newnumber6 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
newnumber6) wrote2008-06-27 04:34 pm
newnumber6) wrote2008-06-27 04:34 pm
Book Foo, with a few random add-ons.
Finished: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Thoughts on the debut of John Carter behind the cut. Not really spoilery.
I enjoyed it for the most part. I think I enjoyed it more on the level of 'well, it's a classic and I can see how it influenced the genre' a little more than I enjoy newer stuff, but as a simple adventure on Mars, it was fun, and I liked it more than the modern S.M. Stirling adventure on Venus I read recently. I'll probably read the other John Carter books if I can get my hands on it. Sure, there's a bit of silliness due to early-20th centuries ideas about Mars (not to mention other science in general), but they're not too bad.
Started and finished: The Fifth Omni Book of Science Fiction (short stories)
Started: Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman
Thoughts on the Omni SF book behind the cut. Not really spoilery.
The usual mixed bag of stories you always get in a short story selection, although a little worse because although there were a few that were enjoyable, there was none that really stood out as 'wow, awesome story, worth the whole book'. The closest was probably "Adagio", by Barry B. Longyear, about a conflict among stranded spacemen waged using the local life form - an extremely slow moving species of sentient 'rocks'.
Finished: Otherland: Vol 4: Sea of Silver Light, by Tad Williams
Started: Queen of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder
Thoughts about the whole of the Otherland series behind the cut. Some minor spoilers. Quick thought: liked it more than I thought I would.
The series involves a huge, highly complex virtual reality network that the hyper rich has built secretly for their own use, and some people are drawn in to investigate it because it seems children are falling into comas because of it. A group of these people get trapped in the Otherland and drawn into all sorts of plots as they explore lots of newly created simulation worlds that seem as real as life.
Now, when I went into the series, I figured it was going to tweak two of my pet peeves in SF - one, the whole "If you die in VR, YOU DIE FOR REALS!" idea (generally stupid unless extremely well explained), and the other being messy spirituality-is-real type elements. I can look past them for a good story. To my surprise, though, in this case, I really didn't have to - they managed to, to my tastes, satisfactorially avoid both problems(though there was a tiny bit of the latter, it was well within acceptable, deniable limits), while using the ideas of both. So, well done there.
It was a long and, occasionally, meandering story though, with groups of characters getting split up and reunited and split up again, and each of them going through their own sets of worlds inspired by history, SF, or fantasy in an almost random way (along with a lot of ongoing plot streams set outside of the VR system). Still, it was handled well enough that, although there were times I was bored and wished they just got on with it, I'm not annoyed at having wasted my time reading it. I might read it again at some point, which is saying something considering it's something like 3500 pages in total.
The ending is a little weak, suffering from "So, here's what all that was about" Syndrome, where a character has to, at great length, explain a whole load of things and how it fit together into the plot all at once - many of which might have been better if they explained it earlier for the audience. Also the author did seem to be too attached to a happy ending for most of the people left involved after the climax - there was a point where I was able to predict what would happen just because it was the most absurdly beneficial thing that you might expect. Still, fun.
Other news! I have a new tasty sandwich treat. Mortadella and Caesar dressing. Now, one of my favorite sandwich discoveries of the last decade was Mortadella and Feta Cheese. Very nice, but there's one problem. I have to have Feta. And though I love feta cheese, I don't eat it enough to make it feasible to have it on hand at all times - it's too expensive in small batches and goes bad in large batches. So usually I only get it if my grandmother gives me some from her own batches (she uses it a lot), and so Mortadella and Feta is, although awesome, somewhat rare for me. However, Caeser dressing does a lot of the same good thing - gives it a nice tangy, salty kick, and I can have Caesar dressing all the time. So it is now superior on my list of favorite sandwiches.
(By favorite sandwich discoveries I mean things that I can make easily and for relatively cheaply, not fancy frou frou sandwiches or ones that require 50 steps, no matter how awesome they might be).
In other food news tried a microwave (PC) 'lamb rogon josh' dish today, which was quite nice for a microwave meal. Never had rogon josh before, but it might be worth trying sometime if I get the chance at a real place.
And, haven't mentioned dreams in a while, but there were a couple in the last few days I wanted to get down. One involving something very disturbing from Doctor Who, and another just SF goodness.
