There's not really anything I could say about Valentine's Day that wouldn't be either a cliché banality or a banal cliché. So instead I'm going to talk about this Ska Brewing Molé Stout I bought at Top's yesterday.
It's good! It's dark, it's chocolatey, it's got a hint of peppers. And it's four bucks a six-pack at Top's! I will probably buy more.
Guess that's it. Off to dinner and Die Hard 5: Son of Die Hard.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that Scott Snyder has some great ideas about Batman but his stuff's just not for me. That one-off issue with Becky Cloonan on art was the best Batman story I've read all year, but Death of the Family was some good ideas wrapped around a needlessly violent and decompressed story. (My favorite part: you can show people dancing until their feet bleed, you can show a tapestry made of sewn-together still-living people -- but if you want to say "ass", you'd better use comic-book symbols to bleep it out.) I think both the setup and the resolution were solid. I just think there was too much dithering in-between. Even without the half-dozen tie-in books.
Gail Simone recently responded to a reader who was put off by the grimness of Death of the Family by saying, "The bat-verse in general IS in a pretty dark place right now, but I do believe some lighter stories are coming." Here's hoping. Snyder's already done some great work -- but great work where Batman smiles now and again would be more to my tastes.
Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2009-01-11, following up on my preceding review of Revelation of the Daleks:
You know, I thought Revelation of the Daleks was pretty good -- good enough that it makes me want to check out more Sixth Doctor episodes, which I hear is an emotion most people rarely feel.
Aaaaand Mark of the Rani has cured me of it.
The setting is interesting, and it's got the Master, and the Rani is a character with potential, but...it's pretty much terrible. At this point I want to punch Peri in the mouth every time she opens it (though this actually makes me kind of want to check out Trial of a Time Lord just to see her die).
The fact that this is regarded as one of the better Sixth Doctor serials goes a long way toward explaining why everyone hates the Sixth Doctor. Not worth buying, not worth renting, not even worth watching while drunk.
Yesterday I went to a Cory Doctorow book signing at Changing Hands.
He was promoting his new book, Homeland, but the talk he gave was more general. It dealt with his usual pet issues: overbearing copyright law and its impact on ordinary citizens, and spyware that attempts to control our computers and how it makes them and us less safe. A lot of it was about Aaron Swartz, the talented programmer who developed RSS, helped build Reddit up, spent the last several years of his life fighting charges from the US Attorney threatening a decades-long prison sentence for copyright infringement (when the copyright holders themselves chose not to press charges), and took his own life last month. It's a sobering story -- obviously depression is a complicated thing and it's foolish to blame a person's suicide on one single cause, but I think any reasonable person can conclude that (1) the charges against him contributed to his decision and (2) they were wildly disproportionate to his alleged crime.
Sobering stuff, but a good talk and mostly light despite ending on a heavy note. Nobody in the audience recorded it, but Doctorow said the talk's been recorded elsewhere and that he'd provide a link once it was uploaded to YouTube. (Edit 2013-02-13: Per Doctorow's blog, the version of the speech he gave the next day at ASU has been posted on ustream: part 1, part 2.)
Before all that, I was sitting in the audience waiting for him to come out onstage. I was reading a copy of Circle of Enemies; the lady sitting next to me asked if it was an urban fantasy novel and when I said that it was, she handed me her business card and said that she was an urban fantasy author as well. Her name is Kater Cheek, she's a former student of Doctorow's, and the urban fantasy novel advertised on her card is Seeing Things. I bought a copy when I got home; haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
I mentioned that I'd recently put out a few audiobooks; she hadn't heard of ACX so I suggested she give it a look if she's interested in producing any of her own.
I talked to Doctorow a bit about audiobooks, too, when it came time for the actual booksigning. The guy in front of me asked if Homeland would be released as an audiobook; Cory said there were no plans at present, because he won't distribute through Audible until they offer a DRM-free option, and Audible is 90% of the market. He said he's looking at options with the Humble Bundle; when I got up there I wished him luck on that, and added that a Humble Audiobook Bundle could be a great help to narrators like myself who don't really have an alternative to Amazon but don't like DRM very damn much either. (I mentioned that, while I sell books on Audible, I can't be their customer, because they don't support my operating system. Crazy.)
