Damsel: So how's your book?

Me: It's the best gay elven slashfic I've read this year.

Damsel: ...

Me: Okay, that may seem like an exaggeration--

Damsel: No, no, I looked at the cover. I don't think you're exaggerating in the least.

(To be clear, I really did enjoy this book.)

So while I was one-armed and not typing, I got to watch, for the first time, The Scorpion King.

First off, this movie works much better when you think of it as really high-budget fanfic set in the Xena universe.

Second, someday I will write a historical film set in ancient times where the old sage doesn't invent gunpowder. Just to be different.

Third, I really actually enjoyed this movie. I keep loving the Rock, even when he doesn't seem to get parts that actually fit with his ability to perform athletic feats, work a crowd with natural stage presence, and make fun of himself without hesitation. I loved him in the Rundown, I've loved him when he hosted SNL, and I love him here.

Fourth, I kept wondering if this was a deliberate deconstruction of Conan, given the hero's refusal to kill the girl, not to mention his on-screen killing of the guy who played Conan in the short-lived syndicated series.

And fifth, what idiot rewrote the ending?

Because here was what the ending was supposed to be:

1) You get the bad guy who has an entire scene dedicated to his ability to catch arrows.
2) You get the Rock poisoned by the bad guy's henchman with scorpion-stinger venom, and surviving, but with the witch-woman noting that "If he survives, his blood will always carry the sting of the scorpion."
3) You have the Rock's masterwork bow stolen early in the movie, then deliberately moved into the area used for the final fight scene by a character who is comically unable to draw it because it is made for strong tough men.
4) You have the Rock get shot with an arrow, get all hurt and determined and iron steely with resolve, and then he pulls the arrow out of his own back, nocks it in his bow (which, as mentioned, just happened to have been left in the area used for the final fight scene), and aims at the bad guy, who is perched on a ledge overlooking a long drop with his arms spread, saying, "Take your best shot."

What is supposed to happen next?

Duh.

What was clearly supposed to happen, what was set up to happen based on every bit of foreshadowing in the damn movie, is that the Rock shoots the bad guy, who catches the arrow, but the Rock's awesome-pull bow makes the shot stronger, so it just barely penetrates and gives the villain a tiny shallow wound in the chest, although the guy has clearly caught the arrow. The villain sneers, thinking the Rock has failed, but then gets woozy and shaky while the witch-woman's voice, in a flashback, intones, "...his blood will always carry the sting of the scorpion." And then the bad guy, weak and emasculated by the Rock's awesomeness and poisoned by the very scorpion-venom he used to poison the Rock a few scenes back, falls from the ledge and dies.

That was the whole point.

But some focus tester somewhere didn't understand that, despite the fact that they were watching this movie while not under the influence of prescription-strength painkillers like I was. And so we get the bad guy going "Take your best shot," and the Rock firing, and the bad guy completely failing to catch the arrow and getting blown backward off the ledge like the arrow was a damn bazooka shot, and hey, all that foreshadowing? Enh. We assumed you were looking at Kelly Hu's legs for most of the movie.

Ah, well.

Also, the Rock needs to use two-handed weapons. When he uses a one-handed sword, he looks tight and constricted. He looks better swinging that plank at people in Walking Tall. Give the man a claymore. Hell, you had some guy invent gunpowder. It's not like historical accuracy was your biggest concern.

I just watched the season finales for both Supernatural and Dollhouse. These are shows that I have watched in their entirety, and they're staying on my PVR and everything, and actually, in both cases, I really liked the emotional arc and the big idea of the episode a great deal.

And in both cases, I would have been an incredibly happy camper if their big-finale action scenes hadn't coughed up a hairball and died there on the screen.

( Week-old Spoilers )

I'm not saying this as somebody whose fight scenes are impeccable. I'm saying this as someone whose fight scenes are always always always too long, in fact. But if I'd written either of those as my big season-finale climaxes and shown them to my buddies, their critiques would have resulted in some good rewriting opportunities. That, you know, I would have taken, instead of, say, filming and airing.

I finished Puzzle Quest Galactrix awhile back but was unmotivated to write anything about it.

Which, honestly, is kind of a review in and of itself.

There's so much potential greatness. I love the new board, with its shifting gravity and complex strategic options. I love that attacking people makes my faction rating shift, and selling things to them makes it shift as well. I love the number of minigames available for mining, haggling, crafting, and scouting out rumors. I love the consequence-free failure that encourages you to take risks and experiment. I love the ship as the means of upgrading. Hell, I even love the use of energy bars for power limitation and the turn-recharge system to prevent ability spamming.

And yet, at the same time, I am dazzled by the sheer number of bass-ackward decisions that were made, decisions that I, a peon junior designer, can look at and go, "Oh, yeah, easy fix."

I played the original Puzzle Quest. I enjoyed it a ton. There was only one minigame I didn't play into the ground, and that was the pet training. You know why? Because it was timed. I don't think that I was alone there in being somebody who didn't want you bringing that timed crap into my turn-based strategy casual RPG.

