eddyfate

It's been a while, so let me catch up.

Car and Internet: Last week I switched Michelle's SmartCar for my Mazda 6 again to commute to and from work. Friday after work the Check Engine light came on, but I was able to get the car back home. Saturday morning, the car refused to start. Since we had just replaced the battery, it clearly had to be something else, so we had to have it towed to the dealership. It didn't get looked at until today, and they want to keep it overnight to make sure that it's working right (apparently a pin in an electrical switch was loose).

So I worked from home today -- since Mondays are usually just taking care of my administrative stuff, it's easy enough to do from home, but I need a steady VPN connection to access the Exchange server and the company intranet sites. So, naturally, our Comcast connection crapped out around 3:30pm today, not coming back until several hours later. I had a couple of things I could do offline, but it means that some things I wanted to get done today I have to do tomorrow instead, and I'll have to work those around picking up a car at some point tomorrow.

Writing: Aside from my White Wolf work, I'm taking more steps toward more personal writing. oakthorne, emprint and I are going to start a small writing critique group to workshop each other's writing. I'm looking forward to it -- we all know each other's writing, we've all developed for each other and we've all had lengthy conversations about style, so it should be very helpful. I got oakthorne's first couple of chapters to read over.

Reading: As my 50-hour weeks have finally died down, I've been taking more time to read. If you haven't found it already, I've been keeping track of my reading list on Goodreads.com.

The most significant recent book I've read, though, was A Game of Thrones. I haven't read any of the Song of Ice and Fire series before, but I've had a number of friends recommend the series to me over the year. The weird thing is, I'm actually not a big fan of epic fantasy -- I was always more of a horror and sci-fi kid growing up, and long books with dozens of characters all doing the same thing over and over just bore me. However, some co-workers made some compelling arguments, and I agreed to borrow the books and tried them out. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised, and once I can borrow the next book I'll check that out as well.

I'm also two-thirds of the way through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is everything I expected it would be, with the addition of ninjas.

Video Games: I have slowly working through my second time playing Fallout 3 -- this time, picking up as many side quests as I can and exploring as much as possible. I can't find out where to determine specifically how long I've been playing, but I'm pretty sure it's around twenty hours right now. I'm also poking at Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, which I picked up in a Sherlock Holmes package for $20 at Best Buy. It's a bit simpler than I thought, but otherwise not bad. (Which reminds me -- I need to snag a copy of Shadows Over Baker Street some day....)

I am trying very, very hard to resist the urge to take a Sherlock Holmes story and a Lovecraft story and mash them together a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Jonathan Coulton: Went to the Jonathan Coulton concert on Saturday. It was three and a half hours of pure awesome, and probably the best $20 I've spent on live entertainment in a while. The opening act was Paul and Storm, whom I had never experienced before, but they're definitely a group I'm going to check out. Also, just noticed that the three of them have put out a RiffTrax for Tron.

That should be enough to tide y'all over for a bit.

The past month or so has been challenging. Most of it has been revolving around work, my main hobby, or the incredibly murky gray area between them, with a few personal things that have nothing in common with either of the previous two things (except for the fact that I really can't talk about them). This week has been closer to my usual level -- closer to fifty hours a week instead of the seventy hour weeks that have been going on. Plus, work has swung back from "shit that needs to be done" to "shit that's fucking awesome to work on," which always helps. And the haters seem to be growing more and more incoherent and hilariously paranoid, which means it's moved from being sincerely upsetting to something closer to watching your dog try to catch his own tail. Especially when it doesn't have much of a tail. Or neck, for that matter.

So, I figured I would take a moment to do some catching up on my Media Whore segment.

Reading: While in Canada, one of our hosts let me browse through a bookstore, and I managed to pick up a copy of Spade & Archer, a prequel to The Maltese Falcon. Apparently it's still fairly new (the book had a 2009 copyright date), which I take as an indication that Canada likes me. While the book doesn't have as much Archer in it as the title would imply, and the plots are far more convoluted than Hammett did, the writing and feel are very close to the original. I also picked up Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, which I'm still working on. Apparently it surprised Russell that I hadn't read Ellroy before.

Television: Yes, I watched the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. In Canada, even, with about six other people. I've also been watching the first couple of episodes of MI-5 (Spooks in the UK), which is a lot of fun -- a bit like a British version of 24. I've (finally) started watching Burn Notice as well, so apparently I'm on a modern spy kick right now.

Video Games: Not a whole lot, but I am picking up Mass Effect again once in a while. I might poke at another game for a bit in the near future.

Podcasts: I think I stumbled across it by accident, but Two Minute Danger Theatre is an entertaining send-up of old radio serials, and you really can't beat the time investment. I got caught up on the 60+ episodes on my flight to Toronto. I also finished up the first season of The Takeover, which was entertaining.

