Would You Have Survived in the Middle Ages?

Shamus Young has an interesting post up on his blog, something I think a lot of D&D players have probably considered at some point. Good role-playing really demands that you try to project what your character should be feeling when they encounter a variety of nasty situations, like the deaths of loved ones, catastrophic burns, a plethora of injuries including some very esoteric ones like disintegration.

So, the question is: would you have survived to your present age without the benefit of modern medicine. Weirdly enough, I think the answer in my case is yes.

We're ignoring the effects of things that you can't estimate, like the effectiveness of vaccines that let you give nasty diseases a miss, and only taking into account illnesses/accidents that you have actually had in your lifetime. In my case, the only life-threatening illness I've ever had was the pneumonia I contracted when I was still an infant. This, however, is survivable without medication, although it probably would have left me with permanently reduced lung function.

I have a righteously competent immune system and I recover from pretty much anything on my own. I didn't take care of my teeth when I was a kid and I've had one cavity filled because I thought it looked bad. I did get my wisdom teeth out a few years ago, but they weren't causing me any pain, I just figured it'd be better to get them out than to wait until they were.

As a side note, I read an interesting article that implies wisdom teeth may actually be beneficial if you're likely to lose many of your teeth before they come in: there's room in your jaw for them, then. That would work out for me, because I was told I would lose most of my top incisors if my jaw wasn't relocated by ortodontia.

The worst injury I've ever had was a teeny, tiny, invisible fracture in my right radius last year and the only result was that I had some restrictions on what I could do with that hand for few weeks. I had bronchitis in high school but I pretty much recovered on my own. That's it. Apparently I'm a freak.

More Comics

I added a couple more webcomics on the sidebar: Jet Packs and Time Machines and Home on the Strange. Both of them make me laugh. JPTM is mostly surrealism, although the creator's style reminds me a lot of Calvin & Hobbes. Home on the Strange is more geek gamer humor and right on the money. Despite what you may think, gamers do realize just how . . . odd . . . our hobby may seem to the rest of the world, so we are able to make fun of how seriously we take our goofy hobby.

I'd like to see some sports fans making fun of their goofy hobby.

Military Science Fiction/Fantasy Tropes

I mentioned this genre briefly in my last post and I thought I would go a bit more in-depth. I'm not a big fan of the "Military" sub-genre in fantasy and science fiction because, although most of what I have seen evidences a great deal of benevolence, the books also seem to have exactly the same plot. It goes a little something like this:

A mind-numbingly exhaustive description of opposing factions, political structures, houses, animals that BY GOD cannot have the same name or body structure as any actual Earth mammal (unless the author is Mercedes Lackey) but DAMN they sure ACT just like an Earth mammal, vehicles, weaponry, alliances, military units, and matters arcane. This description vies with novels like War and Peace and Les Miserables for complexity.

Reader: You aren't seriously expecting me to remember all that, are you? And why do several of the factions have very similar names?

Author: Shh! No talking!

At some point during this description, the protagonists are introduced:

Main Protagonist (MP): Hi! I'm misunderstood! Also, I have angst!

Secondary Protagonist (SP): Shut up, you pansy!

MP: Jerkface!

SP: Momma's Boy!

A disaster ensues which forces them to work together, during which the MP kicks major butt.

SP: Wow, you kick major butt!

MP: Yeah, I have (pick one: implants/magical ability/special forces training}.

SP: Apparently I misjudged you!

MP: You aren't so bad yourself!

SP: You know, it's going to get awkward if we keep acting seperately. It could slow the action down or something!

MP: Yeah! Let's form the Protagonist Mutual Admiration Society (PMAS)!

PMAS: Okay!

Another battle, rife with exquisitely detailed descriptions of gore, carnage, destruction, and the names of many political factions/creatures/weapons/military maneuvers.

PMAS: Whew! War is hell!

Reader: No shit.

Antagonists: We're evil!

Reader: Where the heck did you come from?!

Antagonists: Little do you know, but we are actually behind the gore, carnage, destruction, etc.

Reader: What? Why?

Antagonists: We just get off on being evil! Watch us smirk in a self-satisfied way at how invincble we are!

Reader: Is it just me, or do they seem kind of stupid?

Author: Shh! No talking!

Another battle which is amazingly similar to the previous battle.

Antagonists: Ouch!

PMAS: Bitch! Where's my money!

Ambiguous Guys (AG): Wow, they kick ass! Hey, ass-kickers! Let us welcome you to our home in a fashion that leaves serious doubts as to our motivations/allegiances!

PMAS: Okay!

AG: We've noticed that you have some serious firepower there!

PMAS: Yes, and we know all about military tactics, too!

AG: Hmm . . . perhaps you can assist us in defeating our enemies!

PMAS: Okay!

More battles, each more drawn-out, gory, and nerve-wracking than the last.

AG: You are getting your butts kicked here! What are you going to do!

PMAS: Arm the locals!

AG: Yes, that always works! You guys are so cool, can we join the PMAS?

PMAS: Okay!

Training Montage.

Antagonists: TORTURE TORTURE KILL MURDER!

Secondary Protagonist: (dies)

Main Protagonist: OMG you killed Kenny! You bastards! KILL THEM ALL!!!

The Epic Battle of more than fifty pages of exquisite descriptions of carnage, gore, etc. etc. etc. ensues.

Reader: Zzzzzzzzz.

Author: (kicks Reader)

Reader: Huh? What?

Author: You're missing the best part!

PMAS: Yeah! We won!

MP: KILL KILL KILL!

PMAS: (smacks)Dude, you're being evil!

MP: Oops. Um, can I go back to having angst then?

PMAS: . . .

PMAS: Fine, kid, knock yourself out.

MP: (smacks himself in the forehead and falls to the ground unconscious)

PMAS: That was great! Well, the book's over, let's stand around congratulating ourselves until the Author wraps this up!

Author: Little do they know that another, bigger evil army awaits them!

PMAS/Reader: WHAT!?!

Author: Come on, I've got four more books worth of epic gory descriptions here! And I haven't gotten past C in my Military Arcana dictionary!

Class Dis-Mythed

I think Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures were the first fantasy novels I ever read. I was eight years old and the jokes did not even remotely make sense to me. It didn't help that my Dad started me on the third book first, so I didn't even have the advantage of familiarity with the characters to help me out.

But I still liked them! In fact, I eventually bought all the books in the series and re-read them all numerous times. I feel a little old for them now, as I do for the other fantasy novels I read as a youngster: Piers Anthony's Xanth novels and Craig Shaw Gardner's tales of Ebenezum and Wuntvor. Still, I usually enjoy Asprin's new fantasy offerings while I have abandoned most of the other authors.

I think the primary reason for this is that Asprin also belongs to the "Military Science Fiction/Fantasy" club that loosely includes Linda Evans, Elizabeth Moon, David Drake, David Weber, Eric Flint, Mercedes Lackey, and John Ringo (I may have missed one or two there). The main distinguishing literary factor of their writing is that they all firmly and obviously believe that people act the way they do for a reason. I mean, to the extent that they actually have a really tough time presenting a convincing villian that isn't appallingly stupid and cliched. They are like modern disciples of Victor Hugo. Their books sometimes read like cheerful management tracts for a down-at-the heels organization.

Class Dis-Mythed, apart from its obvious lisp-inducing qualities, is one of Asprin's better books. In it, The Great Skeeve (a human magician whose reality does not meet the hype), undergoes to train a mixed gaggle of off-dimension students in "practical" magic. It just gets crazier from there. Skeeve may not be the magician most people think he is, but his practical thinking skills are top-notch and he demonstrates them very convincingly over the course of the novel.

I thought the ending, which dramatizes the students off on their own, was just a bit dull and over-done because it seems completely isolated from the plot at first, but Asprin brings it back on track after a short while. All in all a very fun, light read.

Rating: 3.5

Myth-taken Identity

Here we have another book in the Myth series by Robert Aspirin, this one about credit-card identity theft. I didn't really like it that much because the subject was over-the-top corny and the characters demonstrate a distinct lack of ingenuity and panache over the course of the book. It doesn't help that the three main characters in this book are mostly one-trick ponies: Aahz, the lean mean green Pervect who has a soft spot for two things: his former apprentice Skeeve and cold, hard cash; Massha, the proverbial Fat Lady who dresses like a cross between a Thousand Nights houri and a Drag Queen at a Cher revival; and Chumley, the big purple troll that is smarter than he acts.

