Biased Opinion - The Screaming Temper Tantrum of "GamerGate"

If you have missed the raging storm of undirected and pointless fury that has been dubbed "GamerGate" by its supporters, then you should probably count yourself as lucky. To bring those unfamiliar with the faux controversy up to speed here is a brief synopsis: On August 16^th, Eron Gjoni, the jilted ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn, wrote and posted a sleazy, tell-all screed of somewhat dubious validity about why he had broken up with Zoe, and her alleged cheating during their relationship. One might think that this poorly conceived rant airing his dirty laundry would have resulted in a few people pointing out what bad judgment Gjoni had displayed by posting it, but instead some people seized upon the fact that one of the men Quinn had a relationship with was Nathan Grayson, a writer for the gaming website Kotaku. This was quickly decided to be evidence of "corruption" in gaming journalism, complete with claims that Quinn had only had a sexual relationship with Grayson in exchange for a favorable review of her free game Depression Quest. Never mind that Grayson never reviewed Depression Quest, and only made a single mention of Quinn as part of a larger article that touched upon multiple topics, in their eyes this was justification for an all-out assault upon her (and, oddly, not him). Minor league celebrity and major league conspiracy theorist Adam Baldwin got involved in the issue on twitter and dubbed the events "GamerGate". And then the portion of the internet dominated by individuals with the maturity of small children exploded.

Under the banner of "GamerGate", the disgruntled, infantile portion of the population who identify themselves as "gamers" launched a campaign of harassment against Zoe Quinn. And by "harassment", I mean rape threats, death threats, and other threats of violence, including the revelations of personal details about Quinn that would permit people to locate her and directly harm her if they so chose. When the fact that their attacks were blatantly misogynistic in nature became painfully apparent even to members inside the "movement", the "GamerGate" proponents loudly declared that their campaign was actually about "ethics in game journalism", but didn't really do much that was different than before, except now they included individuals like Anita Sarkeesian, Jenn Frank, and Leigh Alexander on their hit list. The stream of misogynistic harassment and vitriol continues more or less unabated, but as of yet, the "GamerGate" proponents have yet to identify a single legitimate instance of actual corruption in gaming journalism. Before I go any further, let me repeat that: "GamerGate" proponents have yet to identify a single legitimate instance of actual corruption in gaming journalism. GamerGate proponents have spun wild conspiracy theories, including wild theories that game journalists are censoring them whenever a website like Reddit or 4Chan gets tired of the GamerGate parade of disinformation and hatred and shuts down conversations on the topic, but they have not identified any actual ethical lapses by any actual game journalists. Milo Yiannopolous, who never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like (and who is just about the last person a rational individual would turn to to learn about journalistic ethics), uncovered an online group where gaming journalists talked to one another, and hyped this non-ethical breach as a massive scandal. And by "uncovered" I mean Yiannopolous talked about something that the game journalists involved had publicly talked about for months. "GamerGate" proponents are still flailing about ineffectively, searching for actual substance to justify their unfocused rage, and still failing to find any.

But that doesn't stop the "GamerGate" proponents from venting their rage - almost always venting it in the direction of women, many of whom aren't even journalists. One might wonder, for example, if "GamerGate" is about corruption in gaming journalism, why so much ire had been directed towards Quinn, who is not a journalist. Or why so much vitriol is directed at Sarkeesian, who is not a journalist either. The answer seems pretty clear: To the extent there is any coherence to be found amongst the mostly incoherent rage of "GamerGate", corruption in games journalism isn't the target, women are. But the larger point is that "GamerGate" is really, at its heart, a screaming temper tantrum thrown by children that people like Frank, Alexander, and Sarkeesian tried to treat as adults. And for their pains, they got in return, wails of rage and anger.

Shortly after "GamerGate" got started, several articles were posted concerning "gaming" culture in general. ArsTechnica published an article titled The Death of "Gamers" and the Women Who Killed Them, BuzzFeed posted an article titled Gaming Is Leaving "Gamers" Behind, and Gamasutra put out a piece titled Gamers Don't Have to Be Your Audience. Gamers Are Over. Kotaku phrased their article differently, stating We Might Be Seeing the Death of an Identity. Even Forbes got into the act, publishing The Gamer Is Dead: Long Live the Gamer. These articles all shared a common thread - that the gaming industry was moving beyond niche status as the basis for a geeky ghettoized hobby to become a mainstream past time, with all of the attendant benefits and drawbacks that this entailed. These articles generally made the point that when "video game player" had become a description that could fairly be applied to such a large segment of the populace, talking about a "gamer" subculture populated by "gamers" was not a particularly valid approach any more. These articles were, at the very least, the potential start of a conversation about where games fit into the culture at large using fairly commonly used rhetorical devices such as "The Gamer Is Dead". In short, these authors that wrote and organizations that posted these articles, assumed that their target audience of readers was mature enough to read these pieces and respond in an adult manner.

Instead, the portion of the audience that identified with "GamerGate" reacted by throwing what can only be described as an epic screaming fit. Many of the "GamerGate" proponents seem to have never read the articles in question, and in some cases seem to have not even actually seen the titles, referring to them as all being "Gamers Are Dead" articles. These articles have been asserted by "GamerGaters" to be a huge affront to gamers. "They are insulting us by saying we are dead!" many "GamerGater" have fumed. Many "GamerGate" proponents seem to prefer to ignore the sordid, misogynistic basis for their movement and identify these articles as the catalyst for it (a claim that is specious, as one will discover when reading the articles, as all of them are explicitly reactions to "GamerGate", which means they cannot be the cause of "GamerGate"). But when anyone who isn't in the tiny, but very vocal minority that identifies with "GamerGate" sits down to read these articles, the very childishness of the "GamerGate" response becomes readily apparent. "Gamers" were given the opportunity to show that they didn't fit the stereotype of the socially maladjusted child-men that popular culture had long held them to be, and in the most spectacular way, the "GamerGate" proponents failed this test. After years of self-identified "gamers" insisting that games and game-players should be treated as adults and not basement dwelling troglodyte babies, the gaming press presented a series of articles dealing with the gaming community in an adult manner, and the response of "GamerGate" was to scream and shake with anger.