So naturally, what minigame is a prerequisite for unlocking jumpgates and traveling from system to system? A timed minigame. One which gives no reward for completion beyond "Yep, you can go to that new system," no money, no XP, nada.

(There've been complaints about the minigame itself, but I figured out how to not suck at it reasonably quickly. (For those who haven't played it, the goal is to match a sequence of colors -- somewhere between 12 and 24 -- within a time limit. It has to be done in order, and while there's no penalty for getting other colors, you can't move onto color X+1 until you've gotten color X. And if you get a chain, something that you ordinarily like to get, where stuff keeps firing off all by itself, then you sit there helplessly while the clock ticks down.) I consider the game fair, and I wouldn't be bothered by having had it as a minigame for some other system.)

At the same time, you spend a lot of the game racking up Psi points, given by the purple gems. Psi points do... nothing. Well, that's not true. A few abilities will use them to do pissant damage or something similarly unimpressive. Their major purpose is this: if you've done a set of quests, you can, when attacked by an enemy ship, sometimes spend Psi points to avoid the fight.

You know what the best and most interesting minigame in the game was? THE FIGHTING. You know what I don't want to avoid? THE FIGHTING. I want to test out my new cannon. I want to see if my denial-of-turn strategy can actually let me take down enemies with impunity. Yes, I can imagine how it could have been annoying to be attacked every time I entered a hostile system, but there are two easy ways to not have that happen:

1) If you complete that Psi quest, you never ever ever get ambushed by people ever again, unless it's part of a mission. You don't have to bother spending Psi points at all.

2) Once you hit the Beta Centauri system, you can mine in a manner that breaks the game not merely on a balance level, but on a level indicative of what Dolph Lundgren's character said he was going to do to Rocky thanks to evil Soviet drugs (as opposed to the good American ones that Stallone was taking). Your faction is affecting by you selling stuff to people. You can fly into a system, blow up an enemy ship to get to their sales area, and then dump a crapload of crystals and alloys and radioactives on them, and they will start throwing parades for you the next time you come in-system, even as you coast through the still-smoking debris of the last five ships you blew up.

So we have Psi Points, which accomplish absolutely nothing, and we have the damn open-the-jumpgates minigame, the only timed minigame in the game and the one that you absolutely cannot ignore.

Yes, I'm stating it in an obvious way, but someone, at some point in the design process, must have thought, "Hey, a lot of people hate timed minigames. Maybe we could have the Psi Points auto-unlock leapgates. Or let you get a bonus that makes the timed section easier. Or... something. That lets people spend Psi Points on something other than avoiding combat, the coolest and funnest part of the game that lets people show off their new Shielded Minelayer ability."

Or maybe they didn't.

Other design elements have moments of irkfulness. I don't know why a faction system differentiates between Neutral and Liked and Loved when there appears to be no reward for hitting those levels. The shop prices are the same. You never get allies coming to your aid. I didn't notice new quests opening up. The faction system felt (he says like a jaded designer) like a system that got mostly done, until someone realized that if they put in all the faction effects, it would break other things, like the haggling minigame, and so it had to be stripped back to what it is now. I can support this (Faction isn't a minigame of the match-3 style, so if you have to neuter something, it's the easiest candidate), but it's still disappointing.

And then there's the plot.

Near the end, as part of the critical path, I am asked to go get some special crystals to make a machina, presumably one that something will pop out ex at some point thereafter. I go to where the crystals are, and they turn out to be living crystal creatures -- folks I've helped out on past missions, in fact. There's a pop-up conversation in which I discuss the horror of having to kill them and then harvest their bodies to use for stuff.

And I wait patiently for other opportunities. Like, maybe I can go back to the world where I got the quest and ask about a different way to do it. Nope! Maybe I can talk to them instead and find out an alternate path. Nope!

The only way to finish the game is by genociding the pacifist crystal people.

And I did it. Not because it was a difficult moral choice but I soldiered through for the fate of the galaxy, but because at that point, I was so disgusted with what was being propped up as a story that I ceased to see the crystal people as people and remembered that they were pixel pictures standing between me and the next fight. I had no options. This isn't a game about making choices. This is a game about blowing up enemy ships and saving the galaxy, or at least it would be, if they'd realized that you actually spend most of your time hacking jumpgates and finding alternate ways around jumpgates instead of hacking them because you just hacked three to get here and occasionally watching a jumpgate flicker and revert to unhacked status behind you as the game sends you a little "Screw you, player!" to take home.

On the other hand, I smacked down the enemy ships SO HARD. I was, much as in my old PQ tradition, annoyed if they got a turn. It's a fun combat system that rewards careful thought and minmaxing and powergaming and all those things that I love to do.

Shame they couldn't have gotten a real writer or two to do something with their story.

(courtesy of nihilistic_kid )

Dear Kevin W. Reardon,

There are a lot of people talking about you right now. They are telling you that reacting to a rejection letter with insults and threats is childish, and that urging someone in the midst of a bout of clinical depression to commit suicide is reprehensible. They're talking about you committing career suicide by doing this and getting caught, and what an incredible asshole you appear to be.

