Bible Camp Bloodbath Review
Joey Comeau is the greatest bad role model I’ve ever had. He writes the beautiful web comic A Softer World.
Sometimes Joey Comeau writes novels, too. Great novels. Bible Camp Bloodbath is his latest one.
The book is about this kid, Martin, who decides to go to Bible Camp to stop being a burden to his mother, a special effects artist for horror films, specializing in gore miscellanea. Evisceranea. Bloodpourri. I don’t know, I’m bad at those.
Martin is somewhat excited to be going to bible camp, to meet new people etc etc. But, of course, this turns out to be no normal trip to bible camp. What follows is a particularly poignant coming-of-age story as Martin learns to build relationships, how to macramé, and, along the way, opens his heart up to God and the Bible.
Oh wait, no, wrong book. Scratch that last paragraph. Martin goes to bible camp and all of a sudden lots and lots of people are killed. Easy mistake to make, though.
In each of his novels, Joey Comeau unpretentiously touches upon subjects many authors are hesitant to approach with a ten-foot pole, or anything else particularly long and phallic. Bible Camp Bloodbath is no exception. From murdered children to… well, I mean, why don’t you just read it? Don’t make me do all the work here.
It’s a really fantastic book and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Some other reviewers said that it was too short, but I think it was just about right for what it is. It was certainly a fast read, but delightfully so.
Did I just call it delightful?
Yes, sure, Bible Camp Bloodbath is a very delightful read. It filled with me warm fuzzy feelings as I reached the end. Then I cried a little bit.
You can find the book on Amazon, or on this blog where Mr. Comeau is posting a chapter a day. It’s probably all up by now. Go read it and buy it and love it.
Coming Soon: Awesome Things.
Filed under Arthur Reviews Things, Miscellaneous | Comment (0)How Being a Jedi Got Me Into The Dead Weather Show, part 3
Everyone knows the rule of three: there is a Sith lord, and he has an apprentice, and that’s it. But the Apprentice will always have a secret apprentice of their own. The rule of three is really more like the rule of powers of three, because there’s probably even more secret apprentices than we can count. That’s how the Sith roll.
Which, of course explains the title change. You have two of the same, and one different. And this makes it funny. Come on everybody and laugh it up at the hilarity that is in the new title (the word Show). Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha.
You may notice the way that this story has been split up into three parts. You may think that this is due to my personal laziness, not wanting to write one particularly long blog post, instead splitting my workload into three manageable, bite-sized chunks. Not bite-sized, more like… couple-of-cookies-sized-but-not-quite-a-full-plate. You’d be wrong though. In fact, the only thing I’m writing after deciding to split it up are the preludes like this. The actual story is one long text file.
Then I have them set up to auto-post on various upcoming days at random times. Spreading them out like this is actually a clever scheme to increase traffic.
Let me break it down.
Every time I post something new, the traffic spikes a noticeable amount. This probably seems like an obvious fact, but quite on the contrary. Statistics might prove you wrong. No, rather, statistics would prove you right. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore, I can’t be bothered to go back and read what I’ve written already.
So. We left off at Sora and me arriving at the Crystal Ballroom. Tickets were sold out and we were camping out by the scalpers hoping they would run out of water before us, or something. Sora is visibly pissed off at me, threatening still to carry me back to the river and throw me in. My hands are still irrevocably sticky from that damn popsicle thing.
Sora spawned the brilliant idea to take a walk. We figured that we had enough time to get to the river and back before the scalpers were whittled down. I was obviously very hesitant to oblige, due to recent threats involving me and the aforementioned river, but in the end I agreed.
So we walked the few blocks back down to the Mighty Willamette River. If that’s how you spell that. I don’t actually live here.
We joked that the band might be down on the rocks. And Alison Mosshart and Sora would be lighting up the night if you know what I’m saying. It’s a lightbulb pun, shut up. And me and Jack White would be engaging in insane corkscrew haymakers if you know what I’m saying.
They weren’t and we didn’t. Those two things I just said don’t actually mean anything. They really don’t.
We did however dunk my hands into that toxicity and destickify my hands. This was not much of an improvement. My hands instantly burnt off and I was left with two dull stumps.
Sora shook me awake. Whew, it was just a dream. Apparently I had fallen asleep against the Dead Weather’s bus.