Sadly, this is the common thread that runs through "GamerGate", and even predates "GamerGate" among certain segments of those who self-identify as "hardcore" gamers. For years many fans of video games have insisted that their preferred media could and should be treated as an art form. So when Anita Sarkeesian took them up on this claim and engaged in critical analysis of video games from a feminist perspective, which is something one does with a serious art form, one would think that gamers would have been pleased to have the object of their affection finally being taken seriously. One would be wrong. Gamers have expressed outrage that their precious games are being evaluated in this manner. They have expressed this displeasure with a vitriolic campaign of constant harassment leveled at Anita, including among their spurious charges that she has lied about the games she has evaluated, that she hates games and never plays them herself, and that she has invented stories of harassment in order to claim victim status. These claims, as one might expect, are dubious at best, and most of them are either rooted in the objector's ignorance of the topics Anita is discussing or are simply blatantly falsehoods invented to personally smear Anita. The reaction displayed by "gamers" in all of these cases, amounts to nothing more than an infantile temper tantrum.

Similarly, when a game developer like Zoe Quinn tackles a serious subject like depression and creates a game like Depression Quest that explores the topic in a serious and sober manner, one would think that gamers would appreciate that their medium had an entry that dealt with an adult topic from an adult perspective. One would once again be wrong. Even before Eron's diatribe against her, Zoe was reviled for having the temerity to make a game that some gamers didn't like. Making a game that doesn't involve running about and shooting or stabbing people in the face, it seems, is an affront against "true gaming" and, predictably, the seething rage-filled wing of "gamers" reacted with torrents of abuse and harassment. And during "GamerGate" many of the complaints about "games journalists" seem to have reflected a similar sentiment. Demands have been issued that call upon game reviewers to limit themselves to "objective" issues, like frame rates, control responsiveness, and how detailed the game graphics are, demanding that issues related to the story, including sexist, racist, or otherwise unsavory elements found in games, be left unremarked upon. But if one wants the medium to be taken seriously, then these are the very issues upon which game reviewers should be focused. Almost no one who reviews a film spends much, if any, of their time talking about the quality of the lenses used to film the piece, and instead they discuss elements like the plot, character development, and whether the film had questionable content including displays of sexism or racism. A reviewer tackling The Legend of Bagger Vance might fairly consider the racial implications of Will Smith's character as a representative of the long-standing, and problematic trope of the "magical negro". And if they do so, no one in the ranks of the cinema going audience is going to scream that this reviewer should go back to evaluating just the film speed used to capture the scenes in the movie. By demanding "objective" reviews, the proponents of "GamerGate" reveal that they are still sitting at the kiddie table and are not mature enough to be taken seriously.

The upshot of "GamerGate" is this: Time and again its members have been given the opportunity to deal with the world in an adult manner. Time and again, they have conclusively failed to do so. The reason that "GamerGate" remains a movement that almost no one regards as a serious expression of anything other than inchoate rage with heaping helpings of misogyny is that, thus far, its members have not done anything but behave like spoiled children. The "movement" such as it is, may have gotten Intel to pull advertisements from a single website, but that isn't an indication of anything other than the fact that screaming rage sometimes gets someone to try to appease the mob. What is striking is how empty the rage is. Even when one gives those who support "GamerGate" the opportunity to explain what they think is wrong with games journalism, they rattle off a collection of points that are either entirely specious or demonstrably untrue. They complain that a cabal of "games journalists" are keeping "their side of the story" from being told with biased articles (conveniently ignoring that outlets such as Forbes and The New Yorker have published articles on the subject and also found the "GamerGate" side lacking in enough merit to include). In many cases, the arguments of "GamerGate" proponents boil down to "only write about games in the way we want you to", which would be a standard that itself would violate anything resembling ethical journalism. Perusing the conspiracy theory laden websites that argue for the "GamerGate" position, it becomes clear that the reason that media outlets have not included their "side" in their articles is that the "GamerGate" side is devoid of any merit. In the end, "gamers" have been given the opportunity to show that they, and their chosen art form, have grown up, and in turn "gamers", at least those who have rallied under the banner of "GamerGate", have demonstrated that this has yet to happen.

Biased Opinions     Home

Review - The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

Short review: An unlikely discovery provides limitless energy with a hidden cost. Aliens in a strange universe are confronted by an ethical dilemma. And then everything is fixed effortlessly.

Haiku
What if energy
Came from a strange universe
With odd aliens?

Full review: The Gods Themselves is one of Asimov's relatively few stand alone novels, and the one for which he received the most awards. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite reach the level of excellence that I would hope a novel that won the Nebula and Hugo awards should have attained, although it is still quite good.

The plot of the novel stems from, essentially, a physics trick: Under what circumstances could the impossible isotope Plutonium-186 exist, and what would it mean if we could locate a parallel universe in which those conditions existed. The novel also explores what a wholly and completely alien society without any contact with humanity (and only limited contact of any kind with our universe) might be like.

The first part of the novel is basically a story that asks the question: What if we discovered a dangerous perpetual motion machine that requires an impossible element, and explores the political ramifications that might follow. This section is interesting, but not particularly exceptional, mostly focusing on the fact that once people have something that is immediately beneficial, the long term negative consequences, no matter how destructive, will usually be ignored.

The second part of the novel is by far the best section of the story, as Asimov tackles a universe with entirely different physics from ours, as well as creating a wholly alien culture of creatures living in that universe. As a science fiction author who rarely included aliens in his works, and was clearly uncomfortable dealing with sex, Asimov seems to have saved up a decade's worth of both for this book, creating some very unique aliens, an entirely alien culture, and throwing in a fair amount of alien sex. This is the most interesting and well-written section of the book, as it focuses on how the aliens deal with a huge ethical problem, including an explanation as to why they can not simply turn their back on a process that provides immediate benefits but potential long term negative (and unethical) consequences.