But let's put that aside for a moment. Everyone else is dealing with that.

Let's focus on something that I suspect is much more important to you than what a lot of people feel: You tried to convince a depressed lonely gay fellow writer to commit suicide.

And you couldn't.

As I understand it, you are a gay writer, like Steve. That gives you a keen insight into the way his mind works, a unique set of shared worldviews that should have served you well in terms of finding his own weakest emotional pressure points by knowing your own.

And Steve was depressed, as he noted himself in an earlier post. Not just bummer-day depressed, but clinically depressed, having hit a block in his own writing and career and feeling lonely. Hell, given the crappy winter a lot of us have had, there's a good chance that you had seasonal affective disorder on your side to boot.

Those who choose words as their craft have accomplished amazing things. They have started rebellions and ended wars. They have put kings on thrones and sent emperors to their deaths. They have brought countless lovers together and torn countless marriages apart.

But not you. You couldn't even make a clinically depressed guy kill himself.

Everyone else can attack you, and they're right to do so. But honestly, you're not a good enough writer to be worth their time. 

This is the only writing you'll ever be remembered for.

My opinion, for all the nothing that it is worth, on the current kerfluffle about cultural appropriation and writing the other:

( tl;dr )

Keep writing, keep trying, keep discussing, and try to acknowledge that everybody is doing the same.

This was a fascinating read for me, mostly because this book refused to fit into my standard comfort zone. I apparently have a two by two matrix with "Liked, Didn't Like" on one axis and "Good Book, Bad Book" on the other, and I count myself very intelligent for being able to recognize as good books that I did not myself actually enjoy reading. And this book just doesn't fit.

I have minor ending quibbles, mostly because it felt like a lot of the tension was drained away before the climactic encounter, which I would have put about fifty or seventy-five pages earlier, back when the tension was at its peak. On the other hand, I really liked the emotional flow of the ending, so I'm forced to see it not as bad, but as a good version of a slightly different story from the one I thought I was reading. (Without going deeply into spoiler-land, I was thinking political intrigue, and then there's a hard left turn into quasi-Native American-feeling stuff near the end.)

Ultimately, though, I really really really liked the characters and the story being told. I liked the emotional struggles, I liked the world that was being built. I liked the Brotherhood (and the number of women in said Brotherhood who were not archers or healers or all the other "No, look, we let girls in, as long as they don't want to tank" roles). I liked the politics. I liked the magic, and the alien nature of the big bad.

And for the life of me, I could barely get through this book sentence by sentence. It was like reading Riddley Walker or something, where I needed about twenty minutes to be able to get into the voice every time I picked the book up. And I don't think this is because the individual voice was bad. I think that Violette Malan and I are at opposite ends of some communicative spectrum, somehow, and it's not good versus bad, it's just... how people think to put sentences together, what ideas they think are important, how they present them. I felt the way I felt reading C. J. Cherryh's Chanur Saga, where I respect the hell out of the ideas, and the writing itself isn't bad as far as I can tell, by an objective "are the verbs in the right place" standard, but somehow I have an incredibly hard time latching onto what is being said.

I almost put this book down but once I realized that I needed the adaptation time, and that I should only read when I had at least an hour to devote to it, I was fine. Ended up staying up way too late finishing it, and will be getting the sequel.

So I'm attempting to broaden my horizons, albeit in a very limited way. I'll page through the fantasy section, grab something I've never heard of, and give it a shot. I'm guided by cover blurbs, cover art (which I know I shouldn't be, but on some level, it at least says how much the publisher believed in the book), and blind luck. I also aim for the first book in the series, and the first book in a shared-world non-series group of books, if possble.

(And sometimes my son. The Dude knows that after we arrive together and hot chocolate and a cookie, he will get to go play with the trains in the kids section just as soon as I find a book. If I take too long, he helps me my grabbing books at random.

"How about this one?"

"Uh, I don't think so."

"But it's great!"

"Dude, it's Terry Brooks.")

Last week, I hit Myrren's Gift by Fiona McIntosh.

If you are Ms. McIntosh, or friends with her, you can probably just stop here. She got my $11,00. She wins.
( Unkind )
Ah, well.

This was by no means an official for-work game, but I've been playing games with an eye to design lately, and this game was such a fascinating mixed bag that I wanted to do a full writeup.

( Apparently this turned out a bit long. )This is a game that does a lot of things well and a lot of things poorly, and someone in a position of power never figured out what was what.

