Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in fhtagn's LiveJournal:

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Friday, November 13th, 2009
2:08 pm	Quomodo cecidisti de caelo fhtagn Well, it's been a while. And, once more, we start off with book reviews. I've a few slowly forming in the background and these have the slightly unusual issue of being negative reviews. I usually only put forward the ones I like, but these all get special attention for one reason or another. And so, the first one. Some time ago, lowellboyslash asked me if I'd read any of Anne Bishop's books. I hadn't. Still, I said I'd seek them out and let her know. That was ... well, actually quite a long time ago. Still, I've read the first three books forming the "Dark Jewels" trilogy now and I feel I can pass judgment on them and my judgment is this: ick. The writing is adequate. Nothing special but nothing too terrible. The worldbuilding is wild and unrestrained, by which I mean there's a lot out there and none of it really makes sense or hangs together. The magic system likewise. Broadly speaking, the books follow people called the Blood, subsections of each race which possess unnaturally long lives (One of the major characters is 50000 years old. Several more more are 1700ish.) and access to magic. The Blood are, when they come of age, granted jewels, the colour of which determines thir magical power. The darker the gem, the more magic they have. Oh, and there are three worlds, for no readily apparent reason, but moving between them is trivial enough. That's not what the books are about though. They're about rape and abuse and cruelty and degradation and the celebration of the same. It's rape porn, with particular attention paid to the suffering and abuse of children. This is not to say that the sexual abuse is portrayed as good per se, since it is in fact refered to as evil save when the viewpoint characters are the rapists themselves. It is, however, dwelled on in loving detail. In the trilogy, two people who want to have sex with each other do so once, in the last book. It fades to black pretty much immediately. The rape and abuse, on the other hand, ranges from the merely oft mentioned comments on its ubiquity to detailed descriptions. The magic system allows for a woman to be crippled magically speaking if as a virgin she is raped, and the more powerful she potentially could be, the more violent the rape must be - a process refered to as breaking a woman upon the spear. The author takes glee in explaining that certain men are valued because of their skill in doing this. It posits a setting where men are enslaved with magic cockrings which cause agony to the wearer. And so my suggestion is this - avoid the books. They're not kinky nor are they about BDSM relationships. They're about rape, plain and simple. Right. Moving on. At some point, I'll hopefully get around to posting about Unseen Academicals and Geist: The Sin-Eaters. Eventually. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
11:49 am	Unite Against Fascism are pissing me off. They represent a diverse group of different political and moral views, drawn together by shared hatred of a demonised enemy. They don't hate fascism; they are fascists. What they hate is racism, but calling someone racist is difficult and dangerous because everyone relies on stereotypes to navigate though life and so everyone is guilty of racism to some degree of other. They hate authoritarian figures, but well, many of them are in authority. Fascism, on the other hand, is synonymous to most with Adolf Hitler. Not Benito Mussolini, strangely, but that's humans for you. And everyone hates Hitler. Hitler was evil. Hitler ate babies. Hitler killed 6 million people. (Jews, of course. The gypsies and homosexuals aren't people, you know. Just ask the average man on the street.) Frankly, the ends do not justify the means. You do not justify Gestapo tactics by saying they are needed to fight Gestapo tactics. The fact that they are alleged to use torture does not mean we are justified in using it. You do not win the moral high ground by digging it out from underneath your feet. The problem is simple. The BNP are a group of vicious, evil, bigotted fucks. They are also, regardless of how much we wish it were not so, a legitimate political party. People believe what they profess and vote for them. Preventing them from acting like a political party is censorship, as well as suppressing free speech and political freedom. Free speech is not something that applies to people who agree with you. Free speech applies only to people with whom you disagree, because they're the ones you want to suppress. You fight these people by arguing with them. By showing people that your way is better. By proving that they are wrong. You do not fight the sodding jackboot of oppression by stamping on someone else's protest placards and then putting the boot in, however tempting it may be. Most racism stems from ignorance and can be mitigated, though it takes generations. Wilfull hypocrisy, however, is repugnant and stems from a desire for power over others. Hence, people like Nick Griffin, who knows fine well that what he spouts is bollocks but damned if it doesn't get him press time and followers. And hence people like Unite Against Fascism. The rank and file are doubtless honest in their unthinking dislike of scum, but that doesn't stop them being a howling mob out to slay demons for the unforgivable crime of being different from themselves. And this is why I hate politics. There is no side of the angels. There are only varying degrees to which you're dipped in filth. Edit: Some spelling fixed. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
