The typo “charismantic” suggests the Charismancer character class, a person so likeable that people just do whatever the Hell he asks. SEE ALSO: “Yes Man 2″ proposals.

I finally joined last.fm. Four reasons: I want good music to stream at work, I want another way to learn about new music, I want to share my music with my friends, and - perhaps most of all - I want a strong record at the end of the year of what I actually listened to.

My most-listened artists are pretty representative. Sufjan hasn’t gotten much play outside of Christmas for the past 2 years. Also, last.fm is missing all my pre-2005 listens, which means that U2, Tori Amos, The Smiths, Talking Heads and Outkast are significantly undersampled.

If you scrobble, please post your username in the comments so I can add you. Thanks!

Like most high school students, I went through a musical phase, but by college I was completely over it. Songs are for when you have something so important that you can’t just say it, but most musicals wallow in predictable melodrama, hiding their flimsiness behind song and bombast.

But this is cool: a modern revival of West Side Story with the Sharks and their girls singing and shouting in surtitled Spanish. This linguistic barrier creates additional tension between the gangs (modernized as dangerous killers, not loveable punks) and adds an additional level of characterization to the characters who try to bridge both worlds; their shifting fealties are reflected in their chosen language.

This is exciting. So much of our modern culture is mired in pointless trainspotting nostalgia (c.f. Spamalot, Mamma Mia!) that it’s exciting to see a revival actually try to update the work into something new.

Last year’s premiere five-minute interactive meditation on life, death, and everything in between was the strangely affecting Passage. This year, the most moving mini-indie I’ve played is the just-released Rara Racer. Don’t let the screenshot fool you - give it a try.

If the game’s a joke, then we’re the punchline.

(Thanks to Raph Koster.)

Front Cover | MP3s

1. Dinosaurs - The Stills
2. Mistaken for Strangers - The National
3. I Don’t Have a God - Robots in Disguise
4. House Jam - Gang Gang Dance
5. The Prayer - Bloc Party
6. California Dreamer - Wolf Parade
7. Wintertime - Yeasayer
8. She Is Turning Into You - Snowman
9. Sing! Captain - Handsome Furs
10. Child-Heart Losers - Sunset Rubdown

The title was coined by a mouth-foaming pundit decrying the influence of “atheistic scientists and rational Satanists” on America. The phrase stuck with me - an “atheist” is just a nonbeliever, but an “atheistic” individual is a militant believer in a malevolent un-God.

These songs are spiritual, but not religious. Filled with faith and expectation, yet none of it pointed skyward. They hope to define a negative space without allowing a positive one to exist.

The election is tomorrow. I encourage you to vote for whoever you like (as long as it’s Barack Obama). And if you live in California, Vote NO on Proposition 8.

A distressing number of my Californian friends have no idea how close this proposition is to passing - they assume it will fail because, hey! We live in California! NO is fractionally ahead in polls, but within the margin of error - this proposition will be determined entirely by voter turnout.

Outside forces have spent $25 million dollars lying to Californians about what this divisive and hateful proposition means - Proposition 8 has seen the most advertising of any race or issue this cycle, outside the presidency. Unfortunately, this deluge of negative falsehoods means a 20-point advantage for common-sense decency has been slowly whittled away to little more than a rounding error. If Proposition 8 passes, gay rights will be set back by years, if not decades. The other side is treating this as the final battle of the culture war, and it’s up to us whose hearts aren’t ruled by hate to make sure that they don’t win.

I’m not going to tell you why Proposition 8 is wrong and must be defeated - you’re smart enough to figure that out for yourself. But you have to vote. I don’t care if MSNBC calls the election for Barack at 4 P.M. PST. Get your ass to the polls and vote. Vote.

Thank you.

I dressed up as Scott McCloud’s Zot! villain 9-Jack-9 for Halloween. This is the latest in my popular “awesome, yet unrecognizable” costume series. (Though, three people totally recognized me!) I’m extremely happy with how this turned out.

I learned a few important lessons from this costume, most importantly: don’t choose a costume that prevents you from drinking at a Halloween party. You will take your mask off twenty minutes into the party, and spend the rest of the evening explaining that no, you are not the Music Man, Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins, or Tucker Carlson.