This is not a review per se, because I have two kids and have seen, as I recall, two movies this year, and I'm pretty sure that The House Bunny is not gonna be Number Three. But just having passed the poster in the mall a few days ago, I can see three easy problems with the premise:

1) It's a comedy in which Anna Faris is supposed to be a Playboy Bunny, but looking at the picture, my initial thought was, "Yeah, thanks, no." As a straight guy whose home accidentally got the Playboy Channel free for a few formative teen years thanks to my dad working at a cable company, I can comfortably speak as, if not an expert, at least a knowledgeable source, regarding women and porn. This is not a "women and porn" argument in the making -- I've heard the feminist-porn argument, the misogynist-porn argument, and the those-Swedish-nurses-need-to-pay-for-school-somehow argument, and that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that in that picture, Anna Faris does not look like a bunny. Her lipstick is smudged, her ears are askew, and the look of Kathy Ireland-esque dull surprise is completely at odds with the happy glamourous "nice good girl having a bit of fun" that Playboy tries to capture. Doing a Google Image search, I found another poster that captures the idea of what a Playboy Bunny should look like more effectively, but that's not the one I found plastered over every vertical surface of the dang mall last week. The one I saw was a girl who wouldn't actually make it as a bunny. (Note: This could be a deep intentional note from the marketers, since apparently Anna Faris is supposed to be a Bunny who gets kicked out. That's great deep marketing, if true. Also, stupid. You don't show us a Bunny who couldn't make it as a Bunny and then tell us it's a Bunny movie. Guys who are going to be attracted to watching a Bunny movie are not going to want to see the Bunny who didn't make it, so don't advertise it that way.)

2) The tagline is a paraphrase of "She's going somewhere no Bunny has ever gone: College." Um. No. Again, taking the basic assumption that they're talking about Playboy models and not the actual Bunnies who were waitresses, Playboy brands itself as the classy boob magazine, the one with the wholesome girls who go on to good careers and happy lives and all that. They've got entire issues of the magazine devoted to "the hottest women on campus". Hence, you know, them going to college. Hit Wikipedia. More than half of the women I looked at just to determine whether I was full of it were either college graduates or currently in college.

3) And this is the slightly nasty one, but really,,, Playboy? Today? That's the most risque you can get? I can understand that a bunch of old writers were racking their brains trying to figure out what kind of fish out of water could end up in a sorority and be more titillating than, well, a sorority in a college movie, and then the old writers settled on Playboy as the sexiest thing they could think of. But this is the Oughts. Playboy is what people my age looked at as teens before we went to college and found out that the Internet had stories, pictures, and movies of the secret shameful thing we'd never ever told anyone about right there for your enjoyment. If you want to find bisexual threesomes involving strapons and spacegirl outfits, hit the Google, and it's right there for you. If a teenager today actually looks at Playboy, it's because they actually do want to read the articles. The writers could have gone with a porn star, a virtual sex webcam girl, a sissification Internet mistress, or any variety of crazy sexy thing, but they opted for the porn mag that's slightly sexier than Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue and decided to contrast that with a college sorority, marketing this the way people marketed Sister Act -- "What happens when a lounge singer teams up with nuns?!" -- despite the fact that in stereotypeville, a Playboy Bunny is about as big a contrast to a sorority sister as Vanilla is to Vanilla Bean at the ice cream shop, and neither is so smashingly sexy as to lure in today's young people. It's sexy by old-people standards, and good for them, but that doesn't look like the target audience, unless they're there at the theater because they just dropped their daughter and her friends off and are supposed to think, "Wow, let's go see that ourselves! That Anna Faris! Quite a looker, eh, hon? I'd like to jerk her a soda!"

Or maybe I'm overthinking it, and the appeal is supposed to be Anna Faris in a variety of tight clothing.

Moving away from video games, which is bit minefieldian at the moment given the number of things I cannot confirm, deny, or even answer: stuff I've read, and stuff I haven't:

The Life of Pi: Haven't! I got to page 100, and the plot still hadn't started. I'm willing to own that my days of literary scholarship are far behind me now. I read for pleasure, and if you don't give me pleasure, your ass don't get read. Ideally, there's a plot in there somewhere, but failing that, doing something with voice and character that I didn't get back in high school when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would be a plus.

The High King's Tomb, by Kristen Britain: Heartbreaking, but I gave up on this after reading the first chapter in the store. I honestly wonder if this would catch on with people starting it fresh, not with a multi-year break between the second and third book. And this is going to sound harsh, and I hate that it sounds harsh, but, two things: first, I needed a whole lot of awesome right away to make up for the "We must go dark in the second book, because Tolkien and Lucas both did" deal, in which a very cool first book is succeeded by a book in which everyone is more angstful and we end with much less hope and a few people spiritually poisoned (this is also why I stopped at Path of Angst, or whatever the second Diana Pharaoh Francis book was, in which all the progress that the heroine had made in the first book got tossed out the window for more angst, and then everyone became stupid and stopped talking); and second, the entire first chapter, short though it was, was throat-clearing, and if the author feels the need to explain to a fantasy reader what a village wise woman does without simply going, "Village wise woman, aaaaaaand moving on," and then hammers on the "Yes, she heals, and also, she's eeeeeevil," thing as hard as Britain does... well, by itself, not enough to get me to put a book down, but after the second book, this was a maybe, not a must, and it made it into my hands but not to the counter. And I still feel bad about it, because I so greatly enjoyed the promise of the first book.

Buffy: The Long Road Home: Finally read it, since everyone who wasn't yelling at me to watch Dr. Horrible was telling me to read this. I liked it. It was fun. I liked the banter. I felt a bit of a learning curve, though, and while it's awesome that so many things were evidently thrown in for people who'd read the other comics, as someone coming in fresh, I was occasionally stuck going, "Okay, who's that supposed to be?" I never realized how stylized most comic faces were until seeing how limiting the "Working from real faces from the show" constraint is, where all the white guys with brown hair kind of blend in.