The past week have been a bit like a cartoon coyote: I've been running so hard and so fast that I didn't realize the ground wasn't under me until just now. I conceptually knew it was Friday, but it didn't really sink in that that means it's the end of the week until just now. I've been juggling my usual post-con workload combined with bad planning on my part and a temporary increase in my work responsibilities (which involves playing video games, so I can't complain) while struggling with a mild cold or allergy or something, so it's all been a bit of a blur. Let me catch up on a few things:

* Cruise went well. I had a better time than I anticipated I would, but unfortunately I didn't get to see too much of Mexico, as I had work obligations to fulfill. I did get sick near the end of the trip, but I got over it pretty quick, so I'm not sure if it was sea-sickness, my usual vertigo combined with the rocking of the ship or just something I ate. My biggest regret was having to bail out on a LARP theory roundtable on Friday night to talk over "Killing Sacred Cows" because of said illness. I still end up being a little anti-social on these kinds of trips because I miss my family, and this was a particularly long one, but from an objective (i.e., me not being a whiny bitch) level it was a good time.

* Recently I've been really hooked on the Rain-Slick Precipice games. I didn't expect to like them, but it seems to hit a sweet spot with me between old-school computer RPGs, fast reflexes, inside jokes from a variety of sources, and just plain adolescent vulgarity. The Xbox version of episode two seems a little glitchier than episode one was on the PS3, but when I'm not playing video games for work, I'm pretty obsessed with these right now. (Especially since I'm stuck as hell on Gears of War 1.)

* Finished Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman while I was on the cruise. It was recommended to me after my review of Playing For Keeps (buy it buy it buy it buy it), and there's certainly a similar vibe here, down to a very prominent hero not making an appearance until late in the book. It loses focus a few times, and there are some plot elements that don't seem to be adequately wrapped up, but it was a fun read on the Kindle, and worth picking up if you like superhero fiction.

* Speaking of media, check out the Scam School video podcast. It's tagline is "social engineering in the bar and on the street," and it's a surprisingly entertaining look at card tricks, bar puzzles and other kinds of party jokes. Some of this stuff isn't new to me, but seeing people's reactions and hearing how the various elements are designed to "socially engineer" the audience is fascinating.

* In my gaming life, my new Requiem PC G.T. is settling in nicely. I accomplished my core goal of having a new PC that has lots of reasons to attend the Atlanta game, and a side benefit of getting some decent global play going with him. It's also been entertaining to try to re-learn a game I know very well just from other players. Meanwhile, the victorian age Mage tabletop game is being scrapped and replaced with a modern Mage tabletop game. I have a couple of ideas for characters. I've also been consistently smacking down the urge to run a game of my own.

* I've also been consistently smacking down the urge to write fiction again. Just when I think I have time to spend maybe an hour a week poking at some fiction, something happens to suck up my free time. I know that if it gets too bad I can just re-prioritize and give myself the time to write, but at the moment I've convinced myself that I don't have the time, and that seems to be keeping the muse at bay somewhat. Part of the problem is that I don't know WHAT I want to write -- every time I see a good movie or listen to a good podcast or read a good book, I want to write, but it's a different idea each time. I have about fifteen million worlds kicking around in my head, but I haven't sat down and worked on compelling characters or interesting stories yet. (Part of the problem is that when I DO get a neat story or character idea, I can find more immediate use for that at work.)

The final installation of the Jack Palms trilogy, Jack Palms 3 (retroactively subtitled Czechmate), it actually only about two-thirds as long as the previous two Jack Palms podcast novels. On the one hand, that makes sense, since this is really about wrapping up the loose ends in JP1 and JP2 -- we're not introducing many new characters or plot elements in this one. On the other hand, I think this could have been longer, and that's not just out of a need for more Jack fixes.

Note: Unlike previous reviews, I'm actually going to talk about some minor plot elements. If you don't want to be spoiled, skip the rest of this review. I'm just going to recommend that you listen to it anyway, so go ahead and start downloading it.

Unlike the previous two novels, JP3 doesn't stay with Jack's viewpoint exclusively (which is good, because most of the book it seems like he's unconscious, kidnapped or high). We get to see more of Jane Gannon, Capt. Shaw and those fun-loving Czechs. Once I got used to the structure change, thought, I realized that there were some elements missing -- at one point, Gannon just appears next to the main villain, and how she got there isn't adequately explained. In the previous two books, that's fine -- it's all from Jack's perspective, and Jack is frequently out of the loop, which adds to the feel of the books. With the move to changing perspectives, though, the omission seems odd, and feels like a chapter is missing here and there. (Also, we never actually get to see much of Freeman's perspective, which is another potential source of story fodder in this book.)