Anyway, I asked him to sign my Nexus 7 case, because that's where I keep most of his books.
Which is really a twofer, because now my case has not only a drawing of a skull and crossbones by Cory Doctorow...
...it's also got a drawing of an asshole by Kurt Vonnegut.
(For the record, I haven't opened it but I'm pretty confident that I can. It looks easier than my Mac Mini, Wii, or old 60GB iPod, and I've opened them.)
Originally posted Brontoforumus, 2009-01-06.
You know, I thought Revelation of the Daleks was pretty good -- good enough that it makes me want to check out more Sixth Doctor episodes, which I hear is an emotion most people rarely feel.
Probably the most interesting thing about it is that at this point the show had abandoned all pretense of being a kids' show -- while it doesn't have as high a bodycount as the previous Dalek arc, it's probably more violent, dark, and disturbing all around, with the most memorable scene being a woman searching for her father in a Ubik-like cryo-preservation center and finding his mutated head inside a Dalek armor. (Yeah, we've got Davros mutating humans into Daleks here -- a precursor to The Parting of the Ways.) That and every shot of Nicola Bryant's stockings or cleavage tend to prove the show was trying desperately to keep a now-teenage audience rather than acquire new viewers -- there's some parallel to be drawn between this and my frequent "How the comic industry is fucking itself" musings.
It veers off-course in places, with the first ep's cliffhanger resembling a game of Xanatos Roulette (even with cameras all over the place tracking the Doctor's every move, it's hard to figure how Davros knew Peri would see the Dalek and follow it to the Doctor's fake memorial), and the Doctor's broken pocketwatch feels a lot like an unfired Chekhov's Gun -- maybe it's covered in Trial of a Time Lord (I have very little interest in finding out; if Douglas Adams and Tom Baker couldn't get me to watch a season-long arc, I really don't see doing it for one that everybody seems to hate), or maybe it's just a way of destroying a deus ex machina like they did with the Sonic Screwdriver during the Davison era.
The biggest problem with the serial was the same as in the only other Sixth Doctor serial I've seen to date, Vengeance on Varos: the Doctor and Peri don't really do anything, and the story would transpire pretty much the same without them. Peri's got a good emotional moment in the first ep that is largely ruined by her "Where the fuck is she supposed to be from?" accent; she sounds more like a real person in the second half but overacts to the point of obnoxiousness. #6 has a few good lines and makes me want to see more of him, but again, he doesn't really do anything.
Far and away my favorite part is the utterly nonsensical and downright surreal appearance of comedian Alexei Sayle as the DJ (everyone, including the supposedly-American Peri, pronounces his name that way, with the accent on the "J"). He has fuck-all to do with the story, and shows up a few times in the first ep to speckle the fourth wall and impersonate Elvis; in the second ep, he kills several Daleks with a beam of pure rock'n'roll. It's a very clear example of a celebrity guest star awkwardly shoehorned into a script, yet as far as I'm concerned, the result is completely awesome.
Other thoughts: the Daleks do not actually seem like a race that would have courts and trials. (This plays into the opening of the 1996 TV movie, which piles on the additional questions of what the Master was doing there, why the Time Lords apparently sanctioned the Daleks' brand of justice, and why the Daleks let the Doctor show up on Skaro to collect the remains.)
Anyway! Best Dalek story I've seen in a long time, better than Resurrection, Destiny, or either of their very bad appearances in the past two years. I'd say it's worth a rental, but it's not that damn much more to buy it -- nobody loves the Sixth Doctor.
So the audition that I just managed to squeeze out with no dogs barking on it? The book quit accepting auditions sometime between the time I finished it and the time I went to submit it. (It was up less than a day, too -- I guess you can trust that anything with "zombie" in the title is going to be in demand.)
Rejection's part of the job, of course, but this is the first time I've hit the window where the role was cast after I recorded an audition and before I had a chance to send it in.
Ah well -- back at it tomorrow.
