Harry Potter and the World of Dysfunctional Cylons
From the wonderful mollyringwraith, who brought us the condensed versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, comes Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (condensed) Parts One and Two. If you are a Potter fan, read these. You may even wish to if you aren’t a fan 🙂
This weekend while playing WoW, I got into my first 4-person party, and I admit that this was probably the most fun I’ve yet had with the game. But the Schwartz has an up side and a down side.
Booklist Update
I’d forgotten to keep this up… let me update.
Since finishing Ringworld’s Children, I’ve read: (N = new, R = re-read)
The Hunt For Red October – Tom Clancy (R), Patriot Games – Tom Clancy (R), Bridge of Birds – Barry Hughart (R), Tales from the White Hart – Arthur C. Clarke (R), Star Trek Movie Memories – William Shatner (R), I Am Spock – Leonard Nimoy (R), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling (N), Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams (R), The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul – Douglas Adams (R), Beyond [The Physics of] Star Trek – Lawrence M. Krauss (R), and Crashlander – Larry Niven (N).
I’m working on Eragon – Christopher Paolini (N), A Wizard’s Holiday – Diane Duane (N), and the sixth volume of Chobits – CLAMP (N).
From this list, one might deduce: 1) I’ve had lots of free time lately, 2) I haven’t lots of spare cash on me until I recently got a gift card from a relative, and 3) there’s a certain part of the bookstore I usually visit first.
Checking in
I’ve been gone for a while, here. Sorry about that, but I’ve been going through a rough time and haven’t been feeling quite outgoing enough to post stuff here. But I’ve got a lot of backed-up reviews and links, now, so I’ll at least slap them up here before they spill over.
Fantastic Four: Decently cast, well-executed, and pretty dull, at least until the last half hour. If you know some science, be sure to bind and gag that knowledge and lock it in the car trunk before entering the theater 🙂 OTOH, isn’t it great to be a comic-book fan in an year where the worst superhero movie of the summer is still fairly decent, and the best is Batman Begins?
War of the Worlds: Not necessarily better than the George Pal version, but certainly prettier. I sure would like to see Spielberg’s people do a Godzilla or Battletech flick – at least I would believe all the visuals. This is the first version of the story I know of that gives humanity a glimmer of a workable tactic against the aliens before the traditional denouement takes care of things. It would have been nice if they’d somehow worked a USS Thunderchild into the river crossing scene.
Half-Blood Prince: Far superior to Order of the Phoenix, both IMHO and in an unscientific poll of people I’ve asked. Hard to talk about it much without causing spoilers or boredom, but Tonks and Lovegood (not a 70’s cop show) are still two of my favorite characters.
Shortpacked! on why there will be a few changes to the G1 characters in the Transformers live-action flick.
Shortpacked! again on Batman reaching the pinnacle of human reflexes and agility.
Brad Hicks on “The Spaceship We Have”, parts one, two, and three. He talks about why we have the Space Shuttle instead of the equipment every space geek in the early sixties thought we were going to have by now; and why that’s going to be a real problem real soon.
Ringworld and kabobs
A poster on websnark this weekend pointed out exactly what’s bothering me about the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds trailers; they make it look like a run-of-the-mill disaster flick. Instead of concerning invading aliens, most of the scenes in the trailer could be cribbed from any asteroid impact – tidal wave – volcano – invading commies / killer bees / killer tomatoes / plague-carrying R.O.U.S. – movie.
Finally finished Ringworld’s Children. It was substantially better than The Ringworld Throne, and had an interesting bit at the end that nevertheless seems somewhat implausible for a Larry Niven novel. Still, two months to finish a single genre hardcover is a depressing record for me, and the Public Library isn’t much happier about it. 🙁
Scientifically implausible, with spoilers
Standing Mode
raininva and I watched Robot Jox this weekend – I hadn’t seen it since the early nineties. I liked the mech designs better than I did when I first saw it, and Gary Graham’s an old genre friend now (once considered for Captain Sisko, according to the IMDB). But the script is still ungood. My favorite bit is still the one where the bad guy uses a prohibited ranged weapon during a match, causing the death of hundreds of spectators, and the referees just shrug and say “do-over!”
Contrast this to Gunhed, which has a cooler mech and more interesting characters, but is confusingly edited and is willing to let the audience make up their own explanations for a bunch of plot points. There was enough left unanswered in that flick that I was easily able to steal the whole plot for a Shadowrun game without giving too much away to the players. Still, I prefer it.
I’m trying to make a mental list of live-action “giant robot” movies that are worth spending 90 minutes or so on. Iron Man #28 looks good, but I don’t know if it will ever be dubbed or subbed. And though I love it for camp, I’m not sure I can bring myself to include the first Power Rangers Movie.
Speaking of such, I’ve procured the Cutey Honey live-action flick, which will go into the “to be watched” queue after the latest Orion Slave Girl episode of “Enterprise” and this week’s “Doctor Who”. The movie’s looking very cheesy, which of course is just what I’d be looking for.
