{"id":484,"date":"2005-08-09T13:11:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-09T13:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/2005\/08\/09\/harry-potter-and-the-world-of-dysfunctional-cylons\/"},"modified":"2005-08-09T13:11:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-09T13:11:00","slug":"harry-potter-and-the-world-of-dysfunctional-cylons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/2005\/08\/09\/harry-potter-and-the-world-of-dysfunctional-cylons\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Potter and the World of Dysfunctional Cylons"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the wonderful mollyringwraith<\/a>, who brought us the condensed versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, comes Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince<\/i> (condensed) Parts One<\/a> and Two<\/a>. If you are a Potter fan, read these. You may even wish to if you aren’t a fan \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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. We steamrolled through an area that had given Rain and myself real trouble, and were only stopped by a server glitch which kept us out of a dungeon. The two other players did a good job, and even the couple times I was killed caused little more than rueful laughter. I suddenly felt much more positive about the game.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, last night we partied up with an utter fool, and it cost us. (Literally, but I’ll get to that in a moment.) We ended up with a five-person party before we were done, but one character was several levels in advance of us and insistent on showing us how badass he was, aggroing everything in his path. Twice he had the nerve to ask us why we hadn’t helped him out when he got in over his head, when it was because we were fighting for our lives against the other eight critters he’d upset before running deeper into the dungeon. After our fifth collective death due directly to his idiocy, the party broke apart by wordless mutual agreement, and I went off to turn in a few quest items and repair my equipment. 13 freakin’ silver. (I had so many yellow and red armor failure warnings, that my warning display looked like Iron Man.)<\/p>\n

I decided to give Peter F. Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction, Part 1<\/i> a try. I’m 250 pages in, and we’re still setting up 6-8 groups of characters, and nothing’s really happened yet. I like maybe two characters of the horde, the rest are a) boring, b) stupid, or c) assholes. However, there’s teeny bits of potential scattered here and there, so I’ll stick with it a little longer before I return to Eragon<\/i>. Eric Burns of Websnark has said that he misses pulp fiction a lot<\/a>, and I think I agree with him; the nice thing about the pulps is that stuff happened. Lots and lots of stuff happened. Either the author squeezes in characterization and background where possible, or ignores it in favor of even more gleeful, over-the-top action. A steady diet of pulp wouldn’t be a good thing, but it sure is more palatable than this long-winded drone.<\/p>\n

Other’s tastes differ, but I stand by my viewpoint; don’t write depressing, gritty, “realistic” fiction, TV, or movies if you want my attention. Why do I need an author to tell me how much life can suck? I’ve got cable news channels for that. That may be why I’m finding the new Battlestar Galactica<\/i> a hard slog. BSG isn’t giving me anything I can’t get off of CNN. (And don’t tell me anything about spaceships and aliens – the spaceships and aliens don’t matter<\/b> to the story in the current BSG. They are only a backdrop. Heck, the Cylons aren’t even as alien as Klingons or Vulcans.)<\/p>\n

Come to think of it, there are no Cylon characters in BSG. Sure, Galactica-Boomer is supposedly a Cylon, but most of the time she thinks she’s human. Caprica-Boomer is a Cylon, but spends so much time pretending to be human that she might as well be. Baltar-Six, assuming she exists, is nothing more interesting than a very manipulative human with a glowy spine. (Of course, I still say Baltar died in the nuclear attack on Caprica and this whole series is Baltar-Hell. But I don’t expect people to come along with me on that.)<\/p>\n

Okay, enough rambling for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \ud83d\ude42 This weekend while playing WoW, I got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[28,63,37,43,59,82],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-books","tag-galactica","tag-harry-potter","tag-humor","tag-id10t","tag-world-of-warcraft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1xCb9-7O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gatocasa.com\/unimat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}