My review of Ken Scholes' first two Psalms of Isaak books is up at Strange Horizons.



In other news, I'm catching yet more cats today. Cute little guys! Too bad they're so feral!

Thoughts on the first two episodes of Legend of the Seeker: Season Two:

1) Oh God! Why? Whhhhhhhyyy?? Did Hannah Montana: The Porn-star Years die in pre-viz? Wasn't there something (anything!) else you people could have produced to suck out my brain cells? I mean...now I'm unemployed AND watching your show. For fun. *howls of pain* The humanity!

2) Heeeeyyy...it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Charisma Carpenter! Wow! You really got her to sign on to play bitch-stick to Tabreth Brethell?? Yeah, she looks hot in skin-tight red leather (looooove the costumes--you went there!) but unless Cordy's going to be the queen bee...Biggest waste of a cameo ever! She didn't even try to deliver your paltry excuse for dialogue. You lose!

3) It really bothers me that the writer responsible for most of this drek is named Stephen Tolkin. Seriously? This is grounds for madness.

4) I love physics in Richard-land: At the end of Episode One Darken Rahl returns from the dead (well, they can't get EVERYTHING wrong!) and brands Richard's chest with his red hot ghostly palm. Cut to Episode 2, in which a bunch of dudes return from the dead and start killing the inmates of a now-defunct death camp (how I wish I was kidding.) Zedd to Richard: "Spirits couldn't have killed these people! Spirits don't have bodies!" Yes, that's right. Spirits are not at all capable of killing people. Just branding their chests with their non-corporeal flesh. It's totally not the same!!

Pluses:

1) First shot of Darken Rahl: he's naked! I knew my decision to live would be rewarded.

2) Tabreth Brethell: must have taken acting lessons between seasons. Now she's even turning me on. Hope has a warrior, dude.

3) I still like Craig Horner (Richard). He's got this awesome stoned look going on this season--like he's finally realized how undignified his lines are and just decided to start mainlining crack. Oh, so hot. I get it. This is the "insert your fantasy related porn here" show. But Craig just seems like a nice guy. Totally unpretentious. Not many stoned-looking wood-smiths can deliver the line "You want to tear someone's head off? Take mine!" and make you politely supress your giggles. I love this guy. He looks as lost as I feel!

4) Best most awful line of the season so far: Zedd: "How could I have been so consumed with the acquisition of magic and power that I neglected to protect my own daughter?" Here's some advice for people who write dialogue: actually try to speak it first. If you can't, you've got a problem! But a perversely contented Hannah. The fact that I just rewatched part of an episode to find that line either proves that I've hit a new low--or am possibly the kinkiest girl in the universe.

Pictures:



GRAAAAAGH!


( Don't let the stoned man weild that sword! )

Iz written another thing:

Protesting in the age of obesity.

Anyone know how I can get two cats from Sacramento, CA to Farmingham, NM (as in New Mexico?) to their new forever home?

I am not kidding. 

Frodo had it easy.

This image, posted above the line: Beware of "Bluetooth guy," because he is never completely paying attention to you--just redeemed my entire week.


Remember kids: social deviancy totally wears a Bluetooth!

*cackles madly*

Whoa!  I used to be one hell of an entertaining writer:  http://v-verticordia.livejournal.com/3594.html


It's friends-locked because of all the breastage.

Oh muse, please return to mine arms!!

Smart Phone Knows Where You Are Even Indoors

Really?  And this is something we should develop because....?

Other possible titles for this article: Rise of the Smart Phones: They'll be back.
                                                                     Sentient Smart Phones: Because Brain Cancer Isn't Fun Without An Add-On!
                                                                    Sentient Smart Phones: The Patriot Act Is Totally Missing Something!
                                                                    Take Your Unique Spacial Fingerprint and Shove It!

This is like that table they developed that can order you drinks and read your credit card info at the same time.  I mean, I'm an admitted Luddite, but give me a break.
                                                                 

So far, so good.