The final section of the book is the weakest - so weak in fact that that it serves to restrospectively drag down the first two. In this portion of the story, the problems raised by the first two sections are wrapped up neatly in an entirely facile manner that avoids inconveniencing anyone. As a matter of fact, the final solution makes everyone better off than before, and with little more than a hand-wave eliminates all the problems previously established by the story. This ending is really too simplistic for the rest of the book, and essentially gives all the short-sighted characters in the first two sections an easy solution to what should have been an almost intractable problem..

Still, The Gods Themselves is considered to be a classic of science fiction, and the middle section of the book alone makes it worth reading. Sadly, the opening and closing parts of the story are not nearly as strong as the middle, transforming what could have been a superlative book into merely a decent one. This novel isn't as good as Asimov's best work, and of his books, this is not the one I would have picked to win a stack of awards, but it is still a good book.

1972 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel: To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer

1974 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

1972 Locus Award Winner for Best Novel: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

1974 Locus Award Winner for Best Novel: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

1972 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novel: A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg

1974 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novel: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novel

List of Locus Award Winners for Best Novel

List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Novel

1973 Hugo Award Nominees
1973 Locus Award Nominees
1973 Nebula Award Nominees

Isaac Asimov     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Best Game Ever by Mikey Mason

So, I didn't post any reviews last week. And, more or less, role-playing games are the reason why. After something of a hiatus, my gaming group got back into our role-playing campaign, and because I am the Game Master, that meant that I had to scramble to prepare materials for the session. This meant that last week, instead of writing reviews to post, I was coming up with encounters for the players in my campaign to confront and, if they got lucky, defeat. And I am happy to report, that is mostly what happened. As an added bonus, we introduced someone who had never gamed before to role-playing, and as far as I can tell, she had a great time. In even better news, I sort of over prepared for the game session, so I won't have to do a pile of work before our next session.

And if you ever want to know why role-playing games are fantastic, well, listen to the song. The moments Mason describes in the song - defeating a dragon in three rounds, having a player get his character killed by mouthing off to a deity, splitting the loot and getting experience points after the adventure - these are the things that stick in your memory after the game is done, and this is why we play role-playing games. Sitting around a table with new players who don't know what dice to roll, and have only a vague idea of what is going on, but are still having a blast, this is why we play role-playing games.

Previous Musical Monday: Crusader: No Remorse Rebel Base 1

Subsequent Musical Monday: Ennui (On We Go) by The Doubleclicks

Mikey Mason     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop Halloween Edition October 3rd - October 9th: Osiris Was Enclosed in a Coffin by 72 Evil Disciples of Set

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Where is the creepiest place you have read a book?

I haven't been in very many places that I'd really consider creepy. Maybe I have a higher tolerance for "creepy" locations than most people and don't find places creepy as often as other people do. Maybe I just haven't been in too many creepy places. I don't know which. But, for the most part, I don't remember being in very many creepy places, and I don't recall reading in them.

The closest thing I can think of would be reading at an empty bus stop at night waiting for my ride to pick me up. I take a commuter bus every day to and from work. My wife and I share a single car, so on many nights she picks me up from the bus stop. Every now and then, events prevent her from picking me up right away, and so I usually pass the time waiting for her by reading whatever book I happen to have on me at the time. In the summer, when the days are long, the commuter parking lot is merely a big empty space. But in the autumn, the darkness comes earlier, and casts long shadows over an empty, lonely lot, which could be considered creepy. But to tell the truth, when I'm reading, I'm usually so engaged in the book that I really don't notice my surroundings much, if at all, so it doesn't really feel creepy to me.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: The Third Slave Uprising, Which Was Led by Spartacus, Was Crushed in 71 B.C.

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: In the 1940 NFL Championship Game the Bears Beat the Redskins 73-0

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Arp 178 Is a Triplet of Galaxies: NGC 56, NGC 5614, and NGC 5615

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Liberamans and Becky's Barmy Book Blog.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Book looks – Your favorite fashions from the books you’ve read.

I'm going to pick the hologram generators used by the Scorpion's gang in Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren. Delany has a couple books in which clothing plays a part in the story, from Triton, where the protagonist's choice of clothing is misinterpreted as a slight against those around him (and is presented as part of his general social cluelessness), or the odd light generating clothing worn by the "antagonists" to prevent conversation in the climatic scene in Stars in My Pocket, Like Grains of Sand. Like pretty much all of the other elements in Delany's books, clothing is deliberately chosen as a means of advancing the story.

In Dhalgren, the Kid goes to Bellona, a city in the center of the United States that is strangely cut off from the rest of the world. There he eventually becomes the leader of the Scorpions, a street gang in which all of the members wear holographic projectors that make them look like various predatory animals - with each member's projector showing a different image. The Kid's projector is malfunctioning, and shows an indistinct, abstract image, which could be seen as a sign of the Kid's mysteriously undefined character. Whether or not this is the case, the projectors are both interesting and very cool, so they are my literary fashion pick.

Previous Follow Friday: Martina Navratilova Has 177 Tennis Titles

Subsequent Follow Friday: 179 Is Not a Palindromic Number in Any Base

Follow Friday     Home

Musical Monday - Crusader: No Remorse Rebel Base 1

This Musical Monday was inspired by the 2011 computer game Skyrim. More specifically, it is inspired by a comment I saw concerning the game in which the commenter observed that no matter what the player does in the game, they essentially cannot change how the story ends other than by choosing whether or not to advance the main set of plot quests. Basically, the player can either play through the main set of plot quests to their preordained ending, or they can choose not to. There are no meaningful choices to be made in this regard.