“HEY, GET OFF OF THERE!” Someone was screaming. It was a man. He whacked me across the face with a guitar. Oh man, it was Dean Fertita. Crap, I pissed off Dean Fertita.
Suddenly I woke up again, still leaning against the… bike rack or whatever I was leaning against before. Oh man, it was one of those weird double nightmares that happen in movies and stuff. Except it was always a triple one. I knew something must be weird in this reality but what was it?!?!? And why were my hands so sticky, god dammit?
Sora and I were just standing there still. WHAT IS GOING ON?! I’m standing there trying to figure this crazy stuff out when a man comes over. He looks kind of like Duff from Ace of Cakes. Or, rather, as I remember it… he was Duff from Ace of Cakes. He probably looked nothing like him. But hey, it was some weird dream world, what does it matter? He goes, “Hey, nice shirt.”
What is your game, Dream-Duff? What are you trying to achieve by donging my mind like this? What are you doiiiiinngg.
“Thanks,” I say, skeptical of his cakely antics. He kind of motions toward his own shirt. It’s this.
Actually, I’m pretty certain that’s not what it was. It was something cool and Star Wars and with a stormtrooper or stormtroopers on it. It is blue or something. But pretty cool. Wait, no, he doesn’t look like Duff, he looks like David.
Hahahaha, hilarious. David Tennant. From Doctor Who. Wearing a stormtrooper shirt. Like the guy! With the shirt! And the cakes! Ha ha ha ha ha.
HA HA HA HA HA. HE’S THE DOCTOR AND HE’S IN DOCTOR WHO AND HE’S IN HARRY POTTER! HAHAHAHAHAH. OH MAN. This is rich.
I DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT MY ORIGINAL JOKE WAS!! HA HA HA HA, THIS IS INSANE MAN.
PART 4 SOOOOONNNN!!!
okay, not really, here’s part 4.
Duff from Ace of Cakes walks over and tells me he likes my shirt, my shirt that says “JEDI” on it that my sister made for me, because she’s pretty cool. He points out that he’s wearing a Star Wars shirt too. This is pretty cool.
Then he says, “So, you guys going to the show?”
“Well, hopefully,” Sora says.
“Oh you guys need tickets?” he asks.
“Yeah…”
“You guys need free tickets?”
We laugh. “Well, yeah, that would be preferable.”
“Come with me.”
Wait, what? Me and Sora exchange a look and then follow Duff to the ticket window. He says, “I’m on the list” or something, and shows them his ID. We get our hands stamped and in we go.
This, we decide. Is really freaking cool.
Dear Guy Who Probably Didn’t Actually Look Like Duff Goldman,
You are very cool! And I think we were kind of too awestruck to be able to thank you properly before we got lost in the crowd.
So. Thank you. Thank you so much, you did a very awesome thing, and we really, really, really appreciate it.
We honestly, I think, by that point were really not expecting to be able to get into that show, but then you swooped in with your cake and your awesomeness, and with a beautiful act of kindness, you not only gave us an opportunity to have a great night, but you also restored a large portion of our faith in humanity.
You are a beautiful human being.
Thank you so much. I’m sorry I keep calling you Duff.
Love,
Ben and Sora.
I’m putting a jump here. So, the rest of this story after the jummmppp! Or if you’ve been linked directly to it, then… just keep reading, I guess. Okay. Cool. Continue reading »
Filed under The Dignified Servants | Comment (1)How Being a Jedi Got Me Into The Dead Weather, Part 2
You may notice some striking similarities between these blog posts and some of the ones we’ve had in the past here on St. Timmy Pro. In particular, I Write About You In My Diary, Did You Just Kiss Him? (I did), and All the Drugs… and Threats. I mean, for god’s sake, I even quoted that last one in Part 1! That’s how related they are!
However, the difference is twofold. For one, the “Days With Quinn” series was actually related to St. Timmy Productions. It documented the process Quinn and I went through to garner the ability to create beautiful images like these, on film:
Secondly, the Dead Weather series is being written more than two years from then, and I am arguably better at writing this sort of thing. In truth, it’s probably just as bad as those were. Who cares.