11:44 am	On a more serious note ... I'd like to ramble for a bit about the American system for Health Care and to do so, I'm going to talk about an author. It makes sense eventually; trust me on that. Tim Pratt (aka tapratt and tim_pratt ) is writing a serialised novel, Bone Shop, set in the universe of his Marla Mason books, and indeed the main character is Marla herself. I've probably talked about the books before - Pratt is a good, solid author (with a Hugo under his belt) and the books are light, fun and imaginative. If Mage: The Awakening had used this universe for objective magic shaped by perspective there'd have been a hell of a lot more happy Ascension fans crossing over. Hearing about this, and since I've been waiting for book five in the series, I wandered over and started reading - an interesting experience since each chapter is followed by an author's commentary. About half-way through, I made use of the tip jar button since I was enjoying it and then went back to reading. After I'd finished all that was posted, I went back to the index of the site and read about why he'd started the serialised story. And here's where we get to the bit where the American health care system completely baffles me. My wife was laid off on June 23, 2009, and this novella is an attempt to bring in some extra income while also telling a story I'm passionate about. Your donations will help keep a roof over our heads, and pay our son's medical bills (he has congenital glaucoma, so you can help keep him from going blind). Pay whatever you think the story's worth. Enjoy! You see, I cannot fathom, based on my experiences with the NHS, living like that. Managing money and children are incredibly stressful things, but that's something you see everywhere and can't be helped without a complete change in our economic model. The bit that I can't wrap my head around is that they might not be able to afford the necessary medicine for the child. Here, if you get sick or are sick then you can get treated and if you can't afford the medicine, you get that as well, as well as it being subsidised anyway. It would be the one thing you wouldn't worry about at all which, given how phenomenally important your health is, seems pretty damned appropriate to me. Were Mr Pratt living in a warzone in the third world, I could understand that medical aid would be difficult to acquire, but he lives in California. The States can afford to stop this sort of shit. Hell, given the massive drain on their economy that ill health causes and the massive inefficiency of their current government health programmes, you can make a pretty good argument that they can't afford not to do so. I'm not being particularly articulate here, mainly because the sheer pointless waste leaves me gasping and trying to work out why the hell it occurs. It just doesn't make sense. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
2:07 pm	Um ... so does anyone want to try to defend Ethnography as a scientific tool? 'Cos from what I can find, it's about as scientific as journalism and we all know how that story ends. I ask this having read a rant from a sociologist about another sociologist saying that if you aren't doing rigorous statistic tests and using massive samples then your work isn't science and his anger that this dismisses his entire dissertation as "not science". And, well, having read a bit about it and much as I know fine well that statistical analysis doesn't make a thing scientific, I'm curious as to know this could ever be called scientific at all. Can anyone enlighten me? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
4:18 pm	Two Sarfrican items here. First is District 9 and you should all go and see it. And yes, I know that link is to the Trivia page. District 9 manages to do what good scifi does best, and that's hold up a mirror to humanity and let it see just how ugly it can be. I'll not delve into the plot more than saying that it takes the oft-used racism against aliens and, by setting it in South Africa, make it work well. It's an often painful movie to watch because what it mostly shows is the evil of callous bureaucracy when coupled with a few actively nasty or greedy people - it shows this in the cruelty shown to the lead character in the name of profit, and in the filth in which the aliens are forced to live. Where it really cuts, however, is that if you look at that trivia page, you'll see that the filth and poverty weren't constructed for the film. They filmed it in a real South African township, and millions of people really do live like that. The Nigerians of the film are fictions only in that they sell catfood to aliens rather than other food and weapons to impoverished South Africans. Muti is, by the way, also real. In a completely different direction, my father sent me a scan of a news article telling of how some local