The Occasional Sin

CBR-III Book #6: The Ultimate History of Video Games - Steven L. Kent

2011-07-27T11:29:00.011-04:00

Despite my husband claiming that I am as much a gamer as they come, I don't really feel like one. I think video games are fun and can actually improve our happiness levels and teach us a few new things as well. But beyond that, I really just play the one game. So from my point of view, I don't have a good reason as to why I picked up this book. It has been sitting on my husband's shelf for years before one day I just picked it up and decided to see what it said. A few hours later I was well into it and did not want to put it down. So from my husband's point of view, he says I picked up the book because that's just what a gamer does :)

I absolutely loved this book, much more than I ever expected to. It's as hefty as any college history textbook and so it took me several months to get through (plus I've developed a snail's pace for reading, putting in usually just under 30 minutes a day...I'm pretty bad). But at no point did I feel like putting it down, and it never stopped being interesting and incredibly informative.

Clearly my favorite parts were when Kent writes about video games (and this implies there's more to write about in the book than just games...well, in fact, there is, and more on that later). He provides an excellent history of the origin of video games, way back to the roots of pinball machines (back when they were viewed as sources of gambling and restricted to pool halls and bars, and downright outlawed in some states), through Spacewar, Pong, the arcade explosion, Atari, Odyssey, Coleco, all the way through to Sega, Nintendo, Sony, and so on. Kent attempts to lay out how the technology behind video games originated and evolved (paralleling the history of computers from the vacuum tube to the transistor era). He also follows the evolution of game design, from the surprisingly addicting Pong (a simple tennis simulator) to the intricacy of level design and game world design in The Legend of Zelda. He provides the history behind some of the all-time classics of video games: Space Invaders, Centipede, Pacman, Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, and trust me I could go on and on.

Beyond being a book about video games, it is ultimately a book about the birth, rise, decline, and rebirth of a now multi-billion dollar business. It tells the story of the rise of this huge industry, as told by the very people that built it from the ground up, and those that came later to push it into world-wide phenomenon. It details the humble beginnings of some of the most important business people in the industry today, told in part through actual interviews: Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari), Ralph Baer (inventor of the Odyssey), Steve Jobs (his stint at Atari), Trip Hawkins (founder of Electronic Arts), Minoru Arakawa (first president of Nintendo of America), Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda, and Star Fox), David Rosen (CEO of Sega), and, again, I could go on and on. And what shouldn't come as a shock at all: the birth of an empire can be downright nasty. Kent doesn't hold back in detailing all the scheming, sleight of hands, out-manuevering, and strong-arming that took place.

Another informative aspect of the book is its account of the societal and cultural impact of video games. There are the funny stories: like Japan having to increase its production of coins because so many were tied up in arcades after Space Invaders was released. The slightly paranoid ones: like all the news coverage devoted to how Japan was trying to slowly take over the American economy given their massive sales of Nintendo Entertainment Systems and even their purchase of the Seattle Mariners baseball team (even though that was Nintendo of America, not of Japan). And the really controversial ones.

Controversy over games and their content has existed from the very beginning, back to the Lieberman hearings in 1993 that focused on Mortal Kombat's realistic use of blood and overly-gruesome fatalities (that hearing brought about the development of the ESRB rating system, similar to what is in place for movies), and through to the tragic events that occurred at Littleton, Colorado in 1999 and how the killers related their crimes to Doom (a first person shooter). The events at Columbine renewed the urgency to address violence in video games and how it was being advertised to children, with hearings beginning just two weeks later (though much more dramatic than the 1993 hearings, no new outcomes or laws came about from this hearing). Kent provides a detailed and non-biased account of both hearings, providing the actual transcripts from the sessions. And I have to mention, in another show of how things really are cosmically aligned, I read through these chapters just as the Supreme Court reached a decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which finally ruled this summer that video games fall under the same rights as the First Amendment.

The only drawback to the book is just a matter of time. The book was published in 2001, shortly after SEGA discontinued the Dreamcast and Sony released the Playstation 2, and prior to the release of the Game Cube and Xbox. That's a good chunk of history missing. Lord, a full decade! Now I feel old... But really, the book is just begging for a sequel. I sincerely hope Kent decides to pick up the story where he left off and take us through the recent bout of video game innovation, from motion accelerators and sensors to online gaming communities (in my biased opinion, I was sorely disappointed that there was absolutely no mention of Blizzard, creators of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft).

As a study of a business and how it impacted our culture, and also as a fun and interesting account of video games, it was very enjoyable. Highly recommend.

CBR-III Book #5: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World - Jane McGonigal

2011-06-16T12:15:00.012-04:00

Reality is Broken was a wonderfully thoughtful gift from Subie, who heard McGonigal talk in Boston earlier this year and managed to score a personal signed copy for Rock and me. Thanks Subie!

I had heard about McGonigal just a few days before Subie gave us the book when she was featured over at WoW Insider (World of Warcraft-related news and blog site). I liked her message even though I felt the practical application of what she was saying was not quiet there yet. After reading the book, I still like the message, and I still think the practical application is not quite there yet, but I have a new understanding of how it's possible.

So what is her message? In a nutshell, it is the premise that if we could apply the same kind of productivity and enjoyment to our everyday lives that we devote to games, we could appreciably improve the quality of our lives and make a difference in the world around us. Couched in there too is a defense against those that would claim that games are purely escapist time-wasting activities, that gamers (specifically video gamers) are missing out on life by immersing themselves in games, and that games cannot incite useful or productive work or bring about life-changing opportunities.

McGonigal arranges her book in three sections. The first explores why people like to play games, any games: board games, video games, sports games, puzzle games, word games, pen and paper games, "playground" games, strategy games, and so on and so on. At the surface, games obviously make us happy because they are pastimes, like watching T.V. or reading a book. But deeper down, games make us happy because they challenge us; they push us into tackling seemingly insurmountable odds that we can overcome through creativity, ingenuity, and persistence; and they reward us with intrinsic values such as pride, awe, self-fulfillment, and satisfaction. Games also have the possibility of connecting us as communities (depends on the game).

The second section examines how established game mechanics could potentially be applied to our everyday lives to provide the same challenges and rewards that make games so fun to play. McGonigal argues that one could make a game out of life's difficulties (as she did when she turned her medical recovery following an accident into a game), or our everyday responsibilities, or our social interactions.

The final section presents several examples of real (i.e. currently existing) games that have real-world effects. The argument is that people spend, and have spent, numerous productive man-hours playing games. What if that productivity could be applied in a game that brings about actual change? She discusses several examples of such games (most of which she helped design), but my favorite example she talks about is Foldit, a game in which people manipulate proteins in a 3D virtual environment (comparable to Tetris) to learn what patterns are the most stable. The project's goal is to get gamers to contribute to science by playing.

That is my summary (though not very short) of the major parts I got out of the book, but McGonigal goes into so much more detail about a variety of game-related issues. There is certainly a lot of information here and a lot of insight into the potential future of games and where they're going (specifically, these life-changing games). Like I said, I don't think games are quite there yet. Personally, I think gamers are more likely to spend more hours next week playing the Ocarina of Time re-release than Foldit...but I'm also a jaded, short-sighted person with little to no imagination or foresight. Honestly, I would love to participate in a game that produced real-life results as much as I currently participate in WoW. It would be truly amazing if this is actually where gaming ended up going (and after reading the book I think it's very possible it will).

This brings me to what I liked about the book the best, which was the first section that deals with why games are meaningful, why they make us happy, and why it can be a very good thing to play games. I was nodding in agreement to pretty much every sentence written in the first six chapters (though less so in the chapters that explore how social connections can grow from gaming, contradicting the idea that all gamers are socially stunted recluses...cause, see, I'm socially stunted because I hate people and think every single person out there is an asshole, whether they're in physical or virtual form... but that's just me).

In addition to recommending this book to self-classified gamers, I would highly recommend it to people who don't consider themselves gamers, or who can't comprehend what the big deal is about games, but who have an open mind and interest to learn how games can be important, both for personal happiness and in a potentially larger world-changing sense. In any case, I've always thought that every single person out there is a gamer to some degree. And if you truly are not playing a game of any kind, I would seriously urge you to give it a try. It's quite fun.

CB-III Book #4: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

2011-05-13T19:44:00.008-04:00

This is another selection from my deck of cards that I just got around to reading last month. Though, for some reason, I've had a copy of this book since high school. The same copy, mind you. Which means that for ten years (jesus, ten years!) I moved this exact same book across countries and states, from college dormitories, to graduate family housing, to cheap apartment living, to this new house...without having even read it. I swear I'm not a hoarder.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was written by Ken Kesey and published in 1962. Kesey drew from his own experiences as an orderly at a mental health institute to write the book. Told from the perspective of half-Native American patient "Chief" Bromden, it tells the story of Randle McMurphy after he joins the psychiatric ward to avoid staying at a work farm to serve out his prison sentence. The story focuses on the power struggle between McMurphy and the ward's overseer, Nurse Ratched. During the course of the book, McMurphy antagonizes Nurse Ratched, upsets the established routines and rules, and incites the patients to stand up for themselves instead of being intimidated and emasculated. By virtue of his strong, independent, and sexually liberated (for the 50s) character, he becomes a natural leader and source of inspiration for the mentally ill patients, most of whom are in the ward voluntarily (and therefore in control of when they can deem themselves as cured). The narrator's story (Chief Bromden) is also told during the course of the book, though he immediately proves to be an unreliable narrator. Highly paranoid, he is convinced that the entire ward is operated by a mechanical collective known as The Combine that seeks to control society. The story culminates in a series of disturbing events, with some interesting role reversals (that's about as much as I want to say about where the book goes from the main premise so as not to spoil anything, though I imagine it's a fairly well known story at this point).

As a book, it is very straightforward. The narrator may be unreliable but never in the sense that you don't understand or believe what is going on, only in the sense that he is irrationally paranoid and prone to (obvious) hallucinations. The main themes regard authority and rebellion, and the insidious control exerted by Nurse Ratched. The book also comments on the oppressive nature of mental wards at the time that made them comparable to prisons.

The book was successful during the time it was published, particularly as it criticized American institutions during a time of social upheaval. Kesey would go on to consume massive quantities of LSD and become a main figure of the hippy movement (among many other notable things).

Overall, I enjoyed the book. It is a slow starter and doesn't really count as radical or eye-opening in today's age, but it is a good yarn. McMurphy ends up a much more complicated character than I've described here, and there are several notable supporting characters. The ending really shouldn't have taken me by surprise but the last quarter of the book was the most gripping portion for me.

Also, an aside (cause where else can I say it?): the movie is really not that much like the book. I didn't finish the movie because it was all crazy people and lots of yelling and Doc Brown throwing a hissy fit...and the book was not that at all. Unless I missed something in the book, what I took away from it was that the inmates were not that crazy at all, they just weren't conforming to what people expected and they weren't able to conform. Sure, there was some degree of mental instability, but overall I got the impression that they could mostly be helped if not for the domineering and dehumanizing nature of their care. But Jack Nicholson is awesome.

32 down, 20 to go.

CB-III Book #3: The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell

2011-05-10T14:35:00.006-04:00

Damn. Well, here I am, finally. It's a very awkward moment right now, finally writing a post after such a long absence. I got no excuse. You would think that my newfound free time would have resulted in an overabundance of posts detailing every tired minutiae of my day. In fact, unemployment has been a very weird time. Sure, I spend a lot of time job-hunting, nitpicking my resume, and writing and rewriting cover letters to suit each job description. But you may be surprised to know that I haven't been playing WoW nonstop for 8 hours for the last two months (which is kind of where I saw my days devolving at first). I think this is a very good thing. I haven't been reading that much either. That's not so good. I have been watching a lot of Netflix streaming. This has had mixed results: on the one hand, I've caught up with some shows I always wanted to try; on the other hand, my brain very nearly turned to mush when I tried to cram as much Buffy and Angel as I could in one week because the stupid PS3 led me to believe that Netflix was removing them from the instant stream (but that will be another post...maybe). And I've been very good about going to the gym every day. The house is generally very clean. Most of the windows finally have curtains, which was no small task actually. I guess I'm saying that it's been a weird time in no specific way but it clearly translated into me losing interest in writing.

On to a book review. This was a very nice birthday present from Subie. I actually finished reading this a couple of months ago.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is told in two alternating halves, both of them centered on Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit missionary. One half details Sandoz's experiences back on Earth following a scientific exploration mission to an alien planet with a diverse team of scientists and other missionaries. The other half details how the space exploration mission came about, beginning with how the different team members came to know each other, how the alien planet was discovered, how the mission was put together, and what happened when the team arrived on the planet. If it was a movie, the scenes following the mission would be very dark and gloomy, probably with an overall blue hue to the film, with very somber dialogue and scenes of human despair; the other half would be very bright and colorful, with quick and witty dialogue, beautiful locations and people, and the overall tone would be one of exploration, adventure, and awe. Eventually, the two halves would meet, on the alien planet, as Sandoz retells the fateful events that occurred towards the end of the mission. The scenes prior to Sandoz's return to Earth would take a dark turn, almost (almost) horror movie-style, while the scenes after his return would see the main character gain some clarity and peace. I see Alfred Molina in the starring role, but I guess those higher up see things differently. The tagline and plot synopsis would reference the overall themes of the book, which are religious faith clashing or coexisting with scientific discovery, the meaning of fate, and the difficulties of First Contact.

Without giving plot points away, I think that describes the overall feeling and story of the book.

At the center of it, the book is really about religious and philosophical inquiry set in the science fiction trope of meeting an alien race for the first time. Several of the characters in the book struggle with their faith when confronted with extreme adversity, asking themselves the typical question of why do bad things happen to good people, how can a path of fate or divine intervention lead to suffering, how can God allow bad things to happen. While I'm not an overly religious person, or a creationist, my own personal faith allows the possibility that something initiated that first super spark that put us here, that there are dusty blueprints sitting in some long-forgotten past. However, I don't really think of God as sitting in a control room, watching over football games, deciding what babies are born alive or stillborn, watching people get married, and jotting down the names of murderers, thieves, and adulterers in a little black book. I think bad things happen to good people because shit happens, life is a crap shoot and often unfair, it is what we make of it, but it is also the random hand we are dealt. While the theological discussion in the book is interesting and well presented, it was not personally compelling and, because of that, I did feel like it slogged down the pace of the book. This is probably the complete opposite of what Russell was going for.

Much more interesting to me was the science fiction storyline that brings together a ragtag group of people as they make an amazing discovery, how they are able to explore the vast reaches of space, and what they find when they get there (though this is by no means completely new territory). I'm fascinated by science fiction stories of First Contact, even though I bet any First Contact with alien intelligent life would lead to violent confrontations and laser blasts in the face. Although the mystery of what happened to the science team on the alien planet kept me somewhat hooked, it's not really that important (you know something happened right off the bat, you just don't know how bad it got).

Overall, it was an interesting read, but not as important to me as it might be to someone else.

Real Life Crits

2011-02-15T08:55:00.003-05:00

This post is about a month late. And it was supposed to only be a happy post, dammit, but, as they say, shit happens.

I'll start with the happy part of the post. Rock and I actually moved into our new home on January 14th. It took a tad longer than I expected to settle in (I was still unpacking boxes about two weeks later), but I think things are more or less in place. It does kind of suck that New England decided to have one of the heaviest snow seasons in memory. After hours that turned into days of snow shoveling, snow blower duty, roof raking, roof shoveling, ice sanding, etc., I am officially sick of winter. The downside being that it was a bad time to get a driveway, a roof, and an oil-burning furnace. The upside, of course, being that we have a house! :)

The absolute bitch of it being that I was laid off two days after closing. Yeah...

I don't necessarily want to get into it here. It was devastating for the first week but I've adjusted by now. I've had the house to keep me busy at least. Somewhere in between all the free time and the added responsibility I found the inner housewife that cleans the house every day, cooks and bakes new recipes at least three times a week, and watches hours of Buffy at a time. The job situation is on hold at the moment until my employment authorization kicks in (which may not happen until around May). Though I will start doing the resume polishing/job application thing this week.

Would be nice if winter could be over soon.

CB-III Book #2: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

2011-01-10T13:56:00.008-05:00

This is a selection from my deck of cards. Is it something of a testament to the pervasiveness of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov that despite having never read it, or talked to others who have read it, or seen adaptations on it, I already know what it's about? Who doesn't know, more or less, what the book is about? As Nabokov himself suggested, is it any wonder the name Dolores or Lolita stopped being so popular after the publication of this book?

So, I'm not going to delve into the plot. The one sentence plot summary is that this book is about middle-aged Humbert Humbert's obsession with young girls and his eventual relationship with 12-year-old Lolita.

The heart of the book is a study on desire and obsession, a portrait of sexual abuse, and a view of one man's madness. The window dressing, though much more than that because it is the reason why this book is such a masterpiece, is Nabokov's prose. I wouldn't trade the difficult subject matter, or the visceral reaction this book got out of me because of the depth of sexual abuse, for a kinder or less uncomfortable plot if it meant giving up the intricate literary style. Full of puns, allegories, satire, parody, it was, at times, a struggle to read through. I can't remember the last time a book had me running for the dictionary quite as often. There is more allusion, double entendre, sarcasm, mordant wit, and meaning in one sentence of Humbert's ramblings than in any of the best and most long-winded Internet trolls and/or savants out there. Truth be told, it gets to be a bit too much. It was the same thing that happened to me halfway through book 3 or 4 of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Sometimes I just want plain English. That's a slight on me. The book's prose is just perfect.

The subject matter, like I said...much more uncomfortable than I expected. It is not a pornographic book, as many early publishers claimed (and for which they refused to publish). There is nothing explicit but it is still unsettling to tread the mind of a man so obsessed with young children. Because 12-year-old Lo is a child. After reading the book, I am mostly upset at how Lolita has become synonymous with a willfully seductive and sexual young girl, almost laying the blame on the girl for the ensuing sexual adulation by grown men. Lolita in the book is never willfully seductive, she does not seduce Humbert. There is a passage where Humbert says he was, in fact, seduced by Lolita, but I'm not inclined to believe him because throughout the book Humbert proves to be a pretty unreliable narrator, and because on more than one occasion he alters the telling to excuse his behavior to himself. And even if I could be convinced that Lolita actively seduced Humbert, it still does not excuse the years of sexual abuse, dominance, emotional abuse, and near imprisonment that followed. And the fake patriarchy and implied incest just pushes the subject into a whole different level of repulsive. But I'm also being very harsh because the focus could have just as well been any other form of desire, and in that sense it's not so much a story about peadeophilia, but a story of obsession.

It is an interesting picture of an unhealthy obsession, as I more or less expected from what little I knew about the book. I confess I did not expect it to be a description of abuse. I also assumed before starting that Lolita was complicit, but we actually learn so little about her and she is hardly ever given her own voice. All this is just what I gathered from the book. After reading different reviews on it, I see another reason why it's become such a classic novel. There are several different ways of interpreting it and you are very likely to walk away with a different view altogether.

After all that, though, I'm not sure I recommend it. But I wouldn't discourage it, either. I'd say, find out what the fuss is all about for yourself, if you're prepared to go there.

31 down, 21 to go.

CB-III Book #1: The Shattering by Christie Golden

2011-01-01T10:00:00.005-05:00

Maybe I shouldn’t have started my Cannonball read with this particular book. It immediately sets up an image that could leave me ostracized. I’ll become that girl. The WoW geek, the fantasy nerd, irredeemably fat and lonely. Though I suppose I shouldn’t cry too much because you would have come to the same conclusion if you took even a passing glance at the rest of my posts. So, the hell with it, here is my review of World of Warcraft: The Shattering.

I will say that this is my first WoW novel. I love the game but the lore behind it is, to put it mildly, confusing. If the Warcraft lore and the LOTR lore were part of the same universe, the entire LOTR trilogy would be the Cliff’s notes version of the Warcraft encyclopedia. It’s pretty massive, so I never bothered to read any canon outside of what the game itself offered.

Then the Cataclysm happened. Suffice it to say that the game I’ve gotten to know over the course of four years changed so drastically that I was back to square one. In terms of game design, it was a huge undertaking by Blizzard when they decided to not just add new pieces or components to the existing game (new levels, if you will), but to rework the entire existing structure nearly from the ground up. In terms of lore, it advanced the story to the next level. MMOs are, almost by definition, static worlds that rarely see any changes. Your character may level up to the cap and defeat the hardest boss to exist in the game...but that same boss will be back there next week, as if nothing happened. With this expansion though, the entire story changed and moved forward and it will never be the same as it was just a month ago.

It was a pretty big deal, is what I’m saying. I decided to pick up this particular book because it sets the stage for what happened between expansions, before and after the world shattering. Despite having some amount of cheese that plagues nearly all fantasy, I was very glad I picked this up, and ended up tearing through it rather quickly.

The book is less about fantasy and magic and more about political machinations, cultural divides, and social interactions. The story focuses on major political shifts happening both for the Horde (the “bad” faction if you will, that includes orcs, trolls, undead, goblins, blood elves, and tauren*) and for the Alliance (the “good” guys, made up of humans, night elves, dwarfs, gnomes, worgen (werewolves!) and draenei (space goat aliens)). Coups, murder plots, honor battles to the death, it’s all here and it takes center stage. There is some amount of good vs. evil simplification, but for the most part, the battles (both internal and external) are never black or white, and no character is without her flaws. This is the first book in a planned trilogy, so not every storyline gets squared away at the end.

As much as I play the game and have some familiarity with the lore characters presented in the book, I still tend to get lost whenever I read WoW blogs. But Golden manages to provide just enough background on the characters to set them up without bogging down the book in excessive detail, while continuing to move the main plot forward. I feel very confident saying that anyone not familiar with this universe could still pick this book up and become immersed in an interesting story with decent characters.

I will admit that some of the dialogue is too happy-go-lucky to ring particularly true, especially when severity would have made the scene better (I’m thinking of one scene in particular when the human king decides to help out the dwarven kingdom). These moments are thankfully rare.

All in all, it’s not a bad way to while away a lazy train commute or a few minutes before bed. It certainly doesn’t break molds in fantasy; rather, it’s soft enough on the fantasy aspect to not scare away those that feel squeamish about it. And it’s definitely a good read for anyone playing the game, who is wondering just what the hell happened to the Warcraft world.

*aside: the tauren are a race of humanoid cows, which is probably the main reason I started playing this in the first place

So Long, 2010

2010-12-31T17:11:00.003-05:00

Well, I think it's pretty clear that the holiday season took a definite toll on my free time and my blogging. There is a big hole between right before Thanksgiving and today, but this is how it goes I guess. In any case, I figure New Year's Eve is as good a time as any to reflect on the year that's gone by and think about what's ahead.

It was definitely one of the more eventful years I've had and I'm really glad I was able to document most of it on this blog. I certainly didn't expect such an eventful year to happen 12 months ago. As much as I dislike reading myself, I am glad I've been able to keep track of a few memories along the way.

I started out the year in Honduras. Back then, I was hoping it would be at most another year before I was able to return but sadly it won't happen this time around. With any luck I'll be visiting home sometime in 2011. I miss my family and my friends and Christmas is just not the same not being home, though I can't complain about having spent Christmas with Rock and his family surrounded by yummy food, neat presents, and an intermittent day-long WoW playing session.

But, anyway, some other events: i had my septoplasty, which has been a great improvement; shortly after that, Rock and I tied the knot, assisted by Subie, and even my mom, sister, and brother were able to travel up here for it; Rock and I finally went to Disney World and had the most awesome vacation, even if he was afraid on the plane the whole time; and we rounded out the year by finally taking a big plunge and buying a house.

I guess I can't really say what 2011 will bring, but I do know this: if all goes well, we are done living in communal quarters in two weeks! No more people blasting t.v. at all hours, running up and down stairs, or bringing their loud friends over. We get a whole new list of problems but I am certainly looking forward to being a home-owner.

I'm hoping there's a trip to Honduras in there somewhere. At the least, there is a trip to Chicago for my sister's wedding. Other than that, I guess I don't know.

