eddyfate

It's been a while since I've done this, and I'm getting ready for a LARP in a few minutes, so let's get to this.

• 30 Rock: I admit, when I first caught a couple of episodes of this show, I didn't find it all that funny. But we kept hearing lots of good things about the show, so on a lark we started watching season 2 through Netflix Streaming. We got so hooked that we went back and watching the first season, and now we're catching up on the latest season on Hulu. It's a surprisingly entertaining show with a dose of weirdness that keeps it entertaining.
• Uncharted 2: I wasn't a big fan of Uncharted, so I wasn't all that excited about Uncharted 2. But David picked it up and started playing it, and one night after getting frustrated with Brutal Legend, I decided to give it a try. The best summary I can give is that this game reminded me of the excitement I had when I first watched the Indiana Jones movies. It's more Indiana Jones than any Indiana Jones game I've played.
• Star Guard: On the completely opposite end of graphics quality and price, Star Guard is a free Flash run and gun platformer that just shouldn't be as much fun as it is. The way the story unfolds adds an interesting layer to "green guy kills all the red guys." There's also a checkpoint system and infinite lives, but the corpses of your previous incarnations litter the battlefield as you work through the game.

More as I get a chance.

In cleaning out my podcasts today, I realized that I had nearly 30 of them. I thought I would post a snapshot of what I'm listening to. You can find them all in iTunes (I believe).

* The Chris Leavins Story Hour: A new podcast I'm checking out, a spin-off from "Cute with Chris" (below). No rating.

* The Classic Tales Podcast: Out-of-copyright fiction read by a professional reader. It's a great way to catch up on stories you've been meaning to read. Rating: ****

* Cute with Chris: Snarky Canadian runs a cute animal blog and regularly insults his readers. The show's lost focus a bit in the past few months, but some of the sarcastic humor is just great. Rating: ****

* Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: A history podcast covering odd aspects of history. Dan Carlin is an engaging speaker, but his podcast comes out VERY irregularly. Rating: ***

* Decoder Ring Theatre: A fantastic podcast of audio theater set in the golden days of radio, ranging between superhero, detective and sci-fi series. This has never left my podcatcher. Rating: *****

* Escape Pod: Sci-fi short fiction. Not every story appeals to me, and not every one is recorded or read well, but it's generally good quality work. Rating: ***

* Geologic Podcast: George Hrab's personal podcast, which goes between atheism, music and just bizarre and engaging personal stories. Rating: ****

* GOLD: The Series: Gaming video podcast I found via Twitter. Haven't checked it out yet. No rating.

* Hot For Words: Entymology podcast talking about the origins of words. It's expanded to go also into introducing new words, but it's just a fun podcast if you're into word origins. Rating: *****

* How To Succeed in Evil: Patrick McLean did a shorter podcast of his supervillian consultant a while back, and I loved it. He's (finally) gotten a novel done and recorded, and I plan to start listening to this next in my drive to and from work. I expect it'll be as awesome as the original. Rating: *****

* Murder at Avedon Hill: Another podcast novel I found via Twitter. It's a lengthy fantasy/murder mystery. No rating.

* NPR: Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me!: A hilarious news quiz show. I was a fan when it was on NPR, and now it's a staple podcast of mine. Rating: *****

* Onion News Network: Video podcast from The Onion of a variety of fake news shows. Rating: ****

* The Onion Radio News: Audio podcast from The Onion of their long-running fake radio news show. Rating: ****

* The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd: Another staple of my podcatcher, this is a children's show about a time-traveling professor and his crew going after his evil time-traveling counterpart. Very "Rocky and Bullwinkle" meets "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure." Rating: *****

* Scam School: Video podcast of Brian Brushwood, magician and "social engineer," doing brain teasers and close-up magic at bars across the country. Rating: ****

* Sellout: Podcast novel I keep meaning to listen to, but it regularly ends up cut when I need to make room in my iPod or iPhone for something else. No rating.