So we left off on the wrong side of the river, feeling stupid and resentful. The show started at 9:00 and it was now just about 8:00. We were beginning to worry about getting there in time to buy tickets. Meanwhile, my hands were still sticky with sugary goodness and we hadn’t come in contact with water in about two hours.
Sora was determined that we should jog there. I maintained the classic “look at me! I’ll die!” and said we should get back to the bus stop and just wait for the next bus. We decided to compromise and walk there.
So we head west, onto the Burnside Bridge, and walk walk walk walk walk. We are basically in silence all the way across the bridge. He threatens to push me off into the river a couple of times. I laugh. He’s not joking. Some kids on skateboards zoom past us. They are incredibly cool. You have no idea the level of coolness that emanated from them.
I thought back to our time on the bus. We were those kids, with our headphones and our radness. How did things get so bad?
A single tear rolls down my face. Can’t you see that our morose, resentful, silence is tearing us apart? In the dark recesses of my mind, I’m wishing we could go back to the young, wistful days of our erotic anaconda romance.
Why can’t we just go back to playing Seven Nation Army in my basement over and over and over again, driving my family insane? Why can’t we just play Portal again and again on least time? Why can’t we just play Halo 3 and then listen to Katie’s mom berating Sora? WHYYYY?!
We make it across the river and it’s, like, 8:20 or so. Thirteen blocks to go. We hit just about every little red hand telling us to stop at the intersections. I guess that means we hit every green light, which means the opposite when you’re walking as when you’re driving. Well, no, it doesn’t mean the opposite, it just implies the opposite. It’s bad.
So I go back on what I was saying before and we start to run. This was merely mathematics. I timed the distance between blocks and the time the lights seemed to change at the intersections, and realized that if we gained ten or so seconds for each block, then we wouldn’t have to stop at the intersections anymore. Screw it, it made sense at the time.
We get to 13th street or so and we’re like, “Well, fuck, this is 13th and Burnside, where’s the Crystal Ballroom?” So we ask somebody.
Which is when you zoom out the map and see our glaring mistake.
View Larger Map
We were standing right by it. We didn’t actually make a mistake.
The person we asked looks at us like we’re dumb and then points. We go, “Oh” and walk the rest of the way. And there, devastatingly, on the window of the ticket booth is a sign that looks like this:
Okay, so, I don’t have Photoshop on this computer. So sue me.
It was sold out! We just spent the last six hours on our way here, and it’s sold out. Completely ridiculous. We’re like, “Well now what do we do?”
There’s a guy who’s all, “Yo, anyone be needing tickets all up in here?”
Wait, was that racist? The guy was white. And he was a total sleazeball. And so we asked him how much, and he was like, “how much are you willing to pay?” And we tell him, and he just kind of goes “pfff” and turns away. Total asshole.
I have the absolutely brilliant idea to walk around the block and look for back doors to sneak in. Hey, look, I was desperate. It seemed like a good idea. We’d just… I dunno, pry open the side door and sneak back stage.
Yeah, there are no back doors to that place. Some asshole architect didn’t put back doors on the building, just to screw with me and Sora in the future. I swear.
So we get back onto the front side of the street and we’re basically just like, “Well, fuck.”
This is the second ticket scalper.
We run into another ticket scalper and we’re just like, “Whoaa, LATFH.” Complete with a fully unshaven face, and spandex pants. I swear to god he was wearing spandex pants. He’s wearing, like, pantex. Wait, are those tampons?
Okay, well, yeah, he was probably still wearing them.
Anyway, he’s all, “Hey, you guys need some tickets?”
And we’re like, “Yeah.”
And then he’s all “Follow me.” So we follow him. He takes us back to the first scalper and goes, “they need two.” The first scalper doesn’t recognize us and asks how much we’re willing to pay. We tell him and he goes, “PFFFFFFFFFF” and walks away. Seriously, huge-ass ass. Ass ass ass. Stupid.
We move away a little bit and hatch a scheme. No one is buying the scalped tickets, because no one wants to by scalped tickets for 200 bucks a pop. So we decide to wait. We hang out about ten feet away and look nonchalant. We’re in earshot, though, and we listen to the scalpers peddling their ticket wares. We figure that if we wait long enough, their prices will lower enough to be affordable by us. Even reasonable, perhaps.
So we wait.
