This morning was another of crazy Twilight shit lighting up my RSS feed, first up: IO9’s list of the 30 most disturbing Twilight products. I want you to try and guess what this is before you click on the link.
Next, I always enjoy Surviving the World but this morning he really made me smile:
I know I’m a hypocrite because I haven’t read or watched Twilight and I still know I hate it, but we all have to admit that this is brilliant.
Added at 11:00: Wow, my RSS feed really hates Twilight today, check out this video over at Cracked
“Any similarity to the characters created by Joss Whedon is, like, totally a coincidence. And by ‘coincidence’ we mean accidental. And by ‘accidental’ we mean fortunate. And by ‘fortunate’ we mean intentional. And by ‘intentional’ we mean unauthorized.”- HorribleTurn.com
Horrible Turn trailer from Horrible Turn on Vimeo.
I watched Horrible Turn last night. As a diehard Joss Whedon fan and someone who was completely in love with the original Dr. Horrible, I have to say my hopes were high. I know Joss (I like to refer to him on a first name basis so as to pretend that we are friends) had nothing to do with it, but it was a good platform for fan expansion. That said, I was a little disappointed. It was a fun story, and a creative take on the origin story of Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer, as well as other characters that appear in minor rolls in Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog. But if you are expecting a video as good as the first you will be let down. It just didn’t have the glorious little something that Joss leaves on everything he touches. The singing was good, the acting was alright, but the dialogue and lyrics just weren’t the same. I found myself wanting to skip the songs rather than put them on my iPod and listen to them over and over and over again as I did with the original.
It was a fun take on a story I love, and I am seriously impressed with the time that these fans put into it. It was well directed and edited (although, I do have to say, someone had a little too much fun with the Final Cut plugins). And I wish that I had friends that would do something like this with me; why did all my high school friends have to go to college in other parts of the country? It is definitely worth the 60 some minutes of viewing time just don’t expect that Joss Whedon flair.
After watching this I am especially excited to read the Dr. Horrible Origin comic that I hear is in the works. It will be interesting to see the similarities and differences between the two. And, as always, I cannot wait for the new sequel, maybe now that Dollhouse isn’t gonna happen we will get it sooner rather than later.
I started Dragon Champion by E.E. Knight last night. It has been ages since I have started a new book, and the last one I started I was reading in such short spurts over such a long time I will have to start again from the beginning.
It was nice to get back to some fantasy, I have been on a sci-fi kick for the past few years. I took a sci-fi lit class, and then decided I would start reading Hugo Award winners. This book is different because the main character, Auron, is a young dragon. It is told entirely from his perspective. The reader experiences new things as he does: the first time he sees dwarves, elves, humans, learning to hunt and swim. It is interesting to experience things from this point of view, but, so far I feel like an opportunity is being lost.
This book seems to lack the rich descriptions that are a staple of fantasy novels. Being told from the point of view of a dragon, I expected that Auron would see things differently than a human. I love books written from the point of view of other races, they often possess senses that humans do not, giving the reader insight into situations they they could never experience in reality. It may be that Auron has not developed these senses yet, I am only about 100 pages in, and he is still young, but, I feel like a dragon should have a more acute sense of what is happening around him.
What this book lacks in description, it has made up for in plot. A lot has happened in the first 100 pages. It is a very fast paced story, and I was attached to the character from the beginning. I hope that the storytelling matures with the character and the author introduces deeper, rich environments. If it does, I will definitely stick around for the rest of the trilogy.
Today I had to break my self away from BSG for a few hours to actually get some work done on a site that I have been, well, not working on, for weeks. When I design websites, I have a tendency to fight and fight and fight with them, and then sit down one day and come up with something I like. I don’t know if this is normal, or if this is a bad thing, but it is my ‘process.’ Today was the ‘ah ha’ day for this site. It definitely still needs work, and because I started with such a simple page I’m sure challenges will arise with more challenging pages, but for now I am happy
Milestones is a non-profit therapeutic horse back riding center that I have been volunteering with for the past 3 or so years. If you follow the link above you will see that they are in pretty desperate need of a redesign. Prepare yourself, there is comic sans, and it is big, and blue. Regardless of the current state of their site I love spending time out there. OK, I would probably like it just a little bit more if there wasn’t comic sans, but that’s what I’m here for.
Volunteering with their program is the only reason I spend time outside, and the time I spend out at the barn accounts for the most cumulative time I spend away from a computer screen for the entire week. I have been around horses my whole life, I owned a few in high school, but then I went away to school and the cost and time commitment wasn’t feasible, so now I do what I can to still be around them. This way is a lot less stressful, and a lot cheaper. Being out at the barn keeps me sane during school quarters, and gets me out of the house during co-op, so I am happy to be helping them out with this site. And of course, I need some more websites in my portfolio, so my motives aren’t entirely selfless.
Once I get some more design done I will post more screens, and I plan on looking into some different CMS services to build this site into, I’m thinking of just using wordpress, because I really do love it, even if they don’t warn me before writing over all my files(It is all better as you can see, 3 hours of fixing CSS later). But who knows, maybe I’ll try something new. We shall see
by: Isaac Asimov
I went on a short story kick in New York; my 40 minute subway ride was perfect for reading a short story but never really gave me enough time to get into a novel. I, Robot is one of those books that I was loosing geek cred having not read it and I have to say, I don't know why I didn't read this earlier.
I loved that the short stories followed the same characters through different experiences and challenges that they face. It took a story about robots and made it about humanity. My favorite stories were probably "Catch that Rabbit" and "Liar." The first was about a little girl who was attached to her nanny robot and how her father thought it was inappropriate. It is something I have wanted to explore in my own writing, what are the consequences when technology replaces a human being in an emotional capacity, even when it preforms its tasks perfectly. The other is about a robot that reads minds, I have a thing with mind reading, I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm writing a story about it now and am very intrigued by the idea.
Overall, If you are a sci-fi fan like me who hasn't picked this up, go do it. Now.