This is hilarious. In response, apperantly, to some fringe right-wing urban legend that the old Super Mario Bros games had subliminal communist propaganda messages in them, some one put together a flash animation of Mario (but in a red outfit) doing all the stuff he does in the game, but in heroic slow motion with the Russian Red Army Chorus blaring inspirational music in the background and Mario hoisting up a communist flag at the end. Having whiled away many, many hours playing this game as a younger whippersnapper, this reduced me to helpless laughter.

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Well, I'm about 6,000 words into a new short story. Between the fact that it's feeling like it'll probably come in around 10,000 (twice the standard word limit of a lot of the small press and semi-pro places I tend to send stuff) and that it's hyper-political in a fairly controversial way (it has a near future setting based in part on an over-the-top extrapolation of current trends), it's probably utterly unpublishable, but it's giving me tremendous joy to write it. The tentative working title is, "A Historical Note on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse," which probably tells you everything you need to know. Some standard Burgissian* fictional elements, but combined with radical politics and, well, zombies.



*Burgissian: Adjective, referring to anything related to a subspecies of speculative fiction cropping up in the early years of the 21st century, typically featuring elements such as mind-bending drugs, mysterious women, ironic detachment, grusome monsters and wryly bitter reminisences. Should not be confused with Burgish, a distantly related concept in which elements such as alchemy, European history and the use of lush descriptions of magic to explore the complexities of human relationships predominate, and in which characters rarely have their brains eaten by zombies.