I think the writing was sub-par: several elements are introduced that should reasonably become important later, but they prove to be heavy-handed plot devices that vanish just when you might be expecting some kind of payoff. The main adversaries in the story are a pack of Mall Rats (literal rats) that have secret tunnels all through the giant extra-dimensional Mall. One of the tunnels lets them spy on the Mall Administration and the rats make use of it to learn the plans of the three protagonists early in the story. Then, when matters get serious and the rats should either be discovered or foil the last, best plan by getting advance information, Asprin mysteriously forgets about their access entirely. The result is that the entire story seems very contrived.

Rating: 2.0

Here Kitty, Kitty

I like cats. Given, I'm also allergic to cats and I don't have anywhere to put a cat, but I still sort of wish I could have a cat. Well, my allergies haven't been bothering me that much recently and I will certainly be getting my own apartment as soon as I can, so I figured the first thing to do was to look at some cats. Now, most people would start looking for an actual apartment first, but I like to do things my own way.

I found the above site with a list of all the "official" cat breeds, and I just thought it was cool. I like the Ocicat the best, I think, but I'm also very fond of the Egyptian Mau. Mau is the Egyptian word for cat, go figure. We should name animals after the sound they make, too, you wouldn't have to correct your kids when they insisted that the dog was a "bow-wow". On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd want to be calling dolphins the "eeeekeeiaekkkkeeee"; that's a little hard to pronounce. Spots aside, I also like some rather plain fellows like the Bombay, which really does look like a miniature panther, and the Korat and Russian Blue.

The hairless cats look kind of sad, though.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I'm not usually the type of person to go to a midnight matinee (especially since you don't get to pay the matinee price), but my boss wanted to go see the new Harry Potter movie on opening night (actually, morning) so I decided to oblige him.

The movie was fun, but it substantially different from the book. This actually makes it better than the previous movie as far as I'm concerned: they realized they couldn't fit everything in, so they did some re-writing to make it work on the screen. Even so, it is still a very, very busy movie. I didn't have any trouble following the rapid-fire plot, but it was still the progress of a machine gun. I doubt I would have had such an easy time if I hadn't read the book more than once.

I think they kept in a few things that they still should have cut entirely, like the Occlumency lessons, which were important in the book because they set up further ambiguousity about Snape's character, but they were a great deal less so in the movie due to the re-writes. I think they would have done better to have left out the bit with Bellatrix Lestrange and Neville's parents as well.

I think there are also a few bits they could have cut a bit more ruthlessly to make more time for the things that were really important, but I'd have to watch the movie again with a notebook to really make further recommendations. The scenes came in so fast that they sandblasted my opinions out of my brain almost before I could form them.

The actress that played Dolores Umbridge did a great job however, and they also did a great job of turning Sirius into a sophisticated gentleman with a spotty past rather than a scary street mutterer. The acting was pretty good although the new Dumbledore still grates on me.

About all I can say at this point is that I'm wishing they turned it into a miniseries instead of a movie series. The first book was the shortest and it still made a 3-hour movie. If you are a fan of the books you will probably enjoy this movie, but you probably won't be able to expect any kind of payoff until the final one comes out in 3 years or so.

Shrek the Third

Here we have another third installment in another series. There have been a lot of thirds this year. Anyway, this one, like most of the other ones I've seen, was cute, but not exceptional. I think the main problem was that it just didn't come together very well; it was more like sketch comedy than a single unified movie. Just look at the storyline and you'll see what I mean: Fiona's father dies, leaving the kingdom to Shrek unless he can line up another official heir to take over. Luckily, there IS an official heir because Shrek doesn't want the job, so Shrek sets off to find him. Seems kind of forced, but they could go somewhere with this. So far so good, yes? It kind of goes downhill from there. We have: the return of Charming, who wants his revenge, hijinks with the less-than-impressive alternate heir (his name is Arthur, which should basically explain to you the entire nature of the jokes revolving around his character), a bunch of fairytale princesses running around inside the castle, and Shrek ruminating over the fact that Fiona is pregnant and he is going to be a father soon. It's too much! Any one of those ideas would have made an entire movie all on its own, and all of them were crammed together. Given, they did some fun things with each plot and the whole story does manage to get wrapped up, but it just wasn't as much fun as it might have been if they'd stuck with one idea. Adding to the jarringly disjointed plot was a slight weirdness with the animation. Now, this isn't a major issue by far (in fact other people may not notice it), but it was pretty obvious they did the faces of human characters using a different method than they used for body animation. I think they did one of those tricks where they put sensors on the actual humans face to get much more realistic expressions, but the result is that the quality of the animation on the face doesn't quite match the animation on the body. One is very realistic, the other much less so. I'd say, stick with Ratatouille.

The Anvil of the World

This book is so astonishingly mediocre that it's difficult to even have an opinion about it. I think at least part of the problem is that it's really difficult to identify basic literary elements. Is there a plot? Is this characterization? A joke? What's going on here?

I think this is what happens when someone that isn't actually funny tries to write humor and Make a Statement at the same time. The result? A heavy-handed piece of environmentalist propaganda full of unrelated things that are bizarre but not actually funny.

The main character, Smith, comes across as a strange dichotomy because he is portrayed as being clueless AND effective. (Of course you find out later that he's only effective because some magic is inhabiting him and using him to transport it around. So really, he's just clueless.) The secondary characters include a demonic magician, the son of a Saint that married a Demon, and a well-travelled cook that, Forrest Gump-like, was apparently involved in every major event in recent history.

The entire novel is tiresome from the beginning to the end. Every time it looks like it might get interesting (a train under attack by assassins!) the author ruins it by introducing an amazingly trite explanation (they're ecoterrorists!).

The very last scene is actually reasonably well-done, yet it bears no relation whatsoever to the rest of the book. Maybe the author came up with an idea for a short story and decided to add about 300 pages of text just for the heck of it.

Rating: 1.0

Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End

For some reason Blogger will not allow me to attach a link to the title of this entry. I've been having some irritating problems like this for a while, like the fact that whenever I edit a post it puts the entire thing into a blockquote for some reason. They just rolled out some sort of new functionality package and the only result I've been able to detect is that a bunch of things STOPPED working. Anyway, here is the link: http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/pirates/atworldsend/ I heard a lot of negative comments about this movie; in fact, I only went to see it because I was seriously bored. I can somewhat understand the negativity, but I enjoyed the movie a lot. It reminded me more of the endgame of an RPG than of a movie, though. After spending the first two movies meeting new people and creatures and discovering a bunch of information, all of it comes together in the same place for the Big Showdown. Pirates III handled the number of events a lot better than Spiderman 3 did and the movie wasn't filled with lengthy pauses where either nothing much happens or something happens but it makes no sense. There were a few surreal scenes but since the plot involves people that are supposed to be dead/enchanted/immortal/crazy those scenes were acceptable even if they were indecipherable. I also thought the special-effects extravaganza/endgame was really, really sweet, although I have to admit it occured to me that I'd seen something remarkably similar in The Little Mermaid. I should also mention that if any GM did try to run the Pirates movies as an RPG, I would feel really sorry for them. Talk about splitting up your party!

Jennifer Government

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: why did I get this book? Well in this case I'll tell you flat out: it had my name in the title. I wasn't really expecting much, in fact I had a hard time reading it objectively because I was expecting it to be Libertarian propaganda.

It's not, though, or at least not exactly. Instead, the book is a remarkably honest take on what happens when the government is not capable of/allowed to fulfil its important and necessary functions. A corporate representative says it best near the end of the book, at the moment you might almost identify as the climax: "This isn't freedom, John. It's anarchy."

Max Barry, the author, does not have a lot of love for big corporations, and this shows in the plot of Jennifer Government. A marketing executive, John, at Nike Corporation hits on the idea of building "street cred" for Nike's latest ultra-expensive shoes by having some of the first customers capped. Image-conscious teenagers will be thrilled to be seen in lethal shoes. It is beneath the mighty marketeer, however, to actually carry out these planned killings, so he bullies some poor merchandising rep into signing a contract without reading it.

Everything becomes chaos from there. The shootings draw the attention of Jennifer Government, an embittered agent and single mother that wants to see justice done even though the Government doesn't have the budget for that sort of thing. The remainder of the plot involves kidnapping, a computer virus, and an all-out corporate war involving missiles and guns instead of more traditional standbys like money and advertising.

It's a fun book and fairly short; the kind of novel you take to the beach so that you can fall asleep with it on your face about halfway through and amuse the tourists. The corporation angst felt kind of dated, though, seeing as how this is increasingly the world of The Long Tail. Part of what keeps mega-corporations in existence any more are government subsidies and regulations that keep new entries from competing effectively. In a world without that insulation the mega-corporations will dwindle unless they really do provide unmatched service.

Max Barry also has a very funny website that you can visit if you are so inclined.

Sing it with me now: "You're so vain . . . you prob'ly think this book is about you . . ."

