The long-awaited Vacation Post
Here, finally, is the promised vacation post. I doubt anyone really cares all that much, but here it is anyway. Basically, I'm just going to go over the books I read and the movies I watched over Christmas break, since that's pretty much all I did, aside from the requisite family gatherings and such. The only vaguely interesting things I received for Christmas was a little 20 questions electronic game thing, and a $15 gift card to Jack-in-the-box. Other than that, I got a shirt and a tiny fruit cake (which I left in NC, now that I think about it, not that I would have eaten it anyway) and that's about it.
Books:
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. This was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. I don't see what all the fuss is about, but I enjoyed it pretty well regardless. The only thing was that when I got to the part with the big reveal about the true nature of the Holy Grail, I merely had a vague sense of been there, done that more than anything else, so it wasn't all that shocking to me or whatever. My sisters assure me that Angels & Demons is much better than Da Vinci Code, however, so maybe I'll look into that one later.
Dante's Equation, by Jane Jensen, the creator of the Gabriel Knight series of computer games. This book was essentially split into two parts. The first part was relatively normal and mundane: scientists discovering a physical law of good and evil, a rabbi disappearing in a flash of light from Auschwitz during WWII, another rabbi finding references to this first rabbi in the Torah through Kabbalah, you know, that sort of thing. The second half of the book was just plain Star Trek-y weird and out there, but as such was a lot cooler in my personal opinion.
Prey, by Michael Crichton. Basically, some scientists create some nano-machines and things go awry. It was pretty cool. I would especially recommend it to anyone from DigiPen who have taken or are planning to take either CS380 or CS381, the two AI/Machine Learning classes.
Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson. I realize that this is a "children's book," but I never read it so I figured I'd give it a read. I knew going in what it was going to be about, and so was braced for it and not as affected by it as I otherwise would have been, which in a strange way was a bit disappointing for me. Had I read it cold without any prior knowledge of what it was about, however, I can assure you, with full machismo, that this book probably would have fucked my shit up pretty hard. With that said, it was an excellent read.
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. I vaguely remember reading this one at some nebulous point in my youth, but as I read it again, I kept in mind Ray Bradbury's claim that it had been continually misinterpreted all these years. I can totally see it that way, that it was more about the dangers of television than about censorship. Really, I loathed Montag's wife and her friends. In addition to all that, I also got a vibe on the dangers of excessive political correctness from it as well.
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. Another children's book, but this is one that I do remember having read back in elementary school. I saw the made-for-television movie of this a few years ago, and thought I'd hunt down the book again during my great book-buying splurge over the summer. However, I somehow remained unaware until recently that she'd written several sequels to this book, which I intend to track down and acquire at some point.
Cold Fire, by Dean Koontz. It was decent. It started off with a interesting, seemingly supernatural premise and then went off on a whole psychological bent. Don't have much to say about it, but I enjoyed it well enough.
The Servants of Twilight, by Dean Koontz. Well, actually, I only got about halfway through this one before it was time to come back to Washington, and I haven't picked it up at all since I got back. What I've read of it so far was fairly decent, I guess. The supposed Anti-Christ and crazy religious cults and whatnot. I'll probably finish it eventually.
Movies:
The Golden Compass. I... I really wanted to like this movie, since the books were pretty awesome. However, I just wasn't all that impressed by it. The pacing was pretty bad and none of the characters were fleshed out all that much. Even Lyra and Pan, and the relationship between them, were not developed all that well, which is sad. The movie, overall, had a certain.... soulessness... to it that wasn't present in the book and which wasn't shared by its other book-to-movie contemporaries like Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, or Lord of the Rings.
Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, and 3. I'd seen these already, but with months/years between them. Also, what with having parts 1 and 2 fresh in my mind, I enjoyed 3 much more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Da Vinci Code. Well, I'd just read the book, so I wanted to see the movie. I think that may have been a mistake, as the movie wasn't nearly as good. The pacing, as with Golden Compass, was not that great. A lot of the things that it took the characters several pages or entire chapters to puzzle out in the book were solved in split seconds in the movie. Now, I know that if they'd shown all the puzzling out stuff in the movie that the movie would have been three times longer than it was, but still it kind of cheapened them as characters to leave that stuff out, in my opinion. Also, having Langdon and Teabing arguing over the Grail story in the movie versus how they were on the same page and delighting in describing it to Sophie in the book kind of grated on me as well. And, lastly, what the hell was up with all that "shadow organization" stuff in the movie? In the book, it was just Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion, and that was it, but in the movie we have Opus Dei, the Priory of Sion, and then this extraneous, unnamed "shadow organization" bullshit.
And that's pretty much it. That was my Christmas break, in a nutshell.
Oh, and the dreams I had. I said I would talk about those too, since they were pretty strange.
Dreams:
Dream 1
The first dream is probably the weirder of the two. While I recall that the dream itself occurred in fragments and not in linear or chronological order, I'm going to put together the "story" of the dream as best I can remember it in sequential order.
Let's see... first there were these two people, astronauts, some kind of world heroes or some such. A man and a woman. They were in a space ship exploring space.
Then, in what I presume was supposed to be Hell, there was a demon called Mephisdiabaalo. Basically, his name is just a lame amalgam of Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal, but it somehow didn't strike me that this was the case until after I woke up. Anyway, this demon had six demon lieutenants, three male and three female.
Back in space, the space ship is out of control and is about to crash into a star. Just before it crashes, the six demon lieutenants appear on the ship. The three males and the three females each merge into two beings, one male and one female uber-demon a piece. They proceed to, I presume, rape the male and female human astronauts. The dream kind of censored itself at this point, which I found somewhat odd, since I don't for a minute claim that I've never had pretty graphic dreams of that general nature in the past. Though, I guess, they didn't involve demons and rape before, so I guess I should be glad I was self-censoring my dreams. >_>;;
Anyway, the deed done, two "children" appear. One male and one female, the male born to the human female/demon male, and the female born to the demon female/human male. Actually they're more like an Anne Rice Taltos creature in that they're pretty much born already fully grown.
There's a kind of scene change and then we're in front of this kind of arena area. I am aware now that I, myself, am the male human/demon hybrid "child". Though it was never "shown" in the dream itself, I am aware that the six demon lieutenants had used the four of us (the two human astronaut-heroes and the two human/demon children) to overthrow Mephisdiabaalo. They had somehow changed the two humans into full demons, with the female named Caal, and the male named Maelbog. I'm not sure where the name Caal came from, unless it was just a corruption of Baal, but I'm pretty sure Maelbog is some sort of weird corruption of Malebolgia from the Spawn comics. It's odd because, aside from what little I've read about the Spawn comics on Wikipedia (which was, admittedly, before I ever had this dream), I don't know anything about Spawn.
At this point, I and my sister human/demon are supposed to be fighting our parents, full humans turned into full demons. (Let me just note that neither the "sister" nor the "parents" in this dream bore any resemblance whatsoever to any of my actual RL relatives. Thankfully.) My sister is the slightly stronger of the two of us. Caal is immensely powerful and the two of us together can't hope to defeat her. Maelbog, however, is relatively weak, and either one of us alone can beat him.
Because Caal is so incredibly powerful, we are granted a boon by the six demon lieutenants, who are watching this all for their own amusement, in that we are allowed to summon any one demon, aside from themselves, to our aid. The weaker the demon we summon, the easier they are for us to directly control, but if we summon a stronger demon, we can't control them and so have to convince them and give them a good reason for them to help us.
Turning the demons' boon against them, we summon Mephisdiabaalo himself. He and my sister, the stronger of us, subdue, but not destroy, Caal, and I subdue Maelbog. Then the five of us work together to destroy the usurping demon lieutenants. And... this was when I woke up, so I have no clue what happened after that.