There is at least one new thing happening for me next year. I'll be joining this crazy crowd called Pajiba as they undergo their traditional Cannonball read. I first became aware of the site and Cannonball through my friend Figgy. She doesn't know it, but part of the inspiration for this blog came from her and her blog and reading her reviews and really liking what she did with it. Anyway, I figured since I was already having a good time reading and reviewing books, I might as well join the community that hooked me into it. I don't think this means the rate of reviews will go up, however :(

Happy New Year everyone.

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

2010-11-16T06:09:00.002-05:00

The Remains of the Day is not in my deck of cards. I picked this up because I’ve been hearing a lot about that movie Never Let Me Go, and it just sounds like such a mash-up of Gattaca and The Island that I was wondering why people keep going on about it. And from what I’ve read, it seems that the real driver in the novel is the character development and Kazuo Ishiguro’s prose (and that if that can be translated and captured onto film then the movie will be pretty solid). Now, I’m a sucker for good prose. There’s probably a fine line somewhere in my head where I prefer the way a story is told over what the actual story is or who the characters are. One of the reasons 100 Years of Solitude is my favorite book is because the prose and narrative itself is such a huge part of the novel as a whole. It makes the book fun and interesting and compelling to read. And if I look back at the list of books I’ve blogged about since I started this, the books that stick out the most to me are the ones that were told in interesting ways: All the Pretty Horses, Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, A Handmaid’s Tale. So I was pretty sold on reading Ishiguro after reading so many praises regarding his prose and style. Clearly, this isn’t Never Let Me Go, because that book is all out at my local library, but damn it I was determined to read something by Ishiguro, so here we are.

The Remains of the Day is told from the first person perspective of Mr. Stevens, a butler who once served for one of the grandest houses in pre-WWII England. The story follows him on his vacation, a journey through the countryside, during which he reminisces about his past life, his accomplishments, and his relationship with Miss Kenton, who he is planning to visit at some point during his trip. I was pretty skeptical when I started the book because that is not a particularly interesting plot. But I have to say, Ishiguro writes masterful prose.

Stevens’ recollections (told in flashbacks during his road trip, as if he’s writing a letter to someone, presumably another butler) are mostly about examining his life, to assure himself that he has lived with dignity and purpose because he has served a great man. It’s a quietly sad story that Stevens is telling but he’s too damn proper to come out and say it. In fact, he’s a very unreliable narrator, but there is enough for the reader to read between the lines of the stories he is re-telling and get at the real heart of it. As his unreliable narration continues, the reader gleams that Stevens is actually doubtful, both about his purpose and the greatness of the man he served, and that’s the real tragedy of the story.

The writing is probably the most proper English I’ve ever read, and I think I said the same about Jane Eyre. But where Jane Eyre was boring me to tears (the narration was just too damn dry*), Ishiguro uses it to unfold his story, drawing you in, setting up an environment, and using it to fully describe the character of Mr. Stevens. The novel begins as a study of proper English manners and subtly transforms into a study of character, life lessons, regrets, and missed opportunities. By the time I was halfway in, I couldn’t put it down.

And the heart of the whole novel really is the prose. Ishiguro weaves in Stevens’ flashbacks, unreliability, and melancholy musings, while always maintaining an excruciatingly proper English demeanor. If this was just a story about a butler taking a road trip during which he realizes his life could have been better, it would be pretty straightforward and unremarkable. But the manner of the telling is what makes the entire story interesting and deeply affecting.

Now I need to get my grubby paws on Never Let Me Go. You out there holding on to those copies: return them to the library, now!

* An aside: if I were to explain what “dry prose” means, well I wouldn’t be able to put it into useful words. But it just so happens that I was reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last night and towards the beginning of the book (chapter 2 or so) there’s the bit about how Alice is all wet because of the pool of tears she created and she meets up with a bunch of other animals that also got caught in the pool and when they finally get out they want to dry off, and so the mouse says “this is the driest thing I know”, and he starts reciting some passage about William the Conqueror (har har, but actually that was pretty funny commentary on Carroll's part). My point being, Lewis Carroll also says prose is dry so that’s good enough for me, and also how weird is it that coincidences like those happen at all. (And, that was quite an aside.)

Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services.

~The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

2010-11-12T11:23:00.003-05:00

This is another selection from my 52 Great Books to Read list. Even though The Color Purple falls in the category of books that I know something about because I watched the movie, the only thing I remember about the movie was that I bawled like a baby. So I was already a bit apprehensive about this book, and I went into it assuming it would just end up being a tear-jerker. I don’t necessarily mind being emotionally abused by a book (or a movie) to the point that I’m actually crying, for real. But if I suspect that that’s the entirety of what the experience will offer, I tend to lose interest. It’s the main reason I haven’t watched quite a few movies, because if it sounds so soul-crushingly devastating, I wonder why I would want to go through that. But, like I said, I don’t mind crying during books or movies. The most recent book that had me crying was Deathly Hallows, which I just finished re-reading a few weeks ago. Yeah, I admit it. I was bawling during the two chapters that reveal Snape’s true intentions. You know what’s even worse? I re-read those two chapters a few days later and I was still crying. I own up to it, but I’m not proud.

Anyway, I wasn’t too excited to start this one and I was preparing myself for one long sob story. And what happened instead was so much better. It is a sad story, clearly, but ultimately it’s a story about hope and redemption and finding true happiness. I would now say that it’s actually a pretty damn uplifting story. If every asshole you ever met in the world could turn himself around and find it in himself to become a good person, I would have a much better view of humanity. At least, this book showed me what that view could be.

The book is written entirely as a series of letters, first by the main character Celie, a young African-American woman, to God. Celie has already been tragically abused for someone her age by the time she decides to turn to writing as a way to cope with her emotions and the hardships she endures daily. Eventually, Celie begins to write her letters to her long-lost sister Nettie, once she becomes angry at God for the things that have happened to her. And somewhere in there, Celie discovers letters written by her sister that had been kept from her (Celie). At a young age, Celie is married off to a man who only wants a wife to take care of the house and kids; she is separated from her sister Nettie, who becomes a missionary in Africa; and she is impregnated twice and forced to give up her children. And as crappy as that sounds, and despite the other really crappy things that happen throughout, the story really does grow more and more uplifting. Celie grows stronger, an emotional growth that is flawlessly executed in the tone of her narration.

The book also weaves in the story of a number of characters, including Celie’s sister, Celie’s stepson and his strong willed wife, and Celie’s husband’s mistress, among others. Everyone in the book goes through some kind of change and in some cases, some pretty amazing changes (particularly Celie’s husband).

The book won Walker a Pulitzer Prize and I guess it’s one of the most contested books out there. I’m not particularly interested in looking up what aspects of the book are the most debated, but I would bet a good $5 that scenes of homosexuality take the top of the list rather than scenes of domestic abuse. I’m not in the mood to get riled up and find out, though.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Even the writing style of presenting the story in letters worked out much better than I thought it would. And for a book with such a sad premise, it ends up being a pretty happy story. Surprisingly, I didn’t even cry at all.

30 down, 22 to go.

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

2010-10-30T16:52:00.011-04:00

Wide Sargasso Sea is Jane Rhys' response to Charlotte Bronte's "madwoman in the attic" character, depicted in Jane Eyre as Bertha Mason. In Bronte's novel, Bertha only represents an obstacle between Rochester and Jane, and his source of unhappiness. She is briefly described as Creole, foreign, lunatic, and not belonging to the same world that Rochester and Jane belong to.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys (a Creole herself) writes a story for Bertha, and gives her a voice and a distinct identity, that of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress. The novel follows her life, from her childhood growing up in the West Indies to her arranged marriage to Mr. Rochester, through the deterioration of their marriage, her relocation to England, and her eventual complete mental breakdown. As a sample of post-colonial literature, the novel explores racial inequalities, colonization, assimilation, and the parallels and differences between colonists and the colonized.

I wasn't aware of the connection to Jane Eyre before starting the book. I had already read Jane Eyre a few months ago as part of this same reading list and the character of Bertha Mason didn't grab my attention beyond being the mystery behind the story and the one reason Rochester and Jane couldn't be together. Rhys' story fits so well with the narrative already presented in Jane Eyre, that it feels like a necessary prequel that makes the story complete. Bronte's character Bertha is merely a caricature; Rhys' Antoinette is alive and complex; also deeply disturbed, yes, but the backstory sets up the events that happen in Thornfield Hall perfectly.

So, why Bertha - Antoinette? The novel explores issues of identity and assimilation. Rochester, in his role as patriarchal English colonist, assigns Antoinette a new identity, and renames her as Bertha. In fact, Rochester is pretty much a jerk this entire book too. Like Antoinette, however, his backstory is also fleshed out further, for example his relationship with his father and brother. Antoinette's progression into madness plays out throughout the entire novel, getting increasingly worse until the last third of the book when she is living in England and has lost all sense of self.

I would recommend reading this after reading Jane Eyre. I can think of no other prequel that complements the original story so well (though, the book works as a standalone read as well due to the lush descriptions and heavy symbolism). Are there any other good prequels out there? Seriously, I'm asking...

29 down, 23 to go.

Sin's Adventures in Wonderland

2010-10-14T07:29:00.019-04:00

Many thanks to Rock and Subie for the pictures featured below. Looking back, none of the ones on here are actually mine :)

Rock and I took a 6 day vacation to Disney World in Orlando around mid-September (seriously, time flies). Subie joined us for the first four days. We stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and had access to all the parks and also took a day to see Universal Studios. And I’ll just get this stated now; it was seriously one of the best vacations ever! Below, a lengthy list from Bad to Awesome of how it went, and a few pictures that are not in any particular order.

The BAD

- Dear lord, are there lines. Lines for rides, lines for food, lines for the bathroom, lines for the bus, lines to take pictures…I do not like lines. That said the longest line we voluntarily stood in was 45 minutes long to see a 30-minute scene of “The Lion King on Broadway Show” at Animal Kingdom (which was awesome). I say voluntarily, because the longest line we actually stood in was about an hour and a half long, after the Electrical Magic parade at Magic Kingdom just to get out of the park and onto our resort bus. Guess who was not a happy tourist that day? Poor Rock and Subie, evil Sin came out and it was not good for anybody :-(

- The walking. Yeah, yeah, it’s an obvious one, but it had to be said. We were so exhausted when we got back, we slept twelve hours straight the next day. That’s not an exaggeration. And maybe the walking wouldn't have been so bad but for the horde. Not the WoW Horde. I'd take lovable orcs, trolls, and the walking undead over the thousands of tiny feet and hands that were swarming every inch of the place and rending the air apart with their furious high-pitched squeals. Yes, I don't necessarily like kids, but the magic of Disney is that you get used to them pretty quick. So much so, that I didn't even remember I had an opinion on it till Rock pointed out that Magic Kingdom is the unofficial spokeperson for birth control. So true.

- Rock on a plane. To be fair, he’s not afraid of heights or of small spaces, it was the “dear god, we’re trusting this human-made piece of metal to not crash 35,000 feet” that got to him. Outwardly he seemed ok, but I was really nervous for him…poor Rock.

- Disney Quest’s Build Your Own Rollercoaster. Rock and I built it together and, thinking it would just be a movie of the ride, we went ahead and put in all the crazy loops and figure eights and jumps. And then we’re ushered into a capsule that will simulate the experience. Holy hell. Ok, disclaimer: I am NOT a fan of rollercoasters. I’ll go so far as to say I hate rollercoasters and don’t see the attraction in them, at all. I was not prepared for this ride to feel like an actual rollercoaster but, I don’t know how they do it, you can feel the acceleration (I have been in rollercoasters before, once or twice) and the capsule does flip you upside down and sideways and it jumps and all the rest of it. It was the closest thing to a rollercoaster I rode during the entire trip and it took me completely by surprise.

- That’s about it for badness. I complain about lines but honestly, since it was off-season at the parks, we got into the rides we wanted in 20 minutes or less, and about 80% of the time we just got to walk right on with no waiting.

The GOOD

- Disney Quest. It was pretty awesome to play some old school arcades as well as some immersive virtual games all in the same floor space (and five stories of it!). Unfortunately, the virtual games already feel terribly dated and we get better graphics and motion-controls from a Wii. The place was probably the bomb not even five years ago, but it could use a major overhaul. Why hasn’t Disney partnered up with Microsoft or Sony to showcase some in-the-works technology? Which leads me to:

- 3D, 4D, and virtual-immersion attractions. The rides that use 3D technology are still fun in their own right, either because they have cute stories (the PhilharMagic is adorable, with Donald Duck running through various Disney storylines like Fantasia, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid), or have interesting 4D effects (smoke, water sprays, smells, seat movements, lighting effects, human actors), but with the 3D saturation clogging up every local movie theater, the charm has faded a bit. Clearly, just a few years ago, this would have been THE place to experience some solid, fun 3D action. The 4D elements still keep the rides alive, but the 3D technology is now second fiddle.

- The craziness of it all. I spent most of the trip remarking on the strangeness of certain jobs. I mean, someone’s job out there is to be the Sebastian the Crab puppeteer on the Voyage of the Little Mermaid. The show was cute and whacked out but I seriously spent the entire show feeling bad for the guy that has to activate the smoke machine and light effects (though it’s probably just a computer at this point). The kid in me loves seeing the guys in the mouse costumes and the actors dressed up as the Princesses, but I find myself just thinking “how weird is that?” I don’t know, we met “Mary Poppins” at breakfast and she came over to talk to us and I felt like such a dumbass for talking to a woman in a costume pretending to be Mary Poppins, when this woman knows I am not five and therefore don’t actually believe she is Mary Poppins, so we both know she is just a woman in a costume pretending to be Mary Poppins, and that just makes the whole thing…awkward. But she was very adorable.

- Wizarding World at Harry Potter. I’m aghast at myself for putting this here and not in the Awesome category below. They did a fantastic job with the architecture and building facades, and Hogwarts is built to a pretty awesome scale. But there wasn’t a lot of content. The entire place is essentially one big store (shocking, I know) but I was disappointed to see that some things weren’t pushed far enough. Like the candy store from the books (the name escapes me). The candy in the store is your generic grocery store candy: peach rings, Swedish fish, jelly beans, etc. I was really hoping for an actual confectionary, where they make the candy right in the store and you can watch. The joke shop was cute but you can’t play with any of the stuff so you can’t really tell what’s inside the boxes. I didn’t get on the rides because I’m a chicken and they didn’t have any mild versions from what I could tell (no 3D virtual immersion type rides, although Subie tells me the Hogwarts castle ride was close enough). I felt very silly for doing this but of course I tried the “butterbeer” and “pumpkin juice.” The butterbeer was cream soda with extra foam (whipped cream I think) and the pumpkin juice tasted just like pumpkin pie. Very cute and silly. Finally they had an acapella group made up of “students” and of course they sang the "toil and trouble" song, and a few other things. I love acapella so that was a neat surprise.

The AWESOME

- Everything else. But I really should elaborate.

- THE FOOD. Oh my god, the food. I really didn’t expect the food to be all that great, for some reason, and to be honest some things were pretty unremarkable (like all of the quick service/fast food counters in the parks), but we went to some pretty awesome restaurants. My favorites were the ones in the Animal Kingdom Lodge where we stayed. There was an Indian-inspired restaurant (Sanaa) and an African-inspired buffet (Boma) that made me sad I couldn’t keep eating.

- The pool and hot tub at the hotel, and the water park. I’m so glad I got to do some actual swimming this summer. I want regular access to a pool so badly. We only went to Blizzard Beach (not Typhoon Lagoon) where we rode a really fun raft ride.

- All of the parks. I’m trying to rate them but I really can’t. All of the parks feel different enough that I just can’t compare them.

- Epcot: I loved Epcot’s Soaring ride even if I was freaking out for the first few minutes, and Spaceship Earth is very cool (though the storyline ends with Jobs building the first Mac so Disney really needs to update this and add some more scenes at the end…I can’t really get misty-eyed over the first Mac when I have a much better computer that fits in my pocket). World Showcase was very neat but we didn’t have time to see any of the live performances. We did see the belly-dancer in the Morocco restaurant; she wasn’t super authentic but, as Subie pointed out, it is a family restaurant.

- Hollywood Studios: this was the smallest park and it doesn’t offer a ton of rides. I loved the Indiana Jones stunt show, more so than the Sinbad stunt show at Universal Studios, but overall Hollywood Studios paled in comparison to Universal. I also loved the 50’s Cafe, which really feels like you stepped into someone’s house from a 50’s TV show. And they had amazing fried chicken and s ‘mores :-) I’m also very glad I got a FastPass for the Toy Story ride because, while it was extremely cute and fun, it does not justify an 80-minute wait in line at all (the standby time for the queue when we redeemed our FastPass).

- Magic Kingdom: I loved this park more than I expected to, I think because it has the most stuff out of any other park. We bought tickets to Mickey’s Not-So-Very-Scary Halloween party, which ended up being absolutely awesome. When I planned the trip, I didn’t devote a full day to MK, thinking it would be mostly kid stuff. So at the last minute we bought tickets to the Halloween thing, which was a trick-or-treat event at the park from 7 to midnight, but the rides are also open. It was awesome because, while everyone else stood in line to get candy, we got to just walk onto all the rides. We walked straight up to the Haunted Mansion twice (best ride ever!). In the end, we went to MK three times: one night for the Electrical Parade, again for the Halloween event, and on the day we left for another three hours. The Halloween parade was more fun than I expected, especially because the crowd was pretty small so we got front row seats (as opposed to the Electrical Parade where it was packed and we had tons of people in front of us).

- Animal Kingdom: Rock didn’t really like this one, and I admit I didn’t like how confusing the layout is, but I absolutely love seeing animals and the whole place is essentially one giant zoo. I wasn’t convinced that the Safari felt like a real safari, like other reviewers have said, but as far as zoos go, it was great to drive through all the animal habitats. Different, at least. The Lion King show had acrobats, singers, and dancers, so obviously that ranked high with me. I was upset I didn’t think to get FastPasses for the Dinosaur ride, because by the time we wanted to ride it, the line was 45 minutes long. At least we rode the Jurassic Park ride at Universal.

- Universal Studios: this place is huge! And I think the themes are even more cracked out than Disney’s. They have a Dr. Seuss section where everything (even the trees) looks like the books. They have an ancient temple section that has the Poseidon ride and this restaurant that resembles a cave. I liked the Jurassic Park section, I was not expecting that big drop at the end of that ride but it was fun. They have a comic strip section which had great buildings but I didn’t really recognize the comic strips (it’s older ones like Hagar, Popeye, stuff like that). The superhero section was fantastic and my favorite pictures will forever be Rock posing with Cyclops, Wolverine, and Captain America. Shame there was no Spiderman. The Spiderman ride was my favorite of the entire trip, hands down, even if I had to shut my eyes for a few seconds cause I was getting motion sick. We did the obligatory Jaws and Rock got soaked :-) and saw the Terminator 2 4D show, which is a 3D movie with some parts played by live actors. Very cheesy but very fun. And I think Universal does the movie theme much better, they have entire streets that really feel like actual movie sets, and Disney doesn’t really do that.

So I rambled for thousands of words and there are still other things I could talk about. It was a great trip and we were pretty lucky, the weather was great, the crowds weren’t too bad (most of the time), we got on a lot of rides, and I think I ended up seeing about 90% of the stuff I wanted to (which is way better than I expected). And we rode the Haunted Mansion ride four times all told :-) That’s enough of a win right there.

My Kingdom for a Ram

2010-10-07T13:03:00.006-04:00

Despite what it looks like, what with the numerous posts on the subject, I don't necessarily want to post about WoW all the time. I love the game but even I understand that this makes me seem, well, just plain hopeless. But every now and then things happen that I just need to write about. In my geeky head, it is as if mystical goings-on occur that nudge my faith in super-cosmic powers just a wee bit more. Such a thing happened this Tuesday night.

Those that read my recent ramblings on aquiring a certain purple dragon, obtained by doing many Herculean feats revolving around in-game holidays for the better part of a year (some of those occuring during actual real-life holidays and events, so I leave it up to you to decide how much I ignored my real life friends, family, and duties for virtual duties), may remember that one such holiday was Brewfest. And some of those very attentive readers may even realize that it's been a full year since the last Brewfest and that this year's festivities were upon us just a few weeks ago. Ah, but how time flies.

Trust it to real life to get in the way again, however. My Disney vacation (post still in the works; there were A LOT of pictures) intersected with the start of the holiday so there were four days lost, during which I could have consumed virtual beer as opposed to the real beer I did consume (it was tasty, to be fair). But more importantly, that was four days during which I could not fight the Brewfest boss for a miniscule chance at obtaining one, or both, of the very very very rare mounts that he drops. I was...not pleased.

I went to work at once upon my return. Last year I had seen one mount drop in 14 days and obviously lost the roll. This year: the gods were kind! I got one of the mounts on my third day of trying! It was exhilirating. And I was only the tiniest bit disappointed.

The reason the boss drops two mounts is because they are faction-aligned. One mount is designed off the Kodo mount that is exclusive to the Horde (my faction) and the other is designed off the Ram mount that is exclusive to the Alliance (the filthy enemy). Except these Brewfest mounts can be used by either faction. And well, I already have Kodos. I have many Kodos. Several colored Kodos. This does not make the drop any less sought after. I was certainly happier than a clam, but...a Kodo is not a Ram (hey, that rhymed!).

I kept going. I diligently killed the boss everyday for my daily attempt. I heard many horror stories of people having to destroy several beautiful Rams because they already had one and the item could not be traded. The days ticked down and hope was dwindling.

Tuesday, the last day, dawned and i didn't even realize it, I was so sure the festival ended the next day. With a heavy heart I arrived home that day to face my last attempt for the year. Hope was rock bottom. There was no "tomorrow is a new day" for my character. This was it.

And then, the stars aligned! The fates swirled, gushed, spun, gargled, and spit out a shiny Ram! I could barely believe it! It was EXACTLY like every cliche movie ending where the main character faces insurmountable odds and then, at the last second, evil is vanquished, the bad guy is killed, the guy catches up to the girl, the ring falls into the fire, all of it, but BETTER because I had no idea it would happen that way! It was glorious. Just...beautiful.

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

2010-10-04T07:32:00.003-04:00

I have to put up my Disney vacation post soon but I need to arrange my pictures first, so I figured I would put up this post quickly in the meantime. This is another book from my deck of cards.

A few weeks ago I came across this illustration, which I’m sure is pretty well known by now (it’s actually over a year old). I like the drawing, and it is especially helpful in this case because it almost sums up Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: he imagined all of these things happening at the same time.

Montag is a fireman who has only ever been taught to start fires, not to put them out. In this dystopian novel, books have been banned and are illegal, and any houses suspected or known to have books are burned down. The story follows Montag as he begins to question the reasoning behind the book burning, and as he meets others who teach him that things were very different once. That’s about it for plot, without giving away the ending. It’s a short book and a simple storyline but the significance is in the message. I feel lazy doing what I’m about to do but I love these passages from the book and they portray what Bradbury was trying to get across pretty well, and certainly better than I could. Besides, I think people are already fairly familiar with the book’s message. Like Orwell and Huxley, Bradbury was issuing a warning, for people to not get complacent, to not allow themselves to be lulled, to wake up.

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.”

“…when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities in the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved by any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.”

Unlike Orwell and Huxley, however, Bradbury didn't place the blame on the government first, but rather on the people. He saw people's interest in entertainment and television as catalysts for their disinterest in reading and in literature, a movement which government would take advantage of for their own purposes (in the book's case, to wage a long war indefinitely).

In the book, government has taken control of information, the truth can be modified and presented to the people as the government sees fit, and the people are complacent with it all because the ‘truth’ is good and entertainment is always on. The other message here is the harmful effects of a lack of education, either when it's taken away from people or when people don't want it anymore.