Rating: 3.0

Ratatouille

I've been reading reviews of this movie over the past couple of days since I stumbled over one on the Randex. I can sympathize with director, who has spent considerable time trying to get people to stop drawing parallels between his work and Ayn Rand's. It's no fun to put a lot of work into writing something fun and original and be told that you're "Just like Tolkein" or "Just like Ayn Rand" or whatever. Granted, he might have gotten away with it a little better if he hadn't directed a movie that is similar, in essentials, to The Fountainhead. Ratatouille is about someone that loves his work and is held back by society. Given, he's a rat, and he loves to cook, but Remy is sort of like Howard Roark. Some of the events in the movie are a little goofy, but it's supposed to be goofy. I think the main characteristic of this movie is simply its benevolence. There isn't a really evil character to be found anywhere, although there is some underhandedness and the food critic is certainly fearsome. Instead of reducing this battle over the kitchen to unimportance, it elevates it into a battle royale between opposing forces. As a writer I find it difficult to get a good story out of everyday things like cooking. I consider this to be a deficiency and I always like it when someone else manages to do it. I think everyone needs to be reminded that there are important things in life other than shooting the bad guys. Fighting the bad guys is easy: the lines are clearly drawn and it doesn't take great mental effort to arrive at the correct conclusions. It might require a lot of physical effort, but that's easy compared with the task of figuring out whether to, say, take someone's word on their abilities or sort out what is causing your office morale to sour. Yet all these little activities of astonishing difficulty go largely unnoticed. That's why I'm always pleased when someone shows one of those activities in a light that outlines what an important issue it is.

A Song of Ice and Fire

This is a series by George R. R. Martin that perfectly exemplifies the principle of how to write yourself into a hole; very similar to Robert Jordan, in fact. There are four books in the series thus far: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows. The series starts off with a bang: A Game of Thrones catapults you right into the action and the several threads of the story all take off immediately with the presentation of the various members of the Stark family. The setting is presented a little oddly, in that some of the important fantasy details aren't explicitly drawn out: you have to infer their nature over the course of many chapters and changes of narritive perspective. I actually found this to be a good presentation because you adopt the same view of the world that the characters hold: you take it for granted as the natural course of things in this fantasy world rather than viewing it as some abberation that needs to be corrected. The plot is a twisting complexity of intrigues, betrayals and counter-betrayals, so it is a fun read and Martin does a good job of making it easy to follow the events: the motivations of the various characters are fleshed out so perfectly that the events are not confusing at all. A Game of Thrones leads us from the general stability and well-being of a prosperous land up to the death of the King at the hands of conspirators and hints ominously of the disintegration that must follow as the land breaks up again into numerous factions. A Clash of Kings follows the struggle of these vast warring factions and introduces several new narrative characters and plot threads. Things begin to get more complicated but for the most part we are remaining with the Stark family and the personal importance of the events is clear. Some factions you like, some you dislike, and some you empathize with but despise their methods. In A Storm of Swords, the faction fights are all-but-solved, or at least you think you can see the shape of the solutions on the horizon. Some of the worst characters are killed off, the good ones remember their priorities, and the fantastic parts of the world begin to solidify and take hold. It looks very much as though one more book could bring everything to a very satisfactory conclusion. In A Feast for Crows, this illusion is brought crashing down. Nothing happens in the book. Nothing. More narrative perspectives are brought in, important previous ones are completely ignored, and instead of the great events being resolved you are brought down to the tiniest, narrowest view possible: it is as though the story has developed cataracts and is reduced to stumbling myopia. Tellingly, the author finds it necessary to explain/apologize for the nature of the book. He intentionally presented only half of what was going on in the story; he intends to dramatize what happens to the other narrative characters in his next book. This killed any desire I had to read the rest of the novels. What draws you through these books primarily is the desire to know what happens. Well, if I'm going to have to wait for him to write two more books before I can find that out I'm not even going to bother. I can't retain interest in a story for that long. A Feast of Crows mangled the cast badly enough as it was: my favorite conflicted character died in the most pathetically pointless way possible. The whole story has become uselessly tiresome. I suppose this is what happens when an author takes a ten-year hiatus from writing. In his afterword Martin explains that when he started he found himself writing and writing and writing and he just ran out of room to tell everything that he wanted to in one book. Well, I'll tell you what this means: it means you need to avail yourself of the services of a good editor. Oh well, the first three books were good. Rating: 2.5

Transformers

I just got back from seeing this movie and I am so happy I went to see it. It was an action movie, it was totally melodrama, but oh it was good melodrama. It is so rare to see a movie so full of explosions and meaningful dialog and hilarious comedy; it's simply a delight for the senses. Oh, before I forget: SPOILERS. THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. Yeah!

Now there are one or two criticisms I could make, like the fact that it was kind of dopey how the Sector Seven nincompoop basically said all human technology was reverse-engineered from Megatron . . . what was up with that? Bah. It was totally unworthy of such an excellent movie to make a statement like that, but it was only like 2 seconds of the entire movie so nevermind.

I really liked how Optimus Prime really had the power of his convictions; he was absolutely willing to pay the ultimate price to uphold them. Plus the voice they used for him was awesome, Peter Cullen, who also voiced Optimus Prime in the cartoon series. Personally I think HE should have been called the "leading man", but then I'm a sucker for a military man with a good voice. He was also the voice of King Kong, another impressively masculine character. Why are the best men robots and apes? Nah, on second thought, don't answer that. I'm not sure I want to know.

I also like how (don't forget I said SPOILERS) they didn't cheese out the ending and kill Optimus. I was all set for it, I was ready to cringe and be pissed off, and boom! Someone thinks for two seconds and we have The Happy Ending Extraordinary. Oh, it was good. Everyone in the theater clapped at the end, I haven't been to a movie where people clapped in a long time!

It was also very nice how the military was portrayed as being competent, the Men in Black were shown as jerks, the Secretary of Defense was a cool guy, there was a nifty girl hacker . . . I could go on and on but you'd probably be better off just going to see the movie already.

Have fun!

Soon I Will Be Invincible

No, I have not thrown a cog and suddenly turned into a megalomaniac (or at least, more of one than I already was): this is actually the title of a book. I was a little leery when I saw it at Borders, partially because I was thinking of writing a novel about superheros after I finish my current project(s). That, and I was pretty sure that it was going to be a steaming heap of postmodern dreck. You have to be careful with those books that say they have "novel ideas about good and evil". Most modern ideas about good and evil are bunk. However, I encountered the book again on Oo.net when I found out that someone had pre-ordered it and was planning on reading it. So I was in a quandry: maybe it wouldn't be awful after all. Anyway, if you can't tell this little story is leading up to me buying the book and reading it, finally. My opinion can be summed up very succinctly with one syllable, not even a word: eh. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped. The book asks a lot of questions about what makes a superhero or a supervillian but it never really answers them, either. The two main characters, a super-genius villian (Dr. Impossible) and a newbie hero cyborg (Fatale) posit a lot of potential theories but they don't seem particularly satisfied with their own theories. Certainly none of their actions lead to any sort of resolution; the good guys win because an ambiguously-aligned character allows them to, not because of anything they did. So, not a very satisifying novel. I read in other reviews that it was humorous because there were a lot of "references" to comic-book culture, but I don't read comic books so either I didn't get them or they just weren't that funny. It makes me sad to see a mainstay of incredible melodrama (super heros) made so gray and dull, like wet newspapers. Rating: 2.0

Dragon Bones

This is an interesting little fantasy novel that revolves around the psychological effects of abuse; not so much what the attacker does to the victim, but what the victim does to himself. The plot is a little simplistic but the characters are interesting and well-drawn, so it was definitely an enjoyable read. Dragons are a fantasy mainstay so it intrigues me how many different ways authors come up with to present them. In Dragon Bones the dragons (well, I should say dragon, there's only one in the story) are almost like genius loci; the defining spirit of a place rather than a big firebreathing lizard with wings. Mistreating the dragons has dire consequences for the entire realm. Unfortunately there's not that much more to say about the novel. It's something to do if you happen to be bored, but there's no reason to add it to your reading list if you're like most people and you have more books than time. Rating: 2.5

Paladins

I'm not a big fan of Joel Rosenberg, but I thought I would give this book a try anyway, primarily because I liked the title. Well, the book was okay.

The main difficulty I have with Rosenburg's writing is that nothing he writes is any fun. He conveys nothing that makes me smile or laugh or feel delighted. I can't hold a frowny face for the entire time I'm reading a book. Heck, I can't even stand to be frowny for an entire hour. Yet this is the essence of his writing. His books sit on the spirit like a lead brick.

