Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • Toys Will Be Toys

    Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

    I dare you to find another photograph featuring a Zentraedi Officer’s Pod, a cast-iron “rubber” duck, and a black LEGO minifig.

    Context will arrive in the form of Thursday’s Quacked Panes comic.

  • Dragonsinger

    I wondered what it would take to kick me in the ass enough to bring me back here again.

    When I was thirteen, Mom gave Sis & I to a nice couple from church named Ken and Virginia Savage for the duration of a summer or so. They lived in Soap Lake, WA and made annual road-trip pilgrimages back to Kansas City and to Omaha for the purpose of visiting relatives and important church sites. It was right around the time of that year’s trip when, while we were at the grocery store, I spotted a book cover near the checkout counters and decided that I really wanted that book.

    Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

    That little story, read out-of-sequence from the rest of its series, helped ruin me for lesser books. If it doesn’t involve friendship, wonder, perseverance against the odds and the bad opinion of people who shouldn’t matter, risk, reward, at least one proper brawl, and considerable doses of humor… then what’s the point of your book, I ask. I read the hell out of that book, and it survived up until just a few years ago… so I replaced it with another from the same printing.

    I love quite a few books, but Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonsinger” will always hold a peculiar and special place in my heart. Only a few others share a similar prominence: Raymond E. Feist’s “Magician” volume, for instance, and Julian May’s “Intervention.”

    Folks might look at a guy funny for listing McCaffrey as one of his favorite writers, but I can live with that. And, true, there are things about some of her books (parts of the Pern series in particular) that it doesn’t pay to examine too closely. In later years, I think she lost a bit of her storytelling verve and took to treating bad guys and good guys alike a bit too much with kid gloves; consequences became gentler than one might expect. That was her choice to make, of course, and it’s my choice to leave off the reading of certain novels.

    Today’s a sad one, for today we all learned that Anne McCaffrey is no longer with us. This avid reader, at least, is largely so because of her talent and because of a very nice couple who indulged a spoiled little boy all those years ago in Soap Lake.

  • Monthly Posting?

    I swear to you, my intentions did not include ending up making only one post per month.

    Say! I looked at the lava dome of a volcano a couple of weeks ago! See? I even took Explorer Duck along with! Excitement! Explorer Duck has since gone back home to her owner back in Pennsylvania, as my house was her final stop in the worldwide tour.

    My daughter turns 18 on Monday. I guess I may have to stop calling them my “kids” now, though they’ll always be my “rugrats,” which admittedly makes no sense to anyone but myself. So be it; I’m a known weirdo anyway.

    So far, the new webserver is working beautifully. It’s faster, it’s running a much newer Linux OS than the old one, and most importantly it costs $40 less per month. I should’ve done this years ago.

    The job is… crazy. We just added three new clients and two new Kaseya management add-ons, so I’m never bored. Then again, I’m also never going to get caught up. Sigh.

    My personal life is largely drama-free, and I count that as a very good thing. I get plenty enough excitement from my job and the day-to-day challenges of life without adding interpersonal conflicts, you know?

    Once I get my head a bit more above water, maybe I’ll start looking at ways to spruce things up around here. For now… I’m just hanging in there as best I can.

  • Planes. Trains. No automobiles.

    I ignore this journal for weeks on end, and then I decide to post an epic. Go figure, eh? (more…)

  • Music Meme: 5 Songs

    I picked this up from this guy, who acquired it from that guy… and so on. And I (block)quote:

    1. If you’d like to play along, reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
    2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
    3. Then, as I’m doing here, you’ll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

    I was given… “H”. And since I can do this, I’m embedding tracks in WordPress. Hah!

    • Home By The Sea / Second Home By The Sea (Genesis) – I love this piece. I just plain love it. Especially the various live renditions with the dual drummers. This sort of thing is what I love about Genesis.
    • Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie w/ Pet Shop Boys) – Two great tastes that go great together.
    • Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Daft Punk) – Let’s be honest: They’re probably never going to top this.
    • Hyperactive (Thomas Dolby) – This is one of those love-it-or-hate-it songs from Mr. Dolby, and I happen to love it. I can see why some people don’t enjoy it as much, though.
    • Heat (Jethro Tull) – Speaking of love-or-hate, this is from the Tull album which is the most “electronic” they ever released, and it drove the die-hard fans batty. One of the things I like about it is that nearly the entire album could be used as the soundtrack to a cheesy 80’s spy caper flick… especially this track.