business men were selling Biowashballs, the latest in a line of feelgood shite deceiving people into wasting money whilst heaping disdain upon real science or environmental concerns. The site, if you look, has links to authentic looking scientific tests and component data. These tests are interesting in that they're A - laughable in subject, B - have no errors discussed, C - are reported as performed on single samples and D - don't actually mean anything when discussed anyway. There's even a page reporting the physical properties of the plastic used to make the balls, all of which adds up to, "Doesn't break that easily." The explanations for their mode of action are patently rubbish - they have as much meaning as the Flux Capacitor or anything generated by a random technobabble table - roll d6 ten times and select one phrase from each of Charts A to J for each result. Compile into a paragraph, publish and stupid and ignorant people will give you money, sure and content in the knowledge that by doing so, they'll help the planet. You see, it's clearly scientific and thus real and important and anyone arguing against it is evil and stupid. More importantly, it's green science, and thus different from the evil, hateful puppy-killing science which is all about chemicals and radiation and which is all lies anyway. The people selling these things fall into one of two groups - dupes, and the evil. And yet, terrifyingly, people all over the internet are falling over themselves talking about how wonderful it is that if you put clothes in hot water and agitate them for an hour or so, then rinse thoroughly, they end up clean! Clearly the ball works, but they've tested it and that's an experiment and science, right? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 27th, 2009
5:41 pm	"Someone is granting the crowd absolution" Firstly, let me open with a bit of a rant. I have noticed an increasing prevalence of British people, native speakers of British English, saying ass instead of arse. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Are you deliberately trying to sound like idiots desperately trying to sound American? Ass and arse are two different words in our language; can you not keep them separate in your heads? And, on top of that, if you're going to use it as an expletive, arse just sounds better. It's longer, and more aggressive, and frankly sounds dirtier. In much the same way, shit is the posh, slightly effete cousin of shite. Go on, try it, and see which one allows you to cram the most anger, bile and frustration into one simple syllable? And, having done that, stop bloody talking about horse/donkey hybrids. ( Stuff ) ( Tales of Einarin ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 5th, 2009
11:09 am	In a sudden alteration to scheduled programming ... I found myself reading a review of last night's TV today whilst on the bus to work and it made my blood boil. The reason I read it, rather than skipping it as I usually do anything TV related, was that I chanced to see it was about a program about self-harm[1]. And, whilst most of it seemed to say that the show pretty much what I'd expect, mainly as it wittered on about pointless, self-satisfied middle class whinging, there was one bit which was infuriating. But the baffling question - why choose to slash scars across your skin rather than turn to drugs or alcohol - remained unanswered. It irritated me at first because it's meaningless - one doesn't create scars, but rather wounds which don't always scar. It's true that some cut for the scars rather than the pain and blood, but even so, the sentence is still bollocks. And that's when I realised the implication, that getting drunk and doing drugs are somehow a better, more socially acceptable response. The dismissive hypocrisy there is truly fucking offensive. To give one answer to his question, for some it's because cutting (or burning or beating or starvation or just about anything a person can conceive as a way of hurting themselves) is about regaining control. You control how deep the wound is. You control how much it bleeds. You control how long it is and where it is and how many there are. The pain is yours. Alcohol and drugs, on the other hand, are ways of relinquishing control and letting something else take care of it. Not always a bad thing, and it has its place, but that's still a very different need being fulfilled. That's not the only answer though, because in a group of n people who cut, there will be n reasons and a hell of a lot more views on the subject. It's not something which is easily described, solved and swept away. It's not even a thing in itself, so much as a symptom and also, in my somewhat unpopular view, a treatment. People cut because they feel the need to do so; their reasons for doing so are individual, as are the things which lead them to do it and the results they expect. Some cut in anger, some in misery and some when happy. Some want release, some want control and some want a permanent, present reminder to focus on. Some cut for all the above reasons and for all the above results, or none. And you know what, being treated as second class citizens who're impossible to understand because you can't be simply labled is neither pleasant nor acceptable. There's not really a point to this. I just wanted to get it out and calm down a bit. [1]I really hate this term. It's belittling and also too broad. Self-harm accurately describes cutting, but also smoking, long distance road running and eating too many rich meals. I far prefer self-mutilation, though I admit it's less appropriate for invisible injuries. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