It doesn't help that he writes series fiction, either, so every one of his novels contain elements that are important to the meta-story (whatever it is) but not to this particular novel. Paladins is essentially about men that carry "live" swords; swords that are inhabited by a particularly strong soul. These swords grant great power, but it is a dangerous power, difficult to wield and placing great strain on its wielder.

That's all well and good. So explain to me why he decided to set this fantasy story in an "alternate history" where Mordred beat King Arthur and established a huge British Empire? Not to mention that there are mythological creatures like Morgaine running around? How do these two elements fit together? When you write a novel, the setting should be no more and no less than a vehicle for presenting your story, whatever it is. It should not be this weirdly disconnected world that you invented because you could.

The best characters in the book are pushed hither and yon by the whims of other players, the story ends with a hideous deus ex machina scene (the king comes in and rearranges everything), and everything is grim and defeatist. Not my favorite novel by far.

Rating: 2.0

Public Decency and Nuisance Laws

One of the tougher, long-term debates going on at Oo.net is the question of what kind of public decency/nuisance legislation is proper and effective at protecting rights. I, personally, have difficulty with the idea of ANY legislation to this effect because every attempt I have seen thus far has relied on non-objective definitions. Non-objective law is a monster that cannot be set loose in any circumstances.

Still, I agree that I don't want neighbors that play music at 110 dB or flash strobe lights in my windows or wear thong swimsuits that bare their hairy buttcracks to all and sundry. What rational person DOES want to live with those conditions? So the problem becomes: how do you protect what Ayn Rand called approximately "the right not to see" when there is no universal definition for what is "offensive"?

Well, I think I've come up with a practical method for this, although it probably needs some work. Firstly, you break the area up into two categories: nuisance and communication.

Nuisances are things that impinge on your property, like bright lights, powerful smells (note I didn't say BAD smells), and loud noises. These are nuisances and the most important point is that you must not have to take any action to be affected by them on your property.

Communication is, well, anything that can be used to communicate an idea. This can be images of people or animals or anthropomorphic vegetables (body language) or symbols, or words. These don't necessarily have to be loud or painfully bright to cause a problem, like the aforementioned thong bathing suit.

Then, you have two fundamental situations where this sort of thing becomes a problem. Either you are on your own private property and someone is impinging on you from their private property, or both concerned parties are in some "open" location owned either by one of you or by a third party. I say "open" instead of "public" because of the current state of "public" property, which is owned by everyone and no one. This type of property is improper.

I say these two fundamental situations because others are easily dealt with: if a nudist wanders onto your private beach, you just tell them to leave. End of problem. If you are running an "open" beach, though, then you have an issue that may not be as easily handled.

This is where the stipulations come in.

For private property cases, you simply have to explicitly delineate the rights of the complainee. I came up with a few stipulations, but there may be a few more required.

1. The complainee can by no means be prohibited from engaging in the specific activity, they can only be restrained from displaying it where it impinges on the property of the complainer. How the complainee restrains this display is up to him.

2. No damages. You are not going to get money out of your neighbor. This right here will help reduce harassment because no one is going to spend money to litigate--unless it's a real problem--when they can't hope to gain anything from it except peace-of-mind.

For open property cases the entire matter can be handled by requiring everyone that wishes to have open property to post their restrictions--if there are any. You already see this around with signs like "no skateboarding" and "no swimming", all you have to do is extend it to things like "no complete nudity" or "full coverage suits only" or "no shirt, no shoes, no service".

It should also be required that you identify the type of business you are operating. This is simply good advertising. If you're running a restaurant, there should be a sign saying so, if you're operating a Nazi store, there should be a sign saying THAT.

This works because it is universal and objective, and no one is required to have or post restrictions. At worst, they're required to put a sign on their door explaining what the property is. If the mall doesn't have a sign saying "no nudity" and someone streaks the place, on what grounds are you going to litigate against the mall? You can complain to the mall in the hopes that they will revise their signage, but that's about it.

I think this (or something along these lines) would be a functional approach.

Blogroll Update

My 'roll has been out of date for a while, but I finally got around to fixing it. I don't read many blogs on a regular basis because I have limited patience/interest with politics and most of the blogs I read are political in nature. This may be in an indication that I need to branch out, but since I'm a conservative reader I don't actively search out new blogs to read. Heck, I haven't even been writing that much for months, so I doubt anyone noticed the blogroll issue anyway.

Anyway, I have added:

Rational Jenn: http://rationaljenn.blogspot.com/
I stumbled across Jenn's blog as an indirect result of Diana Hsieh's OList project, but I liked her blog and I like her name so on the 'roll she goes. Her blog is a lot like mine in that she mostly talks about what's going on in her life and her interests instead of politics, but the politics are there.

Edge of Reason: http://danedgeofreason.blogspot.com/
This is my boss's blog, actually, but he writes some interesting stuff about Objectivism and psychology etc.

Twenty-Sided: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/
Shamus isn't an Objectivist, he's a libertarian, but he's also into gaming in a big way so I like to read his material. He is also publishing a webcomic called DM of the Rings that makes me laugh quite a lot.

I also fixed the link so Acid-Free Paper now leads to Toiler's new blog as opposed to his old blog. It's funny because when I first added him to the 'roll on Literatrix he commented that, yes, it was correct to put the hyphen in there even though there wasn't "officially" one on the title of his site. Well, now there is. So, it's even more correct now.

I've also added two new sections to my 'roll, although I don't have a lot of links in those sections at the moment. This may change, but then again it may not. The major addition there is Schlock Mercenary: http://schlockmercenary.com, which is a fun space-opera webcomic that I now read daily.

That's all for now.

Check Out My New Ride

Whenever I reach a new level of prosperity in my life I always wind up having to make tough decisions about what I want to improve first. I have a list (yes, an actual list) of all the things I want to get. It includes things like an apartment, new furniture, gym membership, new computer . . . it's a long list. However, my shortly after I arrived in New York my car started misbehaving again and I realized that it just wasn't worth maintaining the thing any more.

So, I got a new car.

I've always preferred to own new things. I realize this is probably not very economical of me, but I figure the point of doing all this work is so that I can actually enjoy myself, not so I can bury myself in austerity. Well, let me tell you, I understand now why people get a new car every few years. My Ion is gorgeous.

It has a few features that I could do without, like Onstar, but for the most part I just love it. I like having automatic windows and doors. Granted, I forgot to lock the car a few times the first couple of days because I didn't have pushing the button automatized, but I live in a low-crime area anyway, so no harm done. I love that the car is so quiet and accelerates smoothly, two things my old car did NOT do. I love being able to sit in the driver's seat without having to put the seat all the way back and lean forward slightly to reach the wheel. This is a really uncomfortable position on long drives.

I love cruise control. I wish the idiots around here were better drivers so I could use it more, though. I have an hour-long commute every morning and evening, 90% of it on highway and I very rarely can use my cruise control because I can guarantee that when I try to turn it on some moron will pull out RIGHT IN FRONT of me and force me to slam on the brakes. I wind up looking in my rearview miror thinking: Why'd he pull out in front of me? There's no one behind me for a kilometer but he just HAS to get IN FRONT of ME.

People in New York don't know how to merge, either. Instead of sensibly getting in the correct lane as soon as they can, they ALWAYS drive all the way to the end of the lane and then try to run someone off the road. If you don't slow down for them, they'll just drive right into you, it is pathetic.

The New York drivers are another reason I'm glad I have this new car: now I have AIR BAGS and scratch/dent-resistant side panels.

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

I have to admit that I am one of those people that will go see a superhero movie regardless of how campy it looks or how lousy the reviews are . . . I will even defy the opinions of people whose artistic judgment I take seriously to go see a movie with super heroes in it. Now, that being said, let's all remember the first Fantastic Four movie. Actually, let's not, because it was awful. It was really, really bad. So, when I went to see this latest one I was really not expecting very much. Well, I was surprised. Rise of the Silver Surfer was actually quite good! It wasn't perfect . . . some of the plot was just goofy and there was a bit of "bad girlfriend" whinging from the Invisible Woman, but the director didn't let it get out of control. As an aside, does anyone else think that Jessica Alba looks RIDICULOUS with blond hair and blue eyes? Why couldn't they get someone to play the Invisible Woman that actually HAS blond hair and blue eyes? And what was WITH that peacock-blue eyeshadow, anyway? She looked like Mimi from the Drew Carey show. I also want to know why, if Mr. Fantastic designed this snazzy flying car, why did they spend 2/3 of the movie being shuttled around in helicopters and airplanes? That flying car made it from their headquarters in, um, I think it was L.A. to GREENLAND in FIVE MINUTES.

*Coughs* okay, I was going to explain why the movie was good, not get hung up complaining about some of the corny elements. You have to expect corny elements in any movie that isn't R-rated nowadays.