I’ve learned that waiting is often the best option in situations like this. If the tortoise and the hare taught me anything, it’s that you should run as fast as possible as long as you can, and then just wait for your opponent to catch up. Just wait. Take a nap, maybe. It’ll all work out.
So weee wwaaaiiittttttt.
It’s fascinating, really, the fact that those guys make any money. Everyone should have done what we did. I mean, jeez, if everyone was just patient, then everyone would be able to get in for, like, 10 dollars a ticket and the scalping industry would be dead. Because they’re sleazeballs who don’t deserve the money. They buy tickets for the sole purpose of making a profit. If they hadn’t bought those tickets to begin with, then Sora and I could have gotten in. True story.
You may have noticed that the title of this series of blogs is “How Being a Jedi Got Me Into The Dead Weather”, and yet neither one of those two things has happened yet in my retelling of these events. The title remains unexplained. Here, let me reveal something previously shrouded in a haze of mystery.
This is the shirt I was wearing:
Okay, so, I don’t know why I don’t have a better picture of you in that shirt. I mean me in that shirt. I don’t know why I said you.
Oh, here’s one.
I was wearing that shirt. It says Jedi on it.
Filed under The Dignified Servants | Comments (2)
How Being a Jedi Got Me Into The Dead Weather, Part 1
Recently, Sora and I spent a rather proportionally large amount of time together. The following is an intimate account of our adventures during that time, steadily staying true to the conflict in our hearts and in our minds during the strain that was put on our friendship and the resulting budding romance.
Or in other words, half of this is complete and utter bullshit. Mostly the stuff about kissing and balls. Other bits are exaggerated beyond hyperbolic extents. The vast embellishing that occurs is nearly gastrocolic in nature. I just wanted to say gastrocolic.
Anyway.
In the assortment of bands that Jack White is in, which is to say, The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather, I tend to think of them each as a piece of development in a human’s life. The White Stripes represent childhood innocence, The Raconteurs represent growing up and finding responsibility, and The Dead Weather represent the type of growing your hair out and terrorizing young children that only the middle-aged are capable of.
Some people say that The Dead Weather is a darker band than the others Mr. White is in. Aesthetically, it certainly is. But music-wise, it’s simply much much heavier. It kind of reaches into your flesh, grabs onto your trachea, and makes you thrash around uncontrollably. When this happens, it’s best to simply let it take over and not fight it too much. It’s like a headcrab: the more you struggle the more it hurts.
I hate Half-Life 2. I am terrible at this stupid game. I keep holding barrels in front of me to guard from the Combine’s bullets, but then there’s a big explosion and I die instantly. I don’t understand what keeps happening!
So let’s jump into the story!
It’s about six or eleven or so in the morning. I don’t tell time before noon. And I’m home alone, watching Doctor Who. Whenever I’m home alone I watch a couple episodes of Doctor Who. I so rarely watch TV that when I have a chance to I feel as though I’m wasting it if I don’t. But there is never anything actually on TV, so I just go to the DVR, and we happen to have pretty much the entire latest season of Doctor Who recorded on there, so I tend to watch them. Over and over and over again. Hey, Sam, River gets sucked into one of the cracks..
Any way, here’s my text message newfangled technology conversation with my dad, who is at my Grandpa’s house, I believe:
Me: Could you possibly take me to Sora’s when you get home?
Dad: We’ll see.
Me: Okay, well, he just showed up here and his Dad drove away.
Dad: Oh.
So there we go. Sora was at my house. I was thoroughly not expecting it.
Okay, look, here’s the truth. I waited too long to write this, I remember hardly any of it. Probably because of all the drugs and threats.
Sora’s at my house all of a sudden, and all of a sudden we’re in the basement playing music. We play a rousing Seven Nation Army together, about six different times. Then all of a sudden we’re making out. I’m talking full mouth on mouth action. Our tongues are twisting and turning like erotic anacondas.
Erotic Anacondas is the new name of our band, by the way.
Anyway, next thing I know we’re at his house and we’re making sweet, sweet music together. On guitars. We write the beautiful song King Copa. Then we watch the cinematic masterpiece, Stan Helsing.
The next day, I hang out at his house all day. A bunch of stuff happens. It’s pretty cool, dude.
Then I go home.
The next day is the day. THE day. The DAY. THEDAYYYY!