Dream 2
Dream number two is a bit shorter, but still pretty weird. Basically, in the dream I am Jade Champion from the Interstate '76 computer games. I vaguely recall that I might have had dreams in the past in which I was a female, but none of them were as vivid as this one was. As for being Jade Champion, I have no clue why this is, because the rest of the dream has nothing to do with the games, aside from the appearance later of the Picard Piranha (though it strangely has no guns on it whatsoever and is just a normal car).
Anyway, I am in some weird, decrepit mansion and I have found some kid with a mysterious key. We are trying to get out of the mansion, but are being chased by this weird hulking monster. It is a strange creature in that it seems to be made entirely of a jello like substance, but is humanoid in shape. It is mostly blue, but with white frosting-like stuff all over it. It is some hellish mix between a teletubbie, a boobah, and the Michelin Man.
It actually catches us at one point in the mansion, but we are saved by another monster. This second monster, I understand in the dream though it is never "shown," is a monster created by some mad scientist for purposes totally unrelated to the mansion or anything going on in it. All I can remember about it was that it was orange-ish red and had giant, over-sized teeth. I think he was vaguely shaped like some sort of demonic Crash Bandicoot, though I didn't make that connection until after I'd woken up later. We can't figure out why this second monster is there at all but are glad it saved us from the freaky blue guy.
At this point we find the car, the Piranha, inside the mansion, drive it down several flights of stairs and out the front door of the mansion. The car doesn't have any of the weapons on it that it had in the Interstate '76 games, and for some reason that didn't strike me as odd at all in the dream, though I mused after I woke up that they would have been useful. The blue guy follows us and even though we're in the car now, he keeps up with us. We drive across a field and into a forest, and that's when the blue guy catches up. But, once again, the other freaky monster shows up. This time, however, the blue guy gets the drop on the second monster and chains him to a tree and starts beating the hell out of him. That's when I woke up. The purpose of the kid, though he was with me for the entire time, or the purpose of the key he was carrying, or the reason that the the blue monster was chasing us, or the reason the other monster kept showing up, was never explained.
Both of these dreams were as memorable as the other one I wrote a back a while back, as well as the Jurassic Park-inspired dream I had many years ago, which I don't actually think I've ever written about in my LJ at all, come to think of it. Oh well, maybe later.
And that's pretty much it. For real this time. Long post is long. No wonder I put off writing it.
Books:
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. This was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. I don't see what all the fuss is about, but I enjoyed it pretty well regardless. The only thing was that when I got to the part with the big reveal about the true nature of the Holy Grail, I merely had a vague sense of been there, done that more than anything else, so it wasn't all that shocking to me or whatever. My sisters assure me that Angels & Demons is much better than Da Vinci Code, however, so maybe I'll look into that one later.
Dante's Equation, by Jane Jensen, the creator of the Gabriel Knight series of computer games. This book was essentially split into two parts. The first part was relatively normal and mundane: scientists discovering a physical law of good and evil, a rabbi disappearing in a flash of light from Auschwitz during WWII, another rabbi finding references to this first rabbi in the Torah through Kabbalah, you know, that sort of thing. The second half of the book was just plain Star Trek-y weird and out there, but as such was a lot cooler in my personal opinion.
Prey, by Michael Crichton. Basically, some scientists create some nano-machines and things go awry. It was pretty cool. I would especially recommend it to anyone from DigiPen who have taken or are planning to take either CS380 or CS381, the two AI/Machine Learning classes.
Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson. I realize that this is a "children's book," but I never read it so I figured I'd give it a read. I knew going in what it was going to be about, and so was braced for it and not as affected by it as I otherwise would have been, which in a strange way was a bit disappointing for me. Had I read it cold without any prior knowledge of what it was about, however, I can assure you, with full machismo, that this book probably would have fucked my shit up pretty hard. With that said, it was an excellent read.
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. I vaguely remember reading this one at some nebulous point in my youth, but as I read it again, I kept in mind Ray Bradbury's claim that it had been continually misinterpreted all these years. I can totally see it that way, that it was more about the dangers of television than about censorship. Really, I loathed Montag's wife and her friends. In addition to all that, I also got a vibe on the dangers of excessive political correctness from it as well.