It's an interesting take, the idea that people can bring about their own dystopian future, not because there will be supremely powerful governments, but because people will forego their own free will, their own education, in exchange for comfort and pleasure (I'm resisting making aggrandizing comparisons to today's society because I'm not equipped or prepared to make that kind of post but, well, it doesn't exactly sound like science fiction, does it?). The book is more famously known as a warning against censorship and state-sponsored banning, but Bradbury has always emphasized that he was more concerned about people's interest in literature in the first place (though he appreciated the irony of his book being censored by Ballantine editors to remove swear words).

28 down, 24 to go.

The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time . . . Time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

2010-08-26T19:25:00.006-04:00

In The Handmaid's Tale, the United States' government has been overthrown by a totalitarian theocracy. This would be enough to make the current society a religious fundamentalist Nazi-like state, but there is also the added bonus that procreation and births have greatly diminished (either for environmental or social reason that are not fully explained). It has that Children of Men storyline going on. Now, you combine a patriarchal, male-driven, extremely religious, chauvinist society with declining birth rates and you end up with the story of Rachel and Leah from the Bible Remixed. That story tells of an infertile Rachel who used handmaids as proxies to have children for her:

And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.

And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath witheld from thee the fruit of the womb?

And she said, Behold my maid Billah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.
- Genesis 30:1-3

How messed up is that passage? Anyway, in the world of Gilead, handmaids such as the narrator are the first generation of women to be used as concubines for the wealthy elite class in order to bear them children.

The novel, as narrated by Offred (not her real name, just a moniker meaning she belongs to Fred, the head of the elite family that she serves), immediately plunges us into this strange new world where women are not allowed to read, they wear huge costumes to cover their entire body including most of their face, they must be chaperoned at all times, and public hangings are the daily ritual. Right away I'm thinking "yeah, right," eye-roll. I think the story begins to gain an eerie believability when Offred describes her life prior to the coup. She was married. She had a child. She had a job, a mother, she went to college. She describes herself as "I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five [feet] seven [inches] without shoes" (I immediately cast Natalie Portman in the role, though she is considerably shorter I think). That juxtaposition, the description that things were perfectly normal "before" until everything started to degrade and eventually became a bizarre reality, is what most captivated me about the story.

The Handmaid's Tale is thought provoking because, as strange and unlikely as the Gilead society may seem to us today, these things have already happened. Subjugation of the few by the many, total government control and societal shutdown, unchecked repression, trading freedom for security and progress. And that's just the larger themes. The book also explores sexual violence, social conservatism, religious fanaticism, censorship. Hell, these things are still happening. Atwood pushes these themes to the extreme, into territory that we can only hope is really just the stuff of fiction. She has said: "this is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusion." As a skeptic, I want to shrug off this comment as a lot of hot air. But as a woman, I already deal with enough male-centered, misogynistic views, and a noticeable dose of fear. I think a lot of other women do too, and the themes in the book are not completely off the wall.

Two themes from the book profoundly shook me and, to be perfectly frank, downright scared me. The first is when Offred begins to doubt whether her husband Luke harbors the same anti-feminist beliefs as the rest of society:

"He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's anymore. Instead, I am his. Unworthy, unjust, untrue. But that is what happened. So Luke: what I want to ask you know, what I need to know is, Was I right? Because we never talked about it. By the time I could have done that, I was afraid to. I couldn't afford to lose you."

It is a very sad and lonely moment where she wonders if she might lose all support. Wondering if someone you trust without question could betray you has to be the loneliest and most soul-crushing realization.

The other moments that were very discomforting were when Offred is trying to find the motivation, not just to keep living, but to accept that this is her new life and that the old one isn't coming back. Makes me wonder where my motivation would come from if my life were turned upside down. It is the backbone to any apocalypse/survivor/dystopian story and it always makes me wonder how I would survive, if at all. And those types of questions are definitely not just relegated to fiction.

The narrative uses stream of consciousness heavily and is almost too poetic most of the time to ring true, but in the book's epilogue we learn why Offred's narrative is like this. For such a short book, it takes on some hefty themes, presents very complex characters, and tells a unique story.

Another good pick out of my deck of cards. Thanks for the loaner, Subie!

I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance.

If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

It isn't a story I'm telling.

It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along.

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.

Even where there is no one.

Loremaster Sinnh

2010-08-20T07:26:00.031-04:00

Loremaster was an achievement that I resisted for a long time. It just sounded like the most time-consuming achievement that would end up requiring a lot of grinding and running back and forth. What do you expect from an achievement that asks you to complete 2,705 quests? That's a pretty big number! So I always looked in awe at people sporting their Loremaster titles but I also felt bad for the poor bastards that must have spent hours and hours every day grinding out all the last quests. As you can probably guess, I ended up being no better...

Gold Tag

I was actually relatively well on my way towards the Loremaster title before I actively started working for it. I had gone through all the Northrend quests (875 of them) and picked up the Northrend Loremaster achievement as a way to earn gold for my epic flying training. With that, I was already well past the 50% mark, more or less (obviously, a lot of quests, probably 35% or so, were completed during the leveling up process).

Now I just needed to make up my mind. That extra nudge came when Blizzard released a new patch that would let you query their server in order to find out which quests you had and had not completed. Previously, there was no way to keep track, unless you had a fine memory :( and/or spent some time tracking and filtering quests on wowhead.com. But now Blizzard had released the key. Pretty soon, add-on developers integrated the server query into their programs and created a compact little tool for telling you what quests you were missing and where to find them. Suddenly going back to the level 20 through level 60 zones where I had quested nearly two years ago didn't sound so daunting. At least I knew where to go and who to see when I got there. And so I did. Others may bemoan that the achievement got easier with quest tracking and to those I say: the best part is that my title and tabard look just like yours :)

Every time I wear the tabard, my reaction is something like "oh, it's hideous...I LOVE it!"

Once I decided to get started, I heeded Rock's advice, who slapped me upside the head (metaphorically speaking) because I was going to do Outland Loremaster before doing Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster, and that was just crazy balls because the upcoming expansion will make the current Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremasters go the way of the dodo, thus it would make sense to focus on the ones that might be going away. So thank you, Rock.

THEN I settled on starting with Eastern Kingdoms, as rumor has it that it's the easier of the two old world Loremaster achievements to do. And it's true! There are a ton of quests there, much more than you'll need for the EK achievement (I didn't even step foot in the Badlands and I still got the achievement). Most of that time was spent weeping in corners in the Blackrock Spire dungeons because I was horribly lost, and coming quite close to tearing hairs out when some random quest giver sent me to those dungeons for the umpteenth time.

By the time I got EK Loremaster, I could navigate Blackrock Spire with my eyes closed. It’s all about the little victories.

It is still on my bucket list that I have to do the Fallen Hero of the Horde quest line that starts somewhere outside Stonard. I even got the achievement without doing any of that, but I hear it is quite epic. Some of the highlights I did do for EK included: the Tirion quest line in Eastern Plaguelands to save his son; the ghost Pamela quest line to bring peace to a little girl's soul and restore her dad through a pretty badass battle; the quest line to obtain the key to Scholomance, including unlocking the ghost town of Caer Darrow; and the Blackrock Spire quests that reward you with wolf pup and spider pets.

Then I moved on to Kalimdor. People weren't kidding that Kalimdor would be a pain to complete. It is quite a battle to seek out the last 30 or so quests you need to finish. It's even more maddening to spend a couple hours on a single quest only to turn it in and find out it didn't count towards the achievement (there was much swearing involved). But Kalimdor does have some of my all-time favorite zones: Winterspring, Un'Goro Crater, Azshara, and the Shimmering Flats in Thousand Needles.

I love that the majority of the Un'Goro quests are a love letter to Nintendo: there's the quest to kill the gorillas that drop empty barrels, the quest to help “Linken” remember his identity by bringing him his Sword of Mastery, and the quest to help Larion or Muigin who reward you with a zapper to kill carnivorous plants. I also found a very out of the way quest in Azshara to help Kim’jael retrieve, among other things, his stuffed chicken and his wizzlegoober :) Wailing Caverns has a neat storyline and the quest to recover Cuergo's Gold is pretty amusing. However, hunting down five different animals in the Barrens to get items that begin quests does stick out as the most time consuming pain-in-the-rear portion of the entire Loremaster experience.

The quest line starts when you discover a sunken raft with a compass, a map, and a key.

But, with the old world zones out of the way, the rest of the trek was relatively painless. All that was left was three zones in Outland. I say that like it was just a trifle, but Netherstorm had 120 quests to complete, Shadowmoon Valley had 90, and Blade’s Edge Mountain had 86. So there was still some work to be done, but at least Outland marks the start of Blizzard's revamped quest mechanics, where quests didn't take you halfway across the world to continue or complete. Most quests are contained inside the zone and progressing through the quests is just a much better experience overall. I especially loved Shadowmoon Valley, which has the extremely long and lore-filled The Cipher of Damnation quest line. I also liked the Blade’s Edge quests to help the ogres and eventually become their queen, and the quests from the troll that got buried up to his neck and is out for revenge.

You can barely see me but there I am, right in the middle.

Finishing Loremaster in Outland really made me sad that I didn't experience end-game content during the Burning Crusade expansion as I have during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I haven't even stepped foot inside most of the Outland dungeons, even on my alts. That's definitely something I plan to do on my death knight or my alliance shaman.

And pretty soon that was it. Loremaster, done. Add one more poor slob to the pile. To be fair, it really didn't end up being as time consuming as I thought it would be. I even got several other achievements along the way, like The Keymaster, and I maxed out my reputations with the other Horde factions and got The Ambassador. I even got The Seeker achievement (Complete 3,000 quests), which I actually completed before I got Loremaster. That seems backwards to me, but I guess I ended up doing WAY more quests than I needed to. The craziest part is that there are still a ton of quests I didn't do, so I wonder how many there actually are in the game. According to my character's statistics on the WoW Armory, I've completed 3,170 quests. Lord! 0_0 And I wonder why I don't really remember them all.

Another fun quest in Netherstorm to save Bessy the Cow...who doesn't love cows?

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein

2010-07-27T15:27:00.005-04:00

Finally, it comes to this. It’s quite a feat really, I can’t remember the last time I got so impatient with a book that I just tossed it aside and never looked back. I certainly don’t think I’ve ever tossed a book aside with as much disdain and relief. Hell, I even finished the first Twilight book all the way through. So, unfortunately (or, rather, appropriately) Stranger in a Strange Land will now have this infamy for me: god, I hated this book.

First, a quick background. The book tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars during a failed expedition. He is raised by Martians until a second expedition brings him home, sometime during his early adulthood. The book then focuses on Smith’s interactions with Earth’s culture, and basically examines humanity and society from an outsider’s perspective (Smith’s bewilderment when he learns about money, clothes, God, etc, and how he tries to understand such things, or “grok” them). In a nutshell, that’s about it, eventually Smith focuses on religion and begins teaching Earthlings his point of view, which is derived from what he’s learned about Earth religion and combined with his Martian beliefs. I don’t believe the book calls it a cult but, come on. Anyway, I think he royally pisses people off but I didn’t read past the part where his new religion is getting off the ground and gaining a strong following.

The book, published sometime in 1961, became a favorite of the hippie movement, which is no surprise given it’s themes of paganism, sexual freedom, anti-government, individual liberty, so on. It won the Hugo Award for best fiction of the year and, according to Wikipedia anyway, it’s considered one of the most important works of science fiction. I mean, so far all of the books on that 52 books list have been groundbreaking and important in some way. So just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t…I don’t know, I can’t say great because it really wasn’t to me, but I guess I can say that it’s important. There’s even a real life religion (cult?) that exists today that is partly based on the religion created by Smith in the book.

I may really hate the book, but I certainly can admire it for a few reasons: for the time when it was published, it was very radical. A lot of scenes were edited out from the original publishing because they were considered to be too much for audiences (I’m assuming they’re referring to the commune scenes with free love, sexual freedom, multiple partners, what have you). The themes explored in the book were probably considered taboo back then, and probably still are to this day. And it has been embraced by thousands of people, it sparked a real-life religious movement, and it pioneered a real-life social movement as well. I don’t know how many other books out there have done that.

There are also other elements about the book that I will admit I can’t fault it for. Feeling dated, for example. This was written in the 60’s, that’s literally a different world to me. It’s the same thing as looking past Star Trek’s (the original series) miniskirts, beehives, and glossy filters. It was just a different time, it is allowed to feel dated. You can argue that there are plenty of works out there that don’t necessarily feel dated, but I think that’s just a bonus. If it feels dated, oh well.

I also can’t fault it too much for being set in an alternate reality that I didn’t believe in or like. This is science fiction, it’s supposed to be a completely alien environment, and while I completely did not believe in the environment, that’s not the books fault. Finally, I can’t fault it for producing emotional reactions from me that were unpleasant. For instance, I cringed during the scene where two of the main characters started having sex in the middle of the commune. Call me a prude, I probably am, but that was just painful to read. I’m sure I’ve read other books that elicited an unpleasant reaction, its part of the experience.

HOWEVER, I have MANY other issues that I think are completely the book’s fault. The entire book is incredibly preachy. It really feels like it’s just a vehicle for Heinlein to spout out every tiny minutiae of his beliefs. Ultimately, that’s what books are for an author, but dear god, good authors know how to do this without becoming a pain in the butt. It was just too preachy, entire pages of characters not really doing anything expect having a huge back and forth about this one thing or another. They didn’t even sound like real people. That’s the other thing. None of the characters were even remotely interesting, none of them had any unique personality, and at the end of the day I cared absolutely nothing for any of them. The “plot” may sound interesting in a nutshell (an outsider inspecting and dissecting our day to day lives while teaching us new things about ourselves in the process) but it was just drowned in pages and pages of preaching.

The famous parts, the ones about Smith becoming a new-age prophet and leading a new social movement, don’t happen till the last third of the book. Everything before it is legal battles regarding his inheritance (he’s the heir to everyone on the first failed expedition, and all of their estates), then goes on about…god I don’t even remember. The point is, it was all boring. It was a chore to keep flipping pages. There was absolutely no emotional investment required, all the characters were flat and shallow, and the plot happened in between huge segments of preaching about why society is wrong and what beliefs are the truths. A lot of people argue that some people just don’t get the book’s message. That’s crap. I “got” the message, I’m just not buying it.

Finally, I keep having a debate with myself. I found the book extremely hard to relate to. While the point is to hold up our society to a magnifying glass and allow us to examine ourselves as an outsider would, I could not relate to the society depicted in the book.

“But its science fiction, it doesn’t have to even remotely resemble the society you know.”

Yes, ok, but then that kind of misses the point of having the reader reflect about his own society.

“But other science fiction works (let’s take Star Trek again because Rock and I have been on a Star Trek marathon for the past year) present completely different societies and you can still relate to them.”

I don’t know, like I said, I didn’t believe in the environment or the way people acted and reacted, but I can’t necessarily fault the book for that. I feel the same about Klingons, for example…”today is a good day to die?” The. Hell? But if the point of the book is to get us to question ourselves, then shouldn’t it resemble us? Ugh, well, to me it didn’t, so take that as you will. I’m never thinking about that book again.

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

2010-07-21T15:19:00.003-04:00

This is not the book that I’ve been complaining about, that I (still!) haven’t been able to finish because it’s awful (not finishing it, either, screw that, so that is a post for another day). I picked up The Great Gatsby because it is also one of the last audiobooks I bought, and I bought that audiobook because it was another Frank Muller narration, but either way this book is also on my 52 books to read list. And, actually, this book falls into the rather large pile of books that I have read before but I may as well have been sleeping through at the time for all I remember about them.

And sleep through I probably did, in the most literal sense, because this book was assigned reading for my first year seminar in college (which, at my school, was sort of an introductory college class for freshmen, to help them bridge over the transition from high school to college level…the other three mandatory college classes being, what? A momentary diversion I guess…I still don’t know). Anyway, that seminar was in the English department and it had the tantalizingly grand title “The Jazz Age.” I picked that particular seminar because it promised to be a vibrant mixture of film, music, and literary studies on…well, you can imagine, and I figured that was a sound way of not being bored straight through it. It got me halfway there I suppose. We attended jazz concerts featuring our professor and his other ragtime professor buddies (yeah, it was pretty cool), watched Porgy and Bess in opera version (dear lord those were the longest four hours of my life, and I like musicals…an opera is like a musical right? No? hmm), and read really good works like T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (so cracked out but I really did enjoy it) and other poetry by William Carlos Williams, and so on. And, of course, we read The Great Gatsby, and it’s not that this is an obvious choice for a class like this, but that it is the reason why there is a class like this. Fitzgerald himself coined the phrase The Jazz Age and he put it all there in this book. So it’s really very sad that I don’t particularly remember the class discussions but I’m positive (even though I have no real memory or proof of this) that it was the first book we read and that the tone of the class followed from there.

If you want to know what American literature was like during this period, and what the period itself was like, you start with this book. The Jazz Age starts after the end of World War I, through the Roaring Twenties when prohibition existed and the stock market would have taken the 2008 stock market out for Cristal to drown its sorrow, and on to the Great Depression. My English professor would have emphasized how the book illustrates the rise of the ‘nouveau-riche’ in the wake of a soaring stock market, their clash with the established wealthy sectors, the opulence, seductiveness, and flamboyance of the two, and how it all crashes down as the Great Depression starts to take hold. Fitzgerald fittingly describes the flashy, wealthy period but he criticizes it as well, symbolized by the ultimate hollowness and lack of morals of his characters. Gatsby, with his new-money (questionably obtained), earnestly chases a wonderful, dazzling dream personified by the so-called love of his life, Daisy, only to realize that the dream was more splendid, and probably worth more, than Daisy herself.

It is a very tragic novel because it offers a glimpse of wish fulfillment for an endearing and charming character (Gatsby) only to crush it under the malicious, self-preserving, oblivious actions of everyone else (except possibly the narrator, who tells Gatsby, in the only sincerely affectionate moment in the story, that he’s worth more than the lot of them). That’s not to say Gatsby is played to be a saint and everyone else is played to kick him down. On the contrary, none of the characters ever feel one-dimensional and, to some extent, they all undergo change and self-reflection. It was a very good read and it helped me realize that if a book is good, you’ll want to keep turning the page without having to force yourself to do it (god, I hate that other book).

I also need to relate this here because I don’t know where else I would do it, but one of my favorite parts about reading this was reading Fitzgerald’s biography and telling Rock, “I think if I ever have a girl I will name her Zelda. It’s a real name you know.” And Rock replies, “I know, she was the wife of Fitzgerald.” And I say, “How the hell do you know that?” “Where do you think the Nintendo name came from?” “No way.” “Yeah, Miyamoto says he named the character after her.” And this blows my mind because I never would have learned that tidbit without him and it makes me wonder what the hell else is stored in that noggin and honestly how can someone remember so many details about video games, ever? But he does and it truly is a very neat thing to me :)

Ta-da: Zelda's glamorous image also inspired the name of video game creator Shigeru Miyamoto's character Princess Zelda in his The Legend of Zelda video game series. Miyamoto explained, "Zelda was the name of the wife of the famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title."

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been

2010-07-11T20:43:00.026-04:00

[Warning: EXTREMELY long WoW-related post ahead]

When achievements first came out in WoW, I looked at this achievement as something only a hardcore player would do. Not only does it take a year to achieve, it requires the player to perform a variety of tasks that range from easy to mind-numbingly repetitive to downright infuriating. AND you generally only have a week or two during which to do those tasks. AND every other player in the server is going after the same thing at the same time. For the uninitiated, WoW has in-game holidays that mirror real life holidays, such as Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc. For each holiday, there are holiday specific achievements and one meta-achievement (which means an achievement for completing the achievements). And there’s also What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, which is the meta-achievement for completing all of the meta-achievements of all the holidays. There are 8 holidays that are required for What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been, and all together those meta-achievements add up to around 70 achievements. So in a nutshell, we’re talking about completing over 70 achievements throughout the year, but only during specific times of the year. WHY on earth bother to do this, you ask? The reward for completing What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been is the Violet Proto-Drake, a flying mount that flies 310% faster than the normal speed. It’s the fastest mount in the game, a step ahead of the lowly 280% mounts. So there’s that…

I didn’t have much desire to attempt this when it came out, since I was still leveling up and I had never really participated in holidays and dear god that sounded like A LOT of work. But a little less than a year later my character was finally 80 and the first holiday during which she would be 80 was coming up (coincidentally, because of the timing of when the achievements came out, this was also the holiday during which players would be able to complete their long, strange trips and get their mounts…so maybe I was slightly influenced by all the shiny new purple dragons flying around, is what I’m saying).

And so I decided to venture into what still seemed to me to be a mad endeavor. I started hesitantly at first, telling myself I was just doing the holiday achievements for fun…but as one holiday after another came around I started to notice that I was getting increasingly more and more worried about completing each holiday’s achievements. I still looked forward to the holidays coming up, but I was also FREAKING OUT during each holiday. When the last holiday finally came around, I breathed a huge sigh of relief but I was so done with stressing out that when I got my Violet Proto-Drake, it was slightly anti-climactic…I probably said “good riddance” more so than “woot!.”

Well now I get to relive my year-long accomplishments and sincerely agree with The Grateful Dead: it was a long, strange trip. In order of appearance:

Brewfest

The one that started it all, an homage to Oktoberfest, complete with beer, beer goggles, pink elephants, rowdy drunken dwarves, and racing rams (which I don’t believe are featured in the real event…).

Most fun achievement: Down with The Dark Iron. You have to defend your festival (and most importantly, the beer!) from a pack of meddlesome dwarves that spring out of the ground like moles. Best part? The only weapon you seem to have are full beer mugs, so you chug and hurl the mugs at their heads, and get increasingly drunk as you do so.

The beginning of the grind: right out of the gate, this holiday has one of the more grindier requirements. You need to collect about 400 tokens to complete some achievements, and you get those by completing daily quests. No, you don’t get all 400 in one day, silly…then there’d be no point in doing them every day, now would there?

What eluded me: the holiday boss drops not one, but two unique mount models. Have I ever seen one drop? Not a chance. Did I group with someone who happily relayed that they won both in one day? :(

Hallow’s End

WoW’s Halloween, the fare is pretty standard, there are costumes, you go trick or treating to the different villages, eat candy, kill the Headless Horseman…that last one isn’t standard, is it?

Most fun achievement: also the best title for an achievement, Bring Me The Head of…Oh, Wait. Out of all the holiday boss fights, I adore the Headless Horseman fight the best. The setting is awesome (haunted graveyard), the voice acting is fantastic, and the fight mechanic is so much fun (he flings his pumpkin head at you as a distraction and during his last dying moments summons a pack of pumpkins to give you the hurt).

Most stressful moment: you’ll hear PLENTY about the abomination that is the random number generator for this holiday. Part of the meta is to loot a pumpkin pet and a pumpkin hat…which are random drops…which might not drop during the entire event…which has happened to people…talk about a sigh of relief when I finally got that darn hat.

What eluded me: I saw the Headless Horseman’s mount drop once during the entire holiday. Rock’s character actually tied during the roll but lost the tie-breaker. In the two years I’ve done this holiday, that is the only time I’ve seen it.

Winter Veil

It’s a goblin sponsored Christmas! I love this holiday because it really does put you in the Christmas mood. There’s actually no holiday boss for this one but there is a quest line to save Metzen the Reindeer (named after one of Blizzard’s creative team members).

Most fun achievement: With a Little Helper from My Friends. A lot of people stress out over the PvP achievements (and rightfully so if they’ve never done it or just don’t like it), but the sight of a pack of winter gnomes assembling for battle makes this achievement completely worthwhile.

It’s a merry Christmas: I love, love, love that you get to open presents under the tree on Christmas morning. The sight of all those players up early amassing under the tree is too funny, and SO Christmas!

What eluded me: actually, I managed to get all the pets on my main character (I pilfered pets from my alts).

Love is in the Air

I like this holiday so much I dedicated a whole post to it . This is easier than rewriting stuff here :)

Most fun achievement: first of all, the entire holiday is a vast improvement over what it used to be, and a lot of fun all around. But, that said, there isn’t one achievement that really sticks out as being the best. Dangerous Love would come close because the boss fight at the end of the quest line is my second most favorite boss fight.