Naturally, to discuss this element of Skyrim, I am highlighting music from Crusader: No Remorse, a 1995 computer game. But lest one think that I'm not going far enough back in computer game history, I'm also going to reference The Summoning, a game that was released in 1992. And because Skyrim is made by Bethesda, I'm also going to throw in some obligatory Fallout 3 references. What is the common thread between all of these games? Quite simply, the decisions made by the player while playing these games don't matter at all. The end result when you "finish" all of them is fixed from the outset. And quite frankly, after twenty-two years, this kind of limited and restrictive story-telling is getting a little bit ridiculous.

The Summoning was released in 1992. It was a role-playing style game in which your character, the chosen hero, was sent into a massive maze to try to work your way into the fortress of the evil Shadow Weaver and defeat the villainous dark overlord. You could develop your character to a certain extent, mostly by deciding which weapons to get good at using and which kind of magic to be good at casting, but for the most part you ended up pretty much good at everything. But what you couldn't do is alter how the story turned out. You were, for the most part, limited to fighting your way through the particular part of the maze you were in so that you could get to the next part of the maze. The story, such as it was, simply progressed depending upon how deep into the maze you had gotten, and there was simply no way for you to change the outcome.

Three years later, Crusader: No Remorse was released. In the interim, the graphics of computer games had improved considerably. The game even included some (very badly acted) live-action cut scenes, mostly involving characters giving you missions, making chitchat between missions, or blaming you for things going wrong. But once again, you couldn't change how the story turned out. You could only successfully complete a mission and have the story advance along its predetermined path, or you could die. You couldn't save Private Andrews, or prevent Sergeant Brooks from getting captured. You couldn't stop Major Vargas' betrayal, or really do anything other than follow the provided missions and work your way to the end of the packaged story.

If we jump forward to 2008, when Fallout 3 was released, we see a much more open world, providing the player with a large sandbox in which to play. The player can take their character and wander about the Capital Wasteland righting wrongs, fixing problems, engaging in nefarious deals, and generally getting into trouble. But, once again, the "main" series of quests that make up the "story" of the game are essentially immune to player action. You cannot prevent your father from dying. You cannot avoid getting captured by the Enclave. And in the end, you cannot avoid retaking control of the water purifier and activating it. Nothing your character does in the rest of the game changes these facts. There is a "karma" system designed to evaluate how good or evil your character behaves in the game, but how saintly or villainous you have been has no bearing on the outcome of the main quest. Your karma doesn't even change whether or not the vaunted Brotherhood of Steel will agree to work with you in the game's final conflict - they will, with no questions asked.

So we get to Skyrim, and the story is essentially the same: No matter what you do during the game, the main story-line is immune to your decisions. Your only choice is whether to keep following the main quest line, or to simply abandon it and leave it unfinished. Your choices as a player simply don't matter one way or the other. The story will resolve in one way, and in only one way. This isn't a unique feature of these particular games either. The list of computer games that have fixed stories is as long as my arm. And to me, that is something of a problem. Computer game stories are still at the same stage of development they were in more than twenty years ago. One can forgive older games like The Summoning and the two Crusader titles for having stories that limited the impact the player could have. Computer games were still very much a developing medium, and just having a coherent and interesting story of any kind was something of an innovation. But computer game developers have been turning out the same type of story for more than two decades now. It seems to me like there should be room for games in which the choices a player makes has an actual, substantial impact on how the game resolves. In fact, I think this should be the standard at this point. But it isn't. The standard for computer games is a lazy, linear, essentially non-interactive story. Choose Your Own Adventure books were doing a better job at providing interactivity in the 1980s than computer games are doing now. And that is a shame.

Previous Musical Monday: Festival Supreme Theme Song by The Doubleclicks

Subsequent Musical Monday: Best Game Ever by Mikey Mason

Game, Movie, and Television Music     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop September 26th - October 2nd: The Third Slave Uprising, Which Was Led by Spartacus, Was Crushed in 71 B.C.

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Stephanie of Books Are Cool asks (via Billy): How will be reading in 100 year's time? Will there be any printed books left? How about e-readers? What might they look like?

To a certain extent, this question is impossible to really answer, as there will almost certainly be technologies in 2114 that we can't even conceive of now. Think of the world of 1914, and what their technology looked like for comparison to the present: They could not have imagined personal computers, cell phones, e-readers, or many of the other technologies we take for granted today. The entire era of the pay phone passed as the technology grew into adulthood and faded into obsolescence between 1914 and 2014. Now extrapolate that trend out another hundred years. In short, almost anything one were to say today will probably be regarded as laughably silly in one hundred years.

That said, I'm reasonably sure that printed books will still be made, for two reasons. The first is because of the truth contained in the observation that "the future is here, it is just distributed unevenly". No matter what technological progress takes place over the next one hundred years, there will be places where that progress has not been integrated into the local culture. As much as one might want to believe that the world one hundred years from now will be an egalitarian paradise in which no one lives in comparatively primitive conditions, experience tells us that this is likely not to be the case. There will be parts of the world where modern technology will have entered use only sparingly, if at all. And in those places, books will not be a quaint throwback to an earlier day, they will be current, cutting-edge technology. The second reason is simply this: Printed books are simply too useful to ever cease to exist. They don't require power to work. They are relatively easy to make, store, and transport. They don't require another piece of technology to make them function. Their format never becomes incompatible with current e-readers. And so on. There are a lot of advantages to storing books electronically, but there will always be advantages to having physical copies of books as well.

As far as e-readers go, I'll suggest that perhaps they will not even exist as a separate piece of technology any more. The trend in technology seems to be merging different things into one device - witness the merging of cameras, which were once an almost ubiquitous personal possession, with cell phones. Comparatively few people now have (or need) a separate camera to take either photographs or videos. I predict that much the same thing will happen to e-readers, and they will cease to exist except as a function found on a multipurpose device. This isn't that bold of a prediction as to a certain extent it is happening already - most e-readers come equipped with other functions already, but I'm reasonably certain that this process will only accelerate. I hope that e-reader formats will become more standardized across platforms, but I have limited confidence that this will happen, and even less confidence that this will be relevant in 2014.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: French Speakers Who Are Not French Use the Word "Septante" for "Seventy"

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Osiris Was Enclosed in a Coffin by 72 Evil Disciples of Set

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Martina Navratilova Has 177 Tennis Titles

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Perusing Bookshelves and Worn Out Pages.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Book character(s) you’d like to see with their own Twitter page . . .