Also, no, I'm not watching Dr. Horrible. This is the part where I sound like an elitest jerk, but: I didn't love "Once More with Feeling" as much as everyone else appeared to. I didn't mind it, and I found a lot of the almost-rhymes really cute, but I like actual musicals, with people who can actually sing. I watched Raul Julia in Man of La Mancha. I watched Colm Wilkinson in Les Miserables. I saw the guy from Happy Days in Show Boat, which honestly doesn't count for as much, but still. I memorized the entire soundtrack of Into the Woods. Yes, also, there were lighter bits, with Sweeney Todd (tape of the Broadway version and live performance in SF with Neil Patrick Harris, who was decent, and, as I recall correctly, the mom from Life Goes On) and Wicked and Thoroughly Modern Millie and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and the obligatory Phantom and Cats and the monumental third-act problems of Jekyll & Hyde and a whole bunch of others. "Once More with Feeling" felt more like a very enthusiastic filk session than a musical, and there's nothing wrong with very enthusiastic filking, at all, but it's not my thing. I wish blessings and peace upon those who watched it, and I hope they gained much enjoyment and happiness from it.

I got to see Wanted recently, bringing my total of movies watched on a big screen in 2008 up to a shocking two. Mick LaSalle, the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer I love to disagree with, saw it as a dangerous message to be sending to America's youth, that being a horrible serial killing hyperviolent murderer is better than being a nobody. This was a fantastic message, and I applaud Mick for holding onto it for the nine years since The Matrix came out, in which the agents could take over people's bodies, and it actually was to your advantage to gun down the blue-pills.

Short version: I liked it, and loved the hilariously over-the-top action, but I think that either I was thinking too much in some places, or the movie kept trying to get me to think, and then dropping the ball.

To be clear, though: any time something was blowing up, I very much liked the movie. I just wished they'd focused on that instead of trying to do character or plot.

And then, just to go back on myself: I'm playing Ninja Gaiden 2, which my mother got for me as a Father's Day present. I am playing it for work, but not for a project-specific reason. I want to be able to talk intelligently with combat guys when they talk about bosses and how said bosses work whenever we bring up big-fight ideas, and as the hot new thing, this seemed like an important one to play. I've heard the combat guys on Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 using similar terms, so I don't think it's project-specific, which means yay, I can talk about it. :)

Love the combat. Every animation reinforces the fact that you're a ninja. You feel badass, and you also feel like the enemies are badass, and when you're in clusters of enemies, you have to keep moving, since they don't just stand there nicely waiting for you to finish pounding that one guy before whacking you. I'm playing on the easy mode, because I'm a big wimp who cannot handle the higher difficulties, and I've finished the first chapter (first end boss only took me two tries to defeat).

And then... then I look at the rest of the game, and I think, "Wow, we're trying too hard."

The dialog. Sweet Christmas, the dialog. I slapped on Japanese VO and English subtitles, so that I could labor under the delusion that the acting was better in the language I didn't speak. They fell facefirst into the uncanny valley, and everyone except the hero looks like a fricking idiot; the hero only looks non-artificial because the only parts of him you see are his eyes and his massive ninja-bicep arms. The rest of him is covered in pleather or a chrome Shredder helmet. The sword looks fantastic, but increased graphical realism really hits home the fact that a leather-and-chrome-clad ninja is just about one policeman short of a Village People video.

And the level design. Man, BioWare gets slammed for having levels that are too linear, and then, in this game for which I have heard praise regarding its exploration, you are walking in what amounts to very pretty tubes. You can go to the right, and advance the plot, or you can go to the left, find a box, get an upgrade for your health... and then go to the right, and advance the plot. Tubes connecting squares that have a few more enemies in them. Early in chapter two, I walked across a bridge, then tried to jump off, and couldn't. The area below the bridge is an area you can explore... but it's not, really. I'm guessing it's in a different load-chunk or something, so that when you're on the bridge, you're looking down at a nonexplorable picture of the water below, and when you're in the water, you're looking up at a nonexplorable picture of the bridge up above. Tubes. Tubes with pretty art and nice squares.

And yet... nobody cares. People will take all of that, happily, if the combat is good. Probably a message in there somewhere. Like, ya know, make the combat good. (And don't screw up the camera -- the one thing everyone has been ragging on the game about, justifiably.)

I'm also playing Puzzle Quest, and I have reached the level where I am now slightly annoyed if my enemy gets a turn.

I wasn't at our book club meeting on Sunday, but I did send in an e-crit, which meant that I was eligible to enter in the random drawing that determines who picks the next book. Each time you critique a book, you get to add a card. I've been going to book club for awhile now, and I've never gotten to pick. I had, according to people who were there, 12 cards (all of them now removed, since it's my turn). They were playing poker with my cards. Someone got a full house.