The day of the Dead Weather concert. Yeah, back to that again, sorry to keep harping on about it.
We go pick Sora up from Katie’s house. It is very exciting. My dad drops us off over at Sora’s pad where he, Sora that is, grabs some money and some… what were they, I don’t remember? Were they doughnuts? Whatever they were, they were delicious. And then we walked down the street to the bus stop to head toward the Crystal Ballroom. We stopped in at the nearby convenience store and bought popsicle things. Mine fell out of its lead encasement and got my hands all sticky. It was absolutely awful.
This is the closest related image I could find to rocket popsicles. Or wanted to find, really.
Then the ice cream man went by, and Sora absolutely needed to get something. It was a really hot day. So he got a rocket popsicle with balls on it, a la Stan Helsing.
I asked him to try and find me somewhere with a public bathroom where I could run in and wash my hands real fast, but to no avail. People apparently really like closing off their bathrooms. I don’t understand it. If I were running a fine public establishment like that, I certainly would want to show off my bathrooms to as many people as possible.
In fact, my beautiful public restrooms would be the biggest headline on my proposed business plan. It would just be like, “1. MAKE EVENT OUT OF PUBLIC LAVATORY, 2. HIRE ANDY GRIFFITH AS P.L.O., 3. SELL CANDY TO HOODLUMS”.
So, when the bus finally pulls up I’m sticky and I’m sweaty and I’m disgusting. It’s starting to remind me of the homoeroticism from earlier.
We get on the bus, which is of course a euphemism, and sit down. This is probably the most exciting part of the day, this bus ride, so pay very close attention. Listen, you do not want to miss a single detail of this enchanting bus ride.
So we sit there. On the bus, right? And we drive along. I think at some point we do what all the cool kids always do and we listen to music, each one of us with a headphone. We are just like the hippest kids on that bus. There is no way to explain the awe some people had when they got onto that bus and saw us there, listening to our music, singing along as loudly as we could, our heads tilted slightly toward one another so as to keep the headphone in.
“THIS SHIT IS BANANAS, B-A-N-A-N-A-S, THIS SHIT IS BANANAS, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.”
So cool, you have no idea.
Unfortunately, the day was the opposite of us. It was incredibly hot, and the bus was overheating every several minutes and needing to stop to cool down. This, of course, was no problem, as we left several hours earlier so as to ensure our ability to get tickets when we arrived at the ticket booth box office thing.
At one of the stops to cool down, I spot out the window a lady washing her car. She’s in a bikini, completely soaked, and in the process of rinsing soap off the car with a hose.
“Sora!” I say, “Check that out!”
“What?”
“A hose! Do you think I could make it over there and back in time before the bus leaves?”
“Why?”
“To wash my hands!!!”
At some point, as we’re driving along, Sora falls asleep. The poor little guy’s tired, resting head falls onto my shoulder. I put my arm around him and smile. I look around to see if anyone on the bus sees what a precious thing is going on.
Which is to say, he falls asleep with his head against the window and I don’t notice until I’m asking him “is this where we get off?”
I have to plead ignorance on how to get around down town. I wish it were untrue, but I have never spent enough time in Downtown Portland to know where anything is. I know that the Crystal Ballroom is on 13th and Burnside, and I know the bus we’re on is supposed to take us straight there.
So when the thing comes on saying “12th street” my brain comes on saying “12th street?! That’s almost 13th street! Maybe this is where we get off!” So I wake Sora up and say “SORA! IS THIS WHERE WE GET OFF?!?!?!”.
Drowsily, he wakes up and goes, “What? Um, yeah.”
So we get off at NE 12th and Couch. If you know things about Portland, you probably realize what our mistake was. We, however, didn’t know we even made a mistake and optimistically went about trying to find 13th and Burnside. We circled around the biggest school in the world about thirteen times.
No, seriously, what the hell Benson? Why are you so huge?
If you want to pull off the same idiocy as us, here’s a map and some detailed instructions.
View Larger Map
Get off the bus at Point A, and head north for an hour or so. Notice that the names of the streets are increasing in alphabetical value, so Burnside would be on the other side of Couch. Decide to just find 13th street and then double back to find Burnside. At the next turn, Point B, start going East for another hour. Reach Point C and realize that you just went from 12th to 16th with no 13th in the middle. Swear. Head south to Point D and start making arbitrary turns at Point E and F. At point G, smell doughnuts. Go south to Point H, then west, and realize, at Point I, that you’re back at the bus stop.