    And there you go. Anybody want a letter of their own to run with?

  • Iain M. Banks’ “Consider Phlebas”

    One of the names I keep bumping into when I read recommendations about what author to check into next is that of Iain M. Banks. Since I was at one of the awesome Powells Books locations in town a couple of weeks ago, and what seems to be the first of the “Culture” books was available for a reasonable price, I decided to check it out. Or, rather, purchase it since I wasn’t in a library.

    Ha, ha. That’s what passes for humor today, folks.

    Let’s start with the good stuff, which is considerable: There are many good and interesting and clever ideas in this book. As science fiction goes, it certainly qualifies as good speculative material, and less twee than a number of writers’ efforts I’ve seen in the past decade. (Note that “Phlebas” first saw print in the late 1980s.) Charles Stross, by comparison, is a clever fellow with a number of interesting ideas, but sometimes his writing comes off as being a bit taken with its own cleverness. Banks doesn’t give me that impression; in fact, he may have gone too far in the other direction. Some of the meaty speculative stuff sits apart from the main narrative, pulling you out of the story to bury you in concepts and navel-gazing. Interesting navel-gazing, sure, but still.

    I’m impressed that our erstwhile protagonist is clearly opposed to the Culture society that Banks makes no bones about casting as the smarter, more valuable faction in the interstellar war portrayed in the book. At no point does he back down from his stance that the Culture is a path down which humanity should not further tread, and he’s not a raving lunatic or delusional or anything so trite: He holds well-reasoned beliefs that place him on the opposing side. It’s an interesting and effective way to frame the conflict.

    But. And you knew there had to be one.

    One of the big problems I have with the idea of writing a novel is that I’m lousy when it comes time to provide descriptive detail. Well, this book set my mind at ease… somewhat. It turns out that you could probably tell a better story if you leave out, say, two-thirds to three-quarters of the descriptive detail that Banks puts into “Phlebas.” Much of the fight choreography is… exceedingly precise, more often than not, for instance. I found myself skimming entire large paragraphs throughout most of the back half of the book, and I couldn’t honestly tell you precisely how the various combatants on Schar’s World end up getting from where they start to where they lay at the end. A lot was going on, and I was expected to track every aspect of it all. Never mind figuring out what happened at the Megaship, earlier in the story.

    Maybe I’m just not smart enough, but you know, I’d rather expend my brainpower on absorbing the high-concept stuff. Call me crazy.

    A story can win or lose me on the ending, however, and “Consider Phlebas” bears quite an ending. Lots of endings, in fact.

    (Look, this book’s older than my kids. So here’s all the spoiler warning you get. Thpppt.)

    I don’t mean “lots of endings” in the “Return of the King movie version” sort of way. No, I mean that pretty much everybody dies. Actually, everybody does die. Maybe not in the story proper, but what we’re given after the story is a bunch of, “And here’s what happens to the survivors, years later. So and so? Went into cold sleep, revived, then killed themselves. This other person? Dead. Everyone else who got through this? Dead. Oh, the Machine Mind survived, that’s good, right?”

    Why tell me this?

    The story could’ve ended at the last chapter. I’d have been saddened but moderately satisfied, as the mission was complete and the couple of sadder-but-wiser protagonists who made it out could… I don’t know, go on with their lives, and so on. But no. We get appendices and epilogues, including an entire chunk of detail about how the galaxy-spanning war which provides the backdrop and impetus for the story ends, decades later, for reasons which have nothing to do with the events I’ve just spent hours reading about.

    What?!?

    What was the point? Our erstwhile hero manages to nearly complete his dangerous mission, and not only does he die at the point of completion but his efforts amounted to a hill of beans. Righto, then.

    Is it a good book? Arguably. Is it a good read? Only if you don’t care about a good ending, and if you don’t mind sometimes-obsessive levels of detail. Am I going to seek out more of Banks’ books…?

    Probably not.