Inspiration: for one achievement, you have to share a romantic picnic basket with someone and find true love. The image of Rock’s and my character sitting under the umbrella with hearts above their heads was so cute it became my wedding invitation.

What eluded me: the new boss fight also comes with the chance of looting a big rocket mount (complete with zebra-striped seats!). Alas, I did not see a mount drop the entire time. The Rocket is a Lie.

Lunar Festival

One of the less traditional WoW holidays taken from real life, this is a reference to the Chinese New Year. I’m not very familiar with the actual Chinese holiday but I believe some of the similarities are honoring the elders, fireworks, and gifts contained in red envelopes. But my ignorance is showing so, moving on…

Most fun achievement: eh, I’m pretty neutral on this holiday because on the one hand, it is incredibly time consuming since you have to visit a ton of elders located all over the world; but, on the other hand, all of the achievements are very easy and the entire holiday is the least stressful one. Plus, it was relatively fun to watch ANTM reruns while flying from one elder to another.

Most interesting and least interesting boss: the holiday boss for this event is the only boss actually located in the world (as opposed to inside an instance), and it requires around 10 players to kill easily, and it doesn’t matter what faction the players are (everyone gets credit). So it is very neat to see a bunch of players, of all levels and of either faction, gather around to kill him. Sadly, he doesn’t drop anything remotely interesting, that I’m aware of.

Noblegarden

WoW’s version of Easter, complete with bunnies (oh, so cute, bunnehs!), colored easter eggs, chocolate eggs, and flowers everywhere.

Most fun achievement: Spring Fling. Even bunnies are looking for love in WoW. If you park your pet bunny next to someone else’s bunny, they’ll fall in love, and little eggs pop up that hatch into baby bunnies!

Second most dreaded achievement: during the holiday you need to collect about 350 or so chocolates (I forget the number) in order to complete the other achievements. You get chocolates by finding hidden easter eggs in four specific towns…where every other player in the world is also trying to get 350 or so chocolates…my plan B, if I didn’t get the chocolates during my normal playing hours, was to wake up at 3 am…thankfully, it didn’t come to that.

What eluded me: another holiday with no boss :(

Children’s Week

Here we go. This is THE holiday most hated by the WoW community. See where it says “second most dreaded achievement” in Noblegarden? This is where you’ll see “the number one most dreaded achievement” that I also wish I could take out back and shoot in the head. But, besides that, I don’t dislike this holiday in general. I don’t think there is a real world counterpart to adopting a war orphan for a week and training him in the finer aspects of military life, including killing your enemies, touring dangerous locations, and killing deposed kings.

Most fun achievement: Aw, Isn’t It Cute? is doubly fun in that you get to do a neat quest line and get a neat pet as a reward. The quest line involves taking three orphans out for some sightseeing (like a Big Brother, Big Sister kind of thing). The reactions from the NPC’s involved and the orphans are very, very cute and more than a little heart-warming :)

The MOST dreaded achievement: people have written EXTENSIVELY about the pain that is School of Hard Knocks. The PvP achievements required would be easy enough to do as they are a main component of the mechanics for that particular battleground, were it not for the horde of other players that are out to simply kill you (the enemy faction) or to diabolically impede your progress (your own f-ing team!). This achievement really does bring out the worst in people, from griefers who are there to purposely make other people miserable, to the regular players who are just there to get their damn achievement regardless of what it takes and how many teammates they have to screw over to do it. It turns battlegrounds upside down for an entire week and does the exact opposite of what the Blizzard team “envisions:” instead of getting people interested in PvP, it turns people off entirely. Argh, end rant.

What eluded me: actually, I can complain a lot about School of Hard Knocks, but I didn’t have as hard a time completing it as I thought I would. Hell, I even did it twice because Rock was too lazy to do it for his own character. I was definitely the most stressed out, out of any other holiday, but I was lucky enough to walk into battlegrounds where people, even enemy players, were actually helping each other (the enemy team purposely losing the flag and such). But I even complain about this because that is NOT what battlegrounds are supposed to be. I would much rather see them change the achievement to win a certain number of battles or kill a certain number of players. At least that is in keeping with the spirit of the battleground. Ok, now end rant…

No, wait, did I mention you only get one week to do this and that the holiday was on the same week that my family was visiting for my wedding and during which I got (obviously) married? Not a good time.

Midsummer

A reference to Midsummer celebrations during the summer solstice, the event has activities that are all fire related (breathing fire, juggling fire torches, dancing around a fire pole).

Most fun achievement: Torch Juggler was the most fun achievement because I was completely dreading it until I realized how ridiculously easy it is to do :) And because when I was coaching Rock on how to do it I got to say “just click those keys like it’s Space Invaders at the arcade,” and he got it!

Once more around the world: the last of those holidays where you travel all over the world to visit or collect or do something. It was fun and cute during Hallow’s End (you’re trick or treating, how can it not be fun?), tolerable during Lunar Festival (I did it in October, it wasn’t so bad), and downright annoying during Midsummer (oh my god how many more places? I have to visit the alliance places also???).

What eluded me: another grindy holiday where you can complete quests every day to get tokens but it is literally impossible to get enough tokens to buy all of the special items…so I’m missing a pet.

Oh, god, I’m done.

In Which I Was Published

2010-06-17T08:50:00.006-04:00

I hate how it's relatively hard for me to post updates here. I really want to improve my writing. I think I could find it therapeutic if I really put some effort into it, but ultimately days wind down and restart and move forward and I never get around to doing what I think I should: writing here, calling my friends just to talk, starting a new project, working on my backlog of projects. And everyday I get a little more frustrated that I don't do those things, particularly getting in touch with friends. I realize this should be easier now with all the social networking craze, but I don't do Facebook. I can't do Facebook. I hate Facebook. I would have deleted my account long ago in protest but oftentimes it feels like the only remaining link I have to people I know. So it has remained even though I never post on it. I feel out of the loop with my friends sometimes because I'm not on Facebook. I don't like the preferred communication method so for now I will keep using the "older" methods, email, phone, skype, gmail chat (which I'm on nearly 9 hours a day). I gotta get to work on that ...

Anyway, this was only supposed to be a post about something relatively neat that just happened recently. One of those update thingies. Two articles I wrote for Wow.com were picked up and actually published on their site. I only told people about the first one but they actually published both articles about a week apart. It's a very silly thing and the writing is a bit lame (and some of it was embellished just a tad). But it was fun to do, it was a complete surprise to me that both got picked up, and it was a lot of fun keeping it a secret from Rock until the first article was actually on the web page.

http://www.wow.com/2010/06/04/breakfast-topic-when-your-gaming-gets-emotionally-charged/

http://www.wow.com/2010/06/11/breakfast-topic-learn-something-new-every-day/

In other news, I am woefully behind on my reading list. I thought it was due to wedding planning and not having any free time, but I've realized that I'm just horribly stuck on this one book because it is absolutely awful. It feels painful to read but I must finish it. It's been about three or four months now since I started it and I still have about 25% of it left. Groan.

In any case, my free time for the next few weeks will be taken up by what little of the World Cup I can manage to watch. During the weekdays, I can get one game in a night before it's time for bed. Yesterday was a big day, as Honduras took the World Cup field for the first time since 1982. It is literally the first time I've seen that happen in my lifetime, and likely to be the only time I see it in my lifetime with that track record :( Sadly, they lost that game to Chile, but they put on a formidable defense. It does say something that so far Chile has had the most strikes at goal in the tournament but only one actual goal. At least we didn't end up like Australia, though we still have to play Spain :( At least Spain got one-upped by Switzerland in the biggest World Cup upset so far, so maybe that says something too... All I know is that it was rather dusty in my apartment when the Honduran flag was carried out into the field...

And, of course, my WoW activities never cease. Next week is the start of the Midsummer Fire Festival, which means that for the next two weeks I will be pursuing the last world event achievements I need to finally get my hands on that glorious 310% speed mount. It was a journey that started last October. There will likely be a separate post about that later :)

Princess Saved! +3 Heart

2010-05-15T20:30:00.015-04:00

Another big adventure this past weekend: Rock and I got hitched. We had been talking it over for a while and it finally seemed like a good time for it (anytime when you’re not in school for 10 hours a day and studying your weekends away was bound to be a good time).

In true Rock fashion, instead of a bachelor and bachelorette party, we organized a trip to Funspot, NH for the day before the wedding. Rock, Clip, DIJFYS, Woodelf, and myself embarked on the three hour long journey on May 7th (yay for taking the day off from work!), picking up Subie and my family (sister, mother, brother, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, family friend) along the way. At Funspot, we were also joined by Whitebread and Moxsox. I don’t think my family was quite prepared for Funspot as I had been hopelessly unable to convey to them what this place was going to be like, or to explain to them how, very possibly, the three hour long journey (six hour long when you figure you gotta leave and go home at some point) would just not be worth it for them. I think they were a tad hesitant at first, a little unsettled by the decaying 80’s consoles, but eventually they picked up steam. They tried skeeball, Cat Alleys, air hockey, Nascar racing…I was so proud. I wasn’t quite as worried for the rest of the party folk since I figured they would be just fine on their own. Indeed, once I hit my limit right around 7 pm, Subie, my mom, my mom’s friend, and I hightailed it out and left everyone else to fend for themselves. My brother and sister and their SO’s followed soon after, but the rest of the guys were up there till 9:30 pm. So I guess that worked out for them.

Subie and I were dead tired however, especially around the time we were finally rolling into Northampton around 10:30 p.m. I was trying my hardest to stay awake so she could have company while she drove, but I was delirious from sleep towards the end. So delirious in fact that I didn’t realize I had forgotten to bring my own keys to get inside my apartment until we rolled into the parking lot. Rock had them…two hours north. A couple of frantic phone calls back and forth and I managed to locate the on-call maintenance guy who handles off-hour emergencies. Luckily we only had to wait out in the cold for about 20 minutes before the maintenance guy, as close to a knight in shining armor as I’m likely to see (no offense, Rock), showed up and let me in. Bless him.

The next day (The Big Day, or so the wedding blogs told me) started out easily enough but pretty soon, probably around the third call from Rock while I was at the hairdresser (as he’s trying to get last minute instructions for what things he has to pick up), it started to get hectic. Of course, it’s raining as I’m walking from the hairdresser to the car. A tad more soaked than I would have liked, I make it to the VFW where Rock and Subie have started setting up. I have to pat myself on the back for suggesting to my family that they show up around noon to help me finish setting up. I was pretty certain we would be done by then but their help was actually desperately needed. Once they showed up, we were able to head to Rock’s parent’s house to get ready and leave the rest of the party setup in their capable hands.

I guess when you have one HUGE thought running in your mind all day, you tend to forget little things, like my makeup…my contact lenses…Rock’s shoes…Yeah, I couldn’t see straight during the ceremony because I was not going to go up there in glasses, and I had a last minute stop at the CVS to get some makeup and borrow some from Subie and Rock’s Mom, and Moxsox got a pleading request to hit up the Walmart on his way to the party to get some shoes. THANK YOU!

Once that was straightened out, it was finally time for the big event. I still feel pretty bad that I wasn’t there to greet guests, I was so sure everyone would show up late :) But everyone was already there when we finally rolled up at 2 p.m. Pretty soon after that, we got the ceremony going.

Whitebread was amazing, she played The Legend of Zelda theme as Rock and I walked down the aisle. The people that didn’t recognize it (like my family, bless them) didn’t understand why half the room was laughing as we walked…she did an amazing job, it sounded perfect and I’m only sorry I forgot to ask her for an encore later. It pretty much made my day to have someone playing a fiddle at my wedding.

The ceremony, if you want to read it, can be found here. Subie was our officiant. The first decision Rock and I made, something we agreed upon without doubt or misgivings, was that we didn’t want a stranger to speak at our wedding. We wanted someone we loved and respected, and the choice was obvious. We are both so grateful to Subie for all her help that weekend, and for speaking for us (and you may not remember, but we still owe you gas money!). I was pretty nervous during the whole ceremony so I pretty much just remember that it was quick (about ten minutes, it was perfect!), that I gave Rock the wrong hand for the ring, and that I leaned in to give him a hug instead of a kiss.

After that, everyone got to mingle, eat yummy Atkins food, eat yummy Atkins cake, and listen to my horrible music selection (seems Shuffle will always pick the most annoying songs to play). Lucy, Rock's aunt, made a ton of amazing chocolate cookies. There were about six different kinds and they were all awesome. The rest of the time flew by, I felt like I barely got to talk to everyone. But we’re both so grateful to all those that came. Some of my friends can attest that I was a bit nervous and skeptical about my wedding, but I had more fun than I ever expected, and it’s obviously due to all the friends that were there.

The title to this post came from the huge surprise that our guests arranged for us. The last thing I expected was a “Just married!” decorated car. The backseat full of balloons, the Optimus Prime piñata tied to the hood, the streamers and balloons hanging from the car…it was fantastic! No less than three people almost gave the game away by coming up to us and going on about the Transformers’ car, but neither of us had any idea what they were talking about. It’s a good thing we were so preoccupied with everything else, I guess.

Afterwards, Mr. and Mrs. P hosted a bunch of us at their place. I was dead tired by then and did not partake in the fun as much as I should have, but it was something else to see my brother and brother-in-law playing the accordion, and my sister and sister-in-law Wii bowling for half an hour. And it was also something else to see Rock go hoarse from talking so much with everyone. Poor guy, now he definitely worked the socializing front much better than I did.

Well, that was an extremely long post and this is a good place to end :) It was a fun day. I can’t wait to host the first year anniversary party.

My Septoplasty

2010-04-30T13:02:00.003-04:00

I feel like I’m about to write a Scrubs episode. Well, truth is I had a bit of an adventure a couple of weeks ago. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had nose problems. I won’t say they were very serious problems, I’ve never had seasonal allergies or painful sinusitis or nose infections. But my nose has always had…issues. Generally speaking, my nose gets stuffed up a lot and very often, particularly when I’m trying to sleep…even, annoyingly, when I’m dead tired and it is 4:30 a.m. but I can’t fall asleep because I can’t breathe. Lately it had gotten so bad that I could only ever sleep in one position all night long, otherwise my nose would stuff up and I’d have to breathe through my mouth. At least it hasn’t gotten to snoring.

But aside from that I always knew that my nose was a bit off. I’ll be revealing too much over here with this information, but the truth is I could feel that my nostrils were not at all even, and that one of them was nearly closed off entirely. Now that I’m no longer a starving grad student, I figured it was time to get this checked out and see if I could do something about it. And so I went to see the otolaryngologist, and let me tell you, this guy was good. Within five minutes he told me the simple solution was a septoplasty and within ten minutes I had scheduled a day for the surgery. Not bad. I really should have been a doctor.

For the weeks leading up to the surgery, I kept going back and forth on whether it was worth it and if I shouldn’t take more time to think things through. I consulted a very helpful friend who just graduated from med school this year (her response: it’s not open heart surgery, just get it done!). And I rationalized that I should get it done while I have good medical insurance. But I’ll admit I was a little terrified. I’ve never had surgery before.

As you can imagine, I was quite nervous during the days leading up to it. The day before the surgery I got a call from a nurse to give me some instructions and to set up the time of the surgery. I had already been told that I wouldn’t be able to eat or drink anything (not even water!) starting at midnight the night before, but I figured, ah no biggie, the surgery is probably scheduled for 10:00 a.m. or something, I can do that. The surgery was scheduled for 2:00 p.m.! Holy hell, I was not happy. See, I’m sure I’ve gone that long without eating before, whenever I’ve had a lot of work, or slept for twelve hours…hell, I’ve gone nearly 20 hours without being able to hold food down, much less look at it, after a bad hangover (not good times). But as soon as someone tells you have to do this on purpose, it becomes misery. I had a late night dinner and I tried to stay up as late as possible to sleep in the next day (did not work, asleep by 1:00 a.m., up by 8:00 a.m.). I forced myself to take a nap that morning and that got me through till around 11:30 and then I was off to the hospital.

There, I got checked in, put on scrubs (so comfy!), put on those little sock booties, and then talked to the nurse, and the anesthesiologist’s assistant (the actual anesthesiologist had gone missing for a bit, which my doc was not happy about cause the guy was holding up the surgery). I got an I.V. put in, for the first time ever, but thankfully I’m not afraid of needles. This whole time Rock is sitting with me and I’m being all nervous cause I’m worried about what it’ll feel like to fall asleep and then waking up. He tries to reassure me as best he can, bless his soul, but not much is helping. I get to consider my upcoming DOOM for about an hour until finally the doctor comes back and tells me to follow him to the OR. I think I must have made a pretty funny sight waddling down the hallway in my too-large-scrubs and hairnet. The OR was pretty neat looking and I’m kind of disappointed that I didn’t take a few seconds longer to just look around at all the cool stuff. I laid down on the bed and I can still hear my doctor complaining about the anesthesiologist being late and about why I wasn’t hooked up to the I.V. yet (I guess I was supposed to already have been knocked out at this point), and all this time I’m still really worried about what it will feel like to fall asleep. Well, Rock was right in the end, I was sweating the small stuff. The last thing I remember is the nurse coming over to take my glasses off my head, and me looking up at the huge lights…and that’s it. I had been on the bed maybe 20 seconds and that’s all I remember.

The next thing I remember is fighting to wake up and trying to open my eyes, and seeing everything looking very blurry. I also remember thinking “oh man, have they not done the surgery yet? What happened?” I don’t know, for some reason it felt like no time had passed at all. Soon after though I started to feel really nauseous, and I realized my mouth was horribly dry. I think a nurse was standing nearby because I remember telling someone that I was very nauseous and thirsty, but I also think I could have been talking to myself at that point. I also remember beeping going off and one of the nurses rushing up to me and straightening out my arm. I guess I had pinched the I.V. Eventually someone came over and offered me ice chips, bless them. Looking back on it, that was the weirdest part, was waking up. And for about three hours afterwards, I felt so groggy, I couldn’t believe it. The nurse helped to dress me and then Rock came back and we sat for awhile in recovery till I was ready to go, but the whole time I felt so groggy and blah and not there. I couldn’t really lift my head and I felt dizzy.

Eventually I got home and I got to rest. I have to say, Rock was amazing this entire time. First being helpful in the hospital and trying to get my mind off my nervousness, and then going out to get my pills and get dinner. And then patiently putting up with my whims (“I don’t think I want the sandwich for now, too hard to chew, can you heat me up some soup?” “This soup is not very good, can I have the sandwich back?”). All in all, the pain wasn’t that bad. It may have had something to do with the narcotics they prescribed for me, but I wasn’t in any bad pain other than a headache. My nose was bleeding a little bit and I had to wear a gauze strip taped to my face, but the bleeding went away the next day. Other than that, I just had to be careful not to touch my nose, even wrinkling my nose was painful, but it was fine if I just left it alone.

About five days later I went back to the doctor to get my packing removed. That was…not a fun experience. He had to cut up the stitches before pulling out the packing and it felt like first he was trying to pinch through to my brain and then it felt like he was pulling something out of my brain and when the packing finally came out I could feel the suction all the way in the back of my throat. I’m not ashamed to say I cried.

It’s been about a week and a half since then. My nose hurts just a little bit now if I touch it or wrinkle it, and I’m not ready to blow my nose still. I also still have a couple of stitches in there that have to dissolve at some point. As far as breathing, well I definitely think it helped, I can breathe much more easily out of the nostril that was nearly closed. Sleeping has gotten easier and I can even sleep on my other side now. I have to see the doc again in three weeks, and by that point I hope my nose is better than ever! Seems to be on the right path anyway.

Be Here Now - Oasis

2010-03-29T13:11:00.002-04:00

I was having a particularly hard time figuring out how to start this review. And then I read the Wikipedia page on Be Here Now and now…oh, my, so much to say. This album came out in August 1997, hot off the heels of Morning Glory. By then, Oasis was generally praised as “the biggest band in the world.” Those are Noel’s words, obviously, but it really wasn’t that far off. The media craziness that surrounded the band around this time (’96 to ’97) was huge. Most of my scrapbook articles and photos come from this period, because the band was EVERYWHERE. Making headlines for going on tours, cancelling tours, losing band members…my favorite piece of video-recording from this time was MTV’s Unplugged, which Liam decided to sit out complaining of a sore throat (brother Noel took up the vocals that day and, actually, sounded pretty good), but then sat at the side balcony heckling Noel all night. That crazy kid. And then followed it up by singing off-key and spitting during Oasis’ performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards in NY. Man, those were good times. Those videos still exist somewhere back home :)

Amidst the adoration and fame and constant press, there was much drug abuse. This pretty much sets the stage for how the band recorded Be Here Now and how the album ended up. If there is one thing critics will agree on about Be Here Now is that it is a bloated, overblown album. A few examples from the Wikipedia page:

- In 2007, Q magazine described the fact that Be Here Now is often thought of as "a disastrous, overblown folly — the moment when Oasis, their judgment clouded by drugs and blanket adulation, ran aground on their own sky-high self-belief."
- Q magazine described the album as "cocaine set to music."
- Irish Times journalist Brian Boyd wrote: "Bloated and over-heated (much like the band themselves at the time), the album has all that dreadful braggadocio that is so characteristic of a cocaine user."
- “It’s the sound of…a bunch of guys, on coke, in the studio, not giving a fuck. There’s no bass to it at all; I don’t know what happened to that…and all the songs are really long and all the lyrics are shit and for every millisecond Liam is not saying a word, there’s a guitar riff in there in a Wayne’s World style.” – Noel Gallagher
- "If he [Noel] didn't like the record that much, he shouldn't have put the fucking record out in the first place...I don't know what's up with him, but it's a top record, man, and I'm proud of it — it's just a little bit long." – Liam Gallagher

How awesome are the Gallagher quotes? Love it. Sadly, though, I gotta agree. But, that means I also agree with Liam. Let me say this first though: I didn’t remember remembering the album so well. Does that make sense? I mean, I really thought that I hadn’t paid too much attention to it, that I hadn’t listened to it that many times when I first bought it. But when I put it on these past few weeks, it was like finding a long lost friend. I knew all the songs, all the words, all the harmonies. I don’t feel any real emotional attachment to it as I do to the others, but I still, clearly, enjoyed the hell out of it. Which is why I understand what people are saying about overblown, but I still love it.

Yes, the album is excessive. Every song is looong, and every song is dying to sound epic. Think of an album made up entirely of Champagne Supernova wanna-be’s (but add about 5 minutes of play time to each). The album itself clocks out at around 71 minutes, nearly 20 minutes longer than either of the previous two albums. There are guitar tracks upon guitar tracks, several key changes within the same songs, and just buckets of sound. Listening to the album all the way through in one sitting can be a bit tiresome. Looping it in my car stereo for three days straight was overdoing it just a tad (a tad being the equivalent of eating three or so Cadbury cream eggs in a row…I have never done this…one egg induces a sugar high just fine).

BUT every song does sound masterful. Each song taken on its own sounds epic and sound-defying and each one induces that same high that Champagne Supernova was going for. I agree with Liam. I don’t know what Noel is going on about. Every song on that album is fantastic, in terms of composition, complexity, layers and layers of sound, editing, riffs, harmonies, key changes, lyrics, drums, vocals, guitars, the whole thing. The album fails because it is too much to take in at once (trust me…too much), but every song is memorable. Liam’s voice is as powerful and unique as ever and Noel demonstrates what makes him such a good songwriter and guitarist. Like the previous two albums, Noel wrote all the songs. Also like those albums, the lyrics tend to be silly, nonsensical, and optimistic, but (and I think this is something I haven’t quite gotten across in my other reviews) his lyrics also tend to be poetic and deep. Noel has often been described as something of a romantic and a philosopher. Every now and then he tries too hard and then things sound forced or silly, but in general he writes pretty, meaningful, simple, relatable words.

I was a bit worried that all these years later I would listen to this album and only think “yep, bloated, long, what the hell were they thinking;” I did, but I also rediscovered how awesome all the songs are on their own.

