"Anything is Good if it's Made of Chocolate." -- Jo Brand

Tuesday is here "to stay"! BUAHAHAH!!! O, man, I'm so clever...

O_o

OK, so there were a couple big birthdays since last we spoke... Abbie turned 21 and my mom turned 60! Here's a cake shaped like the Millennium Falcon to celebrate!

See? That's the kind of in-depth, hard-hitting info you can only get on this blog. That's why you all come here, and check the blog so often every day. Now, you can be informed and clever too! So when I ask you, "Hey, you know who turned 60 recently?" and you can say, "Yeah, I know who turned 60... your mom! Ooooh, burn!"

Then I'll high-five you... in your face!



Good, now that THAT's out of the way...

Watched that Travolta movie the other night, as I threatened. And now, a brief review.

From Paris With Love: A Review
--------------------------------------

Summary: Meh.

There. That's a quality review right there! Well, brevity being the soul of wit and all... I suppose I could elaborate a bit more...

Travolta was annoying. His co-star (Meyers) was mis-cast. They had bad chemistry. And Action Tropes were everywhere. The most egregious tropes were that Travolta killed everyone he wanted to, while avoiding getting shot by dozens of machine-gun toting baddies, even mere feet away. Nothing new there. Getting sprayed with machine gun rounds, eh? Well, just hide behind a flimsy table for a second, then pop up and fire once with your handgun and kill the baddie. Rinse, repeat.

The worst scene (for hapless, inconsistent realists like myself) was where Travolta was hanging out of the passenger side window of a speeding car (which was pursuing the bad guy) while shouldering a rocket launcher and talking on a cell phone. While weaving in and out of traffic, Hollywood style. My first thought, of course: "He would fall out". Nope. They struggled to catch up to the bad guy and get into position to blow his car up, but couldn't get the shot. So get this... lol... he tells the driver to race ahead and get on the next overpass, so he could shoot the bad guy as he passed below, lol. They couldn't catch up to the baddie, so the solution was simply to race way ahead of him! Why didn't I think of that! So they did! Raced up, had enough time to park on the overpass and then pop the baddie as he passed underneath, before he could get to the motorcade with dignitaries in it... lol.

New Summary: Pantload.

OK, enough of that.

I also watched Midnight Run with Deniro and Grodin last night. One of my favorites, although I'll never understand why a movie needs to be saturated in profanity. It just doesn't do anything for the film! Why put it in there? Every other word starts with an F! I'm hardly a prude, but come on! It taints an otherwise awesome film!

And now, wicked-cool optical illusions...



I hate those stupid little pop-up ads on videos. I'd uninvent them if I could... ah, well.. there's worse problems to have, I suppose...

I bought yet another game yesterday! What was I thinking! It's called Alien Breed: Impact, and it was a great deal ($15). Steam is having great sales on different games each day this week. CRAP! I just checked today's sales, and they have Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for only $33. Dangit, I thought I was done buying games... It's going to be a long day trying not to buy that one... wish me luck... [EDIT] I made it until 5:15 pm Pacific Standard Time before making the mistake of watching Gamespot's video review of BC2... they had me at "hello"... game is officially bought.[EDIT]

The fantasy blog world is all abuzz over the teaser trailer for the coming HBO series Game of Thrones. Hearing Sean Bean mutter "Winter is coming" admittedly gave me chills! And at the same time cemented my status as a nerd. Mixed blessing, I guess. You can read about it and find links to watch it over at Wertzone (among dozens of other sites). It's worth a peek for the quick rush...

So I'm 180 pages into book 3 of the Night Angel Trilogy. The third book is better than the second in many ways, as I'd hoped. Still, the magic systems are a lost cause, I think. Here, let me show another example of how free-form and void of internal logic they are. It's from pages 134-135 of Beyond the Shadows...

They rode together through the rain and soon the city emerged from the low-lying cloud. "It's called Laketown," Sister Ariel said, "for obvious reasons."

The city and the Chantry rested at the confluence of two rivers, which made a reservoir above Vastacchi Lake. All of the buildings of the city and the Chantry rested on islands in the reservoir, the nearest of which was fifty paces from the shore. Arching bridges connected every island to its neighbors and several to the shore, but streets themselves were absent. Instead, low, flat punts navigated the waterways. Some of them were covered against the rain, others exposed. Regardless, the punts moved far faster than they should have.

Vi and Ariel entered the part of Laketown that had grown on the shores by the bridges, but all the merchants seemed to be huddled in their daub-and-wattle homes, with their chimneys smoking.

"By some ancient magic we still can't duplicate, the islands are actually floating," Sister Ariel said. "The entire dam can be opened and the islands flushed out into the lake in times of war. Of course, we haven't had to do that for centuries. And a good thing, too. I understand towing all the islands back up here is a lot of work."

"It's beautiful," Vi said, forgetting herself. "The water is so clean."

"The city was built at a time when magic was used to benefit farmers and fishermen. There were special streams in every city that would take the stains out of your clothing. There were plows that could be pulled by a single ox that would break six furrows in a single pass. There were free public baths with water as hot or cold as you wanted. Charms that kept meat from spoiling. People thought of magic as a tool, not only as a weapon. In Laketown, the slops and nightsoil are supposed to be thrown into these pipes that -- see, no smell? -- that take them directly to the dam. Of course, you can never get everyone to obey even a sensible law -- like not throwing nightsoil in the water you drink -- so the lake itself has spells that cleanse it."

Then the two characters get into one of those punts, and it magically moves itself swiftly through the waters, to the destination they wanted to go to. It's almost like the author was challenging himself to find the most obscure, wild things he could imagine, and attribute it to "magic". I can't help but chuckle. And again, that's just one small example; the series is packed to the gills with such things. And again, there's no explanation of exactly how the magic system operates. Stuff just happens, and it's called magic. Period.

In related news, Vye cut his hair! Vye's long, heroic, flapping in the breeze or pulled back smartly into a raging ponytail hair is gone! Gone! I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with his upcoming wedding. I don't have a picture of the newly-shorn Vye the Conqueror, sorry. I'm sure he still has the strength of 8 men, so it's all good.

On a personal note, I've been growing my beard out. It's a furry, unruly mess and I love it!

OK, one more video and I'm out. This one made me smile inside, so I thought I'd post it...



OK, that's it for now. I hope your week is progressing well.

Dave