I'm trying to decide what book to inflict upon people. I had to read The Time Traveler's Wife and Last of the Amazons, and a couple of months ago, it was Wizard's First Rule (my first time hauling out the ONE for rating the book; we average the rating using Olympic scoring, with the top and bottom scores tossed out, and even though there were multiple scores of one given, it was agreed by everyone that mine was even lower than the other ones, due to my sheer vehemence). As far as I am concerned, this is my chance to unload whatever the hell I want on people.

I'm currently torn between one of a couple Christopher Moore books (Lamb and Coyote Blue are my favorites, and Lamb is likely a better book to argue about in book club) and just going completely to evil and hauling out a Nora Roberts book to inflict on people. Given that one book-club goer thinks that The Time Traveler's Wife is the epitome of what a romance novel should be -- you know, romance with sad people who get screwed up and hurt each other and eventually SPOILER tragically -- inflicting a Nora Roberts book would be the nuclear payload of book-club choices.

(The only thing worse (which had my wife saying, "Even though we don't have the kind of relationship where we actually forbid each other to do things... I'm forbidding you to do this,") would be choosing Bioware Lead Writer and Book Club Attendee Drew Karpyshyn's Mass Effect tie-in, Revelations.)

So which is the better ammunition in the war of forcing your particular novel preferences upon fellow BioWare designers and their spouses and significant others?

Sweet Christmas, I believe I may have discovered a werewolf novel that even my buddy tacithydra wouldn't enjoy. (And for those of you playing at home, tacit is not exactly hard to please when it comes to werewolf novels. In much the same way that I have a weak spot for otherwise bad novels with good banter or fight scenes, tacit can put up with a whole lot of bad provided that somebody turns into a wolf.)

Blue Moon is a paranormal romance. In retrospect, that is pretty important. It is not urban fantasy, at least, not according to today's pet definition that people all over the Interwebs will argue about. Urban fantasy almost always has some combination of romance, mystery, and fantasy in a modern setting. Jim Butcher writes the more masculine version, where it's more noir and less romance, but the mystery and the fantasy are both in there solidly enough that it still (to me) comfortably fits the loose genre definition.

And in Blue Moon, which has four and a half stars on Amazon? Umyeahno.

I mean, there's an attempt. You can see where attempts at things that aren't the romance part are being made. But... well, I can't honestly say whether it's bad, because I was so incredibly misled going into it. Maybe if I'd gone in expecting more romance, I'd have been happy... except that I've read Nora Roberts' Circle and In the Garden trilogies, and if those aren't paranormal romance, I'm not sure what Is. And those were, you know, good.

Romance: The heroine spends the entire book hating herself. The male lead spends the entire book telling her how awesome she is. And every time she is around him, the heroine becomes a tongue-tied idiot. Pure taste on this, but wow, do I not like women who become stupid around men. Stupid is not a turn-on for me. It doesn't make me identify with the character except to be annoyed that I have to read that she tried to think of something witty to say, but all she could think of was, "Um." There are certain levels of wish-fulfillment I can accept, given that, as a guy, I'm not the ideal reader. I can accept that women want a hero who walks around naked and gives them seven to ten orgasms just by dry humping her through her jeans (oh, you wish I were kidding). But who wants the wish fulfillment of being stupid?

Mystery: I knew the major twist villains by page 50. If you're writing a book with a big twist, for the love of god, don't have someone be suspiciously emotional, point that out to the reader, and then have the protagonist shrug her shoulders and say, "Oh, well, I guess we are all just tense." Beyond that particular brand of telegraphing, about seventy-five percent of the mystery would not have happened had the fricking heroine just talked to people. At one point, I read, "I was tempted to ask him what he meant by that, but I was afraid he might tell me." Wow, thanks, author! Not only did you do a lame-ass handwave of people not communicating in order to further the tension, despite the fact that you all but told me in the first 50 pages who the bad guys were, but now I get to see what amount to notes to yourself about your inability to come up with an in-character reason for your heroine not to say, "Okay, you! You! We're both going to the local diner, we're getting a booth, and we're not leaving until we're all on the same page."

Mystery + Romance: Oh, and when your heroine firmly believes that the male lead is an evil bad guy, but then can't bring herself to shoot him and ends up going back to have sex with him again when, you know, just a chapter ago, she saw the evidence that pretty strongly branded him the bad guy, and his only comeback to that evidence is, "Yeah, that must have been planted, come on, don't you trust me?" Apparently I was supposed to feel like her passion was stronger than her mind, but it came off sounding like she was, as Jay and Silent Bob would say, a slave to the cock. As a side note, having your protagonist forget key points of the mystery because she was banging the male lead is iffy but generally acceptable. Having your protagonist realize she wants to ask the male lead about something but then realize she's forgetting because he's too sexy and then consciously decide not to worry about it is bad. Added to this insane "We must never communicate!" bullshit, it made being in the heroine's viewpoint a little like walking through a room with a blindfold on, bumping into objects and swearing and complaining about the blindfold, and never taking the blindfold off.