6:50 pm	Seek and Ye Shall Find ( Read more... ) I first heard about The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Redick from lowellboyslash. Specifically, I heard that she's bought it for publishing in the US, and that it'd been out in the UK for a while. Of course, I ended up buying what I'm told is the "slightly inferior British edit". That may be true, but at least they spelled the word "colour" correctly. So nyer! As far as editting was concerned, by the by, I spotted nothing to complain about, not that I generally do. So, what's the book about. Um ... lots of things. The book follows many conspiring groups and the bystanders caught up in their webs as they set about trying to help themselves and their friends, spark off or avert wars and just get by. The characters span a wealth of nations and social strata, and in doing so give an excellent view of a pleasantly complex (though entirely approachable and understandable) world. The societies we see are pleasantly realistic, and unpleasantly like our own. The latter, because since one of the main characters is essentially an indentured servant and his friends likewise, we get to see just how bad things can be at the bottom, and how the top is blithely ignorant of it. There's a not particularly subtle vein of social commentary running through the book, but it does it very well, and since it ties in to the plot(s) it never gets in the way. Now, since it's a fantasy book, I must inevitably dwell on the magic. There's rather a lot of it, you see, and it runs from the subtle to the terrifying. The author hasn't, thus far, fallen into the trap of having a view-point character as a mage. As such, all the reader learns about magic is that it's vast (there's a lot out there, and if differs from world to world), it's exhausting and that spells carry something of their casters with them. The bulk of the magic actually seen is tied to some enchanted objects, a curse upon the main viewpoint character, and the fact that some animals "wake" to full sentience, gaining the capacity for speech. There are, however, small throw-away fantastic creations everywhere, either hinting at bits of the world driven off to the edge by humanity or (alas using the tired old cliche of) lost to the past. The Flikkermen, who live underneath cities, act as slavers and who glow when they talk, and sing songs of how the world has forgotten their great works. A cloud demon, spotted and avoided by a hawk as it takes wing back to its master. A shore, lined with shipwrecks, which curses any who take anything from it. And, of course, giant ships near the size of cities, built of trees long since extinct. A large proportion of the book takes place on the last remaining one of these. The book's pacing is a little odd, as it hops between characters and said hops tend to take place in chronological order. You therefore often return to a character after something they've been planning to do has already happened, off stage. I found this a little disconcerting at first, since I'm used to seeing pretty much everything in books, but it does mean that Resnick managed to fit a lot more in to one book, and also makes sense from the logical standpoint that you can't see everything at once. The one quibble I really have with the book also ties into the pacing - too much is tied up too fast at the end, and even though the inevitability of certain scenes wasn't a stretch of believability, the speed at which they occured and settled into place was. I suspect the heavy hand of an editor wanting to have a cleaner split between book one and two (did I mention that it's a trilogy? It's a fantasy book; of course it's book one of a trilogy). ( Things to do in England if you happen to be there and, you know, not dead ) I can't decide if this is best described as pure or applied science. I lean towards the pure, myself. Certainly it's pure zymurgy (and I really don't get enough excuses to use that word). In other weird and amusing links, te presento an account of the origins of Ada Lovelace. You know how some films and books are really wonderful until you realise that depending on which bits you close your eyes to, they can be interpreted in a variety of ways. This site neatly cuts through any cosy enjoyment you might have had and presents you with the awful reality. You enjoyed Beowulf? You bastard. Didn't you know that its about colonists hiring an assassin to drive out the natives? For shame! Reminded by a recent conversation with snutters, I dredged up Rhetorical Flair as an happy reminder of the days when Bob was good. I couldn't tell you why this is funny, but it makes me laugh every time I see it, which is not often enough. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