The major reason why the movie is good is that it makes sense. The characters have reasonable motivations. They act like sane people who haven't had their brains sucked out by creatures from the dungeon dimensions. They make reasonable choices that have good results. The Silver Surfer is not over-done at all; he has some real pathos going for him and he makes a very good sympathetic villian, although you do end up wondering whether that gray stuff is meant to be his skin or some kind of body suit, because that leads to some interesting anatomical questions . . . okay, maybe that was just me. Even the Human Torch grows up during the movie and starts acting (sort of) like an adult.

It seems weird to me that the sequel should be better than the first movie, but the same thing happened with the Spiderman movies, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. I have a theory for why this occurs, actually: it's because the Superhero Origins of these characters were all written during the Silver Age of comics, and thus they are INCREDIBLY campy today. Bit by a radioactive spider? Flew threw a Cosmic Storm?! Come on, what do you take us for, idiots? When the moviemakers feel constrained by the limitations of these old, sad comic books, they are unable to make a decent movie. However, when they start getting into their own plotlines and developing their own ideas, it turns out quite well. This even explains why The Incredibles was such a fun movie and why the third Spiderman was so bad.

So, moviemakers: stop riding on other peoples' old ideas and come up with your own stuff. It makes better movies in the long run.

A Contest for Literatrix

I stumbled on this contest by visiting the Randex, and I quite frankly can't think of anything better-suited to my personal interests, so I emailed the contest sponsor immediately. It really is funny what you find if you look around.

I'm not absolutely certain that my current novel is what they're looking for: I will know more when I get a response. However, I'm sure that there are a number of authors out there working on books that involve freedom on some fundamental level, and any author can certainly use some money and extra incentive to get cracking!

My novel is thematically more about volition than freedom, but the functioning of man's volitional consciousness is the underlying reason why freedom (especially of the political sort) is of such absolute importance. So I think I will probably qualify for this contest, and I urge anyone else that is working on a similar novel to do so as well.

What I don't urge, however, is that you attempt to write a novel for this purpose if you weren't already in the process of doing so. Nothing will turn your writing into miserable hacky second-hand dreck than trying to write to someone else's theme. Writing depends on integration of conscious thought with subconscious automatizations, it doesn't work if you try to ignore what's going on in your subconscious and keep everything on a conscious level. In order to fulfil someone else's desires, that is pretty much what you have to do.

I don't know if the contest operator is an Objectivist, and I suppose it's not really that important unless he intends to exert editorial control. Even then, it's still probably not that important because the kind of fiction I write is not about listing a bunch of explicit ideas, but about leading the reader to make the kind of conclusion I want . . . in other words, "show, don't tell". Here's to freedom!

Freedom and Necessity

When I first started reading this book by Steven Brust and Emma Bull, I was reminded of another novel that I read in high school, Dear Mr. Henshaw, because Freedom and Necessity proceeds in much the same fashion: it is a series of letters exchanged between the four principle characters. Over the course of these letters, the story unfolds. There the similarity ends.

Freedom and Necessity is a deep and twisting growth of plots, intrigues, violence, death and love taking place in Britain during the 1850's and vaguely involved with the Chartist uprising: Marx and Engels (the philosophers) are actually characters in the novel. It is effective in the novel, but someone more acquainted with history than myself may find it to be gauche.

The gimmick of the storytelling (the letters), tends to destroy some of the reader's involvement with the plot: hearing someone talk about what happened is entirely different than observing it while it is happening. The authors repair this with another gimmick: one of the principle characters is gifted with an unusually exact memory so she can report occurances verbatim. In all, this is a violation of the literary principle of "show, don't tell", and it means that some sections of the novel are a bit dull.

I think the rest more than makes up for this, however, and I liked this quote from the back of the book so I am sharing it:

And so the adventure begins . . . leading the reader through every corner of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, from the parlors of the elite to the dens of the underclass. Not since Wilkie Collins or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has there been such a profusion of guns, swordfights, family intrigues, women dressed as men, occult societies, philosophical discussion, and, of course, passionate romance.

If you like that sort of thing, give this book a try.

Rating: 3.0

Tiffany Aching

Terry Pratchett is definitely one of my favorite authors so I thought I'd say a few words about his newer books that are intended more for a younger audience. Granted, this doesn't prevent adults like myself from enjoying them, but the opportunity for a fun and worthwhile way to entertain your youngsters should not be ignored.

Pratchett is mostly a satirist and a lot of his work is derivative, but his slanted take on familiar subjects is worth a look--worth a second look, too, in fact. I mention this because the Tiffany Aching books (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith thus far) bear an odd superficial resemblance to the famous books of another popular British fantasy author that writes for the same age group . . . an author whose name starts with a J. and ends with a Rowling, if you get my drift.

The resemblance is odd because although the books share some faint surface details--Harry Potter is about a boy learning to be a wizard, the Tiffany Aching books are about a girl learning to be a witch--you couldn't find two takes on roughly the same subject that were more different if you tried. Harry Potter attends a school where magic is pinned down in books and readily accessable. Tiffany Aching discovers that the only school for witchcraft is the entire world and that no one can teach you the most important lesson: the real trick about magic is knowing when not to use it.

And, of course, you have the Wee Free Men, described by Pratchett as being like Scottish smurfs that have seen Braveheart a few too many times. They can make a special child that can talk to the fairies kind of wish she couldn't.

In the end, the Tiffany Aching books are good fun thoroughly mixed with good sense. Get them for your kids.

Rating: 3.5

Paper and Pen

I wandered down to the bookstore yesterday and paused in the stationery section (oops, I almost committed a faux pas there: stationary means standing still, stationery is writing paper) because I want to get back to work on my novel Ratbreed. So, I had to get a nice new notebook for writing in because nothing puts me in the mood to write like a nice new notebook. Plus, all the typing I've been doing lately has caused my right hand to start hurting and I don't really need to add RSS to my list of woes. (That's Repetitive Stress Syndrome, if you were wondering.)

That's when the influence of Toiler struck me, because there at the front of the stationery (look, I did it right again!) section was a display of Moleskine notebooks. Drat the man, after hearing his enthusiasm for his notebook-of-choice I had to take one down and have a look at it!

I have to admit it is a nice notebook. (Yes, I bought it, what were you expecting?) The thing I like most is that the paper is delightfully smooth. Any writer that's ever written on cheap paper knows the unpleasantness of frequent paper cuts, especially when you're packing up your materials quickly or paging back through your work to figure out where you thought this story was going three pages ago when you started it. No risk of that with this baby!

It also lies nearly as flat as a spiral-bound notebook, which is a huge plus. Frequently book-bound notebooks are worse than cheap books in that you can't actually write in them unless you have three hands or you crack the binding terribly, at which point the pages will probably start to fall out. Once again, not a problem here. Granted, this could probably be solved with a reporter-style notebook, but I hate those because you have to turn the book upside-down to write on the back of the page, and being the awkward person I am this usually means that eventually I wind up writing on the back of the wrong page and my notes are never comprehensible after that.

It's also delightfully spare in appearance. The one I got is plain black without any sort of ornamentation. If you found this notebook lying around, you would just have to open it and read it because anything that monastic-looking would have to contain strange writings of dark and eldritch purpose.

Oh, and I got a pen, too. It's black.

The God Delusion

This book by Richard Dawkins is intended to present the essential case against religion, however I think it falls short of the mark.

The best portions of the book are the ones that deal with elaborating on the various arguments for religion and why they are erroneous; faced with someone else's argument Dawkins has no problem bringing his ideas to bear. I actually found the chapter fairly informative, because I had not previously encountered some of the arguments and I could see why they might be difficult to counter on the fly.

The most bizarre factor I found in this section that Dawkins falls back on a "probability" analysis for many of the arguments . . . an analysis that is logically flawed. It amounts to relying on Occam's razor, which is not, in fact, a logical truism. You cannot discuss the "likelyhood" or "probability" of something that bears no relation to any known facts. Not to mention the fact that there must be a definable and identifiable alternative in order to discuss probability. I can discuss how probable it is that a woman will have a boy or a girl: there are two known alternatives and the result must be one of them. You can't discuss the likelyhood that God or Vishnu or Ashura-Mazda created the universe because you don't know all the alternatives or even that the answer must necessarily be one of these alternatives.

Dawkins just declares that we'll assign some random "likelyhood" factor to each alternative, but what does this amount to? Let me pull some stuff out my rear end. This is not the way to argue logic or use reason.

