Happy New Year! One of the nice things about living on an academic calendar is that I have the chance to step back and re-assess the shape of life every semester. As I've been preparing for the spring, I've started to realize that I miss livejournal quite a lot. I've drifted away because my writing process changed when I moved from my exams into ( Read more... )

For those of you who may not have seen this elsewhere... =)

( Dragon: The Hoarding )

"What I'd really like to have is a tricorder for evil."

Starnes Walker, research director for Homeland Security's Science and Technology division, commenting on new efforts to develop technologies to detect IEDs within the United States.

USA Today 11/27/07 3A

I’ve been reading a lot recently - here are some updates ( Read more... )

I saw Resident Evil: Extinction on Friday night, and it was fun. “Fun” in my mind is a specific variety of “good,” but “good” is a vague descriptor that can mean too many different things when applied to media. =) For example, I’d describe Vellum as “visionary” - another specific variety of “good” that I enjoy a great deal, but that others might ( Read more... )

I started off last time talking about Hal Duncan’s Vellum, and I didn’t have time to get into my thoughts and reflections:

( Read More )

I’m currently finishing Hal Duncan’s Vellum, the first book of a two-part series concluding with Ink. Duncan is a Scottish New Weird writer - although “New Weird” can be a and contested term, I’d use it to broadly refer to a current avant-garde fantasy movement focused on disrupting genre boundaries and formal conventions often associated with ( Read more... )

I just finished Heroes, Volume One on DVD. Interesting stuff. I don’t have TV, so I wasn’t watching during the broadcast season - I devoured the whole thing in one prolonged gulp over the past two weeks. Some thoughts (with spoilers):

( Read More )

I went to see Ocean’s Thirteen on Monday, and it was great. A very entertaining heist movie - much better than the last one, maybe as good as the first (though I’d have to rewatch Eleven for a solid comparison).

It sucks to say this, but Thirteen seemed to benefit from its lack of major female characters. Not because it wou;dn't have been good ( Read more... )

Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters (an eight-issue series from DC that re-launches a classic cast of World War Two characters including Phantom Lady, The Human Bomb, Doll Man, and the Ray, among others) has me thinking about on differences between “patriotism” and, well, something BETTER than patriotism ( Read more... )