(What's the Story) Morning Glory? - Oasis

2010-03-08T12:31:00.004-05:00

This is where it all started, the first album I acquired. I must give credit where it is due, however: (What's the Story) Morning Glory? was originally a present to my sister. I don’t recall if she didn’t like it or what, but I slowly appropriated it until I wound up listening to it pretty much every day after school. The album came out in the Fall of 1995, and she received it sometime that year, if not early in ’96, so I would have just turned 13 or so…yep, definitely ripe for that “let me obsess over music or boys” phase. I wore that album out, too. I listened to that album so much that the one I currently own isn’t even that same one from ‘95/’96 because that one got so badly scratched, I had to buy a new one. The funny part is, since I listened to it last week, it must have been years since I had last heard it. Time is really creepy when you start to put it that way…

Anway…this is a seriously good album. And it doesn’t much matter if I’m biased about this or not, it’s pretty well agreed upon that this is a good album. For example, I just learned that this album won the Brit Award for the best British Album of the last 30 Years at the 2010 Brit Awards. I’m not exactly sure what the Brit Awards are, but, well, at least someone out there agrees that this is a seriously good album. It has a lot of the same emotional power, rock exuberance, heartfelt lyrics, and everything else that made people take notice of Oasis when Definitely Maybe came out, but it is much more polished than their debut album. You lose some of the rawness that was in the debut album, but you still get great harmonies and ultimately a more put-together sound.

I must concede some gritty truths though. I would not trade Hello for Rock ‘N’ Roll Star for best opening track. Hello is good but Rock ‘N’ Roll Star feels much more emotional. I would also be hard pressed to pick Wonderwall over Live Forever. But you got my favorite Oasis song of all time here: Don’t Look Back in Anger. I guess it’s a disservice to Liam, who really shines in this album as a vocalist, even more so than in Definitely Maybe, but I always had a particular fondness for Noel’s voice, which made this song particularly awesome. There’s also Some Might Say, arguably one of my top five favorite Oasis songs. And the amazingly epic Champagne Supernova. I really like this description I found for that song in Allmusic.com: it succeeds at coming off with a “top-of-the-world/end-of-the-movie feeling.” So true. And, it’s got everything you need in an epic song, from the mellow intro to the rising sound, and the waves crashing (literally) at the end. The length contributes to the epic feel also, topping out the album at 7 minutes and 30 seconds. But it never feels overblown or long.

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? feels a little less rock ‘n’ roll heavy than Definitely Maybe, but it definitely showcases good song-writing, good vocals, good musicians, a well put-together band, and it pretty much sums up a big chunk of the rock scene of the ‘90s. So, I feel like I could have done a lot worse when I was 13 than listening to this album (cue Rock saying I should have been badass like him and listened to Iron Maiden =P), and years later I still love it.

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

2010-03-01T12:49:00.011-05:00

I had Dickens pegged all wrong. Having never read any of his books, I had mistook him for a children's book writer (this is what happens when watching Scrooged is pretty much the only association one has to Dickens). Admittedly, since I've read exactly one of his books, I may now be mistaken in assuming he didn't write any children's books. Clearly I could remedy this by reading a little bit about him, but this review isn't about Dickens in general, but the one book in particular. My point being, I didn't expect A Tale of Two Cities to be such a drag...and gory...and really sad...and violent...and all-out depressing...and bloody. You see what I mean. Then again, what on earth did I expect about a story that takes place during the French Revolution?

The problem about a historical novel, for me, is that I generally know next to nothing about the historical setting in which it takes place. As such, I take the author's word at face value, without question. In this case, Wikipedia also informs me that the author's primary source was The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle. And while I wouldn't necessarily put Wikipedia down as a reference in a college paper (have college professors given up on this and are now just thankful their students read up on a subject at all?), it's good enough for me as I read the book and write this review.

And here's what I learned: the French Revolution really sucked. So maybe it brought about a shake-up in the monarchies, and got them to sit up and realize that starving your nation isn't exactly advantageous. But the whole business itself sounds like one of those They Live nightmares. Apparently even looking at someone cross-eyed was enough to get your head "razored" off, to paraphrase a brutally graphic line from the book, and absolutely anyone around you could end up turning you in as a traitor of the Republic. Even mourning the death of someone that was accused of being a traitor could get you killed.

Overall, Dickens paints a very detailed picture of what life was like in France and England at the time. He doesn't hold back in detailing how violent the times were, particularly when describing the mobs, such as the scene detailing the storming of the Bastille (again, Wikipedia informs me that the brutality Dickens described did, you know, actually happen). Dickens doesn't go so far as to justify the mob and their violence, but it is clear that he understands their motiviations. His descriptions do paint the revolutionary mob as essentially a pack of wild animals hungry for blood, but at the same time he's saying "hey, you push people down long enough and this is what you get." He sees that England could head in the same direction if the authorities continue to oppress the people as he described earlier in the book: "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind." Kinda seems like it would apply to the current situation in the U.S., and maybe an American Revolution is in the way, but that's...a completely different post.

The book's plot is relatively complicated as it intersects the stories of about a dozen characters. In fact, there is so much coincidence in this book you'd think there were only 50 people living in the entire world. The probability of some of these characters actually crossing paths as much as they do, over the time span in which events happen, and at the particular junctures in which they meet and cross, must be non-existant. But it makes for very good story-weaving and surprising moments.

The narration is not at all as straighforward as I expected (why I expected that I'm not sure). Quite the opposite, the narrative is poetic, archaic, stylish, metaphorical, convoluted, and very detailed. It's the kind of book that yields a ton of memorable quotes, and I'm not just talking about the "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" bit. Nearly every page has very smooth, powerful writing, which can sometimes be difficult to get through, but overall the story-telling is unique and interesting.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable book. Even though the subject matter is pretty violent, and even though the book can be really depressing at times, it's a good read and the ending is...well, I won't deny a tear or two was shed.

22 down, 30 to go.

Definitely Maybe - Oasis

2010-02-22T14:19:00.003-05:00

Every now and then I’ll find myself randomly listening to an Oasis song and recalling how much I like this band. Oasis is one of the few celebrity things that I obsessed about when I was a teenager. Heavily. Buying all their stuff (as much as I could find, anyway, which was really just their main albums since their singles never made it to Honduras), visiting numerous fan websites, and collecting new stories and photographs. I even had a scrapbook of sorts (lots of interviews printed out and kept in a folder). I taped their Unplugged session and Live by the Sea documentary back when MTV was worth something (I haven’t bothered looking through my old VHS tapes back home to see if those are still around…). Admittedly it was easy to follow their news since they were constantly stealing media attention by getting into brawls, dropping world tours, and of course the wibbling rivalry between brothers Liam and Noel (I always liked Noel better). And, because Oasis is one of the few bands (if not the only one, come to think of it) for which I have all major studio releases, I end up getting this irresistible urge to listen to their entire discography in chronological order. And this time I’m gonna write down my thoughts about it. I was going to make this one huge post but I have nine albums, so to keep it organized I’ll split it up into several posts.

Going in chronological order, we have their debut album Definitely Maybe, which was actually the second album of theirs that I purchased. I’ve been mulling over how hard it is to evaluate this album because I cannot separate the emotional attachment I have to it. I wore this album out. Even if it could be explained to me why the album as a whole or any one particular song is just awful, I would still be completely biased and in love with this album. Nowadays, if I don’t like a song on a CD I just skip the song. I would not be able to skip a song on this disc. I know every song as soon as I listen to the first chords. Even a song like Digsy’s Dinner, which is one of their most off-the-wall songs ever, holds a special place in my heart. So I don’t know if I can be objective.

Here’s what I know though. Rock ‘N’ Roll Star is definitely the most awesome opening song to an album, ever, hands down. The album as a whole is full of Oasis classics, songs people still remember them by: Supersonic, Cigarettes & Alcohol, Shakermaker, these are classic Oasis. Live Forever is AMAZING. It’s more than an Oasis classic, it’s up there with the greatest songs of all time. Slide Away should have been a bigger hit (it should have been released as a single). Liam Gallagher does indeed have one of the most distinctive, original, powerful, emotional voices in rock. The band may be channeling The Beatles frequently, but they do it well. The lyrics tend to be silly, nonsensical, and very British, but they can also be very powerful. The lyrics, along with the melodies, give you a sense of the working class background the band members came from, as well as their dreams, their cockiness, and their optimism.

Those are my blanket statements regarding this album. I couldn’t back them up with any proof that would be beyond question, but this is how I see it. And, what’s even more amazing, is that this is a debut album. Their whole sound and style was tight right from the beginning. Granted, the album does sound rough around the edges, but that raw sound only adds to the rocknroll attitude. That’s another fitting description: this album has attitude, and lots of it.

Ten Little Indians - Agatha Christie

2010-02-18T10:19:00.004-05:00

I remember reading one of Agatha Christie’s mysteries before, one featuring Poirot, but I don’t remember anything about it except that it was a chore to get through. I wasn’t too excited, therefore, when I randomly shuffled this card from my deck. Nevertheless, I have to admit that this was a very good read. Unfortunately for you, I don’t want to say too much about this book because it really needs to be read without any possibility of spoiling the mystery. Actually, I guess it’s good for you that I don’t say too much.

The story doesn’t actually feature Christie’s famous detectives. Actually, no one character is ever the main character throughout the whole novel. The plot is classic, and will undoubtedly sound familiar: a group of strangers are summoned to an isolated island for different, perfectly legitimate reasons, only to be killed off one by one. Now, put that way, it just sounds like the plot of every bad summer-camp-for-randy-teenagers-getting-killed-by-a-freak-in-a-hockey-mask type movie. What you get with Christie, though, is a good narrative of suspense, fear, cabin-fever, and most importantly, one hell of a mystery. I was wondering the entire time, who the hell did it? Believe me, you’ll never guess. Don’t even spoil it by looking this up in anyway. Hence why I’m not linking any articles related to the book. I liked that the plot, with all its twists and turns, is very simplistic. There aren’t any crazy “oh that is not possible!” moments (well, not too crazy), just a really interesting mystery story that gets going right from the start. That's all I can say about it.

21 down, 31 to go.

Something in the Air

2010-02-15T08:40:00.000-05:00

Ah, Valentine's Day. Funny how, even though this is one of the few years where I'm actually dating somebody, I didn't do anything particularly special on February 14th. I guess you could count laundry, bathroom cleaning, and grocery shopping special. Jalapeno poppers from the local mexican restaurant were involved after Rock's and my hard work, so there is that. So while Sunday may not have been a romantic, chocolate-stuffing affair (and in general I'm not one to get too excited about this day anyway) there is something different about Valentine's this year: I've pretty much been celebrating it all week long.

This doesn't mean that I've suddenly become a poster child for heart-shaped Hallmark cards. I mean, I did pester Rock all last week about how he had to buy me a heart-shaped chocolate box, but it's not the heart-shape I care about: I just like any holiday that gives me an excuse to eat large amounts of delectable chocolates (in fact, won't Cadbury cream eggs soon be taking over the seasonal aisle at the grocery store?). And I have been more than a litte giddy about the awesome roses that Rock got on Friday, which came with chocolate frosted cupcakes and was a complete surprise. They look beautiful, and even though I've always felt bad about cutting flowers up, and even though I know I'll feel terrible when the roses start to wilt, I just love how they look. So pretty!

I am liking these SO MUCH :)

When I say I've been celebrating all week long I mean that Valentine's for me pretty much started on February 7th when the Love is in the Air holiday event kicked off in WoW (bet you didn't think that's where this was going...or maybe you did, I am pretty predictable I suppose). Yes, since last sunday I've been trading virtual love tokens, eating virtual chocolates, spraying virtual perfume, and looking for love under a virtual picnic umbrella. Achievements have been gotten and my character is now known as Sinnh the Love Fool. For the next week, while the event continues, I also have the chance of aquiring a Valentine's ooze pet and/or a Big Love Rocket mount (though I'm never that lucky).

What I enjoy best about the WoW holiday is that it's absolutely silly but it's also rather twisted. You don't gift people chocolate to show you care. You pelt them with chocolate samples produced by the Crown Chemical Co. for a cut of the profits. You get rewards for gifting bracelets to the different faction leaders. That sounds nice, until you realize that you are making the bracelets from the bones and teeth of the beasts and humanoids that you slaughter. And there's a mini quest to track down who is really behind the "love sickness" that is plaguing everyone (turns out it's some evil apothecary that wants to use rockets to deploy mind controlling chemicals to everyone at once...evil he is). It's events like this that really remind me how much I love this game :)

Fun Spot 2010

2010-02-04T07:30:00.007-05:00

This past Saturday was a blast. Rock had spent the last couple of weeks trying to talk himself out of this impending road trip, but I think he knew (I certainly knew, though I let him work it out on his own) that it was just a matter of time before we headed out to the funnest spot in New Hampshire: Fun Spot! (side note: I am appalled that Word doesn’t think funnest is a word). He was starting to drive me a bit batty talking about Fun Spot all the time. I would try to steer him faster into the direction I knew he was headed: “well why don’t we take a day off and go up some weekday?” and “why not go this weekend?” and “it’s been so long since you’ve gone, you might as well.” All such helpful hints and suggestions were considered and then met with a “meh.” So Rock does the next obvious thing. He wakes us up on Saturday morning, completely decided to head to Fun Spot…if I really wanted to go too, of course. And he says I’m the indecisive one. I wasn’t intentionally trying to torture him, but since I had not woken up with the indescribable urge to drive to New Hampshire for three hours, I was a tad…hesitant.

The thing with Fun Spot is (as I told him) I always have so much fun when I’m there…but I don’t spend weeks thinking about the place and I don’t get as nostalgic about it as he does. See, Fun Spot is one of the largest arcades still featuring 80’s arcades, and this is a big deal to Rock. As a child of the 80’s, he remembers where and when he first played several arcades (it’s actually kinda weird). I grew up playing Nintendo but I didn’t grow up with any arcades around. I can see how stepping into Fun Spot for him is like stepping back into a magical childhood world that he lived through. For me, it’s a magical childhood world but I’d never seen it before.

It's about what you'd imagine...lots and lots of arcade games

This is now my third time to Fun Spot and each time I’m surprised at how quickly the time flies and how much fun I’ve had and how many games there are that I still have not been able to play. I’ve noticed I’ll head for the same machines though: Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pacman, Burgertime, Contra, Gauntlet, Warlords, Donkey Kong, just to name a few.

The place has another claim to fame, which I particularly like. Several parts of the documentary King of Kong were filmed there. If you have not seen this documentary, do so, now. I think you can watch it instantly on Netflix if you’re a member. Even if the subject matter didn’t appeal to me, I would still say that this is an awesome, funny, interesting, heart-felt documentary. Seriously, go watch it. Now!

As I write this post I can’t help but remember all those arcades, my personal favorites and all the others I haven’t even tried yet. I think next time around I won’t wait for Rock to plod through weeks of indecision. As soon as he mentions he’s getting the urge to visit Fun Spot, I’ll pick up the car keys and head out. Maybe he’ll come to his senses by the time I’ve warmed up the car.

P.S. I do sincerely apologize to Rock, who was sweating bullets while he drove, for turning up the heat throughout the three hour drive cause I was freezing... I feel really bad about that, to this day...poor critter

The Stand - Stephen King

2010-01-15T07:45:00.002-05:00

I’m a little surprised at myself when I say this, but I don’t think I really have anything in particular to say about The Stand. I’m surprised because I found it to be a good book (I would definitely recommend it to others), and it was engrossing (once I picked it up I wouldn’t put it down again for hours). But, other than that, I have nothing much to say about it. I guess those two things should be enough, really, but what I mean is nothing really hit home that much, not the characters, or the ending, or the supernatural elements. They were all just all right, good, nothing to get overly excited about. In any case, I don’t think as highly of it as I do of Wizard and Glass. But the review must get written, so here it is.

The book is divided into three books. In the first book, King provides an awesome story and the best part of the entire book, in my opinion. A superflu epidemic (oftentimes compared to the swine flu, and let me tell you how enjoyable it was for the hypochondriac in me to read about a massive deadly flu right in the middle of our very own swine flu panic) has been accidentally released from a U.S. research facility, wiping out something like 99.9% of the world’s population. King’s narrative throughout this whole first part is phenomenal: suspenseful, tragic, scary (terrifying even), believable (to me, at any rate), and even funny sometimes, as he describes the outbreak, the spread, the reactions, society’s downfall, the panic, basically the meat of any apocalyptic story. The main characters are setup and you start to really care about their different storylines and personalities.

The second part of the book introduces the supernatural elements of the story, where the remaining survivors begin to have dreams in which they are either drawn to Mother Abigail (the archetypal good force) or to Randall Flagg (the archetypal devil). The rest of the story plays out as a battle between good and evil (the spiritual, religious kinds, with God, hell, demons, etc.) as the remaining survivors either build up a democracy along with Mother Abigail or succumb to Flagg’s domination. The last book recounts the final stand and the resolution of this good vs. evil battle.

The supernatural elements, well they’re fine…possibly a bit silly if you stop to think about it but this is King after all. Supernatural stuff is part of the deal when you read his books, silly or not. But I thought the pace of the story gets a big bogged down, things get dragged out a bit more, characters get lost in the shuffle of too many characters, and so on. I’m not saying parts 2 and 3 are bad. They’re still engrossing and interesting, but the high point of the book was part 1 and everything else leaves you with a feeling of “well I guess I gotta keep going here just to find out what happens,” and sometimes it even leaves you with a feeling of "oh come on, the Hand of God, really, THE God? phhht." Parts 2 and 3 also take on a Lord of the Rings type feeling, which King has acknowledged is intentional. I didn’t realize it was intentional until I read the wiki site to refresh for this review, but I did notice a Lord of the Rings quality to it as I read it. I couldn’t describe it to you but if you’ve read Lord of the Rings, and if you read The Stand afterwards, you’d probably feel it too.

One other thing, which I’ve talked about before, is how I both love and hate King’s foreshadowing. For example, he’ll write something like “And that’s the last time they saw each other.” I hate it because I don’t want to know that’s the last time they see each other, I want to hang on to some hope that maybe later on they will see each other even if they don’t. At the same time, I love it because now I no longer have to wonder if they will see each other, I can just wait to find out why they won’t get to see each other. That makes no sense, I suppose, but in my own tortured way, I quite enjoy when those passages pop up.

At the end of it, I’m left in neutral territory because it was an outstanding opening with a tepid ending. But I would still recommend.

Don't Nobody Do Anything Crazy

2010-01-06T07:21:00.010-05:00

I hadn’t been home to Honduras since 2007, which is a really long time for me. I hadn’t been able to go because of graduation and starting a job and then, in 2009, some jackass got it into his head that he would violate the Honduran Constitution repeatedly and create a huge media frenzy when he re-entered Honduras and barricaded himself in the Brazilian embassy. He was still in there when I was deciding to go. He’s been in there since October of 2009 and it’s anybody’s guess when he’s getting out…most likely in handcuffs.

Anyway, that stressed me out whenever I thought of going home for Christmas because how absolutely wonderful would it be for me to go home and then have that same jackass make a huge scene, which would then lead to airports shutting down or the U.S. closing borders to Hondurans? But I finally decided to go, especially since things had been very calm for the last month. The first few days I was expecting stuff to go down at any moment, but after a while you start to realize that the situation in Honduras is nothing more than a sociopath sitting in an Embassy while life is going on outside much as it always has. After a while, you forget he’s even there. You can drive by the Embassy where he’s locked in and see the police barricade and soldiers standing guard (how I regret not taking a picture), but that’s it. I’m glad to say the crazy stayed inside and the trip went very well. And he’s still in there…

Besides stressing out over fears of political insubordination and riots, I also had a chance to reflect on some cultural aspects of Honduras that I’ve (naturally) always taken for granted, but which now jump out at me and make me pause…here’s a list of things you may notice when traveling to Honduras that might strike you as…odd…

1. Most of the year, days are sunny to partly cloudy, temperatures range from 74 to 86 degrees F, humidity is a pleasant 55-65%, and nights get as cold as 60 degrees F….it is ridiculous how awesome the weather is every day.

Perfect weather every day...no wonder I complain about New England winters and summers

2. Nearly every meal, regardless of what it is, will also feature rice and corn tortillas…even pasta dishes.

3. Residential houses can be turned into anything: restaurants, bars, salons, boutiques, grocery stores, offices, you name it.

4. Pulperias are ubiquitous. These are your poor-man’s versions of a CVS on every corner. Home owners will often set aside a piece of their house (usually a small brick house adjacent to the main house) and set it up as a mini-convenience store. You can get food, beer, soda, cigarettes, bathroom supplies, medicine, and so on. Damn, I should have taken a picture of the one right next to my house…(not mine)

5. Any social gathering is a good excuse to throw up a piñata; this is not reserved just for birthdays, as I learned when I went with my parents to my dad’s office holiday barbecue.

Yep, that's a snowman piñata for a holiday office party :)

6. This one is odd only because it’s so eerily similar to the U.S.: there are coffee shops on every street block, some even across the street from each other.

7. The only other store more popular than coffee shops are pharmacies. There is one on every other street block.

8. Fireworks may be illegal, but there has never been a Christmas or New Year’s Eve where it didn’t sound like a war was going on in the entire city for 10 min before and after midnight on those days.

9. Hondurans will go out and drink like it’s the weekend even on Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

10. I’ve talked before about every house having a 6 to 10 ft wall completely surrounding it (some of the wealthier mansions can get even higher), but I didn’t remember that most houses will ALSO put up bars on every window and door. Who said fire hazard?

These houses don't completely show what I'm saying because the house can also be completely removed from the wall...but, as you can see, bars everywhere

11. Any security guard, police officer, or soldier that you see will be carrying a shotgun. I think it’s a shotgun anyway, it looks like one of the weapons you can pick up in Left 4 Dead. This includes bouncers outside some bars and clubs (though those only carry a gun, not a shotgun), guards outside banks (any bank, all banks, every single one, will have armed guards at all times), vehicle patrols, and I know I’ve seen more but I can’t remember where else. Basically, don’t be shocked if you walk to a gas station or a store and someone is standing around with a bulletproof vest, a Security hat, and a shotgun.

12. During Christmas, anywhere you go, any restaurant, store, or house, will have at least three nativity scenes on display…at least.

That’s all I can remember for now. I had a longer list but I knew I would forget half of it by the time I got back. Despite all I know about myself and my horrible memory, I can never get into the habit of writing things down constantly :(

The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

2009-12-01T19:28:00.008-05:00

First, let me just get this out of the way: I am so, so, SO, SOOOOO glad I’m finally done with this book. Second, now that I’ve fully prepared you for a less than praising review, I urge you to not judge this book based on my poor review. People much smarter than me have praised this book very strongly for a very long time. Third, this is a long book…a very LONG book and I was never good at putting up with those. Fourth, possibly I’m depicting myself as educationally-challenged (if that’s even a term, which just cements the point further, I guess). And, finally, on to the book review!

It’s not that I don’t understand why this book is generally regarded as James’ best novel. Really, I get it, the themes are ripe for discussion: the juxtaposition of American ideals (namely, freedom and individuality) with European standards (sophistication and social convention); the embodiment of these conflicting ideas in the story’s heroine, Isabel Archer; Isabel’s struggles as she is faced with betrayal, deceit, responsibility, and emotional pain. I even learned a new literary technique (you know, for whenever I decide to become a writer…): ellipses. Not, not the “…” that I already use far too frequently. I mean the style of skipping over main events, rather than narrating them, and only referring to them in side conversations after they have happened. It works surprisingly well.