Dawkins also has a substantial problem presenting the case for atheism, however. Part of this may be the fact that it's difficult to be for a position that is essentially a negation (atheism is non-religion, it's not pro-anything). The other part seems to be that Dawkins has only vague ideas of what anyone should be for. In complaining about the morality evidenced in the Bible (particularly in the Old Testament), the best rationale he can come up with for why it is vile and destructive is that it is not compatable with the "changing moral zeitgeist". What, exactly, comprises that zeitgeist and why is that a better morality than the one of the Old Testament?

No answer is forthcoming. So, really, the book is kind of pointless unless you're already an atheist and can fill in Dawkins' holes for yourself, or you don't really care much for clarity of thought and communication and you base your ideas on whatever you've read the most recently.

Oh well. If you're looking for a real comprehensive case against religion and for an alternative, I suggest you look into Objectivism and the writings of Ayn Rand.

Rating: 2.0

Seven Possibly Interesting Things

I saw this meme on Gus Van Horn and I thought I'd give it a try since I'm too tired to come up with anything really original today. However, I'm having a hard time with it since I'm also apparently too tired to come up with anything that's possibly interesting about me, too. I'm probably one of the most boring people on the face of the earth.

Hmm. Does that maybe count as #1? Nah, I have to be able to come up with something better than that. Okay, let's try this:

1. I'm the only person in my family that cannot play a musical instrument. I can't sing, either.
2. I still haven't seen The Shawshank Redemption. I'm not sure why.
3. I'm an Objectivist. I love fantasy novels. I can't stand Terry Goodkind.
4. Red is my least-favorite color. Every car I've ever owned has been red.
5. I will hold long, drawn-out, loud conversations with myself when I think no one is listening. Frequently, I am mistaken. Maybe I can get a second job as a street mutterer or something.
6. I have never fired a gun.
7. I think glasses are sexy.

Whew. That was way more work than it was probably worth.

Arrived

Well, here I am in New York with not much to do except work and no one to do it with. It always takes me a long time to get settled into a new place because I'm not very social under the best of circumstances and after a long day full of people I don't know very well I must fight a fierce desire to hide under the furniture.

Let this not be taken to indicate that I'm not enjoying myself: I am. Work is going good and I'm learning a lot of new things about a business that doesn't appear complicated on first brush but actually requires quite a bit of savvy and lots of organization. I'm finding my way around and I've located the absolute earthly necessities: Wal-Mart and Borders. I also found a movie theater and I went to see Spiderman 3 over the weekend.

Given ,I seem to have become a mass of physical ailments, too: after being absolutely fine for several years my allergies have come back with a vengeance and I spent several days stuffed-up and sneezing. Then, just as I was getting better I spontaneously fell over in the parking lot (wow, graceful) and tore all the skin off my knee. It's healing and it ITCHES. Then this morning I was ill, however I seem to have gotten over that much at least.

I have a lot of projects I'd like to work on, such as converting KloOge (more on this later perhaps) so I can run a 3.5 ed D&D psionics game online with all the bells and whistles. I've got novels to work on and I should start looking around to meet some new people. So, I thought, hey, I should blog. Blogging is a good way for me to get in the mood to start on projects and it gives me an incentive to look around for something to write about.

Movin' On Up Redux

For those of you that don't know and may be interested, I'm going to be moving to New York very soon; in fact, Friday is my last day at work. Since I've kind of gotten tired of answering the same questions over and over and over and over I thought I'd include this handy Moving FAQ:

Q: You're moving to New York?
A: Yes.

Q: Why?
A: I found a nice new job there and I'm sick of Dayton.

Q: Where in New York? In New York City?
A: No. Monsey.

Q: Where?
A: *tired sigh* It's just north of New Jersey.

Q: *blank look* Oh. So are you going to live in New York City?
A: No. I'll actually be living in Middletown.

Q: Where?
A: *dirty look*

Q: Oh, um, okay then, have you got a place to live?
A: No, I was just going to sleep in a cardboard box. Of course I do.

Q: Are you excited?
A: Yes.

Q: So what are you going to be doing?
A: I'll be the Production Manager at a medical transcription firm.

Q: I didn't know you did medical transcription.
A: I don't. Note the Manager part of that job description.

Q: Oh, so you'll be like, managing people?
A: Something very like that, yes. Practically identical.

Q: So how'd you find this job?
A: I know people that know people.

Q: Do you think you'll miss Dayton?
A: Is this a trick question?

Q: So, um, are you excited?
A: Well I was.

If you can think of any other inane questions I haven't answered, feel free to send me a message.

300

I have to blog about this movie while it is still fresh in my mind; a true description of any work of art must encompass the whole and not dwell on trifling details that are of small significance to the overall work.

The whole of 300 was: it's very good. The symbolism was profound, the pagentry overwhelming in its grandeur and shocking in its grotesqueries. There was only one flaw that prevented it from ascending to the realms of great art.

I think I should point out this flaw, because it is not so much an error on the part of the director or scripwriter; it is a symptom of a philosophical flaw endemic to this culture. I speak of the chronic inability to recognize, define, or demonstrate what is the good.

The general story of 300 you may already know: it is a retelling of the battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas held off the Persians. The movie (based on a graphic novel with the same title), is highly fictionalized. I don't say this as criticism; the purpose of art is not to teach us history. It would be dull art indeed if it did. The more fiction the better, I say.

In the movie's presentation, on the one side we have the Spartans: highly trained and disciplined warriors raised on deprivation and struggle until they are the finest fighting force in the world. Their small numbers mean nothing. On the other side we have the Persians, slaves to their god-king Xerxes, bound to his will, their numbers almost beyond counting.

The director did an excellent job of displaying the corruption of Xerxes and his slave forces, not to mention the nature of those who would choose to bow before the god-king of the East, taking his wealth in exchange for their freedom. What he did not do was demonstrate the value of freedom in any meaningful way. Without definition or demonstration, a battle cry becomes an empty platitude, righteousness becomes the mindless rage of an animal. You may fight to preserve Sparta, Leonidas, but what in Sparta is worth preserving?

Or, to look at it another way, what in America is worth preserving? What in life is worth preserving?

We are left with no answer. In all the works of this country, there is no answer. Almost everyone retains enough rationality to point out the myriad contradictions, hypocricies and evils that confront us every day. All this requires is the ability to say: here is one fact and this contradicts it. It is very difficult to say about anything: this is truth, this is right, this is good. You require a full ethical and philosophical foundation to be able to declare that with confidence about anything.

This is also what is most significantly lacking in this culture. Even if someone grasps some good in a semi-coherent fashion, they may not think it worth putting into their art for fear of the "contraversies" . . . in this culture there is no shortage of vultures ready and willing to knock down any attempt to define the good. It is quite possibly the most significant cause of the depravity, despair, and desolation that lie in the hearts of the people of this country.

If you want to create great art, you must stand up to battle these vultures. I salute the efforts of the creators of 300, salute them and say, you must still do better.

The Prestige

I just watched The Prestige for the first time on DVD, and I enjoyed it a great deal; it certainly brought a number of ideas to mind.

Isn't it interesting that movies of the same general type tend to all come out at roughly the same time? Here we have The Illusionist and The Prestige together, two tales of battling magicians. Is there some kind of Hollywood espionage going on? My theory is that there's one guy in Hollywood that comes up with all the movie plots. He's some sort of raving genius and the big studios like to hold parties where they get him drunk and let him expound on his newest idea. Then whoever is at the party turns his idea into a movie. Okay, okay, it's not a very elegant theory, but still.

The Prestige properly belongs to the "mind bender" movie genre, so named by my housemate, and there is the half-expected moment of epiphany near the end of the movie where you figure out what is going on. I think that's what really makes the entire genre enjoyable . . . the fleeting sensation that all the pieces have slotted into place and you can see the workings of the machine. It's really great. Unfortunately, in this movie it doesn't sync up quite perfectly. I suspect there are two causes for this. Firstly, that the movie exposition is extremely scattered, rushing from one time and place to another without giving you time to grasp the relation of the events. Secondly, there are some extraneous elements that don't wrap up into the story very well and explanatory elements are introduced too late in the movie to develop properly. It very much left me with a sense that a few pieces of the machine had gone *ping* into the corners somewhere.

It was fun, though, and not the least because it has Hugh Jackman in it. He's such a great actor. I thought Christian Bale was only so-so . . . he was better in Batman Begins. David Bowie as Nikola Tesla was just wicked. I mean, come on, Bowie? Tesla? That's just surreal, and the more so because he did a great job in the role.

Lucky # Slevin

Although this movie contains Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley (Sir Ben Kingsley? What's up with that?), Lucy Liu, and Bruce Willis, it's no better than fair and possibly even worse.

Slevin is a young man caught accidentally in a conflict between two gang lords due to a bizarre case of mistaken identity. It's supposedly an attempt at a twist-ending crime film (vaguely along the lines of Ocean's Eleven), but the pacing is too drawn-out to be fun or leave you guessing.