Stomach starts gurgling. Make quick PB&J. (For future reference: peanut butter makes for a quick meal but is probably not ideal for recording; mouth gets all sticky.)
Voice starts getting hoarse.
Home stretch. Then every damn-fool dog on the block starts blocking its damn-fool dog head off.
Fortunately, I was in the home stretch, because on the third or fourth take I managed to time it just right, in-between canine outbursts, and finish it with no barking on the track.
Still, would have liked to do one more quick track. But the dogs would not shut up. So I biked downtown and back -- and the fuckers were still barking when I got home. I think they barked for two hours straight. Never did figure out what the hell pissed them off. If anything.
Important thing was I got two auditions done. Not as many as I'd have liked, but tomorrow's another day, hopefully without interruptions.
I still love dogs. But man they sure do cramp my style some days.
Fiancée stayed home sick today, so I didn't get a chance to record anything.
Dizziness not as bad today; cough/breathing a little worse than when I was taking the full dose of the inhaler, but I'm much more functional so I think I'll probably keep it at a half-dose for now.
Puttered around today. Applied for a few jobs, took care of my lady, worked out, read a bit of Little Brother since Doctorow's signing Homeland at Changing Hands on Sunday and I'm thinking about going. Worked on my Wii homebrew configuration a bit; I haven't gotten my replacement lens in yet but now I've set it up so I can play backups from an external hard drive or SDHC card. (Speaking of, it looks like Sony's trying to get rid of a bunch of inventory; the local Fry's has 16GB cards for $9 and I've seen similar deals online, too.) Seemed like an appropriately Little Brother-y thing to do, though I'm still hoping I can get my Wii fixed up to just play my discs.
I mentioned recently that I've got COBRA coverage sort-of worked out and took a trip to the pulmonologist last week so I could renew some prescriptions.
I went back on an inhaler, a nasal spray, and a pill that I'd gone off a couple of years ago.
The relief was immediate. What took a couple days was the reminder of why I'd gone off them.
Some combination of my meds makes me dizzy. It's a sort of constant, mild-to-moderate discomfort. It affects my balance and coordination; I bump into doorways. And it makes it hard for me to concentrate. I feel slow and sluggish -- like I'm, well, drugged.
I'm not sure if it's the inhaler, the spray, or both. (It's not the pill because I forgot to take it a couple times and still got the symptoms.) But the dizziness came back.
Today I cut the dosage of my inhaler by half. The dizziness still came, but it didn't seem to last as long. I managed to do 45 minutes on the elliptical machine, though it wasn't entirely comfortable. At least I've got handles to grip to steady myself -- don't know how I'd do on a bike right now.
So I'm not sure if cutting the dosage really helped with the dizziness or not. But my wheezing and coughing seem worse.
Would sure be nice if I could work it out so I don't have to choose between one kind of discomfort and another.
I'll experiment (experiment with drugs!) over the next few days -- try the dosage I've got right now for a couple days and see if there's any cumulative effect; if not, maybe try increasing the inhaler again while halving or stopping the spray. Because I sure do enjoy being able to breathe comfortably, but I'd like to be able to move and think coherently while breathing comfortably.
On the plus side, I got four auditions recorded before my stomach started gurgling too much for me to continue. That's a productive day. Next up: dinner.
My latest audiobook: Your Average Ordinary Alien, written by Adam Graham. Available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.
The description, in the author's words:
Kirk Picard Skywalker is an unemployed sci-fi fanatic who dreams of being abducted by aliens from outer space. One day his dreams come through and he's horrified to learn that the aliens are all too ordinary.
It's the story of an unemployed computer scientist and his long-suffering girlfriend -- can't imagine what drew me to it -- and gave me the opportunity to flex some comedy muscles and play three characters plus narrator. It's a fun read, a bit of good-natured but ultimately sympathetic skewering of fanboys, and it made me smile. It's also got a Christian message -- a bit outside my usual, more cynical milieu, I suppose, but "Work hard and be kind to people" is, I think, a sentiment most everybody can get behind.
Be sure and read my previous audiobook post for some notes on Audible DRM. And you can discuss my audiobooks at Brontoforumus.