No, I’m afraid my problems with the book are much simpler than disagreeing with the plot, the themes, or the ideology. I was simply bored. The pace of the book induces zombie-reading (you know, reading over a paragraph before realizing you’ve no idea what you just read). And (granted James is a key figure in psychological realism) I think it was too psychological, and a lot of it went over my head. Spark notes helped a lot. In other news, I really am becoming a dunce :(

My attempt at spicing up my posts with some visuals...I'll give Isabel some credit, though...she didn't come off as that stuck up

And, lastly, I disliked Isabel. But I think that only shows that James is excellent at character development because I hated this woman as if I knew her in real life. She thinks about herself obsessively and generally has the highest opinion of herself, regarding her strong beliefs in individuality, freedom, and her moral strength. This is mostly the attitude of the first half of the book and it really does get very annoying. But character development is the major element of this portrait (I had to get that in there) and by the time we reach the second half of the novel, Isabel has undergone some… well, some development. She isn’t radically different from who she was at first, but the events she has undergone have created a conflict within herself, between who she once was and what she has become (between freedom and social convention).

I don’t want to give plot points away, but she really is incredibly stubborn and stupid at times, and even she comes to realize this by the end. So, again, it’s not that the story or the character are badly written, it’s more that James does such a good job of creating this person that I was yelling at her (in my head, of course). And, speaking of the end, this book ends with one of the biggest cliff-hangers of all time. Ok, maybe not that drastic, but it does end very abruptly and indefinitely, meaning you can’t be completely certain what Isabel has decided to do at the end. Critics generally agree on what she did end up doing, but from the text it really can be interpreted in a couple of different ways. It’s not that big a deal, you do still get a sense of completion, but be warned in case you don’t like those kinds of endings. In any case, the point of the ending is to leave the reader with a sour taste.

I probably didn’t give this book a completely fair chance. I mean, I did when I started it, I was expecting it to be a really good book, but it just lost me somewhere along the way, in between Isabel’s self-reflection and the story’s snail pace. I highly doubted whether I would finish it at one point because it was an exercise in overcoming boredom. But, after finishing it (and reading analytical overviews), I see what James did there.

20 down, 32 to go.

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

2009-11-06T12:37:00.002-05:00

I can already tell I won’t be able to do this book justice. I’ll just get this out of the way now: I loved this book. Rock will laugh at my “sentimental female nature, the typical silly-girl stereotype that sighs at the doomed love affair and cries during the film adaptation.” Well, in fact, I did. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. Daniel Day Lewis is partly to blame, damn him and his awesome acting (though the hair…was a tad ridiculous). I didn’t cry when I finished the book, but watching the movie afterwards really put that last nail in, as the saying goes. The screenplay adaption went well beyond anything I expected. I remember liking the movie when I saw it years ago. I didn’t expect such a faithful adaptation of the novel.

It would be hard to improve on the book anyway, or to mess up the carefully-aligned series of events that take place. The novel won Edith Wharton the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, making her the first woman to receive one, which is a pretty cool feat right there. The novel is probably best known (at least, that’s what I knew about it before I picked it up) for its accurate portrayal of New York City’s upper class during the late 1800s. Wharton herself grew up in that society. In the novel, she doesn’t scorn or condemn the society, but she does question the moral righteousness and stifling social codes that the society depicted in her novel adheres to.

The central character is Newland Archer, who finds himself questioning his society’s norms – norms which he strictly upheld at the start of the novel – in light of his perfect but dull marriage, his too-perfect wife, and his wife’s modern and unconventional cousin. You see the triangle, I’m sure. My favorite aspect of the book was the complexity of Newland’s and May’s personalities. Newland’s views change quite radically (radically for the context, anyway), from strictly upholding the established social norms and seeking the perfect marriage with the perfect New York socialite, to questioning everything his society believes and the motivations of all the people he thought he knew so well. The catalyst for this is, of course, May’s cousin, the Countess Olenska, a woman who is the complete opposite of every cookie-cutter debutante he’s ever met. Then there’s May, who Newland generally attributes as a product of New York society, with little opinions or motivations of her own beyond those which have been instilled in her. In my opinion, one of the saddest parts of the book is that Newland never really understood his wife, while becoming painfully clear at the end that it was May who always understood him.

And yet Wharton doesn’t portray Newland as a complete jerk, but as a person in the middle of a personal crisis. That, I think, is why the book works so well, instead of coming off as just a book about someone’s affair. The entire environment also makes the book enjoyable. Wharton’s careful descriptions, both of characters and settings, rich with detail and meaning just make every paragraph fun to read, even if she’s merely discussing the emotions evoked in Newland by a lady’s forgotten parasol or the preparations for the annual society ball. I’m keeping a copy of this book in my phone, as I would definitely pick it up again to read a chapter here or there.

21 down, 31 to go.

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2009-09-16T10:38:00.009-04:00

If you didn’t already guess, I pretty much suck at maintaining websites and at writing and at doing stuff worth writing about. Well I could talk about my WoW exploits, but I want to preserve some semblance of not being a complete junkie…though I suspect I’ve already failed at that, as well. Anyway, the one thing I have going for this site is my book reviews, because now that the mind-drain that was college is long over, I can go back to reading for fun like I used to in “the old days.” And while I’m no New York Times Book Reviewer (or even a mildly popular blogger) I continue to write up my reviews so that I can one day look over my posts and say “ah yes, I recall reading that book and according to this post written by me, found it extremely enjoyable…not sure why I don’t remember a thing that happens in it.” Why this happened just the other day when I was reading my blog titles and saw a post on Slaughterhouse-Five and I said “what the-…which book is-…oh right, right, I did read that book…huh.” But I digress. On to the book review.

It’s funny to me how I’ve always known of Sherlock Holmes. And who hasn’t heard “Elementary, my dear Watson,” in some long forgotten context, which actually never really existed? Yet I’ve never read a mystery novel written by Sir Conan Doyle, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen any of the TV movies or mini-series. Probably the closest I ever got to see an adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story was that Saved by the Bell episode where the gang winds up in some cooky old house playing a 90’s version of those mystery dinner role-playing games (those crazy kids). By the by, googling “mystery dinner role-playing” will lead to quite a few groups out there that actually stage these things for you…there’s just a whole other world out there, sometimes, is what I’m saying (and, no, it’s not pr0n). So I was actually looking forward to picking up The Hound of the Baskervilles and discovering for myself what this Holmes guy was all about. Many thanks to Rock who donated Sir Conan Doyle’s complete collection to my measly library.

Reminds me of the upcoming Worgen class for WoW....dammit, there I go again!

The first thing that jumped out, which is probably not news to anyone, is that the story is told from Watson’s point of view, and not at all from Holmes’. In fact, Holmes was absent for a good part of the story (maybe a little over half the story) so that overall we experience the entire story as Watson does. Watson is clever and inquisitive but not a master-mind like Holmes, and so, as the reader’s proxy, he is as perplexed and surprised by the conundrums of the story as the reader is. As clever as Watson is, his explanations (like ours) tend to be wrong, something which (in my opinion) amuses Holmes to no end. To be perfectly honest, I would have to say that Holmes is an arrogant, teasing, righteous know-it-all. However, he does actually know it all, so you can’t fault the guy for looking down on everyone else.

The story itself sounded like the makings of a decent X-Files episode, in which an older gentleman is found dead in his own backyard from what appears to be a heart attack, but the locals are convinced that the man was attacked by a supernatural creature in the form of a hound with blazing eyes and jaws (though I’m betting there are many X-Files episodes with similar premises…there’s only so much supernatural stuff to go around). The gentleman is Sir Charles Baskerville, the wealthy land-owner in the area (obviously), who dies leaving only one heir, Sir Henry Baskerville. Dr. Mortimer, a friend of the family, hires Holmes to solve the mystery and protect Sir Henry, who is believed to be in danger. According to Dr. Mortimer, the Baskervilles have been cursed for centuries by the Hound of the Baskervilles, who kills the Baskerville heirs as revenge for the evil doings of Sir Hugo Baskerville, described as an evil and sadistic man who enjoyed kidnapping women and later sending his hounds after them when they got away.

Knowing nothing about the story, I was not expecting any supernatural elements, which really make the story creepier. I was expecting very formal writing where nothing too unpleasant happens and murders are committed quietly and neatly. In fact, the story can get gory and violent without being over-the-top or cheesy. The story-telling did lose a bit of steam towards the last quarter of the book, as the mystery is resolved well before the end, but I think I’ve gotten too used to mystery stories that rely on the last 20 pages to bring all the events to the climax (Harry Potter, I’m looking at you). Overall, though, I highly enjoyed it and am glad I have finally read a Sherlock Holmes mystery. For those wondering, this was another card in my deck of 52 Great Books to Read.

20 down, 32 to go.

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

2009-08-12T12:41:00.003-04:00

Out of my deck of cards. Unlike most, if not all, other 13-yr old girls on this planet, I did not pick up Jane Eyre during junior high (I’m not saying I strayed from Victorian romances, but that I picked up Wuthering Heights instead). I believe if I had read this book back then, I would have swooned over the romance much more than I did (after all, isn’t it the fantasy of every school girl to learn that that cute boy she has a huge crush on, the one that seems so unattainable, is secretly having a huge crush on her?). However, as a school girl harboring crushes of her own, the rest of Jane Eyre would have probably gone right over my head. As such, I’m glad I didn’t pick this up until now, since I was much more interested in Jane’s strengths as a character, completely independent of the romance storyline with Edward “Stephanie Meyer only wishes she could write Byronic heroes this good” Rochester.

Like an orphan out of a Dickens’s story (or like any heroine in a Mexican soap opera), Jane goes through some pretty tough times before finding happiness. Orphaned as a little girl, she is taken in by her uncaring aunt, then sent to a strict religious boarding school (the kind where it’s always cold and everyone is always hungry and the Man always finds a way to suck the joy out of life), and then confronted with the death of her only friend. Eventually she becomes a teacher and gets a job as a governess with Rochester as her employer. I guess I let the cat out of the bag by saying there is a romance between the two (no surprise there, though, right?) but, for a tragic heroine, things are never that easy. That’s just volume one of this book.

Anyway, there’s more to it of course, but the point is Jane survives and rises above a number of trials that would have broken down most people. I like the description given in the back of the card, and I don’t see the need of saying it any better: “Jane Eyre lives in a world of cruelty and injustice, yet nothing breaks her spirit. Readers today are still inspired by Jane’s rebellion and passion – traits that were considered merely daring in a society that had little use for a single woman.”

Now I know next to nothing about Victorian society, but I can imagine how some of Jane’s actions would have been pretty scandalous, or against what was expected. Above all else, and despite how cliché it sounds, she remains true to herself, and is committed to maintaining her sense of integrity and morality despite whatever hell may come after. Now there’s a role model that is worth reading about (not to sound preachy, but this book and this character beat the hell out of most of the young adult garbage that is out there these days).

My only complaint is that the narrative itself is pretty boring. I don’t mean the writing style is bad, just that it’s extremely proper and too straightforward (if that makes any sense…). Bronte also tends to go on and on at times, which can get a bit drowsy (I did possibly end up merely skimming some pages; I definitely skimmed over most of the whole St. John argument). Knowing that there’s no reason for comparing Emily and Charlotte other than because they are sisters, I will just say this: Wuthering Heights has more originality and drama, but Jane Eyre has more normal, relatable, and likable characters.

19 down, 33 to go.

The Subtle Knife - Phillip Pullman

2009-08-02T17:24:00.006-04:00

Book two of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (audiobook format). I'm not sure what to say about this book...I think I liked it, but it took me nearly a month to finish (listening to, not reading) because I couldn't make myself stop listening to Broken River Prophet and put this on instead. That is partly due to BRP being awesome, but it was also due to Subtle Knife not being very engaging. Yes, that might be a good description, not engaging. I can think of things I liked: I loved Will (a lot of that might have to do with how good the actor's voice is); really liked Mrs. Coulter who is the kind of villain you love to hate, though there wasn't enough of her in this book; inter-dimensional travel is a plus to any fantasy story IMO (check The Riftwar Saga); the Specters turn every adult in one particular world into essentially zombies (zombies always being another plus in any genre); you get a relatively decent cliffhanger at the end, enough to make me read the first chapter of the last book right then; and, kinda unrelated, it was very well acted.

But, overall, it was a bit of a sleeper. There wasn't enough intrigue, not much mystery, and nothing totally unexpected happened. Will and Lyra meet up in an alternate universe from their own, where they realize they are both on related quests and must help each other (or, I think Lyra is told by her golden compass that she has to help Will, but same deal). After that, they run into some good people, some bad people, lose some things, acquire others, travel a lot, escape the "authorities," realize they are destined for greatness if they can only overcome their personal doubts and fears (Will), don't get to realize that they are destined for greatness if they can overcome the people that are trying to kill them (Lyra, but hang tight, your time will come in book 3), and get help from others who must make sure these two succeed above all else.

I sound mean, I know. To be fair, it's not a terrible setup, and there are a lot of different bits and pieces going on at once that will lead up to something. But, it sounds kinda rehashed, the story-telling is too serious, and maybe I'm going deaf, but I'm not really sure what this is all leading up to. At this point, I think the main conflict is that there's a side that wants to bring down God and another side that doesn't agree (yes, God). Why bring him down? Well, as far as I can make it out, Pullman is turning the tables: instead of a God that represents good (the way we know it), God in this story is the bad guy. Long ago, when the angels rebelled in Heaven and lost, things started to go bad. Now a similar war is coming, but this time "the right side must win."

Now I'm not saying that this plot is objectionable. It's actually pretty interesting, the idea that you would need to overturn a Supreme authority that you consider your God because, in actuality, he's a jerk. It worked for Stargate. But Pullman doesn't give us much in the way of back-story. Presumably that's book three.

That’s my take, anyway. At this point, I’m not jumping up and down with excitement to start book three (I’m certainly not using two Audible credits to get it, rather than the customary one, so I’ll have to read the hardcopy at some point). I’m hoping that the twist in book three is that Lord Asriel (the guy leading the rebellion against God) ends up making things way worse and everyone that supported him is left standing with egg on their face. Then again, if that does happen, it won’t be much of a twist. And if it doesn’t happen, then we just end up with a story about a guy beating God with a subtle knife and a golden compass (I guess an amber spyglass will feature somehow, as well).

Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie

2009-07-17T11:48:00.004-04:00

Chalk up this unusual selection to my deck of cards. Knowing the story pretty well (and having watched the Disney version and Hook), I would have never picked this up on my own. But it actually did make for an interesting read, only because the details in the story are so much more bizarre than just the general plot. Barrie makes for a weird story-teller: oftentimes he is very cute and his writing is very silly (like Alice in Wonderland), but his writing also has an undercurrent of biting sarcasm (in the way the narrator will mock Mr. and Mrs. Darling, or call the children heartless, or deride Peter Pan). It's not something that is very pronounced but it just sounds like the narrator (who I assume is Barrie, but I suppose it could just be a made-up voice) is mean to the characters and doesn't necessarily like them.

I was surprised at how prominent the themes about motherhood and growing up without a mother actually are in the story. Peter doesn't just like Wendy a lot, he wants a mother. It's not just Peter Pan either. All the Lost Boys, and even the pirates, want a mother more than anything else. The pirates kidnap Wendy so she'll be their mother. And Peter won't admit it but the most scarring event in his life was being separated from his mother (I don't remember if the mother left him or he left his mother). It also gets complicated when Wendy does grow up and become a mother for real, because now Peter hates her for growing up but he still wants a mother so he turns to...Wendy's daughter. And then Wendy's granddaughter. And, in today's skeptical society, that sounds very odd I guess, but I think the point is that, for Peter (and, I suppose, the other motherless characters), grown-ups can't be caring and nurturing and adventurous all at the same time, but children can as long as they are "gay and innocent and heartless."

Now, the heartless part sounds weird to me, but those are the author's words. Barrie (or the narrator) is saying children are heartless because they can very easily leave their parents and go off with Peter Pan like Wendy and John and Michael and forget about their home and forget they ever had parents and not realize their parents are back home, sad and waiting. So, is he saying that's a good thing? It's also difficult to say whether he thinks growing up is a good thing or a bad thing. He writes that Neverland is this wonderful place where children don't grow up, where they will always be innocent and happy. But Neverland also makes them forget their family and so they become "heartless" and selfish (in the case of Peter, he eventually even forgets about Hook, and about Tinkerbell, and he forgets about Wendy to such an extent that he doesn't see her again for years). But then everyone (including the Lost Boys, except Peter Pan) return to England and everyone grows up and they settle down "to being as ordinary as you or me."

I think that, in the end, the point Barrie is trying to make ends up being more than just "never grow up" (which seems to be how his story is always remembered). I think what the moral of the story amounts to is that growing up is inevitable, and refusing to grow up just makes you selfish and heartless, but growing up doesn't mean you have to stop believing in innocence and adventure and wonder (even though Wendy grows up, she still remembers Peter fondly and retells his story to her own daughter).

I also have to mention that Hook is the most interesting and complex character in the story. He's not just the one-dimensional ruthless pirate. I mean, he is a pretty typical ruthless pirate, but he's also trying to be an effective and respected leader - while at the same time suffering from soul-crushing self-consciousness and doubts about his ability. He's always concerned with "good form" (with playing by the rules and with appearing to others as a gentleman who is skilled in proper social conduct) - while at the same time being a backstabber and knowing full well that much of what he does is in "bad form." Actually, I found the "good form-bad form" internal struggle Hook has surprising to read, because I thought that was just something that was thrown into the Hook movie version. After reading the story, though, I can say that Hook is the most faithful adaptation of the actual story (if you ignore that Peter Pan is played by a very grown up Robin Williams), right down to the issues about Peter's mother and Hook and many other things. Well, even the montage where we see Wendy growing up and becoming older and all that, is in the story. The Disney version just captures the silliness and the adventure (although it does do a good job of capturing Peter as a jerk...he was kind of a conceited brat). And I know I watched the new Peter Pan movie, but I mostly remember being bored with that one.

I almost want to watch Hook now.

18 down, 34 to go.

How to Piss Off a Country in 13 Steps: Lessons from Honduras

2009-07-14T07:19:00.003-04:00

The following is a step-by-step guide on how to become the most hated guy in Honduras. Thanks to ex-President Zelaya for his contributions.

1. Announce that, as President, you want to add a ballot during the regularly scheduled elections (November 2009) to determine whether a Constitutional Assembly should be convened to amend the Constitution (but don't announce what changes you're hoping to make, even if people suspect that you're trying to amend the one-term law which limits a President's term to four years and prohibits re-election).

2. Decide that you will conduct an opinion poll to allow the general public to vote on whether they want to add the aforementioned ballot to the elections (regardless of the fact that the Constitution prevents any referendums from being made 180 days prior to or after an election, and regardless of the fact that the executive branch does not have the authority to hold such a vote).

3. After Congress passes a bill prohibiting the opinion poll (which they've ruled is unconstitutional, as mentioned in step 2), decide that you'll use your taxpayer's money to hire an independent firm to conduct the vote.

4. Order your Chief of Armed Forces to distribute the ballot boxes (which Congress said was illegal). (Note: the Armed Forces is the entity that conducts elections so you have to ask them to do this).

5. At this point your Chief of Armed Forces will refuse to carry out this illegal activity for you. Fire him promptly. The commanders of the Air Force and Navy will resign in protest but you can just announce that you'll run things completely on your own from now on.

6. Congress will then say "Excuse me, you can't fire these people, they will be reinstated, ok? Thanks, bye-bye." You may now refuse to comply with this announcement and retaliate by leading a mob into the Armed Forces Headquarters to pick up the ballot boxes in order to distribute them yourself. While it is legal for you to enter Headquarters, it may be seen as illegal to break through the gate and lead civilians in, but just go ahead and disregard that for now.

7. Collect the ballot boxes that were assembled in, and delivered from, Venezuela. Your good friend Hugo Chavez, who oversaw the assembly (and maybe stuffed the boxes for you in advance) sends his best and wishes you good luck.

8. Brace yourself, because now that you've pissed off Congress, the Supreme Court, and your own political party, they will be sending the Army over to your house to walk you out at gunpoint and put you on a plane and expatriate you to Costa Rica (they should arrest you and put you in jail but this could lead to civil violence, so they would rather decide to send you away). This will endear you to the international community so don't worry just yet. And mention your pajamas repeatedly.

9. The international community will now rally to you, despite your strong ties to Castro and Chavez, and demand that you be reinstated (we can't figure out why they fail to understand that your removal from office was legally mandated either, so just roll with it).

10. After a few days of putting your cause out there, and getting support from the media and other governments, decide that you will triumphantly return to your country to take up your post.

11. When the army blocks the runway with their tanks and prevents you from landing, just send out a call over national radio asking your supporters to break into the runway and show those armed soliders who's boss. One of your supporters will unfortunately lose his life over this crazy endeavor, and the runway will remain blocked so that you'll have to land in El Salvador, but at least you got the media attention you wanted.

12. For the love of God, don't try to go back to Honduras! They have about 12 arrest warrants with your name on them, including treason and drug trafficking. Stay low, continue to fly around to Washington and Costa Rica and gather international support for your cause.

13. At this point the international community will appoint a Nobel Peace laureate as mediator so that you and the interim government that was legally appointed after you were exiled can reach an agreement. The interim government will obstinately refuse to reinstate you and threaten to arrest you if you return but you still have international support. Find a way to drag this out forever.

Ta-da!

This step-by-step guide does not include the pre-requisite tasks that must be concluded first in order to fully piss of a country. These actions include appealing to the poorest sectors of society claiming you are "one of the people" despite your multi-million business enterprises; flying yourself, your family, your extended family, your servants, and your horse to various countries on taxpayer money (call it public relations); allying yourself with Chavez and joining him in talking crap about the U.S., your traditional ally and largest trading partner (also disregarding the thousands of Honduran immigrants that are awaiting a decision on their refugee status in the U.S.). There's more but this should keep you busy for now.

Congratulations, you've just become the most hated man in Honduras!

***

In all seriousness, if this was a research paper, I would have cited all the steps listed above. But (thank God!) I'm not in school anymore so I don't have to follow the rules. Instead, I've assembled a bunch of links that explain and document the situation better than I have (I'm no political or legal expert, I'm just a relocated Honduran that is worried and upset and a tad pissed off at several people, including Clinton (cow)). A million thanks to my friend Figgy and to La Gringa for rounding up these links. Please check out their sites if you want to learn more, they're doing an amazing job of reporting on the issue from the actual scene.

Events leading up to removal of President Zelaya

Following the removal of President Zelaya

Diplomatic Attempts

Trying to return to the country

The U.S. Stance

Chavez being insane

Going on in U.S. Congress

It wasn't a coup

Testimony of The Honorable Otto J. Reich, Committee on Foreign Affairs

Why Honduras Sent Zelaya Away

Requiem for a Dream With a Happy Ending

2009-07-13T12:47:00.003-04:00

I finally got around to watching Slumdog Millionarie this weekend (or, I should say, Netflix finally got around to sending me a copy after it had been on Very Long Wait status for about five weeks). As you can probably tell from the title of this post (assuming you've watched Requiem for a Dream), this movie reminded me a lot of that movie. In other words, it's a movie where a lot of really messed-up things happen to generally decent people (though I guess the people in Requiem weren't all that decent). Like Requiem, this movie made me cringe, made me depressed, and (strangely enough) made me sick to my stomach. While the queasy feeling in my stomach is partly due to a scene where a kid is blinded using scalding oil (I didn't appreciate the vomiting scene either), it is mostly due to the incredibly annoying way in which the movie was shot. The shaky camera, the out of focus shots, and the running sequences shot with hand-held cameras gave me vertigo and a headache approximately 20 minutes into the movie.

The story itself was interesting. Jamal, from the slums of Mumbai, India, enters India's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" game show. Exceeding all expectations, he answers all questions correctly up to the 10 million rupee question, which he blindly guesses (though, honestly, that would never be a top question because it is a ridiculously easy answer). Suspected of cheating, he is questioned by the police, where he retells the critical events in his life that have shaped him into who he is. More importantly though, he has gathered bits of knowledge from these events, which is how he is able to answer the game show questions.

