• Uncategorized

    Bujold’s Mirror Dance

    I’ve got a big crush on Miles Vorkosigan. He’s got a sense of style that appealed to me as soon as I read Young Miles back in the day. He’s not so silly as to be fearless, but is manic enough to keep getting embroiled in shit and smart enough to extricate himself. Makes for good times. Mirror Dance (which I read in the Miles Errant omnibus) is the best of the series, combining a Bujold-style people-manipulation story with two good coming-of-age tales. It’s a pivotal book in the series, where Mark becomes his own person and Miles is forced to confront his own mortality. (Definitely some spoilers below the…

  • Uncategorized

    Zomblies!

    Greg went artsy with his Left 4 Dead review, but art aside, I’ve got to be honest: That shit is fun as hell. I’ve never been able to play a first-person shooter so easily and have so much damn fun. I’ve been waiting for a co-op game like this since I started playing Doom II back when I was 11 or 12. My mother and father weren’t so into computer games like that, and I was (otherwise blissfully) an only child. As a Survivor in Left 4 Dead, though, I consistently do the most damage to my teammates (hey, I’ve got to be proud of something), have consistently awful aim,…

  • On Life and Love

    Star Trek: actually good

    I went in ready to hate the thing. It looked nothing like Star Trek, I hate J.J. Abrams’s mysterious shit, yadda yadda. I also complained plenty during the movie, but when I sat and thought about it… It was actually a pretty damn good movie, and the best Star Trek movie since… First Contact? Certainly better than that Insurrection and Nemesis crap. I had very few major complaints: Red Matter: Um. Red Matter? Red stuff?! Honestly. Just a little bit of technobabble won’t drive away the masses, Abrams. Uhura: her character only did three things: 1) avoid Kirk’s advances, 2) intercept a Klingon message (off-screen), and 3) love Spock. Not…

  • On Life and Love

    Tastee (del.icio.us) links! (May 8th)

    Links for May 8th from 10:13 to 10:13: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Joe The Plumber: “I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual… I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children” – Joe the Plumber may be evil. "I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children."

  • On Life and Love

    “Art and Soul” posted

    Based loosely on a local art festival I attended a couple of weekends ago (also called Art and Soul), I’ve written “Art and Soul“, a little short about… courage? It was full of limbs. Some with pseudoflesh, some shiny or dull metal, some more plastic-like materials. And all were decorated intricately. The metals were engraved with tight, swirling patterns covering most of the surface, and the pseudofleshes were scarred in similar patterns, as if the wearer had been burned or cut very, very carefully. No wonder people were giving it a wide berth. It falls within my newfangled Transhuman Congress ‘verse.