At the end, it's pretty much what you'd expect to see on television on a dull Sunday afternoon.

Galileo Blogs

I wandered over to Galileo Blogs' site from Oo.net and I have to say it's pretty impressive, so I'm adding him onto my blogroll. I should probably do some more work to flesh it out, but it seems like a lot of the sites I add to my 'roll wind up getting deleted some time later when I become disenchanted with them. Oh, well, such is the price of progress.

Rousseau and the Real Culture War

David Heleniak has done me the favor of letting me read his forthcoming book, Rousseau and the Real Culture War so that I could review it, and I have to say that I found it quite interesting. Heleniak's point, that the Left and Right are basically identical, is a pretty common observation, but I have never encountered his particular discussion for the reasons why this came about anywhere.

I'm not especially familiar with Rousseau or 18th century French philosophy, and it was startling to see how and why Heleniak considers that his ideas have given rise to the modern Left.

The book does have some flaws, mostly because the organization and presentation of the argument are a bit scattered and it requires some concentration to follow, but the material is sound. Heleniak does a good job of keeping it concise, so it's easy to sit down and read it all the way through. I'm sure we'll be hearing more from Mr. Heleniak in the future. At the moment I'd say he's still an amateur, but a very promising one. There's nothing wrong with being an amateur: I'm one and probably will be for quite some time.

Mr. Heleniak indicated that he plans to have Rousseau and the Real Culture War available at lulu.com sometime next month, and perhaps also available at Amazon or other sites later. I'll post an update when I have firmer information than this.

Rating: 2.5

Crank

Have you ever seen a movie and then kind of wonder why you bothered? Well, that's the way I feel about Crank. In fact, I pretty much felt that way before I saw the movie, I just let my housemate talk me into renting and later watching it because he wanted to see it. He's a guy, I suppose he can be forgiven for having occasional low tastes.

The "story", to the extent that there actually is one, is pretty basic: the main character, a professional gang killer-for-hire, has been poisoned as an act of revenge by (surprise) another gang killer-for-hire. The "twist", to the extent that there actually is one, is that adrenilin slows the effects of the poison. So, numerous ridiculous stunts, chase scenes, etc. ensue.

I'm pretty sure that Crank doesn't come even close to qualifying as art. There's not really even a plot. However, it is proof positive that in order to produce a successful action movie, you don't need a reason, just an excuse.

The Illusionist

There's really not that much to say about this movie other than the fact that it was well done; it is almost a study in understatement, driven by the character of Eisenheim, the Illusionist. There's not a great deal of excitement or suspense. Events unfold quietly, at a measured pace.

Eisenheim is in love with Sophie, the Duchess, however since he's the son of a cabinetmaker their romance is essentially impossible . . . at least on the surface. She is taken away from him and he travels the world for many years. During that time, they lose touch and it is arranged for Sophie to marry Crown Prince Leopold, largely in support for the Prince's schemes to gain support from Hungary and become Emperor. Leopold cares little for Sophie other than for political gain. Leopold becomes interested in Eisenheim's fantastic illusions, sparking a reunion between the two childhood friends and a rivalry between the Crown Prince and the Illusionist. Then Sophie is murdered.

The film doesn't deal with any particularly grand abstractions, even seeks to avoid them, but the interactions between the various characters are fascinating and the acting is superb, even if the conclusion is somewhat predictable. The illusions are also neat to watch, so I thoroughly recommend the film.

Jack Bauer Gives Us the Lowdown

I spotted the above brief humorous article while I was browsing around and I had to chuckle, even though I don't watch 24.

Eragon

The way of a director that would turn a popular fantasy novel into a movie is as a darkened kitchen containing an open diswasher.

I hadn't heard anything particularly good about this movie, but I decided to go see it anyway because I enjoyed the book a great deal. Sadly, it wasn't really worth the effort. The movie is incredibly mediocre.

The major problem that I could detect was that the events and the characters' motivations did not link up very well. Events proceeded one after another but there was never a sense of a plot moving forward: nothing seemed connected to anything else. The characters had no personality, the soundtrack was heavy-handed . . . all in all a bad job of telling a good story.

NutriSystem Update #1

Well, I'm on the fifth day of my new NutriSystem diet and thus far things are going pretty well. Some slight ups and downs have occured as I acclimate to the new food intake schedule, but that's only to be expected.

# of Days on diet: 5
# of Pounds lost: 9

Quick Thought

I heard on the radio this morning that Nancy Pelosi wants new legislation put into place that will require the government to negotiate better drug prices for Medicare recipients. Pardon me a second, but it isn't a negotiation if the government demands lower prices! It's equivalent, literally and morally, to a thug holding you up for your wallet. If he only takes SOME of the money instead of ALL of the money and lets you keep your drivers' license and credit cards, that doesn't make it any more right.

Sheesh.

The Pursuit of Happyness

I hadn't been to see a really good movie for far too long. A coworker recommended The Pursuit of Happyness to me and it seemed intruiging, not at all like the usual tired romantic comedies and action movies that parade endlessly across the silver screen.

The premise is simple: Will Smith plays a hardworking father that wants to provide a better life for himself and his family. Trapped in a dead-end independent sales position, he discovers the potential of a career as a stock broker, and it seems like a dream come true. But it is a faint and distant dream, seemingly not for the likes of him. His bitter struggle to grasp hold of his dream before it escapes is both horrifying and inspirational.

The perpetually-goofy Will Smith is not someone you'd expect to see in a movie like this, but he carries the weight of the entire movie much like Tom Hanks carried Cast Away, and he does it so well that you have to wonder whether he's acting at all. The direction is great: elements are introduced, played upon, and then reveal their importance in a grand dance of interconnected pieces. One small thing that struck me is that even though Will Smith is black and most of the people at the brokerage are white, race is not made much of as an issue. It's not even mentioned at all, which makes Mr. Smith into an almost-unseen type of character: the heroic man with whom everyone can identify.

New Year's Resolutions?

I'm a little ambivalent about doing any New Year's resolutions this year, largely because I find it difficult to predict my progress towards concrete goals. This may, in fact, be my problem: my goals are too abstract for me to make reasonable progress towards accomplishing them.

Let's take an example of one of my goals: find a better job. The difficulty comes in defining what, precisely, constitutes a "better" job. One that's in a better location? One that pays more? One that offers better opportunities for advancement? Ideally, I'd like to get all of those things, but often it's necessary to settle for just one of those qualities . . . it may even be necessary to take a cut in one of the other areas.

So, it's often difficult for me to decide what opportunities to pursue, and even then, they tend not to pan out. I didn't do such a good job of accomplishing my resolutions for last year, largely because Something Came Up. I think this possibly qualifies as the Lamest Excuse Ever.

So, this year, I've decided to take a slightly different approach. My overall goals are the same (I'm in pretty much the same position I was last year), but I'm going to try altering my approach to them. So, for instance, instead of resolving to lose a specific amount of weight, I'm going to try NutriSystem for a month and monitor my weight. If I lose weight, I'm going to focus on keeping at it for another month, and so on.

Likewise with finding a better job: I'm going to look at the want ads and apply for anything that looks good this week. Then, next week, I'll do it again. Sooner or later I'm bound to find something.

Happy Holidays etc.

It seems kind of silly to make a big deal about coming back and then not blog for two weeks, but I've been kind of distracted.

The first thing that happened was the Saga of Car Repair, which is kind of a funny story in and of itself. Events ran as follows:

1. Dad calls me asking what he and Mom can get me for Christmas. After positing several suggestions, he mentions helping me out with getting some regular maintenance for my car, which is in dire need of same. This sounds like a fantabulous idea to yours truly, so we conclude the discussion with the decision that we will look around for a good place to get said repairs.

2. The VERY NEXT DAY my car develops an ominously flat tire while I am at work. So, I wind up sitting around for two hours while I wait for Sandy's Towing (good service, btw . . . the wait was NOT their fault) to come get me. In theory, this could have been resolved more easily by me a.) having a spare and b.) changing it myself, however I'm not especially mechanically inclined and trying to change a tire in the freezing cold parking lot when I have only the most rudimentary idea what I am doing and I have forgotten to bring a coat is not my idea of a brilliant . . . idea. I'd rather pay the hundred bucks to have a professional move my car than worry about frostbite and/or potential serious injury. This is the same reason why I don't offer to jump start other people's cars.

3. I tell Firestone (my car repair persons of choice) that I need new tires (second flat in three months and they are bald) and while they're doing that I could use an oil change, inspection, etc. etc. etc. just open the thing up and see what needs to be replaced.