* Sessler's Soapbox: Video podcast of G4's Adam Sessler, where he rants about things in the video game industry. Rating: ****

* Seth Harwood Audiobooks: Regular podcast of Seth Harwood, author of "Jack Wakes Up" and the other Jack Palms novels. Rating: ****

* Stephen Fry's Podgrams: Stephen Fry's personal podcast. Comes out whenever he damn well feels like it (which isn't often). Rating: ****

* The Stuff of Genius: One of four podcasts that David just turned me on to. Haven't listened to it yet. No rating.

* Stuff You Missed in History Class: Two of four podcasts that David mentioned to me. No rating.

* Stuff You Should Know: Three of four podcasts. No rating.

* TechStuff: Four of four podcasts. No rating.

* Tiki Bar TV: A bizarre little video podcast from Canada about three drunks and their adventures. Rating: *****

* Transformers: Lovingly Reviewed: A brave man who is going through and reviewing (and mocking) every single episode of the original Transformers series. He's about halfway through now. Rating: ****

* Two-Minute Danger Theatre: Another 40s audio theater podcast, but it mocks the format instead of playing to it, and each episode is under two minutes long. Comes in fits and starts, but it otherwise hysterical. Rating: ****

* Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series: A redub of much-shortened episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh. I've listened to other comedy redubs, but this one seems to have the longest staying power, and is consistently funny (though later on it starts to develop entranched inside jokes, so it's best to start from the beginning). Rating: *****

Clear Skies was a 45 minute machinima movie created using EVE Online and Half-Life 2 to tell the story of a snarky, down-on-their luck courier crew swept up into the politics of the EVE universe.

I say "was" because now it's a series of movies with the release of Clear Skies 2.

Even if you don't play EVE Online, it's a fun space opera story in the style of Firefly, which uses both graphic engines to amazing use. If you haven't seen machinima before, this is a good place to start (then followed by Red vs. Blue).

And now, back to work and hermiting.

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.

First, a bit of background. I have been a fan of Ian Fleming's novels for many years, and a fan of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler for even more. Over that time, I have had friends and acquaintances express surprise that I was totally unfamiliar with John le Carré's work, particular his George Smiley novels. When we were waiting to see Coraline this weekend, we hung out at the nearby bookstore. I found a book containing le Carré's first three novels for $10, so I picked it up on a lark.

By Sunday afternoon, I had already finished the first one, Call for the Dead, and I'm kicking myself for missing this author earlier.

What's interesting is that even though it's about a British spy in the Cold War of the 1960s, the people who recommended it to me because I like Fleming were actually not nearly as accurate as the people who recommended it because I like Hammett. The protagonist, George Smiley, is about as far from James Bond as you can get -- fat, timid and middle-aged, he has a realistic view of the world that is at odds with Bond's rather monochrome view of the world. His ex-wife sleeps around far more than he does, and even his expensive clothes look worn and sloppy. But he has a razor-sharp mind and a moral code that is complex but unwavering, and in that he resembles Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe more than Bond.

The book is short -- barely 160 pages. The writing isn't as florid as Chandler or Fleming, but rather has the simple effectiveness of Hammett. The plot's a bit muddled in places, but le Carré uses Smiley's propensity to think through his writing to help reiterate key points for the reader while showing interesting peeks into his protagonist's thought process. As a mystery it plays by the rules and is fair, but like Hammett it's less about a particular clue unlocking the puzzle Holmes-like, but rather learning the nature of the characters involved and realizing which lies are which.

If you're a super-spy fan, you might not like Call for the Dead. However, if you're a fan of noir and a cast of characters that all have a little bit wrong and a little bit right with them, then check this book out.

(This is what happens when you have to work late three days in a row -- I end up regurgitating a ton of entries.)

Atomic Array (Podcast): I've heard about this for a while (primarily from Ed Healy's insistence that I give it a listen). I admit that I was just letting it pool in my iPhone until I got around to it, because the idea of yet another RPG review podcast didn't spark my fire. But when I noticed that there were a lot of products being reviewed that I was actually interested in, I spent the past week catching up. And I admit, it's pretty good. After the first few episodes the dynamic between Ed and his co-host Rone starts to click, and they sound more natural. Each episode is exclusively devoted to one game or product, which actually makes it easy to skip episodes that I'm not interested in, but also gives in-depth treatment to the ones that I am. Each episode has a short segment of Ed reviewing a product that relates somehow to the main theme of the show, and Rone ranting about whatever appears to have passed through his brain before recording time. Once in a while, they have short skits or "phone calls" with related guests breaking up the main interview. And they give away massive amounts of stuff every single episode. If you're looking for an RPG review podcast, pick an episode or two and see if it's to your taste; I think this one will get better as continues.

Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future (RPG): Labyrinth Lord is, essentially, a free PDF RPG that recreated the original (late 70s, early 80s) Dungeons & Dragons with about 98% accuracy, a self-proclaimed "retro-clone." It's been created via the OGL, and the developers admit that it's primarily to allow new support for the original style of D&D. And it's free. This was the game I cut my teeth on, and I admit to a hankering of nostalgia for a D&D where the PHB, DMG and MM all fit within 160 pages.

But even cooler to me is Mutant Future. Like LL, this is a stab at the original Gamma World. Unlike LL, though, it's not a faithful recreation of the game, as the original GW rules aren't under the OGL. Instead, it's a different version of LL that feels like GW. The two systems are very compatible (and MF even includes an appendix on how to combine the two), but the game is actually something new instead of a mechanical recreation of a previous game. And it has spidergoats.

Just reading over the files made me want to break out the graph paper and notebooks, dig up my dice and run a session or two of old-school fun.

Speaking of my Media Whore feature, I have a backlog to get through from vacation and illness. Let me bang them out before I forget.

* The 7th Son trilogy: Three podcast novels that are really one huge podcast novel. It took me about 20+ hours to listen to it all, and that's skipping JC's chatter and special features. I came into it thinking it was overhyped, and walked away realizing that it's totally worth it. Go listen. Support JC.

* Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories. All this book did was reinforce in my mind that Ian Fleming really wrote short stories; his novels were just a bunch of short stories woven together to good effect. With the exception of "007 In New York," I liked all of these, even though some of them don't involve espionage, action or even James Bond all that much. (And no, the short story has nothing to do with the movie.)

* Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition, Vol. 1. I picked this up in a comic shop right across from the British Museum (Gosh!) on a vaguely recalled recommendation from Attack of the Show. If you prefer modern British espionage that's really gritty, get this book. The series evolves more into a counter-terrorist unit after 9/11 hits in the storyline, and some of the artists take the look of the book into more superhero-y directions than the writing deserves, but it's a good read and well worth the 13 pounds I dropped on it.

* Silverfin (graphic novel). I like James Bond. I like James Bond novels. I wasn't a fan of this. It could have been the graphic novel treatment, but it felt more like the fourth Indiana Jones movie than a James Bond novel. Pass.

* Bytejacker. I think I might have pimped this video podcast before. If so, that. If not, short reviews of downloadable and indie video games. Worth it, I think. It led me to:

* Nanobots. Point-and-click adventure game in the style of the old Sierra games. It's short (about 3-5 hours), funny and very, very hard. It suffers from some bizarre logic puzzle, but I chalked that up more to the genre than a flaw in the game.

* Dirty Split. The best recommendation I can give to this game is that I installed it around 9pm, planned to play it for an hour or two before going to bed, and was blearily watching the credits at 1am. It's a murder mystery point-and-click adventure game, but with incredible voice acting, a distinctive animation style, and a story that's complex enough to be engaging but without bizarre logic. Again, it's short, and a bit on the easy side (especially compared to Nanobots), but it's certainly a game that was designed with a particular goal in mind and proceeds to accomplish that goal in every way. It doesn't try to appeal to everyone, but if you're that cross-section of target audience, you simply cannot pass this game up.

Whew. I know there's more, but that's all I can recall right now.

I can't make this shit up. Jean-Claude Van Damme playing Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD, a movie produced by Jean-Claude Van Damme.

JCVD trailer

IMDB entry

(What's worse, I actually want to see it....)

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.