I might suggest the Rat Queens of the Rat Queens series, but given that they seem to destroy almost everything they come into contact with, this might spell doom for Twitter. Actually, now that I think about it, destroying Twitter sometimes sounds like a good idea. So the Rat Queens it is.

Previous Follow Friday: Ai Weiwei Will Showcase 176 Lego Portraits at an Exhibition in Alcatraz

Subsequent Follow Friday: Arp 178 Is a Triplet of Galaxies: NGC 56, NGC 5614, and NGC 5615

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Parasite by Mira Grant

Short review: Sally Mitchell died. But then she didn't. Now SymboGen pays all of her medical bills so they can study the genetically modified tapeworm inside her. And then things begin to get really creepy.

Haiku
Deadly accident
Miraculous survival
Creepiness ensues

Full review: Sally Mitchell is a lucky woman. Well, she's not entirely lucky because she was nearly killed in a car accident. In fact, she was so badly injured in the accident that her brain stopped functioning and the doctors caring for her had brought her family in to discuss harvesting her organs for donation. But Sally has a SymboGen Implant - a genetically engineered tapeworm designed to release antibiotics and other medications in order to preserve her life - so she didn't die, but instead woke up right when the doctors were recommending turning off her life support. But now Sally can't remember anything from before the accident, and seems to have a new, entirely different personality. Maybe Sally isn't so lucky after all.

Parasite is a biological terror novel about the dangers that can be unleashed upon humanity as a whole by the hubris of a few. The novel is also about how willing people are to accept without much question a solution to their troubles that is probably too good to be true, and the terrible costs that such unquestioning acceptance can impose. The novel is also about the search for identity, as Sally Mitchell must grapple with the question of who she is now, as she retains no memories of who she was before the accident. These three threads weave together through the novel to the fairly obvious, but still extremely disturbing and unsettling conclusion.

As Sally Mitchell is the character at the center of the novel, the technology at the center of the novel is the genetically modified tapeworm she and millions of others carry in their gut. Manufactured by the biotechnology giant SymboGen, and marketed under the name the Intestinal Bodyguard, these living implants are something of a magic pill - keeping their hosts healthy by secreting chemical assistance to help combat everything from head colds to infected wounds. By the time of the events in the novel, these "intestinal bodyguards" have largely replaced most pills and shots, revolutionizing the field of personal medicine. Those implanted with this new technology no longer need to consult with a doctor when afflicted with an ailment, but instead can proceed with the confident assumption that their benign parasite will take care of the problem.

In the story itself, Sally is brought back from the brink of death, presumably by her implanted tapeworm. Because Sally's medical issues were so severe, her recovery is something of a mystery, and as a result SymboGen agrees to pay her ongoing medical costs so long as they can study her. When she woke up, Sally did not even remember basic life skills such as how to feed herself or how to speak and had to be remanded into the guardianship of her parents even though she was technically an adult. Despite the best care SymboGen's money can buy, six years after the accident, Sally still has no memories of her life from before the moment she woke up in her hospital bed. But if Sally has no memories of the twenty-something years she lived prior to her accident, can she truly be the same person she was before? Even though Sally appears to be a much kinder, nicer, and generally better person now than she had been before her near death experience, these differences still serve to unsettle and disturb her family.

Sally's crisis is set in a world in which other, even more disturbing things are taking place. People, it seems, are falling ill in a very specific way: First behaving erratically, and then falling into a coma from which they never recover. The medical community in the book is stumped, but the cause is fairly evident, at least from the perspective presented to the reader. In short, something is going wrong with the Intestinal Bodyguards, and it is also apparent that SymboGen is covering this fact up. Through the novel, SymboGen, and its charismatic and obviously overconfident CEO Dr. Steven Banks, is presented as a company that has enough power as a result of their unique position as the manufacturer of the Intestinal Bodyguard that they are able to get away with almost anything, including covering up a crisis that is a threat to the life of anyone with one of their products implanted in them.

The story stays focused on Sally while she attempts to deal with her own problems. Accompanied by her incredibly loyal and understanding boyfriend Nathan (who happens to be a medical researcher), Sally follows clues sent to her by a mysterious individual who promises to reveal what is happening, both to her and to the people suffering from the mysterious affliction that turns them into vicious, mindless automatons before they slip into a permanent coma. These clues are accompanied by excerpts from the incredibly creepy and extremely obscure children's book Don't Go Out Alone, a book that Nathan is surprisingly familiar with. The trail leads Sally to Dr. Shanti Cale, one of the missing founders of SymboGen, who had been presumed dead. Dr. Cale also turns out to be Nathan's mother, which is one of the elements of the book that seems a little bit too much of a pat happenstance. When this coincidence is combined with the coincidence that Sally's father is the commander of an Army unit investigating SymboGen, and Sally's sister is a medical researcher with that same unit, the entire book feels like it relies a bit too much serendipity.

One might also criticize the book on the grounds that the "big reveal" at the end of the book is telegraphed to the reader almost from the beginning of the story. But this transparency is not only not a negative element in the book, it is necessary to create the very tension that the story relies upon. The reader knows what has happened to Sally (especially after Dr. Cale's experiments are revealed), and what is happening in the world around her, even if the characters in the book do not. This dichotomy of information between the actors in the story and the reader reading about them serves to create the discordant pressure that builds until it is released in the brutal revelation that takes place in the final pages of the book. It is a mark of Grant's skill as a writer that she can essentially tell the reader what is going to happen almost up front in her story, and yet still craft a book that is still loaded with the high volume of suspense found in Parasite.