Swear a few more times. It helps.
At this point, ask for directions. For those of you playing along online, this is the point at which you simply zoom out the map and see the glaring mistake we made.
View Larger Map
We forgot about the fucking river.
Filed under The Dignified Servants | Comments (2)Why 60% of Internet Users Will Not See My Site
I have made a decision. I have thought about it quite a bit. It has gone back and forth in my mind, back and forth until I begin to scream at it to shut up and please go away, I’m trying to sleep here. I’m trying to read. I’m trying to play guitar. It is a penetrating decision that could prove to be fatal to everything I want to do.
But it’s a decision I find myself needing to make.
People always find things that they simply cannot stand for. They will do whatever they can to try to demolish whatever it is that they can’t stand for. This decision is a reflection of that, of my views. It is in no way the size of decision that even echoes the magnitude of importance that other movements have. It doesn’t even echo the importance of things in my life, if you know what I mean. It isn’t as important as a boycott of Monsanto, or Coca-Cola.
You could say it’s trivial. And it may be. But it’s important to me, and I feel I can do a little bit to stop it, the same way stopping buying GMO foods made by Monsanto or Coca-Cola products would do a little bit to stop them.
This is why, starting with the next upgrade to sttimmypro.com (STPv3), I will no longer support the browser Internet Explorer, which constitutes about 60.7% of all internet users (via pingdom.com, click for article). What does this mean? It means that if you try to view this website in any version of Internet Explorer, you will get a page that asks you to upgrade to Firefox or Chrome. There will also, most likely, be a link to this post, on a blank white page with no style information. That way it will work in IE.
But why? Why would I do this?
Because Internet Explorer is a terrible browser. There is no getting around it. It crashes, it’s insecure, and the one that takes the cake — or no, the one that won’t fess up and gets the whole class stuck in the room for an extra five minutes past the bell: it doesn’t follow w3C standards.
Sure, IE8 is far, far better at standards than IE7 or IE6.
But the deal is, the developers ignore important aspects of internet standards, and try to make their own set. Due to the large number of internet users who use the browser, web developers — the people who make the websites you visit — are forced to throw dozens of workarounds into their code just so that their site will display properly in the one browser that it won’t work in.
Think of it like this.
Let’s say there’s a large group of car designers from a bunch of different companies that gets together and agrees on standards for their car designs. And they agree that the cup holders in their cars would have a diameter of two and a half inches when at their full size, at a minimum. Every company involved at this meeting adopts the policy.
So in the following years, every car on the market from companies all around the world have these cup holders that have a diameter of two and a half inches.
That is, except for one certain company. And it’s the company that has the most people who drive their cars. Their cars have cup holders with a two inch diameter.
Meanwhile, the people who make cups for fast food restaurants have to either decrease the diameter of the base of their cups a half inch to comply with the fake standard that the one company feels entitled to build into its carsl, or continue making cups that won’t fit in 60% or so of ever car ever made. While the standard-size cups fit in every other car you could possibly buy, the cupmakers still feel forced to make their cups a different size because the majority of people who drive cars drive that company’s brand of car.
Do you understand?
Internet Explorer is the asshole car company. Web developers are the cupmakers. The W3C standards are the standards the association of car designers made about cupholder size.
And so, from now on I will not make my cups a half inch smaller or whatever (don’t make a dick joke don’t make a dick joke don’t make a dick joke). From now on I will only comply with normal internet standards, not Internet Explorer standards. Because if I make my cups smaller, it is literally an act of support for a browser that doesn’t fit to standards. I don’t believe you can support internet standards and support Internet Explorer at the same time.
Which is back to the main point: starting with the next upgrade to this website and continuing until Internet Explorer is fully standards compliant, sttimmypro.com will not be visible in the browser.
So if you haven’t, upgrade to Firefox. Seriously.
Smart button (I was like, “Well that’s ironic. The button supporting Firefox works in every browser but Firefox.” But it turned out someone installed adblock on this computer. Stupid adblock.)
Also, semirelatedly, the IE Car would stop working every six seconds and the bottom would fall out every time you hit a bump.