Oh Good Night!  Now they've ensnared even the lovely Charisma Carpenter in their insidious clutches!!

Legend of the Seeker Part Deux: Lost in New York!




Behold the bad dialogue!  Revel in the skin tight leather!  Never, EVER piss Joss Whedon off--you too could end up on Legend of the Seeker!

I can hardly wait!  (cackles madly)  Here's hoping for a sexalicious Craig Parker cameo.  Oh Darken, please come back! 

While I certainly like the looks of the trailer for No Impact Man, I have to agree with The New Yorker about the stunt-like nature of many of the new eco-tomes.  The whole article is well worth a read (find it here) but this last passage really nails it.  For all their purportedly good intentions there really is something disingenuous about well-to-do urban bloggers claiming to save the world by giving up toilet paper or (gasp!) taking the stairs.

From Green Like Me by Elizabeth Kolbert in the August 2009, New Yorker.

Thoreau’s stunt was, qua stunt, a disappointment. Though “Walden” sold better than “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” it grossed its author only $96.60 in royalties. Thoreau tried to put together a lecture tour of the Midwest and Canada, but most of it had to be called off, owing to a lack of interest.

No Impact Man, by contrast, has already been a public-relations triumph. Before he had even finished his experiment, Beavan caught the attention of the Times. A reporter came to his apartment for dinner and wrote a long profile that ran on the front page of the House & Home section. This led to a flood of media requests. Beavan got calls from television stations as far away as Japan and Australia. He was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, Scott Simon, and Stephen Colbert. Meanwhile, a crew of documentary filmmakers followed No Impact Man and his wife around the city. (For maximum impact, their movie is being released simultaneously with the book.) Reportedly, Beavan has sold the rights to his story to Hollywood.

No Impact Man’s appeal to the media is no mystery. His shtick deals with a serious subject but is easy to poke fun at. Colbert characterized it as “like ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ only completely implausible.” The Times called it, at best, “a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion.” (The headline was “THE YEAR WITHOUT TOILET PAPER.”)

In his book, Beavan reports that he was “devastated” by this treatment. “I feel that it has trivialized my work,” he writes of the Times piece. “It worries me that I’ve single-handedly managed to make a mockery of the entire environmental movement.”

There’s something a tad disingenuous here. Beavan is, after all, a man whose environmental activism began over lunch with his agent. And it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to see through his claims to experimental rigor. Indeed, in its own candlelit way, his project is almost as incoherent as Farquharson’s. When No Impact Man shuts off the power at his apartment, you might think that his blog would have to go dark (and along with it his compulsive checking of his ratings on Technorati). But every day Beavan bikes to the Writers Room, on Broadway at Waverly Place, and plugs in his laptop. Meanwhile, Michelle scooters off to work at the offices of BusinessWeek, and Isabella spends the day at the (presumably electrified) apartment of a sitter.

So committed is Beavan to his claim of zero impact that he can’t—or won’t—see the deforestation for the trees. He worries a great deal about the environmental consequences of Michelle’s tampon use and the shrink-wrap around a block of cheese. But when it comes to his building’s heating system, which is apparently so wasteful that people are opening windows in the middle of winter, he just throws up his hands.

A more honest title for Beavan’s book would have been “Low Impact Man,” and a truly honest title would have been “Not Quite So High Impact Man.” Even during the year that Beavan spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his. Most of them were struggling to get by in the slums of Delhi or Rio or scratching out a living in rural Africa or South America. A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan’s Fifth Avenue apartment.

What makes Beavan’s experiment noteworthy is that it is just that—a voluntary exercise conducted for a limited time only by a middle-class family. Beavan justifies writing about it on the ground that it will inspire others to examine their wasteful ways. On the last page, he observes:

If wiping were the issue, this would be a reasonable place to end. But, sadly—or perhaps happily—it isn’t. The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.

What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.” ♦