In the end, Parasite is a well-written and engaging techno-zombie thriller that approaches the subject from a biotech angle. Featuring a sympathetic and well-drawn central character, the story carries the reader through its somewhat predictable, but always interesting twists and turns, instilling into the read a rising sense of horror until the curtain is finally pulled back and one realizes exactly who one was rooting for through the book's pages. But this revelation really only serves to confirm what the reader probably already knew, leaving a final, deeply disturbing question: How could SymboGen (and, to be honest, Dr. Cale) not have already known what was revealed at the end? Given that there seems to have been almost no way for them not to have known, their silence on this subject through the book seems to be part of some sort of larger plan, a realization that should be disquieting to say the least. If you like stories about biotech induced terror, you will like this book. If you like stories about zombies, you will like this book. If you like stories filled with suspense, you will like this book. If you like all three, you will love this book.

Subsequent book in the series: Symbiont

Mira Grant     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Festival Supreme Theme Song by The Doubleclicks

Festival Supreme is a comedy and music event scheduled to be held on October 25^th, 2014 at the Shrine Expo Hall and Grounds in Los Angeles, California. The event organizers decided to hold a song contest asking musical acts across the country to write a song related to the Festival. Naturally, the Doubleclicks decided to enter this contest with The Festival Supreme Theme Song. The song is equal parts upbeat music, snarky humor, and scientific facts about steam. Or, pretty much the usual for the Doubleclicks. The best part is that you can go and vote for their song right here. You know you want to, because the Doubleclicks are awesome and their song is too. So go and vote before it is too late!

Previous Musical Monday: Four Dead in Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Subsequent Musical Monday: Crusader: No Remorse Rebel Base 1

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop September 19th - September 25th: French Speakers Who Are Not French Use the Word "Septante" for "Seventy"

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Stephanie of Books Are Cool asks (via Billy): How important is a book's cover to your overall impression of it?

I'm not going to say that I am completely unaffected by book covers, but for the most part, they simply aren't important to me. This may be due to the fact that I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and both of those genres have a long tradition of terrible and embarrassing book covers. But the salient point is that a book's cover generally means almost nothing to me one way or the other.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: 69 Is the Number Bill and Ted Were Thinking of When Talking to Their Future Selves

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Third Slave Uprising Led by Spartacus Was Crushed in 71 B.C.

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Ai Weiwei Will Showcase 176 Lego Portraits at an Exhibition in Alcatraz

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - BookCatPin and A Kernel of Nonsense.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question (provided by Take Me Away . . .): Blogger pet peeves?

I hate it when people send me e-mail requesting a review in which it is apparent that they didn't bother to read my review policy first. I think I'm reasonably clear about what I will and will not review, and yet I frequently have an e-mail in-box full of requests from people hoping that I'll review their e-book romance novel. Even worse are the requests from people who want me to do a book tour or who want to write a guest post. I'm certain I'm clear that I simply don't do either, and yet I can count on a requests for one or the other almost every day. I wrote those pages for a reason. I just wish people would read them.

Previous Follow Friday: Paragraph 175 Is a Documentary About Nazi Persecution of Gay Men and Women

Subsequent Follow Friday: Martina Navratilova Has 177 Tennis Titles

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Everybody Sees the Ants by A.S. King

Short review: Lucky Linderman is a teenager with problems - a father who is a turtle, a mother who is a squid, an aunt who is zoned out on pills, an uncle who hides in his weight room, and a long-missing grandfather who he visits in dreams in a POW camp in Laos. And everyone thinks he's the problem.

Haiku
A suicide poll
A face ground into concrete
A lost grandfather

Full review: My brother maintains that no one can write a teenager as well as J.D. Salinger. I believe that my brother is wrong. No one can write a teenager as well as A.S. King. No one captures the combination of confusion, anger, boredom, and intense, bewildering feelings like she does. And in Everybody Sees the Ants, King's talents are on full display as she recounts the story of Lucky Linderman, a persistently bullied teenager whose morbid investigation into suicide results in a panicked reaction from his school and the adults in his life. Lucky is also afflicted with apparently uncaring parents and haunted by the memory of his grandfather - who disappeared in Vietnam before Lucky's father was even born.

Lucky Linderman is a fairly ordinary high school freshman. He's not big, or strong, or popular, and doesn't possess any of the other attributes that serve to make a high school kid stand out in a way that makes the experience more tolerable, and consequently he gets pushed around by Nader McMillan, a bully who has been tormenting Lucky for years. Lucky's parents don't get along - not so much because they fight, but rather because they both seem so indifferent to one another, and in their cold war, they generally seem to simply neglect Lucky. On the whole, however, Lucky is generally no different than many other teenagers who get dragged to the pool all summer so that their mothers can swim laps to work off their frustration.

Like most teenagers, Lucky makes mistakes out of foolishness and naivité, but in Lucky's case, his mistake is a very public one: As part of an assignment that requires taking a survey and presenting the results, Lucky decides to poll his fellow students about how they would commit suicide if they were to do it. This provokes a reaction from the school administration, which quashes his project and calls in Lucky's parents, both of whom react in very different ways to the supposed crisis. Lucky's mother, who he calls "the squid" presses forward with her regimen of relentlessly swimming laps to avoid dealing with the problems in her life, while his father, a chef whom Lucky calls "the turtle" reacts by spending much more time at work, pulling in his head in the hope that the difficulties will pass him by. Lucky's father tells him to deal with Nader's bullying by simply ignoring it, advice that simply boils down to "hunker down in your shell and it will pass". And everyone has their own idea of what Lucky "should" do, even the ants that speak to him, acting as something of a Greek chorus.

The ordinariness of Lucky's outer life creates a stark contrast with his inner life, which is dominated by the memory of his deceased grandfather. Early in the book Lucky recounts his activist grandmother's dying request to Lucky, asking him to help her missing husband find his way home. This is, obviously, an impossible burden to place on a child, and it profoundly affects Lucky, who has recurring dreams of going to the jungles of southeast Asia on "rescue missions". It is these dreams that skirt the border between fantasy and reality, as Lucky tries to rescue his missing grandfather while receiving advice from a man he has never met in the flesh. One might be tempted to dismiss these dreams as delusions or wishful thinking, but during his sojourns in the Laotian jungle his grandfather always seems to pass along some snippets of wisdom and every time Lucky wakes up, he has something tangible that he "brought back" from the dream world. These artifacts are what adds an intriguing ambiguity to this element of the book: Is Lucky merely imagining himself working to rescue his grandfather, or is he really engaged in a spiritual extrication?