1:54 pm	What delays? Well, having posted something recently, I've been inspired to dust this off and actually post it. A mere 2 months or so after I started writing it. Oh well. It seems that the Shrub is no longer in power. As such, that seems a fitting time for me to actually compile all these various things I've been meaning to post for ages. Who knows, I may even get it all posted before the next president gets elected. ( Bond, Zombies and Kung Fu. Oh, and the lawyers ) ( Books, but not enough of them ) ( Truly random things ) (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 1st, 2009
5:03 pm	Self-Injury Awareness Day You know, it's been well over two years since I last cut myself deliberately. The scars have all faded and, unless you know to look for them, they're almost impossible to spot. I miss, and think about, cutting nearly every day. I'm not entirely sure what message about self-mutilation I want to get across there, but I figure a reminder that it exists is probably most important. It happens, and to a hell of a lot of people and for a hell of a lot of reasons. If you don't do it then you probably can't understand why anyone does or would, but you don't need to. It does make our lives easier if you're understanding, however. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
1:01 pm	Finally! At last! Someone has gone and stated that there's no such thing as a sugar high. Thank Christ for that. Could people now please stop using it as a bloody pathetic excuse to be silly when they want to and get on with their fucking lives? Thank you. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
4:54 pm	Books, books and fewer books! It has come to my attention, as I unpack my library, that there are some gaps in it. Could anyone who has any of my books please, well, let me know and we'll see about my collecting them at some point. I'm specifically looking for Order of the Stick's On The Origin of PCs but the other missing links would be nice too. (Comment on this)
Friday, December 12th, 2008
12:18 pm	Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? lowellboyslash recently posted a review and commentary on Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and now it's my turn. It's an fairly entertaining book, and a very long winded way for Doctorow to explain at great length why he agrees with Heinlein's "The right to bear weapons is the right to be free." The basic thesis is this - tech-savvy high school kids fight back against the evils of the Department of Homeland Security, proving that security theatre is just that and painting authority as evil, corrupt and self-serving. Oh, and the lead character, this being a book about teenagers coming-of-age as well, gets laid. That, if anything, is one of the book's two great weaknesses. The first is that Doctorow falls into the Gilbert and Sullivan trap, and by the end of the book *everyone* is happily married or the appropriate 21st century equivalent. The second is that he keeps explaining the tech-stuff for the uninitiated, often at great length. Informative, yes, but it still comes off as condescending and rather breaks the flow of the story. Still, it's worth a read. John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars is a very entertaining film. It's also utter trash and not very good trash at that. The plot is simple - on a Mars run by a lesbian matriarchy (one wonders how many lesbian matriarchs there can be), a mining crew release the wind-borne spirits of the previous inhabitants of Mars who resemble in every way possible Khornate berserkers and proceed to do what Khornate berserkers do best, but badly. Oh, and the protagonists kill lots of them. The film also has a phenomenal degree of metacharacter to it. The bulk of the film exists as a flashback as the female lead gives her report on the incident to her superior, or at least higher ranked, officers. There are occasionally flashbacks within this. And, on one memorable occasion, a flashback within a flashback within the overall flashback. This film is the bloody and incoherent cousin of an onion. And now, as moment of comic relief and a brilliant example of why I have a great deal of suspicion for most literary critics and their work - I give you the feminist reading of Portal as a game in which traditional feminine roles are subverted and male power challenged by a gun which fires glowing vaginas. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
12:21 pm	Delightfully misheard lyrics "Moonlight and music and blood in my pants" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
6:51 pm	Like bamboo This post has grown over the time it has been in preparation. It was, originally, quite short. Oh well. Never mind. I give you: Site-pimping, books, random stuff, a wasted lagomorph and a bit about gaming. ( Good Old Games and Kamikaze Cookery ) ( What could be better than books? ) Walking through Sheffield recently, weebleflip and I spotted a stall selling "Blue Obsidian". These smooth, transparent and pale blue lumps were further labled as "a man-made crystal" and "works on the throat". It's things like that which really make you lose faith in humanity. ( These make no sense at all ... ) Several weeks back, I spent a week with the sentence, "What a waste of a perfectly good lagomorph," running through my head. Having bugged weebleflip about it and raged against Google's inability to tell me anything about it, I finally just asked snutters about it and he replied, "Road Waffles." As such, I give you a wasted lagomorph. ( You can lead a gamer to water, but you can't expect him to make a swim-check ... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 7th, 2008