Fantasy: Finally, this is a werewolf novel in which the first 200 or so pages are spent with the heroine insisting that she doesn't believe in werewolves. You know, I liked the X-Files as much as anybody, but Scully needed Mulder. Also, we needed some cool deaths and suspense. Instead of Mulder, we had the male lead, who smiled a lot and gave the heroine orgasms, and the cranky old guy who just said cryptic bullshit instead of actually giving advice. And when you're in a book with a wolf on the cover, shelved in the fantasy section, and I have to watch people go crazy after wolfbites and long discussions of autopsies of people with overly long claws and teeth and sudden hair growth, you know what doesn't work for me? The heroine continuing to not believe in werewolves. It's realistic, sure, but this is the book in which the heroine got multiple orgasms from a dry-hump by a guy she met two days ago and was apparently just fine with this, so maybe realism is not the highest priority right at the moment, and we could have this supposedly badass heroine actually say, "Well, shit, I guess werewolves are real. Okay, let's lock and load," and shoot some frelling werewolves instead of continuing to not believe in them well past the point of legitimate character building.

Also, the end fight scene sucked. For those of you who don't know me, please see the first paragraph of this for reference to why this is the kiss of death.

Just got a nice big Amazon order including a whole lot of urban fantasy. I'm partway through it at the moment.

Iron Kissed, Patricia Briggs: I was a bit pinged by buymeaclue before reading this, so I was maybe hypersensitive about everyone caring about the big romantic choice. That said, I like the way it was handled, and the mystery was a lot more understandable this time than in the first book (where I sort of got lost). I was thrown by the ending and bordered on feeling like the big major event was an excuse to add more romantic tension and roadblocks, but the denouement won me over enough that I decided I was being oversensitive (at least for me; there are definite triggers there that I completely respect, and some friends I wouldn't recommend this to based on it, but I didn't think it was gratuitous, and wow, at this point, I figure everyone knows what I'm talking about anyway).

Ill Wind, Rachel Caine: I'm new to this series, and I had an odd reaction. I loved the take on magic, I was interested in urban fantasy that wasn't about werewolves and vamps and fae (which I like, but am sort of full-up on; any new writer is gonna have to really do something different with them to stand out from my fairly full dance card), but the protagonist occasionally rubbed me the wrong way. I don't know if it's just a character type that I'm not comfortable with or something, but I came away from some of her, "And no way was I going in looking like that, gah, girl power, I'm buying some shoes!" moments feeling annoyed. It wasn't the dress-up parts that bothered me -- Sookie Stackhouse dresses up, and I'm just fine with it. I think it was the sassiness. I don't know. Not a killer criticism -- Ms. Caine has my money, and she'll have my money for the next book -- but something for me to think about.

I'm in the middle of another Sookie Stackhouse book now, and am suffering the effects of having had a year go by since the last one, because there are a lot of characters whose names aren't really doing a lot for me at this point.

Me: Onions, really?

Damsel: Wow. I thought you were being metaphorical when you said you were fighting onions.

Me: Nope!

(Hours later)

Damsel: Still on the onions?

Me: No! I've upgraded. Now I'm fighting rats.

Damsel: ...

Me: With glowing balls on their tails.

Damsel: Upgraded, you say?

Me: In a manner of speaking.

(Hours later)

Damsel: And now, goats.

Me: They're blocking the bridge. Apparently I... I cannot get past the goats. I have to go find something for them to eat. I have to do a fetch quest so the goats will let me across the bridge.

Damsel: That's epic.

Me: Perhaps my heroes have forgotten that about five minutes ago I took down a twenty-foot-tall flying fire-breathing hammerhead koala. We could probably take the goats in a fair fight.

I really love the visual and musical style in this game, and I really really really wish that it didn't bang my head forcibly against the idiocy of its design sometimes. It's a give and take, designers: if I can sit through a ten-minute cutscene in which someone shows me their European vacation photos while talking about Chopin's "Raindrops", you can give me something better than goats on the damn bridge.

That said, I am enjoying the slow ramp-up of the combat from tactical turn-based to real-time, and I like the light-dark power switches a ton. There's a lot to love here amidst the onions and koaladons.

It's been a bit of a week. We got a dog, which is great from a Dude-occupying perspective, but really, the house did not lack for people in need of care. Also, whenever the Damsel or I hear a weird noise, the train of thought now has an additional step. I believe it now goes, "Crap, was that the Bud? The Dude? The Dog? Loud Cat? Obsessive Cat? My Own Stomach? Quiet Cat? Ninjas?"

Also, having everyone in the house get sick when you've got a 2:2 child/parent ratio? Not fun.

I've had a bit of time for reading lately, though. Not for posting, evidently, but at least for reading. So, in no particular order, stuff I've read lately:

Church of Dead Girls, by Stephen Dobyns


The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger


Cursor's Fury, by Jim Butcher
I'm just buying whichever one comes next. I'm in. He's got me.

Somethingorother in Death, by J.D. Robb
Ditto. I'm easy. I love the pacing, and the structure, and the character development, and I'm an easy sell at this point. We've caught up on the series, so we'll be slowing down now and, you know, only reading them when she puts out another one.