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. Another children's book, but this is one that I do remember having read back in elementary school. I saw the made-for-television movie of this a few years ago, and thought I'd hunt down the book again during my great book-buying splurge over the summer. However, I somehow remained unaware until recently that she'd written several sequels to this book, which I intend to track down and acquire at some point.
Cold Fire, by Dean Koontz. It was decent. It started off with a interesting, seemingly supernatural premise and then went off on a whole psychological bent. Don't have much to say about it, but I enjoyed it well enough.
The Servants of Twilight, by Dean Koontz. Well, actually, I only got about halfway through this one before it was time to come back to Washington, and I haven't picked it up at all since I got back. What I've read of it so far was fairly decent, I guess. The supposed Anti-Christ and crazy religious cults and whatnot. I'll probably finish it eventually.
Movies:
The Golden Compass. I... I really wanted to like this movie, since the books were pretty awesome. However, I just wasn't all that impressed by it. The pacing was pretty bad and none of the characters were fleshed out all that much. Even Lyra and Pan, and the relationship between them, were not developed all that well, which is sad. The movie, overall, had a certain.... soulessness... to it that wasn't present in the book and which wasn't shared by its other book-to-movie contemporaries like Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, or Lord of the Rings.
Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, and 3. I'd seen these already, but with months/years between them. Also, what with having parts 1 and 2 fresh in my mind, I enjoyed 3 much more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Da Vinci Code. Well, I'd just read the book, so I wanted to see the movie. I think that may have been a mistake, as the movie wasn't nearly as good. The pacing, as with Golden Compass, was not that great. A lot of the things that it took the characters several pages or entire chapters to puzzle out in the book were solved in split seconds in the movie. Now, I know that if they'd shown all the puzzling out stuff in the movie that the movie would have been three times longer than it was, but still it kind of cheapened them as characters to leave that stuff out, in my opinion. Also, having Langdon and Teabing arguing over the Grail story in the movie versus how they were on the same page and delighting in describing it to Sophie in the book kind of grated on me as well. And, lastly, what the hell was up with all that "shadow organization" stuff in the movie? In the book, it was just Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion, and that was it, but in the movie we have Opus Dei, the Priory of Sion, and then this extraneous, unnamed "shadow organization" bullshit.
And that's pretty much it. That was my Christmas break, in a nutshell.
Oh, and the dreams I had. I said I would talk about those too, since they were pretty strange.
Dreams:
Dream 1
The first dream is probably the weirder of the two. While I recall that the dream itself occurred in fragments and not in linear or chronological order, I'm going to put together the "story" of the dream as best I can remember it in sequential order.
Let's see... first there were these two people, astronauts, some kind of world heroes or some such. A man and a woman. They were in a space ship exploring space.
Then, in what I presume was supposed to be Hell, there was a demon called Mephisdiabaalo. Basically, his name is just a lame amalgam of Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal, but it somehow didn't strike me that this was the case until after I woke up. Anyway, this demon had six demon lieutenants, three male and three female.
Back in space, the space ship is out of control and is about to crash into a star. Just before it crashes, the six demon lieutenants appear on the ship. The three males and the three females each merge into two beings, one male and one female uber-demon a piece. They proceed to, I presume, rape the male and female human astronauts. The dream kind of censored itself at this point, which I found somewhat odd, since I don't for a minute claim that I've never had pretty graphic dreams of that general nature in the past. Though, I guess, they didn't involve demons and rape before, so I guess I should be glad I was self-censoring my dreams. >_>;;
Anyway, the deed done, two "children" appear. One male and one female, the male born to the human female/demon male, and the female born to the demon female/human male. Actually they're more like an Anne Rice Taltos creature in that they're pretty much born already fully grown.