The voice actors return for this story, as well as the now-traditional intro song by Madvillain. The production quality is about on par with the previous two books -- not super polished, but far better than a majority of podcasts out there. Between comments from Seth's Q&As and minor references in the novel, there looks to potentially be a JP4, possibly set in Boston, which actually addresses one of my other niggling concerns (i.e., why continually reference his ex-wife if she doesn't ever show up in the span of three books?), but since I'm now up to June of this year and getting ready to start on Young Junius, whether that will happen or not is totally up to Seth.

If you're okay with some lingering subplots and a few rapid shifts in resolution, this is a pretty satisfying conclusion. It hasn't soured me on Jack Palms or Seth's writing, and I do look forward to more -- I just thought that it could have been a little more than it was.

I recently finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. David actually picked up the book close to a year ago, and I had been meaning to get around to it because I have this vague plan to eventually read all of the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (of which I've read... um... three now; it's not an urgent goal). Anyhow, short version: there's a reason why this book took the Prize, so read it.

The short plot breakdown is two young Jewish men, one American and one Czech, who end up creating a new comic book character (The Escapist) to compete with the newly introduced Superman in the late 1930s. The story follows the men's lives through the Golden Age of comics, repeatedly referencing luminaries of the time like Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. While comics are an important part of just about every page of the book, only one chapter actually talks directly about the stories in the comics, and many characters and titles are completely glossed over (both real and fictional ones). I admit that the comic element is what drew me in at first, but over time the story took a stronger hold of my mind and reminded me that a good book can not only cause me to think, but entertain me at the same time. The fact that the actual craft of the writing was top-notch certainly helped.

This has easily been my favorite book this year, and might actually move to one of my favorite books of all time.

* Installed twitterbar on both my laptop and work Firefox browsers, so I can do it more often than "when I think to check my phone and Twitter account."

* Partially that's because I'm preparing to leave tomorrow for ICC, and I want to see if I can "live blog" the convention through Twitter.

* And partially it's because there's a certain amount of strange shit that happens in my life, and I want to see how much of it I can capture.

* Planning to play G.T. a fair bit at ICC. Will probably play Jack Spade a bit, but right now it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for Jack or Aspasia to be hanging around large Kindred gatherings for a long period of time.

* Picked up a couple of books this weekend - yet another anthology of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and Night Watch by Sergey Lukyanenko - to flip through when I'm not working at ICC and on the LARP Cruise. I'll let y'all know how they are.

* Also picked up a new Xbox 360 to replace the dead one we've had for a couple of years now. Got a lot of good Gears of War action in over the weekend. Also got a Halo 3 collector Master Chief helmet and stand that I gave to Chaney as a present.

* I missed Raw last night. I'll have to catch up next week.

Playing for Keeps is a superhero novel written by the talented (and amazingly cool) Mur Lafferty. It's about a group of super-powered individuals who aren't powerful enough to be heroes and who aren't bad enough to be villains, so they hang out in a bar and try to make something of their lives with their extremely specialized powers.

But really, it's more than that.

To digress for a bit, I've been a fan of Mur's for a few years now, and we've been acquaintances for a couple of those years (i.e., we keep bumping into each other at cons and we chat online once in a blue moon). Mur has a way of humanizing geek tropes that's always engaged me, so when I heard she wrote a superhero novel, I was intrigued. Unfortunately, her podcast hit right around the time I started working at White Wolf, so I didn't have the bandwidth for the longest time to listen to it, but when I heard it was going to be published, I tracked her down at Dragon*Con and forced her to sell me one [1].

Anyhow, I knew going in that it wasn't going to be as simple as "good guys, bad guys and the other guys," and it isn't. It starts off as an inversion (the good guys are really thugs, and the bad guys are just misunderstood), but by the end the story gets very complicated and you realize that these are just people. Mur manages to take about a dozen complicated characters and give them good opportunities to show their depth in a scant 250 pages that will go by faster than you expect.

But it's not all roses and kittens. The large cast and short length means that some characters do get short shrift, including one of the main villains and a character that is repeatedly implied to be the most important hero in the world. Further, the ending is set up (in typical Mur style) to offer a multitude of future story options, which can leave it a little unsatisfying. There are also a few editorial gaffes that made me cringe, but nothing that I don't expect from a smaller press [2], but most of the problems really are a case of wanting more from this engaging world.

Mur did tell me that she's been given the green light to work on a sequel at D*C, so I'm hoping that PfK2 will fill in some more of that white space and provide another awesome offering of superhero goodness.

Seriously, if you like superheroes and you like good drama with lots of humor and wit, pick this up at Amazon.com. If you can't spend money but you can spend time, pick up the free audio podcast of the book instead.

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Footnote 1: This may or may not be how it happened.

Footnote 2: Of which I lump just about all RPG companies, by the way, so I'm certainly not going to throw stones