6:20 pm	Well, the nice thing about the trains on the East Coast Main Line these days is definitely the free WiFi. It's thanks to that that this LJ-post is able to continue my habit of ranting about books and things for the enlightenment and amusement of my adoring fans and, of course, both people who read this blog. First up today is a brief discussion of Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz. I read it, almost amusingly, on this selfsame train three weeks ago and have been meaning to moan about it since. It's a fantasy novel set in England sans serial numbers, where the bigoted and fanatical but not actually evil Catholic Church hates a race called the Deryni who have magical powers. And then politics, rivalry and assassinations ensue. They ensue badly. The characters are bland and two dimensional. The politicking is simplistic and uninteresting. The assassinations start out with some potential but are badly described and set up, and basically too poorly explained, justified and solved to actually make me care. Oh, and the young protagonist grows up and gets magic powers. You'll never guess my opinion of said magic powers, will you? Crap. The different powers, spells and artifacts shown are simultaneously stated to be of the same origin and shown to have fuck all in common. Some require chanting in bad English poetry. Some the chanting of numbers in Latin whilst rearranging odd artifacts. Some require nothing but a thought. Reading minds is by turns trivial and exhausting, but apparently some artifacts allow easy teleportation without the need for anyone gifted to use them. It's clunky as hell. So, to sum that all up, don't bother with it. There's a whole series that follows after it, but I'm not going to chase them up. They'd need to be a hell of a lot better to be worth thinking about it. To counter the negativity, I instead give you something glorious. Dan Akroyd is a complete nutter; we've known that for ages. With the advent of Crystal Head Vodka, we now have proof. Watch the video, really. It's worth it for the pure astonishment. And after all, it must be good vodka - it's filtered through Diamonds[1]! Oh, and I got some results. Nice ones, too, though the follow-up work for one of them is going to be a cow. ::sighs:: Still, it was heartening after so long with nothing. And one of them slots straight into a paper Keith's written, so it looks like I'll be published from the post-doc before anything from my PhD sees the light of day, [1] Herkimer diamonds are, in fact, not diamonds at all, but a form of quartz. Not that that probably makes a great deal of difference to either Akroyd or his customers. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
6:02 pm	Well, about eight years after I was first invited to Durham to visit shimgray, I made it. Pity I missed him by about five years, but given my usual sense of timing, that's scarcely worth mentioning. Durham, I've always assumed from the views I've had from the railway, is quite pretty. I was wrong. Durham is sodding gorgeous. There are hills, trees, a river, buildings of stone so old it's rotted away in the centuries of rain and a lot of twisty, turny streets. People often say that Cambridge is beautiful and I've always disagreed, saying that it's got some pretty bits but is mostly fairly generic. Durham has some generic bits, and probably some very ugly bits. The other side of the spectrum goes a lot further though, and the nice bits are just so much nicer than anything I've seen in .cam or .ox that it's not funny. It also felt so much more alive than either of the other two. I can only assume this has to do with the twisting layout and the plentiful greenery in and about the city centre, since wherever you went the view changed. Either way, a lovely place and I'll have to go back. Hell, it'd almost be worth a visit just to go back to the Victoria Inn and try the rest of the beer. I had a pint of Devil's Water there and only time constraints really kept me from having another. On a different tack entirely, I doubt there's anyone who's not familiar with Jack Chick's Dark Dungeons, a frankly hilarious, if hate-filled, diatribe about why playing Dungeons and Dragons will turn you into a Satanist. Most of us, though, thought that sort of crap was thankfully lost in the past. It seems we might have been wrong. To cut a long story short, GenCon 2008 raised $17000 at a charity auction and gave it to the Christian Children's Fund, E. Gary Gygax's chosen charity. Or rather they tried to do so and the donation was allegedly refused because they couldn't accept money of which some part had been raised from the sale of D&D books and paraphernalia. There's various fluff floating about regarding whether or not that's the real reason they didn't accept it, but the now official reason, that they don't want to be seen as endorsing a gaming convention, seems a little thin to me. Being selected as a beneficiary doesn't actually, to my knowledge, require them to do anything. Weird, either way, and worrying. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