The movie is undeniably powerful, emotional, and generally quite good. And, unlike Requiem, it has a happy ending, so that's neat. Now, I've always said that Requiem for a Dream is a really good movie, but I will never, ever watch it again. Never. Same goes for Slumdog Millionaire. It's a good movie (mind you, I didn't say really good...the directing is too messed up for that), but I will never, ever watch it again. If I want to get really depressed, I'll just look at my bank account. I think it's funny that the movie review on that poster is "the feel-good movie of the decade." Yeah, ok, you feel good at the end when he gets the girl and he gets the money. But, to me, it didn't make up for the previous hour and 40 minutes of down-trodden, life-is-crappy, story.

The Golden Compass - Phillip Pullman

2009-06-29T10:34:00.001-04:00

Its funny how there are some book reviews that I can't wait to write because I've got a lot to say about the book. Then there are others that I try to put off because I don't have much to say or because the books were so good that I can't find the right stuff to say. But now, for the first time, I completely forgot all about writing this book review. Well, it's not my fault; it just wasn't a hugely memorable book.

I wonder if I'm losing my ability to read children's books. I devoured Harry Potter books when they came out, but that was a while ago, I guess. But reading this book was just not very fun, and it bordered on being pretty boring.

The story takes place on an alternate universe (see, it sounds very Star Trek already, it should have been awesome). In this universe, a human's conscience/soul/imaginary friend/what have you, personifies itself in the shape of an animal (known as a daemon) that is intimately and innately bound to its human. Apparently Pullman got this concept from paintings such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine,” Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's "Young Lady with a Parrot," and Hans Holbein the Younger's "Lady with a Squirrel," which featured women holding animals. It's not a bad idea and Pullman develops the human/daemon relationship fairly well (though, logistically, I find it impossible to conceive of 6 billion plus animals following 6 billion plus humans around all the time, in the market, at work, in the bathroom, during a one-night stand; what do the daemons do then, what do they eat, what if you don't like your daemon…). Anyway, this alternate universe also features talking armored bears, witches, some ghoulish flying thing named a cliff-ghast, and there are possibly a few other weird creatures in there that I don’t remember.

The story centers on 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua and the sudden dramatic changes that take place in her life when a mysterious group of people start kidnapping children. Sometime prior to embarking on her adventure, and before delving into what passes for this book’s plot, she receives the golden compass, which is like a Ouija board that tells you the truth when you ask it a question (and, possibly, it conjures up the image of that girl that drowned in the lake down the road that a friend of a friend heard someone talk about ages ago). The fact that Lyra can read this compass makes her very very special but, true to the children’s book mystery genre, we don’t find out why, at least not in this book.

Anyway, Lyra sets out to find out what’s happening to the missing children, and eventually she sets out with others to rescue them, and then she finds out what’s happening to them, and then other stuff happens because there needs to be a sequel to this book. What happens to the children is the only thing this plot has going for it so I won’t divulge the details. It’s hard to briefly describe the plot of this book because there are a ton of side plots: Lyra’s parents, the armored bear’s civil war, the witches’ civil war, the nature of Dust (a mysterious particle that people are keen to research regardless of the cost), and the evil machinations of organized religion.

I didn’t mind the personification of organized religion as a dictatorial, conniving, unscrupulous institution. It’s not new. But the dwelling on it and the lengthy discussions on original sin and the explanations on the religious hierarchy and the details on the different political groups was a bit of overkill. I wonder how many kids are able to waddle through all that and keep reading. It just felt like a lot of adult content thrown in there (and by that I don’t mean that it should be rated PG-13 for mild language and suggestive scenes, I mean that it’s like reading a newspaper article about Hamas and Fatah: interesting but somber).

But, I will admit, I did not completely hate this book. I didn’t even mildly hate it. It was all right. Not very memorable and a bit too serious for a children’s story, but set in an interesting alternate world with likable characters (particularly Lyra and the main armored bear).

Oh, and also, the audiobook version is excellent. This is probably why I kept going with the book, and the only reason I got the second book. The story is narrated by Phillip Pullman himself, but all the characters are read by actors. All the voices are great (the voice of Iorek, the armored bear, I had hoped would be different, more like Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile, but instead it’s more like Treebeard in The Two Towers…just wrong). My favorite was the voice of Mrs. Coulter, the story’s villain. She sounds very sweet and lovely and innocent and then she sounds like a complete cow, it works so well.

The Ups and Downs (and the Gates)

2009-06-25T11:22:00.007-04:00

This week started on a sour note. I need to renew my passport, which should really just amount to showing up at a particular destination with some choice documents, forking over way too much cash for a fake-leather bound booklet, and proceeding with life as usual. Not leaving it up to fate, I decided to call ahead and make sure I had the right documents. Picture me, starting out her Monday morning at work, coffee in hand, ready to get the day going, dialing up the number for customer service, asking if so-and-so documents are the ones needed, and getting the bitchiest call center attendant known to man. Ok, A) I realize being a call center attendant is not all daisies and sunshine; I hate talking on the phone too, I get it; I hate people in general, I understand that too. And B) it sounds like you must really hate life cause, after all, you ended up as a call center attendant. But, damn it to hell, why take it out on me? I don't want to relive the tediousness here but in all my time calling customer service numbers I have never had a ruder, meaner, and dumber attendant. A minute into the call I was really regretting that I had no way to record the conversation. Jerk.

Tuesday was considerably much more fun. Rock and I met up after work for dinner and Up. I'd been wanting to see this for some time and, strangely enough, our tiny town was playing it in 3D. Judging from the trailers, it looks like all animated movies will now be offered in 3D. The movie looked very good in 3D, though there are times when the image can look a little blurry, particularly around the edges. It's also funny how your brain adjusts to it after a while and then you no longer seem to notice that it's in 3D. The movie itself was awesome. Of course, I was bawling during the opening sequences. I'm worried that the last animated movie I saw was Wall-E and that also had me bawling at times. Apparently the animated movies are getting to be too emotional for me. I am such a wuss.

Tuesday was also like Christmas, because when I got home I found that my recent Amazon purchase was waiting for me: Stargate SG-1 The Complete Series Collection. Just look at it. It makes me ridiculously happy for some reason and I can't wait to start watching.

It is seriously so shiny...and cubic.

However, Tuesday was also like those Christmases where you have your heart set on getting a certain gift and then you open the box and it's socks or something (I'll be honest, though, I love socks, especially if they are fuzzy or striped or soft). When I opened the Stargate box, I looked over the DVD's and several of them had scratches on them, which displeased me greatly because the Amazon third-party vendor claimed the set was brand-new but they clearly just shrink-wrapped a used set and delivered an item that was clearly not new. I've written a strongly worded email, demanding to know what they plan to do about it and if they will exchange it for a brand-new item or give me my money back. Most likely they will say that those are the breaks. At which point I will slink away with my slightly defective Stargate box, though that doesn't mean I will love it any less. It's ok SG-1, it's not your fault.

Finally, today I was almost sideswiped by some jerk with Florida plates. Like I wasn't even there. I honked my horn like there was no tomorrow and then look over to see that the moron is laughing. Scared to death with my heart about to jump out the roof, I honk again, make a rude gesture to indicate he watch where he's going, and then realize I should probably keep my eyes on the road and watch where I'm going. Did I already mention today that I hate people? I thought so.

And it's only Thursday to boot.

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

2009-06-22T07:40:00.003-04:00

This is yet another of the cards in 52 Great Books to Read. Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for the text.

I believe I read this at some point in high school for a class. I had very little recollection of what happens in it besides what is common knowledge anyway, that the story is about a man turning into an insect.

Indeed, that is the plot of this short story. Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up in his home one day to discover that he has turned into a "horrible vermin." Literally, not figuaritvely. He has an armour-like back, a domed belly divided into sections, and many tiny legs. There is no actual process of metamorphosis in the book. This is not The Fly, in which we witness the (disgusting) progression of man into insect. In the story's famous first sentence, the entire metamorphosis takes place. Gregor wakes up a bug. The rest of the story is about Gregor as a bug and the happenings in a bug's life.

Thus we are offered no explanation as to how or why the change happened. We are simply introduced to a flustered Gregor, who is very confused but primarily very worried because he is in no condition to go to work and he cannot afford to lose his job. He hates his job, he hates his boss, he hates his co-workers, but he is the sole provider for his parents and sister with whom he lives. So he must make every attempt to get out of bed, despite his condition, and at least call in sick or try to catch a later train.

Kafka seriously underplays the improbability of a human suddenly transforming into a bug by writing in a very matter-of-fact style, thus underplaying the absurdity of the metamorphosis. As if turning into a bug is something that happens every day to anyone. The real conflict or exploration in the story is not how or why Gregor has been transformed but the consequences that result from his transformation: he loses his job, his family shuns him and locks him up because of how he looks, and his parents and sister must learn to provide for themselves.

A very brief look at articles that turned up during my Google search indicate that this story has been interpreted in tons of ways. It shows up in psychology and religious discussions, in existentialism and modernism and magical realism, and in biographies of Kafka (that the story is a reflection on Kafka's relationship with his dad). I don't know about any of that, I didn't really read the articles. What did strike me about the book is the writing style, which I guess is why the story is so famous, because it presents such an absurd situation in a very straightfoward way.

I also read somewhere in there that Kafka thought the story was very amusing and that he and his friends would laugh when he read it to them. I can see some humor but mostly I just felt really bad for Gregor. His life is stopped short the moment he turns into a bug, and instead of being a provider and productive person he becomes a recluse, he can't leave his room and he can't do much except run on the walls and ceilings and try to communicate with his family, who now feel his existence is a huge burden to them. I was very intrigued to find out what becomes of him and was saddened by the ending. Poor Gregor :(

17 down, 35 to go.

My Draenei Character: The Battle Within

2009-06-19T07:52:00.014-04:00

Disclaimer: I realize I haven't moved too far from book reviews and WoW posts on this site...I assure you I am capable of writing about other things. I will attempt to do so...someday.

I have a shaky relationship with the Alliance from World of Warcraft. My very first WoW character ever was a night elf warrior. She got up to 22 before I dropped her for some forgotten reason (possibly I got bored running around the bleak landscape of Darkshore but maybe I just decided to save myself some grief brought on by Rock's incessant nagging that I roll Horde). I'll admit, the starting landscape for the trolls is much prettier, all reds and oranges and bright sunshine and crystal blue waters and breakdancing trolls that greet you with "How ya doin, mon!" So I was quite happy with my Horde home. There was a brief stint where I leveled up a gnome mage to 20 or something just cause they're so darn cute and tiny, but I stuck with the Horde.

I stuck with the Horde, even despite their abysmal showing at certain battlegrounds, particularly Alterac Valley. My poor little troll shaman couldn't last 5 minutes without being viciously killed by the Alliance. It was during these particular moments that the grass looked way greener on the other side. But the Alliance races didn't appeal to me, the humans look boring, the night elves were boring, the gnomes are cute, I'll admit that, and the dwarves, well, just no. I know, there's no rhyme or reason as the saying goes, I just wasn't interested.

Until, that is, the Burning Crusade expansion introduced the draenei. Part of me really wished the Horde got the draenei instead of getting the annoying blood elves, but the side of me that looked longingly at all those battleground victories by the Alliance realized I had finally found an Alliance race I would like to play. And how could you not? The draenei are so weird, they have goat legs and cloven hoofs, a lizard tail, tentacles coming out of their jaws, and huge glowing eyes. And their skin ranges from purple to blue. And they're technically aliens that crash-landed from outer space. Awesome.

Just look at those hoofs! And the horns! It's like the designers were drunk drawing this.

I immediately leveled up a draenei paladin to 37, at which point I decided PvP servers were not for me and I switched to a non-PvP server. I was busy leveling up my new Horde character so I forgot about the draenei until a few weeks ago when I started leveling up a draenei shaman. She's currently 30. But now I am faced with a decision, one that has stumped many others before me, that has incited dozens of articles and webpages dedicated to sorting out that all-important question: shaman or paladin?

No other two classes are compared against each other so often, and with such zeal (I think....). Once upon a time, paladins were only available to the Alliance while shamans were only available to the Horde, so the two classes were intentionally pitted against each other by Blizzard. That changed with BC when the classes became available to both sides. So even though technically these two classes aren't supposed to stand against each other anymore, the debate is still there. I know I'm still wading through it.

I started a paladin because I had never played one before and they certainly seemed to have an easy time of it by getting into their little bubble that absorbs all damage, and healing to full health in an instant, and wearing plate armor. But I think I was getting bored with the paladin, there just didn't seem to be anything too interesting going on. When I started my second draenei, I decided to try a shaman because I just really like shamans. As I write this now, I realize there's no good reason why, I just do, so I did.

But now I've decided to really evaluate that decision. I mean, I already have a shaman, I already leveled up my troll shaman all the way to 72. Why bother leveling up a second one? Shouldn't I try something new? Was the paladin really that boring? Won't I get my butt kicked a lot less if I'm a paladin? Don't shamans get invited to less groups than paladins? Aren't shamans more fun? Do I really want to start a draenei for the third time?

On and on, believe me, I bore myself, it's not just you. In the end, I have no idea. I can barely decide if I would rather have a waffle or an english muffin with cheese when I go out to breakfast. I wish WoW people read this and I could get bullied into picking one. Or that more people read this and I could put it to a vote. As it is, I will probably agonize about it for a few more days until I finally settle with the path of most laziness and decide to not start a character over and be content to have my shaman and get my butt whooped by paladins and always think: "darn it, the grass looks greener on that paladin's lawn..."

What is the Deal with Seinfeld?

2009-06-17T07:24:00.004-04:00

I've accomplished a (relatively) monumental task, that of watching all nine seasons of Seinfeld from start to finish. This monumental task is, actually, diminished by the fact that over the course of my life I have, at one point or another, watched every single Seinfeld episode ever made. There was not one episode in the entire collection that I did not recognize. I'm not sure what that says, or if it says anything, but the point is that I've always loved Seinfeld and I guess it shows.

In terms of the Seinfeld episodes, there was not much new for me to discover by watching the whole collection except for a couple of bits of information that I never quite pieced together before. These have added to my Seinfeld lore. For example, at the end of season two Jerry and Elaine reunite as a couple. This storyline was only there because the creators (Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David) were certain the show wouldn't be picked up for season three. But, it is not a storyline the creators wanted to pursue, which is why there is no continuity between seasons two and three. Also, I didn't realize David stopped writing for Seinfeld. Consequently, episodes from seasons 8 and 9 have a very different feel from what the beginning of the show was. In particular, I missed the opening bits of Seinfeld doing his standup comedy.

I also learned that Kramer's name was actually Kessler in the pilot, which connects to a subtle joke in episode 8 of season 9 (The Betrayal, the famous backwards episode) that has a scene where Jerry and Kramer meet for the first time and Jerry, trying to remember Kramer's name, says "It's Kessler, right?" Actually, I learned several other tidbits of information that I never knew, mostly from the DVD extras. My favorite DVD extra was the "Notes About Nothing." During the episodes, instead of subtitles, you can activate the notes, which contain trivia about the episodes, the storylines, the production, etc.

I also never quite realized how many jokes or situations from one episode resurface in later episodes. There are several running jokes like this that span entire seasons. It was also interesting to watch how much the show grew, from being on the brink of cancellation during the first few seasons to exploding into a huge hit. It went from being written solely by David (who really didn't want the gig to begin with) and Seinfeld to being written by a large team.

It's hard to pick favorite episodes but on the top of my list is The Opera, episode 9 from season 4. I think this one is my all time favorite because it has a creepy, suspenful feel to it with the stalker and the clown, and it also has Jerry doing a hilarious song and dance of the theme song from The Bugs Bunny Show, and Kramer singing bits from Pagliacci. From the "notes about nothing" I learned that the Crazy Joe Davola character was named after someone the writers actually knew. This is the character that stalks Elaine during the episode. In real life, Julia Louis-Dreyfus didn't know there was a real person named Joe Davola so she was seriously freaked out when the real Joe Davola introduced himself to her at a party, thinking it was a real stalker. The Betrayal is another really good episode, which can be watched forwards on the DVD (but it's better backwards). I also find that I've picked up quite a few Seinfeld lines that I say all the time: serenity now, look at it, these pretzels are making me thirsty, that's a shame, if that helps you.

I must acknowledge something that I knew back in 1998 when the episode first aired, and that is that the series finale was pretty bad. I'm sure the pressure was huge to end the series with a bang, and there's also the feeling that there just isn't a good enough ending to a show like this. But it went pretty bad there at the very end. I didn't have a problem with them ending up in jail and that part of the plot (that's actually not bad). And I also really liked that they brought back so many memorable guest characters. But the episode itself was too serious at times, and it was very fragmented, and some of the guest characters were not that funny. Worst of all, I was actually a bit bored. I had hoped that time would give me a different perspective, but I still think that was the worst Seinfeld episode. However, the hour-long clip show that preceded the series finale is another Seinfeld episode I would put at the top of my absolute favorites list. It certainly makes the list for best clip show for a sitcom, hands down.

I think the next DVD show I must compulsively own and watch is Stargate SG-1.

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

2009-06-16T07:57:00.002-04:00

This is going to be one of those reviews where I won't be able to do the book any justice. This is one the books listed in my deck of cards, 52 Great Books to Read, so I figured it would be good. It was, in fact, amazing, and that's not saying much. It follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, an African-American living in Michigan. His nickname, Milkman, is given to him after neighbors discover that his mother has breastfed him way past the appropriate age. His grandfather was erroneously registered as Macon Dead after he was released from slavery. His father has overcome a difficult childhood to establish himself as one of the most prosperous people in his town. His mother has shut down emotionally due to her abusive and unloving marriage. His sisters have allowed life to pass them by. His aunt saved his life while he was still in the womb. His cousin has fallen dangerously in love with him. His best friend Guitar wants to kill him. The novel explores the lives of all these characters, weaving in and out of their stories, of the past, the present.

It's one of those books that is probably assigned in English class. The discussion will most certainly include racism, the quest for identity, the plight of women who are left behind to assume responsibilities after men pursue their own freedom, the significance and relevance of Biblical names and allusions, the search for one's ancestry and its effect on the present, the effects of greed and unrequited love, the nurturing female, and not to mention symbolism (singing, flying, names).

It's been compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," because of its fluidity of prose, its focus on the impact of ancestors on subsequent generations and the character traits that resurface over and over, and some use of magical realism (talking to ghosts, a woman born without a navel, people flying). The prose is certainly impressive and it became my favorite thing about the book, because I would pick it up and be immersed immediately and not want to put it down. It is a beautifully written, captivating story. It has a leisurely pace for the first 3/4 or so, where Morrison weaves between the stories of the different characters. The last quarter of the book is absolutely gripping and even grander than everything that preceded it.

There may have to be another Morrison book for me in the future.

16 books done, 36 to go.

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

2009-06-10T11:14:00.006-04:00

The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. This is not how McCarthy's novel starts, but it sums up quite nicely the main imagery of the story, which is that of a young cowboy riding through the desert plains of Mexico, owning nothing but a horse, having left behind his dead beloved grandfather and his uncaring mother who sold out their farm from under him, looking for nothing more than a place to go. I didn't have any expectations for this book. I only picked it because I needed a new audio book and this one was narrated by Frank Muller, who I've gone on about before for being an awesome narrator. I really need to write a post on Muller alone because I've pretty much decided that I will only listen to his books until I have no more of his books to listen to.

Anyway, more about the audio book later. I picked this particular book narrated by Muller because it promised to be a cowboy story and I did just finish reading Wizard and Glass and wanted more cowboy-type stories. The end result was that I love this book.

I'm no expert on cowboys (beyond watching Fistful of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven...ok, watching for the most part with some dozing off), but McCarthy seems to know his stuff. In any case, for the uninitiated like me, the western culture sounded very believable. I'm also no expert on horses but, again, the writing sounds like McCarthy is an expert on horses (or a very good researcher).

The story is about John Grady Cole who leaves his home in Texas after his grandfather's death and, along with his friend Lacey Rawlins, heads for Mexico to find work as a cowboy. Along the way, they meet up with a mysterious kid who calls himself Jimmy Blevins. What follows is a series of unfortunate events, a wealthy ranch owner and his beautiful daughter, wild colts and a magnificent stallion, a strong-willed matriarch, a rogue town sheriff, murders, a Mexican jail.

I realize the whole "cowboy falls in love with the wealthy daughter" line is very trite, but damn it if I didn't love this love story and totally believed that Cole and Alejandra were meant for each other and if McCarthy had expanded on the difficult love relationship more than he did I would have bawled. But I didn't, because it isn't a mushy love story, it is a gritty, heartbreaking love story and it might make a decent dramatic telenovela with a cheesier writer but McCarthy keeps the writing raw. He doesn't overload the sentimental details but you still get tenderness, longing, regret, loss. Other events that happen besides the love story can be violent, cruel, sympathetic, funny, depressing, terrifying. It made perfect sense for me to learn that McCarthy also wrote "No Country for Old Men." Also, and I'm having a hard time coming up with ways to describe how the story is told but, some events in the book are told slowly while other events jump out all of a sudden. The effect is that the book can at times be intimate in its leisurely descriptions and at other times be hectic and take you completely by surprise.

The writing style makes use of polysyndetonic syntax, which is not something I would have known on my own but it's what the Wikipedia article on the book mentions, and it certainly is true. Basically, it's the use of extremely long sentences joined together by conjunctions (like "and," "or"). That can be an annoying feature to some, but it really sets up a flow and it is especially interesting to listen to. I'm copying a quote below, which is rather long, but it is a good example of this style.

He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.

The audio book was also very good. Muller excels at character voices and giving each voice a distinct personality. His accents (Mexican, southern drawl, female, you name it) are extremely convincing and it's hard to believe that he is the only one doing the voices. I did say the run-on style is interesting to listen to but it can be slightly hypnotic too (but I tend to zone out with any audio book, so it's my fault really).

I have less hope for the movie being good because I remember watching it ages ago and thinking it was boring. Besides, if I watch it with Rock I'll have to hear him say "Matt Damon" like the Team America guys every five minutes. I'm not saying that's not funny. I'm just saying I, too, have a hard time taking Matt Damon seriously. And an equally hard time seeing his name without doing the voice too.

"He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."~ "All the Pretty Horses", Cormac McCarthy

True Love

2009-06-01T09:21:00.013-04:00

What is true love? How do you know you’ve got that something in a relationship that makes you say “I love this person, and they love me?” Love might be that he has dinner ready every night because he knows I’ve been on a long, stressful drive. Or it might be randomly buying me a chocolate cupcake because he knows chocolate makes any day instantly better. Or putting up with my random sad/whiny/angry moods when I’m being a real jerk and picking a fight and he just wants to be left alone, poor guy. Or taking me to my favorite steakhouse, even though he doesn’t like red meat. But the real proof, I think, was surprising me by transferring my level 72 shaman from our original player vs. player server to our new non PvP server.

For days now I’ve been working myself up to actually spend money to transfer my character. We moved to a non PvP server because we couldn’t go 30 minutes without getting killed by some jerk in our PvP server. There was no way leveling up to 80 was going to happen that way. So we gave up on our dearly beloved characters and started fresh in a server where PvP combat is optional. It worked really well and in no time at all I had a level 71 hunter and he had a level 73 shaman. But I never forgot my original shaman. She was the first character I leveled up to 70, back when that was the leveling cap. She was getting close to maxing out her engineering skill (which, I do believe, is one of the hardest professions in the game). And she actually had her flying mount and epic gear already. But I couldn’t make that final decision and just transfer her already.

Then last week I log into my non PvP server and I do a double-take. Standing in the login screen is Sinadia, in her epic gear, and it takes me a good 10 or 20 seconds to put it together cause I’m bewildered as to how my long-missed shaman has suddenly appeared in my new server. And that was five days ago and I still can’t believe that Rock rushed home to his computer after work (on his bike, no less) to log into my account and pay to transfer my character and make sure she was all ready to go before I got home. It is the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me :)

So there she is. She did get a slightly new name because Sinadia was taken on the new sever, but Sinnadia is close enough I suppose. I can’t wait to work on her engineering skills again and see if I can build myself a motorcycle (why, yes, I did pick engineering as a profession because I’m an engineer, but I think this post has already established that I’m a nerd). Now I need to come up with something equally outstanding and awesome to surprise Rock with. Any ideas?