Just finished up listening to the sequel to Jack Wakes Up, and it's a worthy successor. Jack Palms II: This is Life picks up a few months after JWU leaves off. Like the original, it's a series of roughly thirty-minute episodes with Seth reading his book, but this time there are a few guest voices playing some of the main characters (although Jack continues to sound exactly like Seth). There's also a few choice sound effects added into the mix, really ramping up the quality of the audio. I did notice a few more gaffs than in JWU, but I chalked it up to Seth trying to push the boundries on this new book, and they didn't bother me much at all.

The story not only feels like a natural extension of JWU, but it also puts Jack in even more shit than the first book. While I kind of picked out the "twist" ending pretty early on, some of the character changes and events either I didn't see coming, or I hoped wouldn't come because I was empathizing with Jack so much. One thing that I really like about this series is that Jack isn't really the kind of character that just casually pulls out a gun and blows someone away -- he makes mistakes, he freezes up and he sometimes lets his reluctance for bloodshed get him into worse trouble. He's very human, and overall it makes for a very compelling crime story.

The only real complaint I have is similar to the one I had for the first book, only moreso -- there's a lot left dangling, and while JWU kind of resolves most of it to a reasonably satisfactory ending, JP2 was clearly written with a Jack Palms 3 in mind. Expect to have your questions about some major plot elements postponed for the final book of the trilogy. I'd be pissed if it weren't for the fact that JP3 is already done and in my iPod.

Whatever I said about listening to JWU (or buying it when the print book goes on sale in May next year), double that. Unless something goes crazy with JP3, I can only assume it'll be an awesome conclusion to the series.

It's a zombie movie. The protagonist has rescued his buddy from being attacked by a zombie, but he finds out his buddy's been bitten. Does he try to save him, or put him out of his misery?

This time, you get to decide.

The Outbreak is an interactive movie, a combination of good old "Choose Your Own Adventure" interactivity at key points combined with decades of frustration yelling at stupid horror movie protagonists. The idea, in retrospect, is very simple: construct a decision tree of events in a zombie survival scenario, film each option, then use the power of the Internet to show the options, allowing the audience to click at key points and make a simple but interactive zombie movie.

The site is surprisingly good quality and accounts for a lot of different ways to experience the movie. If you fail, you can start over from the beginning or try "Chapter Select" and get a tree of your previous decisions, and which ones are untried or led to your death (unlike, say, Dragon's Lair, which often kicks you back a notch and forces you to try again). As you go through, you'll see some similar scenes, but creative editing allows for subtle differences in certain scenes from time to time, and earlier choices can (and do) impact later ones.

The only downside I see is that the choices are fairly arbitrary. Move Furniture or Get Wood? Fuck, how do I know? There is a fair amount of clicking on choices at random and hoping they work out, but that's not too different from the source they're emulating (Choose Your Own Adventure books), so it's a minor beef. It's also really short -- I played through every option in about fifteen minutes. However, it's one of those head-slapping "why didn't anyone think of this before?" ideas that I'm hoping will take hold and propagate on the net.

I'm behind, so here we go.

* Betrayal at House on the Hill (Board Game): I borrowed this board game from Kelley after she spent weeks trying to track a copy down, and we ended up playing a couple of games after our Mage game canceled out. It's one of many "RPG as board game" style games, but it's got a lot of clever little mechanics that really make it feel like a horror movie. It's surprisingly deep and has a lot of replay value even after you've uncovered all 50 scenarios. If you see a copy, it's definitely worth picking up.

* Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People - Episode 1: "Homestar Ruiner" (WiiWare DLC): Don't let the extremely long title fool you -- there's not a lot of depth in this . I'm a big fan of Sam & Max Season One as well as a fan of Homestar Runner, but unfortunately it's only my enjoyment of both sources that kept me going. I frequently got lost in sorting out what I was supposed to do, and many of the puzzles seemed arbitrary (which, granted, makes sense in the world of Strong Bad, but isn't a whole lot of fun in a point-and-click adventure game). If you like each it might be worth the $10 to kill 4-5 hours, but otherwise I would wait until the entire season is done and see if it grows into its property like S&M did.