One I remembered was kind of cool. We were living on a space habitat, a massive ring like something in Iain M. Banks' Culture books, and something had happened, it was damaged and we needed to evacuate. But, also, something was coming, something that was eating the universe, and so it was very end-of-the-worldy, even though a spaceship did eventually arrive towards the end, before the universe eater reached us, to start evacuating people. Despite the grim nature of the circumstances, it was actually quite a calm and peaceful dream, and I regretted when I woke up that I _wasn't_ on a dying ring habitat.
As to the Doctor Who dream? All I can remember is... *shudder* naked Davros. (He was standing, and the story was set sometime before he was in the chair). You couldn't even really see anything (that is, if it was a TV show I was watching, the actor was in a full body costume and the bits were alien), but still. *shudder*.
Oh, and damn you Marvel. You finally decide to do a Runaways What If (What If... The Runaways became the Young Avengers)... and not only do you have to give it to CB Cebulski to write (a guy who seems very nice and apparently likes all my favorite characters, but to whom I've never particularly enjoyed any of his writing), but you make it a BACK-UP story to five other What Ifs I have no interest in. *shakes fist*. I think I'll have to resort to... let's call it magic, to get this story.
Finally, shouldn't there be _some_ standards and accountability with television commercials? I mean, specifically, that when a TV channel advertises something as an "all new episode", should it not _be_ an all-new episode, and if it is not, that commercial pulled and replaced with one that does not use that phrase (or, in the absence of that, some kind of punishment)? I'm speaking specifically of the Comedy Network, which I watch a fair bit, and I constantly see commercials for Corner Gas that start with "ON AN ALL NEW CORNER GAS"... except they're reruns. This year's reruns, sure, but reruns all the same. NOT ALL NEW. YOU DIE NOW. It's not like I'm looking forward to new eps or anything, it's the principle of the thing - if you advertise All New, it had damn well better be all new. It's bad enough when US channels used to advertise something as the "World television premiere" of something that already aired in Canada, but this is another level entirely. I don't actually think they're being deceptive in this case, just lazy (too lazy to redo the commercials from when it was new), but laziness is not an excuse - you're a network, you've got millions of dollars - fix it. *shakes fist*.
Thoughts on the debut of John Carter behind the cut. Not really spoilery.
I enjoyed it for the most part. I think I enjoyed it more on the level of 'well, it's a classic and I can see how it influenced the genre' a little more than I enjoy newer stuff, but as a simple adventure on Mars, it was fun, and I liked it more than the modern S.M. Stirling adventure on Venus I read recently. I'll probably read the other John Carter books if I can get my hands on it. Sure, there's a bit of silliness due to early-20th centuries ideas about Mars (not to mention other science in general), but they're not too bad.
Started and finished: The Fifth Omni Book of Science Fiction (short stories)
Started: Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman
Thoughts on the Omni SF book behind the cut. Not really spoilery.
The usual mixed bag of stories you always get in a short story selection, although a little worse because although there were a few that were enjoyable, there was none that really stood out as 'wow, awesome story, worth the whole book'. The closest was probably "Adagio", by Barry B. Longyear, about a conflict among stranded spacemen waged using the local life form - an extremely slow moving species of sentient 'rocks'.
Finished: Otherland: Vol 4: Sea of Silver Light, by Tad Williams
Started: Queen of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder
Thoughts about the whole of the Otherland series behind the cut. Some minor spoilers. Quick thought: liked it more than I thought I would.
The series involves a huge, highly complex virtual reality network that the hyper rich has built secretly for their own use, and some people are drawn in to investigate it because it seems children are falling into comas because of it. A group of these people get trapped in the Otherland and drawn into all sorts of plots as they explore lots of newly created simulation worlds that seem as real as life.
Now, when I went into the series, I figured it was going to tweak two of my pet peeves in SF - one, the whole "If you die in VR, YOU DIE FOR REALS!" idea (generally stupid unless extremely well explained), and the other being messy spirituality-is-real type elements. I can look past them for a good story. To my surprise, though, in this case, I really didn't have to - they managed to, to my tastes, satisfactorially avoid both problems(though there was a tiny bit of the latter, it was well within acceptable, deniable limits), while using the ideas of both. So, well done there.