There's a kind of scene change and then we're in front of this kind of arena area. I am aware now that I, myself, am the male human/demon hybrid "child". Though it was never "shown" in the dream itself, I am aware that the six demon lieutenants had used the four of us (the two human astronaut-heroes and the two human/demon children) to overthrow Mephisdiabaalo. They had somehow changed the two humans into full demons, with the female named Caal, and the male named Maelbog. I'm not sure where the name Caal came from, unless it was just a corruption of Baal, but I'm pretty sure Maelbog is some sort of weird corruption of Malebolgia from the Spawn comics. It's odd because, aside from what little I've read about the Spawn comics on Wikipedia (which was, admittedly, before I ever had this dream), I don't know anything about Spawn.
At this point, I and my sister human/demon are supposed to be fighting our parents, full humans turned into full demons. (Let me just note that neither the "sister" nor the "parents" in this dream bore any resemblance whatsoever to any of my actual RL relatives. Thankfully.) My sister is the slightly stronger of the two of us. Caal is immensely powerful and the two of us together can't hope to defeat her. Maelbog, however, is relatively weak, and either one of us alone can beat him.
Because Caal is so incredibly powerful, we are granted a boon by the six demon lieutenants, who are watching this all for their own amusement, in that we are allowed to summon any one demon, aside from themselves, to our aid. The weaker the demon we summon, the easier they are for us to directly control, but if we summon a stronger demon, we can't control them and so have to convince them and give them a good reason for them to help us.
Turning the demons' boon against them, we summon Mephisdiabaalo himself. He and my sister, the stronger of us, subdue, but not destroy, Caal, and I subdue Maelbog. Then the five of us work together to destroy the usurping demon lieutenants. And... this was when I woke up, so I have no clue what happened after that.
Dream 2
Dream number two is a bit shorter, but still pretty weird. Basically, in the dream I am Jade Champion from the Interstate '76 computer games. I vaguely recall that I might have had dreams in the past in which I was a female, but none of them were as vivid as this one was. As for being Jade Champion, I have no clue why this is, because the rest of the dream has nothing to do with the games, aside from the appearance later of the Picard Piranha (though it strangely has no guns on it whatsoever and is just a normal car).
Anyway, I am in some weird, decrepit mansion and I have found some kid with a mysterious key. We are trying to get out of the mansion, but are being chased by this weird hulking monster. It is a strange creature in that it seems to be made entirely of a jello like substance, but is humanoid in shape. It is mostly blue, but with white frosting-like stuff all over it. It is some hellish mix between a teletubbie, a boobah, and the Michelin Man.
It actually catches us at one point in the mansion, but we are saved by another monster. This second monster, I understand in the dream though it is never "shown," is a monster created by some mad scientist for purposes totally unrelated to the mansion or anything going on in it. All I can remember about it was that it was orange-ish red and had giant, over-sized teeth. I think he was vaguely shaped like some sort of demonic Crash Bandicoot, though I didn't make that connection until after I'd woken up later. We can't figure out why this second monster is there at all but are glad it saved us from the freaky blue guy.
At this point we find the car, the Piranha, inside the mansion, drive it down several flights of stairs and out the front door of the mansion. The car doesn't have any of the weapons on it that it had in the Interstate '76 games, and for some reason that didn't strike me as odd at all in the dream, though I mused after I woke up that they would have been useful. The blue guy follows us and even though we're in the car now, he keeps up with us. We drive across a field and into a forest, and that's when the blue guy catches up. But, once again, the other freaky monster shows up. This time, however, the blue guy gets the drop on the second monster and chains him to a tree and starts beating the hell out of him. That's when I woke up. The purpose of the kid, though he was with me for the entire time, or the purpose of the key he was carrying, or the reason that the the blue monster was chasing us, or the reason the other monster kept showing up, was never explained.
Both of these dreams were as memorable as the other one I wrote a back a while back, as well as the Jurassic Park-inspired dream I had many years ago, which I don't actually think I've ever written about in my LJ at all, come to think of it. Oh well, maybe later.
And that's pretty much it. For real this time. Long post is long. No wonder I put off writing it.