Month: January 2003

The Review…. Part Deus

Here’s the link to the second part of The Two Towers review that is over on the D&D website.

And another thing…

In a bizarre tangent of my last post, I bring you this oddity. I really don’t have much to say on this other than…. ummmmmmmm ooooookaay.

Ooo. Daddy, Daddy! The Pogroms are starting. Can I watch?

According to THIS article, a federal judge has officially decreed that the X-Men and their fellow mutants are not human.

Personally this is a load of crap. They’re just as human as you and I, albeit in a slightly altered genetic fashion. Marvel needs to get their heads outta their asses and stick to their guns. The very thing the X-Men stand for is equality and acceptance, regardless of the differences a person has about them. Campaigning for this “non-human” status on the basis of money is just pure unadulterated greed on Marvel’s part and it betrays the very essence of their characters.

Oh well. It’s just another nail in the coffin of integrity and decency hammered there by the greed of capitalist big business.

Come comrade, let us return to the line up and wait for more toilet paper.

A Review Of The Two Towers

For those of you who’re interested, there is a fairly decent review/commentary of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers over at the D&D website. I agree with most of the points given so far but I disagree wholeheartedly with the reviewer’s views on Treebeard and the Ents.

Check out Part One of the two-part review.

And for those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, be aware that there are a few spoilers that, well, just might spoil certain aspects of the film.

I’m On That Light-Blasted Road To Caemlyn… Again.

Like most of the other Robert Jordan lemmings on the planet, I went out the other day and picked up the new novel, Crossroads of Twillight, in the seemingly never-ending Wheel of Time series.

I’ve started reading it with a lot less enthusiasm than I had five or six books ago, but what I’ve read so far has been enjoyable, albeit in the pedantic and plodding fashion that Jordan is so fond of. One would hope that maybe, just maybe, his royal Jordan-ness would get to the point for once and not elaborate on the infintesimal minutia of every single character in the world. No such luck however.

Actually it’s not all that bad so far. I just like to complain about it like every other fanboy on the planet. At least there’s not that horribly plodding trek to Caemlyn from the first book… at least not yet *knocks on wood*.

I’m only fifteen or so chapters in – which, for those of you who haven’t read Jordan’s works, means I’ve got just a little ways past the descriptions of the main characters clothing *grin* – but already it’s a thousand times better than Terry Goodkind’s last novel, The Pillars of Creation, which infuriated me beyond words with it’s inability to tell a decent story and for the fact that the main characters in the series only appear in the last few chapters and then only in a cardboard cutout, deus ex machina capacity.

Anyways, back to Crossroads. It’s a good book and I’m not dissapointed that I bought it. I’ll probably get the rest of the series whenever Jordan gets around to writing them (my best bet is 2014 at the very earliest), but I am currently looking forward to the release of a couple of other novels with a bit more enthusiasm. Among them, the overly-mass marketed but still thoroughly enjoyable Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix which is due out in June, George R. R. Martin’s A Feast For Crows, the latest in his A Song Of Ice And Fire series, and Neil Gaiman’s short story about his American Gods’ protagonist, Shadow, that will appear in the Legends 2 collection.

And so I return to my cocoon of books. After I finish this one, I think I’m going to tackle Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en which was a very intriguing (and heavy) present my wife got me for my birthday. It’s apparently the (re)telling of some classic chinese fables/stories and I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like.

A Very Respectable Age

Yesterday, January 3^rd, 2003, would have marked J.R.R. Tolkien’s 111^th birthday. Meaning he would have been eleventy-one, which is a very respectable age for a hobbit author.

Happy Birthday Professor.

You can read the CNN story Here

And while we’re on the subject of birthdays, on January 1^th, 1983, ARPANET switched over to the TCP/IP protocol, and the Internet was born. One more year and it can legally drink everywhere.

For more info click Here