Mood: lovey
Music: Broken River Prophet's "With Infinite Arms to Cradle the Flames" (it's finally mine! so awesome...)
Movie: City of Ember (soooo you're telling me that all this time you haven't figured out how to use fire for heat and light and cooking? oookaaay... and the best the builders could do for an exit strategy was a water park slide of death? i guess that was to make sure only the fittest survived to repopulate...i see what you did there)

Mirror, Mirror - Gregory Maguire

2009-05-27T08:31:00.000-04:00

I think I've been putting off writing this review because I didn’t particularly like the book, but I didn’t dislike it either. It was just ok. Gregory Maguire is best known for his novel “Wicked,” which tells the origins of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s story “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” That Maguire novel was pretty cool, as it tells the back story of a legendary evil character. In the telling, however, you learn that evil and good are not so black and white, and that both sides can have a little of the other in them. Perhaps I find “Mirror, Mirror” less interesting because it is a pretty straightforward retelling of the Snow White fairy tale, with some adjustments.

The story is set in 16th century Italy, where Don Vicente de Nevada is raising his only daughter Bianca after his wife’s death. There is no stepmother in this story. Instead, Maguire introduces Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia, two members of a Valencian-Italian noble family and children of Pope Alexander VI (Maguire based these characters on real people, which is very neat because I would have never heard of this crazy family otherwise). Lucrezia fulfills the role of the evil stepmother in the original story and, instead of being jealous of Bianca’s beauty alone, she is jealous because her brother is attracted to the girl (incest is heavily implied but never stated outright). Also, instead of a mirror that talks and knows who is the most beautiful, the story has a mirror that acts like a window, allowing the viewer to look into other places (it only comes into play when Lucrezia is able to see that Bianca is alive and living with the dwarves, instead of being dead with her heart cut out as intended).

And the dwarves are another matter altogether. These are not the Disney variety. They aren’t even regular people with a medical condition. They are some strange rock-like beings that originate from the earth or something, and they have a collective consciousness that sounds very Borg-like to me, and their features are constantly shifting, and sometimes they are shapeless, and other times they look like dogs, and they can walk through walls. The whole thing sounded pretty stupid to me.

Other than that, it is pretty much the story you expect, down to the evil woman asking a hunter to cut out Bianca’s heart, and the hunter letting the girl go instead, and the girl meeting up with the dwarves, and the poisoned apple, and the sleeping that looks like death, and being revived with a kiss (no Prince Charming though, but I guess the kisser is supposed to be a plot twist so I won’t say who it is).

The most interesting character was Lucrezia. This aspect is similar to what Maguire did for “Wicked” (and, I’ve heard, for “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister”), and that is to explore the concept of good and evil as I mentioned above. Lucrezia is pretty twisted, allegedly not opposed to sleeping with her brother, definitely not opposed to killing her own children, or other people’s children. But her life was not always her own and she was constantly married off to people by her father and brother to advance their political careers (and her many husbands killed to make way for the next one). She had a cushioned life but not a carefree life, and rather than being all-out evil, she’s actually pretty conflicted. I also like what he did with Bianca who is actually the least developed character in the novel. She just stands for innocence, in contrast to Lucrezia. As such, Maguire didn’t write “Snow White” (his story isn’t about her); he wrote a story about greed and jealousy and revenge.

I find that I also have a hard time liking the way Maguire writes. His style sounds very forced to me, like he’s trying too hard to make things sound important and poetic and deep. He has a couple of writing devices that I liked, like some chapters told from different first-person perspectives (told by Lucrezia, or Bianca, or the dwarves) while other chapters are told from the third-person. He also inserts poem verses in between some of the chapters, which develop the personalities of different characters.

I picked this book up because “Wicked” was interesting (and because it made for a good Broadway show). But after reading this one, I doubt I’ll pick up another Maguire book. Not great, not terrible, just all right.

52 Great Books to Read

2009-05-21T14:48:00.007-04:00

This is not my list. It is a deck of cards that my friend Villar dared me to pick up. I post it here at the request of my friend Figgy. It also allows me to procrastinate for a couple more days while I write up my next book review (the book was done a week ago...the review has not been started).

I've split it into categories according to what I've read and haven't (for anyone that cares). Feel free to post your own lists in the comments section if you like.

Books I have read:
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Books I read for class, which means I probably just skimmed heavily, and will most likely have to read again
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
To the Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Books I know the plot to but have never actually read (and by "know the plot" I mean "probably watched the movie," so that's not necessarily saying much)
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
Hamlet, William Shakespeare (recently finished)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

Books I have never read
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Ten Little Indians, Agatha Christie
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Potrait of a Lady, Henry James
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
Native Son, Richard Wright
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

Which, if I didn't leave anything out or lose a card, adds up to 52. Phew...

TV/Music/Book: DJ Shadow, The Private Press (for about 7 days straight now...)

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

2009-05-12T12:51:00.000-04:00

This is a weird one to just pick up out of the blue. In fact, it was picked out of a deck of cards. See, many, many years ago (odd how I’m old enough to say many, many years and realize that it has actually been about ten years…eesh) my best friend Villar gave me “52 Great Books to Read” (actually a misleading title cause it includes plays and short stories). She wrote an inscription on the box: “let’s see if it’s true that you’ll read them.” Well the dare was set ages ago and, in my customary speediness, I am now taking up that dare. I’ve had a bit of a head start over the years and have already read 14 of those listed (some read many, many, many years ago, such that I don’t necessarily remember the plot, but it’s having read them that counts). So, I took out the 14 I had read, shuffled the rest, and picked out a card at random. That was Hamlet. Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for being awesome and having ebooks available. Check them out, they’re free and legal (all books with expired copyrights).

First off, a disclaimer. Shakespeare is seriously hard to read sometimes. Maybe it’s because I’ve been out of school too long. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had an English lit class since, well…actually…I don’t think I did take a class in the English Department at college ever…hmm…I remember I read stuff…but maybe it was philosophy or some such. Or maybe it’s because I am really quite illiterate. Regardless, it was a tad rough getting through this thing. So, many thanks also go out to Spark Notes.

I think the general gist of the play is well known (and there have been several stage and screen adaptations, some including Shakespearian-trained actors like Kenneth Branagh, some including unlikely megastars like Mel Gibson, some including guys like Ethan Hawke): Hamlet’s father, recently deceased, appears to Hamlet as a ghost to inform him that his wife-stealing, poison-dripping, murdering brother stole his wife, dripped poison down his ear, and effectively murdered him (the father, not Hamlet). The ghost wants Hamlet to get his full revenge on and Hamlet agrees. The rest of the play is filled with Hamlet dallying back and forth about whether to kill his uncle and how to do it, all the while pretending to be insane so that people don’t think he’s up to something (or, at least, so that people think he’s up to something like being crazy but not up to something like planning the perfect crime). Somewhere in there we get hints that Hamlet and Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius who is the King’s advisor, had a thing going on but now that Hamlet is pretending to be crazy, he’s also pretending he never liked Ophelia at all. According to SparkNotes this has much to do with Hamlet now being a misogynist because his mother, the Queen, has wedded his uncle so shortly after his dad’s death.

After Hamlet goes through some soul-searching and accidentally kills Polonius, and after the King ships Hamlet off to England, and after the ship gets attacked by pirates and Hamlet is sent back to Denmark, and after Ophelia goes crazy and kills herself, and after the King and Laertes (Ophelia’s brother) devise a plan to murder Hamlet, the play comes to it’s renowned grisly end: Laertes stabs Hamlet with a poisoned sword, Hamlet stabs Laertes with a poisoned sword, Hamlet stabs the King and forces poison down his throat, and the Queen accidentally drinks poison, and everyone dies. The end.

The story was not a surprise to me and I have no strong feelings for it except it’s a good revenge story. What I didn’t realize till I read it is what a complex character Hamlet really is. We want to think of him as a hero and victim (the play is about him after all, and his father, whom he loved very much, was taken away from him by his very own uncle). But he is also one screwed up guy. In pretending to be crazy, there is a fine line he’s crossing where he really does seem to be going crazy. He has no qualms about killing Polonius or about violently confronting his mother or about telling Ophelia that he never loved her at all or about sending two of his friends to be executed. In one scene, the King is by himself and it is Hamlet’s opportunity to kill him. However, the King is praying so Hamlet decides to wait because what’s the point of killing someone that just finished confessing when that would send him to Heaven instead of Hell? Better to wait until he’s sinning and condemn him to Hell that way. I mean, the guy is seriously a jerk and a badass at the same time.

Here’s what he says to his mother when he confronts her about marrying his uncle so quickly:

Queen.
O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.

Ham.
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty,--

In case you’re wondering, enseamed bed does mean what it kinda sounds like it means. Here’s what he says when the King asks him what he did with Polonius' corpse:

King.
Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

Ham.
At supper.

King.
At supper! where?

Ham.
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him.
[some lines have been cut here]

King.
Where is Polonius?

Ham.
In heaven: send thither to see: if your messenger find him not
there, seek him i' the other place yourself. But, indeed, if you
find him not within this month, you shall nose (smell) him as you go up
the stairs into the lobby.

I think now I see why they cast Mel Gibson as Hamlet. It kinda makes me want to watch that movie version. And it kinda makes me want to watch Reinassance Man, too. And I have to mention this somewhere because for some reason I always remember that scene from Clueless where Josh’s girlfriend is saying “to thine own self be true, Hamlet himself said that” and Cher says “no, Hamlet didn’t say that” and the girlfriend says “I think I remember Hamlet accurately” in a snooty tone and Cher scoffs and says “well I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn’t say that, that Polonius guy did” and Josh laughs cause it’s true. It always makes me think of that, go figure.

This is the only Shakespeare play in that deck of cards, so my days of poring over centuries-old english is over for a while. But that is not to say that I won't be picking up another of his plays at some point. I hear Othello is a badass, too.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

2009-05-11T11:54:00.001-04:00

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So begins Vonnegut’s book, a story that takes place in Germany during World War II. Billy Pilgrim and several other American soldiers are captured by the Germans and taken to Dresden where they witness, and survive, the February 1945 bombing of the city. This part of the story is based on Vonnegut’s real life experiences as a POW, where he really did witness the bombing of Dresden and survived along with the other POWs and their German guards inside an underground slaughterhouse meatlocker (Slaughterhouse Five is what the real German guards called the detention facility). Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, meaning that he travels through time to different events in his life, including his childhood, his service during the war and time spent as a POW, his marriage, his old-age as a widower, and his murder. He also visits events in his life that occurred when he was abducted by aliens and put on display in a zoo in the planet of Tralfamadore, where he was wedded to Montana Wildhack, a porn movie star that is also abducted. A reason is never given as to why Billy has come unstuck in time.

I interpreted this unusual plot in two ways (if either is correct, or if none of them are, I don’t know and it probably doesn’t matter): 1) Billy really does become unstuck in time and is able to time travel to different events throughout his life, including a time where he was abducted by real aliens; or, 2) Billy’s experiences during the war, and his repressed memories of those experiences, are turning him insane. I’d say either device is pretty cool.

I enjoyed this book more than I expected to given the subject matter and unusual plot. It is very graphic in its description of war and imprisonment, which is very significant given the source material. As Vonnegut himself says in the prelude (which is really the first chapter), the novel is “short and jumbled and jangled,” with events jumping throughout the book to different moment’s of Billy’s life. During the war, Billy grapples with his ineptness and horror at witnessing a massacre. After the war he grapples with depression. As such, it is a sad and grave book…but in a good way. It is an anti-war book but not in a preachy way. It says: “Look, these are the horrible things that happen during a war. Look.”

Also, for some reason, I liked the descriptions of the science fiction books that the Kilgore Trout character writes (Trout is a science fiction writer that also appears in many other Vonnegut books). Also, it is the sixty-ninth entry to the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. Just thought I’d put that out there.

Code Monkey

2009-05-05T08:55:00.002-04:00

Some of the past weekend was spent helping Rock re-design the back-end code of NobodyComesHere.com. Well, "helping re-design" is too strong a phrase. It might be more accurate to say that first I watched movies while Rock spent hours coding, then I tried very hard to understand as he explained the basics of object oriented programming and PHP, and then I copy/pasted a lot of his original code, deleted certain words, and wrote other words in their place.

I can't say I'm any nearer to writing SQL queries or figuring out what classes to write or how to write a DAO from scratch, but I do know what these things are. And I have some vague concept about the general design of NobodyComesHere.com: there's a database, and data access objects, and a controller...and I think I'm forgetting something. In any case, I found the experience not too unpleasant and, even though I'm not planning to become a programmer any time soon (I still have not forgotten that my only C in college was from the one computer science class I elected to take), I am looking forward to my next coding assignment.

Mood: accomplished
TV/Music/Book: Bridget Jones's Diary. Oh Colin Firth, how do I love thee, let me count the ways...

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

2009-05-01T10:43:00.001-04:00

Despite my realization that I really need to stop re-reading books and actually find something new, I picked up Catch-22 for the third time. It was the audiobook’s fault, really. It seemed to be the type of book that would lend itself to a good audiobook rendition, so I picked it up.

Reading Catch-22 the first time was a bit frustrating. I had never picked up a book that had that much stream-of-consciousness to it, so it felt very messy and disjointed. Plus, everyone in it, and everything that happens, is absolutely crazy. Well, yeah, that’s the point, I know, but it was too crazy. But I still enjoyed it because it had a very good mix of comedy and tragedy, and also what do they call it when you get both those things at the same time? It had that too.

I read it the second time for no real good reason except that it was there. Having read it the first time, it was much easier to follow along. Everything made perfect sense, everyone was very crazy and very sane at the same time. Now, I’ve read it (heard it) for the third time. One thing never changes: it’s still one crazy book.

The story is about an Air Force Squadron stationed on a fictional island off the coast of Italy during the last stages of World War II. It mostly follows Yossarian, a bombardier who thinks everyone is trying to kill him, particularly the enemy, which is why he refuses to fly more combat missions. However, the story has a huge cast of characters, each with well developed storylines. The story is told in a non-chronological, stream-of-consciousness style from multiple points of view (though all in the third person). No wonder I was lost the first time. Events are told out of order and described from the point of view of different characters, so that the reader learns more about a particular event each time it is re-described.

I certainly appreciate the writing style of the book much more than I did the first time. It seems to be a chaotic book, where many things happen at once and the storylines make no sense the first time they’re introduced, but Heller is very good at weaving events together and fleshing everything out. He relies on paradox, repetition, and circular logic, and is very good at combining comedy and tragedy.

The audiobook format was not as good as I expected. Jay O. Sanders is the narrator. Generally, he does a good job but he can sound a bit morose and sort of like that monotonous teacher that just drones on and on. I didn’t like his voice for Yossarian, who sounded whiny and like a jerk. It’s also my fault for having read it twice already, because certain memorable moments did not sound the way I had imagined them in my head. The narrator is very good in scenes that have several characters, and there are moments where his delivery makes a moment even funnier. But for a book that has many funny moments, it did not sound that funny because of the narrator’s delivery.

Wikipedia is Evil

2009-04-30T08:12:00.004-04:00

So there I was, having finished reading Wizard and Glass. Three more books left in the Dark Tower series, all ready for me to start reading them. There was just one issue. Just as fervently as Rock had talked up book four, he assured me that the rest of the series was terrible.

“How terrible?”
“Pretty terrible, you won’t want to waste your time.”
“Interesting.”

Well, I had put my faith in his review of book four, and he was right…would I really want to spend the time and money to find out if he was right about this too? But what could be so bad about them? Incredibly curious, I skimmed through the remaining three books and caught a couple of key words: vampires, wolves, priest from Salem’s lot, Eddie Dean asking Roland “do you know who this Stephen King guy is?” Ok, that was really the one that sealed the deal. I mean, come on, you wrote yourself in the story? Really?

Thoroughly disgusted, I realized I didn’t really care to go through the exercise of finishing the series. After all, even though you need to read books one through three to appreciate four, the really absorbing story of book four is contained within book four…but I was dying to know how the whole thing would end. How to find out? Do they write Cliff’s notes for these things? As it turns out, they do, in a manner of speaking. A quick google search led me to Wikipedia pages. Thus began my slippery slope into reading plot summaries of books I didn’t care about but which had me desperately intrigued. So I found out what happens in the end of the Dark Tower series (very disappointing ending, Mr. King) and I spared myself the suspense. I’m not proud. I spared myself the suspense of reading stories from the master of suspense (he is quite good in that respect). It’s like choosing to get full on French fries rather than going to the most fantastic French restaurant. I know.

Sadly, though, there is no redemption in this story. I decided to watch the Twilight movie when it came out on DVD. I wanted to know why it was the New York Times’ Editor’s Choice and one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Decade…So Far. But I know that the movie is never the same as the book so I read the first book. Well, there’s a lot wrong with this one (the fact that I’m reading a teen angst book being one thing). I won’t go into it, especially when others have done a much better job than I ever could. Suffice it to say that I disagree with the New York Times and Amazon…fervently. Also, I may have found the one and only instance of a movie that actually improves on the book.

In other words, not one of my favorite books. And the story doesn’t end there. It goes on for three more books, each increasingly longer than the last. Well, I think we all know where this story is going. Ten minutes later I’m at the end of the Wikipedia summaries, again not feeling proud of myself, but at least I didn’t spend the next six days gagging and rolling my eyes at the “star-crossed lovers.” I suppose if I had nothing else to do, I would have endured it better.

Finally, the point to all this: Wikipedia is evil. No longer will I have to actually read books (that’s so last century apparently) or even have them read to me. I can just get the bastardized versions and spare myself the trouble. I’ve become like those people that watch the movie instead of reading the book, except it’s like I’m watching the 30-Second Bunnies Theater of The Shining. I should be pelted with tomatoes. But maybe I just don’t like over-bloated, self-glorified, needlessly-lengthy series that manufacture excessive side plots instead of pushing the story forward. What would I know, though, I didn’t read it.

Wizard and Glass (Book IV The Dark Tower Series) – Stephen King

2009-04-29T07:28:00.003-04:00

I started Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series over a year ago. I put it down halfway through book two and didn’t really care to pick it up again until I started driving to work and listening to the same CDs over and over and over and over…Given Rock’s assurances that the first half of the series was some of King’s best work, I decided to venture into audiobook territory. I started with book two again and, I was surprised to discover, I actually liked having it read to me. Apparently I started with a very good audiobook, as far as audiobooks go, because the narrator, Frank Muller, is “the superstar of audiobooks.” I have also heard two other audiobooks not read by Muller and the difference is undeniable. The man is an audiobook superstar.

And so it went, through book two and eventually through book three, and finally to book four, Wizard and Glass. At this point Rock assured me that book four was perhaps King’s best story ever. Actually, he had assured me about this for so long now that I needed to read it just to know whether I disagreed with him or not. Well, I listened to about half of the book before I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed his tattered copy off the shelf and was about 90% done with the whole book by the time I managed to stop myself so that I could listen to the audiobook that I had paid so much money for.

The story centers largely on Roland’s adventures shortly after winning his duel with Cort and earning his guns. Roland’s father sends Roland away to the far-off land of Mejis for his own protection, along with his friends Alain and Cuthbert. In Mejis, Roland falls in love with Susan Delgado and, together with Alain and Cuthbert, uncovers plans by “the Good Man” to attack Gilead, their hometown. The events in the book are defining moments for the character of Roland; it is, essentially, where we learn why Roland is who he is and why he sets out on the quest for the Dark Tower.

I highly recommend this book. I had enjoyed books two and three (and one, but I always see one as a separate story for some reason) but was oftentimes put-off by the sheer weirdness of everything that happens. I think the audiobook media was partly to blame. The story takes such unusual turns and contains so many other-worldly elements that if I zoned out for even a few seconds I would lose track of what had happened. On the other hand, while Wizard and Glass does contain mystical themes, it is, at the core, a suspenseful, romantic, tragic, coming-of-age adventure story.

One element of King’s writing that I found particularly enjoyable (though maddening at the same time) is his blatant foreshadowing, such as sentences along the lines of “and that was the last time they saw each other” or “he would come to bitterly regret this decision during the events that followed.” Of course, in a larger sense, we already know how this story turns out since we are introduced to Roland well after these events have taken place and can surmise how they unfolded in order to shape who he is. Still, blatantly telling the reader what is going to happen is, in my opinion, a very effective way of making the reader take notice, by putting the reader in the place of God: we understand what the characters don’t and we can see what they can’t, namely the defining moments that will alter their future. As the reader, I wanted to scream at the characters, as if I was watching a scary movie (“Don’t open that door, that’s where the killer is! Run! Run the other way!”). And I desperately wanted (hoped for) a different ending, even though the ending was always well known and inevitable.

The story is very romantic but it kicks ass too. Two favorite moments are: “the girl at the window” (again, an infuriatingly clever moment where King lets us know that this vision of Susan at the window is Roland’s favorite and strongest memory of her); and, Alain, Cuthbert, and Roland taking out 40 or so men by following them from behind and picking them off one by one. There are many other very good moments. In fact, I have nothing bad to say about this book (except that it was so tragic in my opinion, that I was still going on about it days after I finished it). It has characters I came to love, characters I came to hate (murderously), moments that made me giddy, moments that made me cry.

Happy Birthday Rock!

2009-04-28T07:21:00.011-04:00

We here at Occasional Sin Enterprises wish to extend our deepest sympathies to fellow blogger Rock over at Nobody Comes Here Inc., on his yearly oldening day (thank you Bbungles for my new favorite term!). Don't overdo the cake and make sure to thank your mother :)

As this will be my post for the day, I also have to squeeze in a couple of screenshots from my latest WoW adventures. It seems to be Easter over at World of Warcraft (except it's called Noblegarden Festival and it's, oh, late April...still, it's an egg hunt). Everyone playing this weekend, me included, looked like a bunch of idiots running around collecting virtual eggs. No, I know, I know, someday I will write up an eloquent post in which I explain my theory on how WoW is really a way to indulge in obsessive-compulsive behavior. Nevertheless, there I was. The hunt was not entirely unfruitful: I got a spring bunny pet and I got turned into a spring bunny too. I particularly love how even virtual cats are essentially lazy critters. So true.

Mood: celebratory
TV/Music/Book: The Return of the King Extended Edition cast commentary

PTO Day for the Win

2009-04-27T17:44:00.003-04:00

One nice thing about having a stereotypical cubicle desk job and 8-hour work days is getting paid time off, which means you can take a mini-vacation any day you want and not have to excuse yourself. Last night I realized with dread that I would have to wake up in eight hours, drag myself out of bed, commute for an hour, and go to work. This morning I realized I can call PTO day! It's like asking for a time-out.

Some WoW was played, a cake was baked, a latte was sipped out in the park, and x-files will be on the tv soon. I did catch some of today's most popular stories, the vast majority focusing on the impending swine flu epidemic (pandemic?). It seems pretty nuts, although I am confused about the severity of it since it essentially acts as a flu and, while in some cases swine flu can lead to pneumonia and death through respiratory failure, I do believe a regular flu can also be fatal. And doesn't the common flu also mutate and spread really easily and pop up everywhere around the world? Admittedly, it is quite scary to see it start up in Mexico, jump to the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, etc. Before you know it, Madagascar is closing down EVERYTHING. And then the undead come...

First Bike Ride of the Season!

2009-04-25T19:54:00.010-04:00

Which means it is finally a respectable, tolerable, sunny, breezy spring day. I feel quite proud of the fact that I rode my bike for over two hours this morning. I am amazed that I did not want to curl up and die from exhaustion. I do believe the sweaty, tiresome hours spent at the gym everyday for the past six months may be paying off somehow...despite weighing exactly the same now as I did back then :(

I will overlook the fact that Rock's first ride of the season occurred about two months ago in 32 degree weather and congratulate myself once again. So, yay!

Mood: tired, amazed
TV/Music/Book: Star Trek, in which something stupid happens with the holodeck...again