification and it is unfair to single out Goodreads reviewers. Many reviewers have their own system as to what the stars mean, and you can just as easily make the opposite argument (i.e. that Amazon reviewers flocking to Goodreads undeservedly inflate the ranking of books). Also the general ranking of books at Goodreads does not seem to be lower than on Amazon. I researched several books on both websites and found the ranking could go either way.

However, it would be nice if major sites like Amazon and Goodreads would harmonize their systems to avoid this ambiguity that can have potential adverse effects on the work of authors.

***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.

13 Comments

Review of Molly Greene's Novel Mark of the Loon

8/9/2012

4 Comments

In her debut novel Molly Greene introduces us to Madison Boone, real estate agent extraordinaire who also “flips” houses in her free time. Madison falls in love with a cottage that is being sold in unusual circumstances, and she is able to buy it with the assistance of her no-nonsense lawyer friend Gen. But as Madison embarks on yet another remodeling project, the past of the house begins to unfold piquing her curiosity. However she is not alone. A motley crew of characters in the neighborhood and beyond is also interested in what Madison finds, and their interest grows as she unravels the mysteries behind her dwelling and its former owners. These mysteries are of course eventually resolved, but perhaps the most important mystery that Madison solves is that about her own self.

The book sports a superb cover by Jan Marshall. It is very well written and formatted, and all the characters are believable - from the sleazy Levi Velasco to the flamboyant Genevieve Delacourt. I liked how the author weaves the symbolism of the ever present Loon into the story, and connects it to the past owners of the house and to Madison. I also liked her vivid descriptions of the cottage with its lush gardens set in California’s Sonoma County. For example: “An English cottage right out of the Shire was set back in the midst of a clearing. Built of native stone, it looked as if it had been picked up by a tornado in the Cotswolds Judy Garland-style and plopped down here among the rainbow hues of the wild abandoned garden.” Reading passages like these makes images appear in your mind as though you had taken a picture, and there are many more where this one came from.

Mark of the Loon has intrigue, romance, friendship, mystery, danger, and even a little touch of the supernatural thrown in for a very pleasing read, and I recommend you treat yourself to the experience!

4 Comments

Print Books Are Unnatural

8/4/2012

2 Comments

I was thinking the other day about how the rise of e-books has revealed something peculiar about how books sell. Some e-books become best sellers in the moment they are published while others sell much less but consistently overtime. Some e-books do not sell very well for a stretch of time and then “take off” while others sell irregularly alternating between periods of good sales and bad sales (peaks and valleys). There are multitudes of sales patterns and which one will regulate the “sale’s life” of a book is determined by multiple variables. Thinking this about e-books I realized something: print books are unnatural.

Let me explain.

First let me clarify that by “print books” I don’t mean those printed by POD (print on demand) services. I am writing about traditionally published print books. There is an aspect of the publishing of these books that is often not understood by people and this is what I call here the “time factor.” When you publish a print book, in the moment the book hits the stores a clock starts ticking. If your book does not achieve significant sales in a few weeks then it gets removed from the shelves along with your dreams and gets sent back to the publisher for a refund. Why is this?

In the brick and mortar store, your print book is a physical object that occupies space and competes for said space with other books. The book stores obviously want to make money and what they do is that they give preference to the books that are selling better. So your book has a very narrow window of time to be a success. This is why print books are unnatural. These books cannot develop their natural sales pattern because there is a selection process in favor of the books that sell well from the beginning.

This hurdle is overcome by e-books for the simple reason that they are virtual and therefore don’t occupy any space, which means they won’t be “removed” if they don’t sell that well compared to other books. And this is the way book selling should be because each book is different, and it is also the reason why e-books have a greater chance of success than print books.

Thus we come to the paradoxical conclusion that an e-book, something that does not exist in the real physical world, is actually more natural than a print book!

***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.

2 Comments

Why I will Not Buy J.K. Rowling's New Book

8/4/2012

6 Comments

As many of you know I am a serious Harry Potter fan. I think the books are brilliant and that Harry Potter will be remembered as one of the greatest characters of all time. That is why I was interested in J.K Rowling’s new book, “The Casual Vacancy.” Whereas the Harry Potter series started out as books for children, this is a book written for adults. The book will be out in September but the Amazon’s book page is already up and running. So I stopped by to take a look and what I saw left me speechless.

Whereas the hardback will sell for $20.93, Rowling’s kindle book will sell for $19.99! I couldn’t believe my eyes. This price even has the old trick of proclaiming it is being “discounted” from the original list price of $35, so you “save $15.01 (43%),” yeah right. It seems that Jo has willingly or unwillingly walked into the traditional publisher’s dishonest scheme of pricing e-books the same as print books. How could she have allowed this to happen?

I admire(d) Rowling because she did things differently. She insisted on retaining a certain level of control over the movies to make sure directors would not do crazy things with them and was willing to give up a percentage of her profits in exchange for this. She was a visionary in allowing fans to write fiction based on her characters, and she also opposed the over-commercialization of the Harry Potter franchise.

In the discussions on the book page people have pointed out that it is the publisher (in this case Hachette Book Group), not the author, who sets the price. Although this is true, Rowling could have tried to negotiate this beforehand. I can only surmise that she is either ignorant of the whole e-book/print book controversy, she doesn’t care, or she agrees with the publisher’s point of view.

Whatever it may be, I am very disappointed. Jo, you gave us Harry Potter and for that I will be thankful forever. However, I will not buy your overpriced book no matter how good it is although when the book does come out, it being a JK Rowling book, I expect it will become a best seller. On the meantime I should take some solace from the fact that in the book tags 326 people have so far voted for the tag “overpriced kindle version,” so for what it is worth I am not alone.

6 Comments

My Review of the Fargenstropple Case by Lia London

Zombies: Myth or Reality?

Spotlight on Theater: The Bregenzer Festspiele

Is Your Reading Experience Colorful? I Mean That Literally.

Tim Burton's Great Short "Vincent" Narrated by the Master of Horror Vincent Price

You Want to Be a Traditionally Published Author? Then Self-Publish!

Do Goodreads Reviewers Lower the Rankings of Books on Amazon?

Review of Molly Greene's Novel Mark of the Loon

Print Books Are Unnatural

Why I will Not Buy J.K. Rowling's New Book

Blogroll

Categories

Archives