The other serious Whovian at my office wants me to bring in the Whoman DVD that I still owe rubinpdf money for. I will do so. He has been warned 🙂
Booklist: I re-read Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, and am trying to finish his Beyond This Horizon, but the latter’s just not grabbing me. OTOH, the local library had a hardcover of Larry Niven’s Ringworld’s Children, which I’m enjoying much much more than The Ringworld Throne. It’s feeling more like SF than the “fallen-civilization fantasy” that Niven admittedly loves, but I think is a bit mined out. I’ve got another nonfiction library book on the OSS to read after that.
Wow. This got long.
Spring Preview Day!
Beautiful day outside – 60 degrees already and supposed to top out at 70. While I wouldn’t diagnose myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder, I can’t deny that later sunsets and warmer temperatures help my mood a lot. With all the writing I’ve been doing lately about asteroid miners, I have to wonder what they’d do to deal with the problem of spending weeks, months, and years in an environment where it never ‘got light out’.
Finished re-reading Neuromancer and reading Soul Music this weekend. Soul Music was almost too light-hearted for a book dealing with the weariness of being Death, and the way that musicianship can change people. Also, if I understood the ending (and I don’t know that I did), there was a lot of ‘reset button’ hand-waving happening to avoid untidy loose ends. I suppose, on the Discworld, that’s not unreasonable.
One thing that’s never made completely clear in Neuromancer (partially because William Gibson didn’t actually know that much about computers (or so I’ve read)) is whether Case, the expert computer cracker at the center of the novel, is in fact a computer expert in any way. On re-readings of the book, he seems more like an experienced top-level “script kiddie” or video gamer than someone who can actually read or write any kind of code. Wintermute calls him “barely print-literate”.
Fun link today:
“Who’s On First” at the video store
Clearing the mental registers
Latest reading / writing progress: Finished a re-read of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which is like The Lord Of The Rings of military thrillers; long and complicated, but internally consistent and plausible and worth the read if you can stick it out. Trying to read Terry Pratchett’s Men At Arms or The Truth, but I keep stalling in the early pages of each. Last year, Witches Abroad did a much better job of sucking me in.
Wrote a bunch of flavor text last night, and a few hundred words for “Cat Out Of Hell” over the weekend. Also figured out what the MacGuffin should be for “That Goat Doesn’t Belong To You”, making it more a part of the story and slightly less of a MacGuffin.
Our Lord of the Rings CCG is addictive, and I’m not saying that as an employee, either. raininva keeps killing me at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, though.
I got honked at on the way to work this morning because someone mistimed his sudden acceleration and wasn’t able to cut me off as he’d planned. I guess he was trying to say, How dare you prevent me from being rude to you!
I did nothing for Mardi Gras last night, continuing a tradition I’ve maintained as long as I can remember. I will probably continue that tradition next month in a few months for Cinco de Mayo too. But at least Card Night will probably be a go this weekend – MarsCon and sicknesses have put a damper on the last few.
Just discovered NeoOffice, the OS X port of OpenOffice. Basic MS Word / Excel functionality, for free? I knew this had to suck… except it doesn’t. Now I’ve got it installed on all the machines I use at work or home.
And that’s Wednesday morning.
Marscon and stuff
Got back from Marscon Sunday. It was an interesting weekend – all the rooms were taken over by a military group preparing for special training, so all the attendees had to drive back and forth to their hotels. Put a damper on things, that’s for sure. I wish I’d remembered that there would be a Rocky Horror show on Saturday night – maybe they’ll do it again next year.
Caught up with kittykatya, impink, tzel, Tom & Donna, Jesse, Suzanne, Dave & Jodi, Dwight, Helen, and a bunch of other folk. I got some cheap Discworld paperbacks, and another Steve Jackson card game; for $1, I also bought a memory – the two books of the 1978 D&D Basic set (4th or 5th printing). We also got some Deadlands modules, and raininva won an auction for a signed uncut sheet of WARS: Nowhere to Hide!
Screen-capture trivia: the men’s miniskirt Starfleet uniform from the early Season One episodes of TNG. Strange that this didn’t catch on. I mean, can’t you just see Worf running around in it?
There was something else on my mind, but it’s gone now.
Continuing the saga of the books I’ve read this year – just finished a re-read of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I have to give Asimov credit for, in the space of a few short stories, giving me the feel of observing the fall of a Galactic Empire.
Borg Booklist #1
Following snidegrrl and jsciv, I’m going to keep track of the books I’ve read this year.
So far: The DaVinci Code, The Maltese Falcon (re-read). and the Robotech novel series (re-read). Of the three, I’d have to rate The Maltese Falcon the highest – it makes more sense than the movie (good though the movie is), and is steeped with the mundane details of life in San Francisco in the 1930s.
I still have some of the books from the Rising Star sale in that bag, including some Terry Pratchett, Peter David, and Diane Duane.