Thanks to Joe for taking such nice photos.

I recently built the Taj Mahal out of LEGO bricks. It’s the biggest LEGO set ever made (over 5900 pieces) and completely awesome. It took about 15 hours to build from start to finish, and I took several photos to document the process.

All these pieces, just waiting to be built.
My workspace.
A piece of the base. (One of six.)
The base. (iPhone for scale.)
The minarets.
The central dome’s internal framework.
First story of the central dome complete.
Adding the second story of the central dome.
The central dome.
Central building, side segment. (One of four.)
Central building, corner segment. (One of four.)
The central building (base).
The central building (complete).
The Taj Mahal.
The Taj Mahal!

Last, but certainly not least: the building is hollow, so you can place a lamp inside to illuminate the structure.

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is rightly famous for the epic world-building of future-history tetralogies like Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun. And while these books are unparalled in the scope and complexity of their imagined worlds, my favorite Wolfe book is There Are Doors, a deceptively simple tale of a department store clerk who falls in love with a woman from another world. Two other recent works, The Wizard Knight and his Locus Award-winning novella, “Golden City Far,” are concerned with love: true love, knightly love, adolescent love. Though arguably simpler than his “solar” cycles, Wolfe’s more “grounded” works leave a deeper emotional impression.

The publisher describes An Evil Guest as “a novel in which Lovecraft writes Blade Runner,” which is superficially correct but also misses the point entirely. At its core, An Evil Guest is a romance, a notoriously tough sell to the genre crowd. The three corners of our love triangle Cassie Casey, a struggling musical actress who appears in kitschy off-Broadway shows; Gideon Chase, a dashing detective-wizard who gives the U.S. government the brush off to follow his own investigations; and Bill Reis, former ambassador to planet Woldercan, recently returned to Earth and somewhat changed. Chase needs to use Casey to get to Reis, and he uses his magic to unlock her inner star. Reis wants Casey because she is beautiful and Chase because he is useful, and he finances Casey’s latest production (”Dating the Volcano God”) to get closer to them both. Casey wants them both because — well, she’s not sure what she wants.

The jacket flap claims the story is set “100 years in the future,” but the calendar year is irrelevant. The world has a hard-boiled noir atmosphere — the musicals and showgirls, the diners and automats, cars and trains, and South Pacific island getaways — but it also has interstellar travel, shapeshifting aliens, and superluminal communications. There’s also room for werewolves, fairies, and alchemy…despite the varied sources, the novel isn’t a pastiche; Wolfe’s world is entirely consistent with itself, if entirely confounding to expectations.

And it is, in the end, Lovecraftian. Though only in the end; the first four-fifths of the book will have you scratching your head about why that particular adjective was invoked. The truth lies so far beneath the surface that for most of the story, it’s completely invisible. When elements of the mythos do start to appear, they’re surprising, but also startlingly effective - the lurking horror is unnerving, but the invisible horror is terrifying. The sudden introduction of unknowable evil into Wolfe’s strange-but-rational world has a powerful effect on the reader; having spent the entire book trying to understand the rules of this strange world, it turns out that none of it matters. The surface strangeness was only a distraction from the true forces, both good and evil, at play.

An Evil Guest is not Wolfe’s greatest work. But the way it seamlessly combines Lovecraftian horror, pulp, romance and science-fiction into a cohesive whole could make it his most personal. It’s hard to imagine another author that could keep this many balls in the air.

Coming soon: Athiestic scientist.

You may know what to do when Japanese monsters attack. But when they fall in love?

Front Cover | MP3s

1. Papa Was a Rodeo - The Magnetic Fields
2. Nothing Better - The Postal Service
3. Candy - Iggy Pop feat. Kate Pierson
4. Elevator Love Letter - Stars
5. Xavia - The Submarines

These songs are men and women singing at each other, not always with each other. Moreover, they are songs where the entrance of the female voice comes as a surprising revelation. They start as monologues but unexpectedly become a conversation.

I meant for this album to sound like an unfolding relationship - but now I think it’s a relationship dying, and all the tracks are in reverse.