* The Long Goodbye (Novel): Okay, I admit it -- I'm a huge fan of Raymond Chandler, so it's hard for me to knock any of his books. But The Long Goodbye is an interesting one in the Philip Marlowe series. For one, it fleshes out Marlowe's character a bit more, especially after the events in the previous books. Secondly, there's about thirty billion different things going on at once, and while you might see one or two of them coming, there's some that come out of nowhere. Finally, there isn't really a case per se -- it's Marlowe going from bad to worse because of his standards and ethics, which is the dilemma really at the heart of the American detective genre of the early 20th century. This is probably Chandler at his best, and well worth a read even if you aren't enamored with the genre.

* Signed up for iSweat. It's reskinned Twitter (and even syncs with Twitter), but it's also an easy way for me to be more honest about my workout schedule, such as it is. The idea is to "break one sweat every day," but I'm not there yet. Now that we have a smith machine as well as the elliptical machine in the condo, I can eventually build up to alternating between weight training and cardio.

* Quick Media Whore bit: Avoid Fringe. People who liked Lost may like it (I didn't like Lost either), but it comes across as a slow-moving, refried X-Files. I mean, props to J.J. for juggling a ton of creative projects, but this looks like it could have used more work, or at least a better set-up. Usually I try to give new shows four episodes, but nothing about this show clicks for me.

* In the process of reading Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. In some respects, it's kind of a counter-argument to the relationship between RPGs and games posited in Rules of Play, so I'm intrigued by the philosophical tension (although SP seems to be aligning with my interpretation of RoP's view on RPGs anyhow). I may have to see if I can dig up First Person as well at some point, but I'm still only about a third of the way through SP.

* Slowly making some changes here at work, between physical office move and subtle changes to my workflow. Trying to move administrative stuff to Mondays and being more selective about how I spend my time at work, but I'm still spending about 40-60 hours a week working. One of the downsides of being in a part of the company that touches on a little bit of everything is that it's harder to juggle when "everything" keeps getting slowly bigger.

* Wedding this Saturday, and more Victorian Mage this Sunday. Hopefully things will get rolling now that we've seen the so-called "ghost."

Yeah, I'm on a podcast kick, but right now it's wonderful to listen to books on my commute, which is about 30-40 minutes each way nowadaya.

Jack Wakes Up is a free podcast novel by Seth Harwood. It's the story of a one-hit action star named Jack Palms who is recently divorced and recovering from a heroin addiction. A request to go out and help entertain a few visiting Czechs ends up with him getting entangled in a mess of drugs, murder and violence involving four conflicting factions in the LA scene. After the podcast, a print novel was released

I haven't had a chance to finish this yet (I'm at the second to last episode), but already I'm hooked. It's very modern noir (and I don't often use that title personally). It's got a lot of gray morality, plot twists and good action that doesn't shy away from bring brutal and gritty. Jack himself is a complicated, intriguing character that has as much of a problem staying on the wagon as he does trying to extract himself from this messy situation. Even his relationship with his 1966 Mustang fastback is intriguing and entertaining, making you wonder how much if it is the car and how much of it is a reminder of a better time in Jack's life.

It's the first in a trilogy of Jack Palms novels, and I'll likely post reviews on the other two as I finish them up.

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

Today is a double-shot of two songs recently that I'm grooving on.

The first is "Artsy" by The Real Grouch. He's a hip-hop indie artist, and his YouTube video parodies a number of... well, they're well-known television ad campaigns. The substance of his song I also groove to, as it's about being an artist without feeling the need to play into artistic stereotypes.



The second is "Oh No You Didn't," the song from (most of) the commercials for Pandemic Studios' Mercenaries 2. This song is a fun-loving song about brutal and ruthless payback that is so fucking catchy it will not leave your head for days. DAYS I TELL YOU. The website is offering the MP3 for free download, so check it out and become as addicted as my household is to it.

(Note to self: I should try and find/make a Media Whore icon at some point.)

Epic Fu is a short video podcast that talks about what's cool on the Internet -- art, music, technology and the like. It's twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays), and it runs about six minutes each episode. At first, I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but it crams a TON of little tidbits into each episode, and I've already found a few cool new websites and music artists that I like as a result. It plays great on my iPhone, and the hostess (Zadi Diaz) is just weird enough to be engaging.

If you're looking for a couple of bite-sized bursts of Internet culture each week, it's worth checking out.