It was a long and, occasionally, meandering story though, with groups of characters getting split up and reunited and split up again, and each of them going through their own sets of worlds inspired by history, SF, or fantasy in an almost random way (along with a lot of ongoing plot streams set outside of the VR system). Still, it was handled well enough that, although there were times I was bored and wished they just got on with it, I'm not annoyed at having wasted my time reading it. I might read it again at some point, which is saying something considering it's something like 3500 pages in total.
The ending is a little weak, suffering from "So, here's what all that was about" Syndrome, where a character has to, at great length, explain a whole load of things and how it fit together into the plot all at once - many of which might have been better if they explained it earlier for the audience. Also the author did seem to be too attached to a happy ending for most of the people left involved after the climax - there was a point where I was able to predict what would happen just because it was the most absurdly beneficial thing that you might expect. Still, fun.
Other news! I have a new tasty sandwich treat. Mortadella and Caesar dressing. Now, one of my favorite sandwich discoveries of the last decade was Mortadella and Feta Cheese. Very nice, but there's one problem. I have to have Feta. And though I love feta cheese, I don't eat it enough to make it feasible to have it on hand at all times - it's too expensive in small batches and goes bad in large batches. So usually I only get it if my grandmother gives me some from her own batches (she uses it a lot), and so Mortadella and Feta is, although awesome, somewhat rare for me. However, Caeser dressing does a lot of the same good thing - gives it a nice tangy, salty kick, and I can have Caesar dressing all the time. So it is now superior on my list of favorite sandwiches.
(By favorite sandwich discoveries I mean things that I can make easily and for relatively cheaply, not fancy frou frou sandwiches or ones that require 50 steps, no matter how awesome they might be).
In other food news tried a microwave (PC) 'lamb rogon josh' dish today, which was quite nice for a microwave meal. Never had rogon josh before, but it might be worth trying sometime if I get the chance at a real place.
And, haven't mentioned dreams in a while, but there were a couple in the last few days I wanted to get down. One involving something very disturbing from Doctor Who, and another just SF goodness.
One I remembered was kind of cool. We were living on a space habitat, a massive ring like something in Iain M. Banks' Culture books, and something had happened, it was damaged and we needed to evacuate. But, also, something was coming, something that was eating the universe, and so it was very end-of-the-worldy, even though a spaceship did eventually arrive towards the end, before the universe eater reached us, to start evacuating people. Despite the grim nature of the circumstances, it was actually quite a calm and peaceful dream, and I regretted when I woke up that I _wasn't_ on a dying ring habitat.
As to the Doctor Who dream? All I can remember is... *shudder* naked Davros. (He was standing, and the story was set sometime before he was in the chair). You couldn't even really see anything (that is, if it was a TV show I was watching, the actor was in a full body costume and the bits were alien), but still. *shudder*.
Oh, and damn you Marvel. You finally decide to do a Runaways What If (What If... The Runaways became the Young Avengers)... and not only do you have to give it to CB Cebulski to write (a guy who seems very nice and apparently likes all my favorite characters, but to whom I've never particularly enjoyed any of his writing), but you make it a BACK-UP story to five other What Ifs I have no interest in. *shakes fist*. I think I'll have to resort to... let's call it magic, to get this story.
Finally, shouldn't there be _some_ standards and accountability with television commercials? I mean, specifically, that when a TV channel advertises something as an "all new episode", should it not _be_ an all-new episode, and if it is not, that commercial pulled and replaced with one that does not use that phrase (or, in the absence of that, some kind of punishment)? I'm speaking specifically of the Comedy Network, which I watch a fair bit, and I constantly see commercials for Corner Gas that start with "ON AN ALL NEW CORNER GAS"... except they're reruns. This year's reruns, sure, but reruns all the same. NOT ALL NEW. YOU DIE NOW. It's not like I'm looking forward to new eps or anything, it's the principle of the thing - if you advertise All New, it had damn well better be all new. It's bad enough when US channels used to advertise something as the "World television premiere" of something that already aired in Canada, but this is another level entirely. I don't actually think they're being deceptive in this case, just lazy (too lazy to redo the commercials from when it was new), but laziness is not an excuse - you're a network, you've got millions of dollars - fix it. *shakes fist*.
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Also, rogan josh is amongst my faves,
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