4:59 pm	Films are probably another good place to start. I've watched three things recently which stuck in my head, and here they are in no particular order. Mr & Mrs Smith was just what the doctor ordered. I'm not sure how I missed this when it came out, but I only actually found out about it by seeing the spoof of it on a Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episode. The premise is simple: Two deadly assassins discover that their slightly estranged, ignorant and normal spouses are, in fact, each other. Oh, and they work for opposing agencies. Wacky hijinks ensue as they try to decide if they're actually in love or whether or not to kill each other. It's exactly as silly as that sounds and it's fun. Mindless entertainment with a good mix of laughter and big fucking guns is worth knowing about and this does that very well indeed. The Big Lebowski is also a very funny film. That's all it has in common the Mr & Mrs Smith. Following a few days in the life of total drop-out and waster Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, the film is pretty much entirely character driven, with the surreal happenings serving only to given the Dude and his friends things to riff off. The film starts out with the Dude setting off to get compensation because a chinaman pissed on his rug, and goes further off the rails from there. Just watch it - you'll thank yourself. Continuing the let's-watch-films-weebleflip-hasn't-seen theme of late, Airplane was pulled off the shelves and set spinning. I'm not going to bother explaining this one - if you haven't seen it, you should go and do so. What struck me about it was what they got away with that you just couldn't do these days without people going up in smoke. The smoking, for a start, but also the paedophilia references and the jokes about jive-talking. They lined the sacred cows up and very carefully took pot-shots at each one, carefully making sure that everyone had steak. Except, I suppose, the poor bastards who had the fish. Soon to follow - The Blues Brothers! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
4:35 pm	Books. Books always seem like a good place to start. I recently read Light by M. John Harrison and I don't recommend it. In fact, I think I'd go out of my way to suggest that people don't bother. The author seems to be under the delusion that because he doesn't understand any physics, it's OK to make up random shit and pontificate about it as if it is physics. This, in turn, justifies to his use of steam-of-consciousness inspired descriptions of things to hide the fact that he doesn't really have anything to say. There's a lot of babble which tries to be mystical and philosophical and fails, instead being incoherent. The characters barely manage one dimension, the plot is thin, circular and uninteresting and there are very few ideas in there worth any time and those that are aren't really given much. As for the Belgariad, I recently reread it and am amazed by it. It's pretty much an accepted truth by scifi fans that Eddings isn't much of an author and that he only has one plot and one set of characters. I'll not dispute that. That said, the Belgariad is where they first appeared and they're damned fun books. They're clearly aimed at fourteen year olds, by the way, but don't let that put you off. There are two things which struck me as I reread them which make the books stand out from most fantasy. The first is how culturally diverse they are - there are seven gods, and each is represented by a nation of people. What's important, however, is that each of these nations is divided into multiple cultures. There are loads of them, and they all have distinct behaviours, clothing, and economies. Yep, economies. True, they're not fleshed out much beyond favoured imports and exports, but that still puts it ahead of the pack. The second is that it skips time quite a bit. The five books are set over a period of about two years. As such, Belgarion does grow from a callow youth to a competent swordsman as is standard, but he doesn't do so in the course of a week, but rather from two years travelling with and training with some of the best warriors of the land. Taken together, these aren't really enough to make the books sound appealing, but the other ingredient is the sense of fun. The books are written with a sense of humour firmly in place, and are full of exciting, interesting and new things to see as the likable characters move from place to place. The Belgariad will never be reckoned as great literature, but as something to curl up with as comfort reading, it's some of the best. As an aside, I do like the illustration on the Amazon page I linked to for the Belgariad. Can anyone think of a better way to destroy the mechanical integrity of a sword than by doing that to the hilt? (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
5:09 pm	( Television ) ( Breakfast Club Bagels, with lots of cinnamon ) ( ... In Which The Author Despairs of Humanity, or At Least America ... ) ( Gaming and professional catherders ) ( In sickness and in health ... ) "As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her." – Robert G Ingersoll "It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible." – George W Foote (3 Comments |Comment on this)