4. Firestone calls me back the next morning (elapsed time car in their posession: 14 hrs) and informs me that, well, basically the entire car needs to be replaced. Okay, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was still pretty bad. The catalytic converter was in two pieces (so THAT'S what was causing all the noise), the rest of the exhaust system needed replacement, I needed new brake shoes on the front wheels and two new brake CYLINDERS on the back wheels (they were busted and leaking), and, oh, by the by, the sway pins (I think that's what they said) are also broken so the car could just spontaneously roll over at some point.

5. I hang up on them and whine and complain (internally) about how fiendishly expensive transportation is for a while. Then I start trying to figure out where I can scare up some money to pay for all of this. After ritually cleaning out my pants pockets and seat cushions, I email my parents to let them know the damage and encourage them to contribute whatever amount seems best to them.

6. Mom calls me back and explains that they'll just pick up the tab.

7. Brief hiatus while I figure out how I wound up on the floor with the phone on my face.

8. Car is re-obtained from Firestone in actual working condition (total elapsed time car in their possession: 25 hours). There is much rejoicing.

So, that is my Holiday Story for the year. Hope everyone has a great New Year!

Neverwinter Nights 2

One of the two games that I've been waiting, literally, all year to buy, NwN2 has really turned out to be a worthwhile experience for me. The funny part is that most of the value actually comes from some of the philsophical (specifically, ethical) issues that arise within the official campaign.

For those of you unfamiliar with NwN, the general idea is to bring the 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules to computer gaming in a form that enables individuals to write and publish their own stories. While both games and their various expansions contain their own "Official" campaign that you can easily play as a stand-alone game (and they are reasonably fun just to play), by far the heftiest part of the package is the DM Toolset. This is an extremely nice feature, because once you've finished the Official campaign, you can still download new playing material, usually for free or very cheap. (Or write your own, of course.)

Anyway, on with the review. The graphics are, as one might expect, much improved in this newer game, although this does mean that they require correspondingly better computer hardware to run. They've lost most of the cartoony aspects from the previous game, that's for sure. It runs reasonably well on my low-end machine, or at least it does now that I've turned down all the graphic options.

The thing that tickles me, though, is that a lot of the conflict in the game plot can basically be described as a result of bad philosophical principles. As an Objectivist, this made it fun for me to play because as the plot thickened I was sitting back thinking: "I could have predicted that," or "I knew something like that would happen." The ethical positions in the game are portrayed very consistently and quite well.

UNfortunately, there's basically no Objectivist "side" at all if you want to be consistent, so if you have limited patience you may experience a desire to smack some of the characters before you've finished. If you like CRPG's and D&D in particular, I say this game is well worth the money.

However, DO NOT BUY THE OFFICIAL STRATEGY GUIDE. This is a friendly warning, free of charge: it is totally worthless. It doesn't tell you anything you can't figure out for yourself by playing the game, and much of the information is actually incorrect since there have already been multiple 50+ meg updates that changed large portions of the game in significant ways. If you are planning on writing your own mods, it might be worth it to buy the World-Builder's Guide, but other than that don't touch it.

The Return of the Jenni

I've actually been feeling somewhat my old self (and, yes, I realize that term may be subject to debate!) again lately, perhaps because I finally gave up and spent several days sleeping or perhaps because I've returned from Computer Game Purgatory and actually started paying attention to real life again. Either way, I figured that this was a good time to start back on blogging. Plus some of my friends like Toiler and Myrhaf have been posting occasionally.

So, with their good example before me, I present a return to our Regularly Scheduled Programming.

Voting With My Feet

Objectivist bloggers are getting ready for the mid-term elections, and, once again, there's a great deal of debate and dispute. I am greatly saddened by Dr. Peikoff's comment that anyone choosing to vote Republican or--my choice--not vote is not an Objectivist and does not understand Objectivism.

Let me tell you what I understand. I understand that I have to use my own judgment, and an attempt to substitute anyone's thinking for my own is no more and no less than a total abdication of rationality. I have heard arguments for both sides and I have come to the conclusion that I simply don't have enough information to make a decision that shows any signs of being well-planned in this particular area.

I also have a very good reason for not devoting my entire life to this issue: it's not that important. We are not talking about a vital or even indicative clash between ideological opposites, here, we are talking about trying to make a short-term, concrete decision about the shortest-term-thinking, most concrete people in the world today: politicians. It is not these people, ultimately, that will be responsible for determining my fate and the course of the great drama that is my life, but the people that think long-term and in abstract principles. Those are the people with whom I share my ideas and utilize my small powers of persuasion, in a forum where my voice may actually, possibly, be heard.

It is not possible to realize a gain by strenuously supporting the least objectionable of an unpalatable alternative. At best, you will simply slow the descent into destruction while making it appear that you are still in favor of that eventual destruction. I'm rejecting this false alternative outright.

That Day

I don't have any sage words to add on the anniversary that every American should be observing today. Everything I have felt or thought has been said--and said better--by someone else. Yet, I would be delinquent in my responsibilities nonetheless if I failed to speak.

What really strikes me at this moment is the scale of the devestation: not that it was so large, but that it was so small. What's three thousand people more or less? Many more people than that die every year in car accidents. It's no more damage than we do to ourselves in casual murders over drugs, sex, and fashionable tennis shoes.

Yet it is this attack that is a disgrace to any creature that has ever laid claim to the title of human being. It is the essence of horror--delivery, unarmed, into a fate that you can forsee but not act to escape. Every facet of your life comes with its attendant risk, but you do not sit paralyzed with fear because you know that you have the power to act, even up to the last second, and that is the only power you need.

You can act, and act correctly, because you can reason; you can put facts together and solve the daily and deadly dangers that face you. If you work with your reason instead of fighting it you come to enjoy this exercise; mere security bores you and you seek out greater challenges to overcome. Even in moments of extremity you can seek out a solution. You can disarm a mugger. You can drive defensively. You can solve it.

But what can you do when your reason cannot serve you? You cannot reason with a madman. There is no solution for fireballs, clouds of smoke, and thousands of tons of collapsing steel. The one thing you have that preserves you from danger cannot save you. You become this man, waiting for an unknown fate.

I may not like what my fellow country-men choose to do with their lives. But I hate with all the fire that is in me those that would deny them the choice.

Book Meme

John Baker was kind enough to inform me that I've been tagged for a book meme. Normally I'd let the tag pass by, but since he's such a nice fellow I thought I might as well go along with it. I've posted something similar to this before, but what the hey.

1. Name one book that changed your life.
I could go the easy route with this and say Atlas Shrugged, which would be true, but it should also be fairly obvious to anyone that reads this blog. So, instead, I'm giving credit to The Little Engine that Could, my favorite book when I was a very small child. It contains an instructive and important lesson that all children could benefit from internalizing.

2. Name one book that you've read more than once.
Atlas Shr . . . no, no, I'll think of something else. I've read almost every book that I've ever owned more than once, so I'll pick one at random: Cryptonomicon, by Neil Stephenson.

3. One book you would want on a desert island.
Probably the New York City yellow and white pages. If my presentiments about conditions on desert islands are correct I wouldn't have much time or energy for reading but I might get unexpected use out of a large book with thin pages.

4. One book that made you cry.
Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

5. One book that made you laugh.
The Wanderings of Wuntvor by Craig Shaw Gardner.

6. One book you wish had been written.
How to Become a Super-Hero in Thirty Seconds, Guaranteed

7. One book you wish had never been written.
I'll answer this even though I don't think there's much purpose to it: tie between The Communist Manifesto and the Bible. The removal of one book from the amazing pile of ridiculous slush out there isn't going to have much of an effect. Some crank will eventually come along and write something even worse.

8. One book you are currently reading.
Weirdly enough, I'm not, however I just finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
There's a few of these on my shelf at the moment, so I'll go with The Anubis Gates.

10. Tag five people.
Not a chance.

On the Shelf

In case you hadn't noticed, my blogging has been extremely erratic for the past couple of months. This is a result of several factors conspiring to temporarily kill my enthusiasm for matters literary. I will be back, and with several fiction projects to boot, but right at the moment I'm shelving the responsibility while I take care of other matters. Thanks to everyone that's visited.

World War II Army Quiz

Amusingly enough, this fits my personality pretty well. I find it amusing as well that the allies (except France) are all definitely at the top and the axis are all definitely at the BOTTOM. HT: Gus Van Horn

You scored as Finland. Your army is the army of Finland. You prefer to win your enemy by your wit rather than superior weapons. Enemy will have a hard time against your small but effective force. Finland 94% Poland 88% United States 81% British and the Commonwealth 75% Italy 69% France, Free French and the Resistance 63% Germany 38% Soviet Union 25% Japan 19% In which World War 2 army you should have fought? created with QuizFarm.com