Eventually an act of everyday heroism results in retribution that leaves a visible scar on Lucky's face. despite being willing to endure Nader's bullying himself, Lucky simply cannot stand by while Nader bullies someone else. This precipitates a larger crisis in Lucky's family that results in his mother taking him with her to visit her brother in Arizona, which is, as Lucky explains, the only place she could arrange for them to go on short notice that had a pool. Once there, Lucky discovers that the screwed up nature of his family is not unique. His Uncle Dave spends his time away from home or isolated in his garage weight room while Lucky's Aunt Jodi is addicted to bad food, the Dr. Phil Show, and pills that she may or may not need. Lucky is drawn to Dave's seemingly manly pursuit of muscles and his allegedly sage advice concerning women. He is, at the same time, repulsed by Jodi's intrusive but well-meaning meddlesome attempts to "fix" him. But as the story progresses, Lucky learns that the lives of adults are often just as confusing and screwed up as his.

But Lucky's story really develops when he forms a friendship with Ginny, a beautiful older girl (in the sense that a high school junior is "older" than a high school freshman) who has a career as a model and a contract to advertise shampoo. Lucky is somewhat awestruck by Ginny, considering her worldly and wise in a way that only a high school freshman can consider an upperclass high schooler to be worldly and wise. And while Ginny's life seems to be perfect at first glance, her family is, in its own way just as screwed up as Lucky's and she harbors much of the same confusion and resentment that he does. While she expands Lucky's horizons, in part by introducing him to the clandestine production of The Vagina Monologues she is performing in, and in part by her singular public act of rebellion, she is at best an unreliable guide to adulthood.


Ultimately, Everybody Sees the Ants is the story of Lucky blindly groping towards his own identity. For much of the book, he is defined by others. The adults around him see him as a suicidal kid. Nader sees him as a target. His grandmother sees him as a means of freeing her long-lost husband. For his dreamed grandfather, he is a means of salvation. For Uncle Dave and Aunt Jodi, he is a project - someone who they can fix. It is only when Lucky realizes that everyone else sees the ants too and are no better equipped to cope with life that he is able to forge his own path. In some ways, the story is about choosing which advice to take and which parts of your past to honor, but it is also a story about letting go of things that keep you from moving forward. No one is able to capture the brutal and glorious paradox of growing up like A.S. King does, and this book is a brilliant, tragic, and touching example of her doing exactly that.

A.S. King     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - The Sowing by K. Makansi

Short review: Remy's family has fled from the food-dystopia of the Okarian Agricultural Consortium, and Vale Orleán is determined to hunt them down. At least he is until he starts to pull aside the curtain on the Sector's dirty secrets.

Haiku
Remy and Vale are
Both two sides of the same coin
Fighting over food

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: The Sowing, the first book in the Seeds trilogy, is a young adult work of post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction in which agricultural policy is the tool that ruling elite of the Okarian Agricultural Consortium use to impose their will upon their fellow citizens without most of them even knowing it. Against this nefarious ruling elite is pitted a tiny but determined Resistance whose members are desperately trying to solve a secret code that holds the key to topple the oppressive regime. Oddly, both the ruling Okarian elite and the members of the Resistance are drawn from the same social circle, leaving the downtrodden farmers and the shadowy outsiders mostly out of the picture.

The novel shifts between two main viewpoint characters. Remy is a member of the Resistance, living in difficult conditions, separated from her parents while enduring the tough regime of training to be a guerrilla fighter with inadequate food, shelter, or equipment. Not only that, the opening pages of the book detail the pivotal event that caused her family to leave their lives in Okarian society and join the Resistance: The brutal murder of Remy's older sister Tai and the rest of her class as they were in the middle of a lecture on DNA synthesis. Vale, on the other hand, is comfortably ensconced in the elite of Okarian society, and although his position in the Okarian military means that he has to endure rigorous training, he is otherwise comfortable and showered with all of the necessary and unnecessary comforts of life. The contrast between Remy and her circle of young Resistance members and Vale and his crowd of friends and hangers-on is made murky by the fact that prior to her sister's murder, Remy was part of Vale's social circle, and the two were even somewhat linked romantically.

The book is, in large part, carried by this shifting viewpoint which illustrates both the stark contrasts and disturbing similarities between the lives and Remy and Vale live, and where their outlook on the world differs and converges. And the early part of the book needs this, because one minor weakness of the novel is that the dystopian nature of the Okarian Agricultural Consortium is not readily apparent. We are told that the senior members of the Okarian government were behind the attack that killed Tai, and that Remy's parents spend their time educating workers on the Consortium farms of the dangers their government poses to them, but we aren't really told what those dangers are, or what secret someone would arrange to kill a classroom full of college students to protect until well into the book. As a result, it is somewhat difficult to understand the nature of the conflict or what is at stake. Eventually the perfidy is revealed: The Okarian elite have implemented a program in which they have, via genetic engineering, manipulated the diet of the populace so that those on the farms become stupid and strong, while the privileged elite eat food that is designed to make them more intelligent.

But that revelation is fairly deep into the story, and in the mean time, the reader is able to get acquainted with the two main characters and the cast that surrounds each of them. Each story line involves the central characters chasing down a separate goal, with Remy attempting to unravel a piece of encoded DNA left behind by one of her former professors and Vale assigned to plan and lead a mission to capture Elijah Tawfiq, a key member of the Resistance. As might be expected, these two separate plot lines are on a collision course, and eventually Remy and Vale are reunited, although under less than ideal circumstances. At that point, their stories intertwine briefly, and then each character's story then diverges again, with Vale's trajectory, at least, changed fundamentally by their meeting.