Now on to a saints book, a modern fantasy book by Tim Powers that a buddy loaned me, and the next Dresden book. I've got a Charlaine Harris reprint (Secret Rage) that I'll get to at some point as well.

Finished "Hypatia" last night. Woooooooo. Now back to fiction.

Damsel: How was it?

Me: Significantly more academic than I had hoped. I don't think I'm really the target audience. I'm not really up to speed on Neoplatonic philosophical movements.

Damsel: Ouch. That's too bad. It sounded like a really interesting story.

Me: Oh, it was, definitely. Just not in this book.

I think I got what I needed to get out of it for the next novel, but the book made me realize how very much I didn't miss academic writing. I have settled comfortably, post-Masters, into my life as a layman, and I have developed a fine appreciation for books written for me and my people.

My buddy tacithydra wrote a nice critique of Beggars in Spain in which she politely avoided pointing to the clumsy old post in which I got extremely angry at the book and springboarded from that into a declaration that I was tired of hiding spiritual beliefs. She makes the argument that the book is a response to Objectivism, not an endorsement, since the Sleepless didn't end up winning, and their society ended up fundamentally flawed in many respects.

I can see this argument, but while I respect Ms. Hydra's opinion immensely, I disagree with her here. I've been trying to think about why, because "Because I hated the book a lot" doesn't really have a lot of strong rhetorical backing. I can't say that she's wrong, because she didn't get as passionate as I did about the book, and I am comfortably sure that she came into it with a clearer head. Also, she read it more than once. What I can say is that it didn't work for me as a disagreeing response to Objectivism, and while I had very strong opinions about the book as I read it, I wouldn't consider my reading sloppy or uncritical per se.

Ultimately, for me, what it comes down to is emotional response. I was annoyed when Kress gave weight to the usual arguments of Objectivism by making the Sleepless actually better than the Sleepers. I was annoyed when the vast majority of the Sleepers were set up as hateful and stupid, with occasional forays into stupid-but-wise (for example, Leisha's Sleeper sister, who gets this disturbing treatment that turns her into this "Aw, I didn't need no education, I just needed love" caricature that most closely resembled the happy-go-lucky black characters of old movies, the ones who appear on the surface to be proving that you don't need money or white skin to be happy, but who end up reinforcing class and race boundaries with their demonstrated acceptance of and apparent satisfaction with their unfair position in life, and damn this is turning out to be a long parenthetical).

And actually, that absurdly long parenthetical sums up how I feel about the book. I don't know the term for it -- it's somewhere between an Uncle Tom and a straw-man argument.  If zero is an egalitarian lifestyle, and one hundred is pure Objectivism, then Kress goes straight to one hundred, and then holds her hand to her mouth and goes, "Oh, my goodness! It doesn't work! Sometimes the beggar you give a dollar to today may save your life tomorrow!", and with an air of thoughtful consideration, dials it back to eighty.

It's the literary equivalent of the person who says, "Look, I think you're completely full of crap, and you think you're right, so the only reasonable approach is for us to compromise and say that you're mostly wrong, but not completely. That sound good to you?"

She didn't show the philosophy failing. She showed that when you set up a society with a crazy-ass hatemonger in charge, bad stuff is going to happen... and she did this while setting up everyone in the world who didn't follow that mindset (all the Sleepers) as a bunch of idiots sitting around on the couch lazily complaining that their free lunch didn't have enough chocolate sprinkles.

My opinion on this is of course weighted heavily by the fact that I hated the book, and that by about page 20, I was reading this out of determination, because I wanted to go into Book Club with the full book under my belt, so that I could blow people out of the water if they tried to invalidate my opinion by noting that I hadn't finished the book (which did, in fact happen -- I was sick on Book Club day, but almost nobody finished the book, and the person who picked the book defended her choice by noting that they couldn't understand the book fully without finishing it). Also, I hated Leisha. Hated, hated, hated. I didn't really like anyone, but I hated Leisha with the flaming passion of a thousand suns. Maybe that came from bad experiences with intelligent but emotionally stunted people in real life. I don't know. About the time when she slept with someone's husband, I was rooting for her to get hit by a train and die. So any conclusion Leisha reached resulted in me saying, "Leisha, you are wrong," and then looking for ways to support the opposite of Leisha's conclusion. It's not the most objective and dispassionate way to read a book, but hey, I paid for it. I get to decide how I read it.

On the flip side, I'm currently (still) playing through BioShock, and there is a critique of Objectivism for you. You see all the anthems of Objectivism writ large on the wall of the first room, and then you go down the elevator and see the corpses and the wreckage -- you get to see exactly what happens when a bunch of people who grow up trying to disguise selfishness with logic get into a limited-resources situation, and the end results are dialed down a bit further than eighty on the "here's the way it should be" scale.

Compare Kress's clumsy characterization to the feeling you get while scrounging desperately through a doctor's office for bandages, having just gunned down four screaming madmen while they came at you with knives, while a big-band singer croons "The Best Things in Life are Free" over the radio nearby. That level of irony right there is a bit more my speed.