One interesting element to the story is that neither Remy or Vale seem much interested in the larger political issues in which they are embroiled, and to the extent they are, they have very similar outlooks on life. Remy's primary motivation to join the Resistance seems to be the murder of her sister. Vale's primary motivation to excel in his military position seems to be a wish not to disappoint his parents. In fact, until deep into the story, Vale seems completely perplexed as to why anyone would choose to join the Resistance, a stance that betrays a severe lack of self-reflection on his part. This similarity highlights one of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Because almost all of the main characters are drawn from the same social circle of members or former members of the favored elite of the Consortium, there is a kind of bland similarity to the characters and how they view the world. The books has no character who represents the view of the mysterious "Outsiders" until well into its pages, and even that character is only relatively briefly on stage - and is on stage in such a way that really doesn't provide the reader with any substantial information about who the Outsiders are, or what they might want. Similarly, there are almost no characters from the Consortium's farming communities, and the ones who are in the book don't show up until very near to the novel's end. The Sowing is, in some ways, similar to what one would get if you changed all of the viewpoint characters in The Hunger Games to teens from the Capitol.

In one sense, this singularly focused set of viewpoints is a weakness for The Sowing, as the characters attitudes towards the world around them has something of a monochrome aspect. However, this myopic set of viewpoints also works to the story's advantage, as it becomes apparent that everyone represented in the book share some fairly gaping blind spots concerning the world in which they live. Because all of the characters who are ostensibly on "both sides" of the conflict operate under a common set of assumptions, they, and by extension the reader, can be taken by surprise when they encounter a character who doesn't share those assumptions. And once the reader realizes that the conflict as presented is essentially an intra-family dispute between two halves of a single formerly close-knit social circle, the revolutionary nature of the Resistance seems to be somewhat questionable. While life might be somewhat better for the workers on the Consortium's farms should the Resistance prevail, no one seems to have even bothered to consult them on what they might want. And no matter which side wins, things are likely to remain the same for the Outsiders. The realization that the "revolutionaries" don't seem to have really considered interests other than their own gives this book substantially more depth than many other works of young adult dystopian fiction, and provides the possibility of a stronger, richer story in future installments.

Despite the somewhat monochromatic nature of the central characters, they are all likable in the way that only naive, idealistic youths can be. Though the story in the novel presents a fairly simple conflict between heroic freedom fighters and callous tyrants, the elusive hints of a larger and more complex conflict are what raise the novel above the ordinary. In the somewhat crowded field of young adult dystopian fiction, The Sowing is well-ahead of most others, and will be sure to entertain and intrigue anyone who enjoys this genre.

Subsequent book in the series: The Reaping

K. Makansi     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Four Dead in Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Let's have a history lesson. In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States, at least partially on the strength of a campaign promise to get the country out of the war in Vietnam. However, in 1970, the U.S. was still mired in the conflict in Southeast Asia, and, on April 30, Nixon announced an expansion of the war that has become known as the Cambodian Campaign, or Cambodian Incursion. The war in Vietnam was already deeply unpopular in the U.S., and this new foray didn't make it any less so.

At least partially in response to the announcement of the Cambodian Campaign, on May 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th of 1970 students and others protested on the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. These protests were not peaceful, often degenerating into police attempting to alternatively disperse or round up protestors, who in turn pelted the police officers with empty beer bottles and rocks. By May 3^rd, Governor Rhodes of Ohio declared the protestors "un-American", and then he launched into some truly colorful rhetoric, stating that the protestors were "worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes". He further elaborated that the protestors were "the worst type of people that we harbor in America," and "I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America." To deal with the supposed threat, Rhodes called up the National Guard to handle the protestors.

On May 3^rd, the National Guard tried to use tear gas to break up groups of protestors and imposed a curfew. Some reports say that while trying to enforce the curfew, the Guard bayoneted some students. An additional protest was planned for May 4^th, but the University tried to ban it, distributing flyers that stated that the protest was canceled. About 2,000 students showed up to protest anyway, and the National Guard showed up to stop them. After a few rounds of advances and retreats by the Guardsmen (including one sequence in which they boxed themselves into an athletic field surrounded by a chain link fence), Sergeant Myron Pryon began shooting at the students with his .45 for unknown reasons. He was soon emulated by dozens of other Guardsmen who began shooting their M1 rifles into the crowd. Sixty-seven rounds were fired in just under 15 seconds. Four students were killed. Nine were wounded.

The four students were Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder. Two were participating in the protest. Two were simply walking from one class to the next. None were within 200 feet of the Guardsmen. None of the wounded students were within 70 feet of the Guardsmen (making the explanation given by the Guardsmen that they felt threatened somewhat suspect). The event sparked nationwide protests across the country as more than 4 million students went on strike, causing more than 900 colleges and universities to close. Kent State closed down for six weeks. On May 8^th, eleven people at a protest at the University of New Mexico were bayoneted by New Mexico State Guardsmen. Five days after the shootings, more than 100,000 protestors arrived in Washington D.C. The President's Commission on Campus Unrest concluded that the shootings were "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable". No matter how one feels about the Vietnam War, or protestors, or any of the other political issues of the day, I would hope that everyone can agree that National Guardsmen killing University students who were armed with little more than a few rocks is a tragedy.

Forty-four years later, enter schlock merchandiser Urban Outfitters who, today, unveiled a new item in their catalog: A faded pinkish Kent State sweatshirt decorated with bloodstained holes. They claim this was intended to be a joke, but it seems like there's little to joke about in an incident in which four people were killed for, at most, the crime of voicing their dissent. Only someone entirely ignorant of history would think this was a matter fit for a joke. Urban Outfitters has since "apologized" for their tastelessness, but one has to seriously question the judgment of anyone who would have thought this product was a good idea to begin with.

Previous Musical Monday: Persona by Blue Man Group

Subsequent Musical Monday: Festival Supreme Theme Song by The Doubleclicks

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young     Musical Monday     Home