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Blue Moon Swamp
Feb. 6th, 2007 07:48 pmI finished reading the Science Fiction of The 40's book. It wasn't bad, though I found "Venus And The Seven Sexes" a little bit on the painful side of satirical. Several stories I could have sworn that I should have read before, but they didn't seem familiar while I read them. Maybe I just have a MLAS.
One of my co-workers was talking about Eragon a couple of weeks ago, comparing the book to the movie, and seemed surprised when I told her I hadn't actually read the book. She just assumed that I'd read all the big books out there, especially the big YA books. But I haven't read that one, or Artemis Fowl, or any of the Geronimo Stilton, though I have read a bunch of Secrets of Droon and Magic Treehouse, and am working my way through the Lemony Snicket books. (Still not up to The End yet.)
So, thinking of that, I started reading The Merchant of Death, the first book in D.J. McHale's "Pendragon" series. I'd bought a special $2.99 promotional copy of it a while back. So far...it's not doing much for me. I mean, for one thing, if you're gonna have a character who has a secret destiny in another magical world, he should be a misfit, right? Someone who's never fit in? In this book, he's a basketball star at his school(he's 14), and the book starts with him kissing the girl of his dreams. Okay, his friend back on Earth(who keeps receiving missives from him, and investigating the mysterious disappparance of his family on his end)is more of a misfit, but he doesn't get a secret destiny, does he? At least not so far... I'll tell you, what's the point in being an outcast if you don't have the consolation that at least the cool kids don't get cool secret destinies? Only half kidding here. But this makes our protagonist reluctant to get involved and more interested in trying to get home (since he doesn't know it's not there anymore), which is a bit annoying.
As a result, I've been going to my nonfiction backup book, which at the moment is Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, subtitled "How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity." Lessig is, among other things, the chair of the Creative Commons Project, and an actual bona fide lawyer, so he has some interesting thoughts on copyright law and its implications for culture. And it's conceivable he won't be that sympathetic to the RIAA, given the fact that he's already brought up the Jesse Jordan story, of a university student who got sued for music piracy because he built a search engine. It's full of bits that I have to stop and tell my wife, so it promises to be a good read. Sorry, Pendragon.
Is it just me that gets annoyed whenever networks muck around with their TV schedules? It's not just moving a show from one timeslot to another one on a semi-permanent basis(which caused me to miss a lot of "Scrubs" episodes), but the one-time things, especially the ones that they don't announce in advance.
I mean, on Sunday I was expecting "Studio 60" to be on at 8:00 on CTV the way it usually is, which is when the VCR was set for. Instead, probably because of that stupid football game I couldn't care less about(though it did make a funny "How I Met Your Mother" episode), it was on at 9:00. After "HIMYM", I happened to notice that it was on, halfway through. We knew it was also on on Monday, but we're already watching and taping so much other stuff on Monday that we weren't sure we'd be able to fit it in, so we watched the second half of the episode. We did tape the first half on Monday night(it's on at 11:00 on the American station, which is just one of many reasons why we watch the Canadian broadcast instead), and we'll watch it tonight and see if we missed much.
Last night it was also announced that "Heroes" was going to be on at a "special time" next week, 8:00 or something. Except that according to my usual TV lookup site, it's still listed for 10:00, so I don't know what the hell's going on there. Is the site just working on old information? It didn't say anything about the "Studio 60" rescheduling when I checked it later. I've started setting up weekly recording schedules on my VCR, but that only works when the same shows are on at the same time every week... Do TiVo people have problems when shows are rescheduled? Do they get the updated times, or tape the wrong thing? Just wondering.
Oh, and next week there's two hours of 24, for some reason, as I was just reminded. That'll be wonderful. I mean, I like all the shows we're watching, but I like my non-TV time in the evenings as well. That's why I'm not really weeping for "Six Degrees" and "The Nine", or most of the other swiftly-cancelled shows from the past. We're still watching "Battlestar Galactica" and "Angel" on DVD, but at the rate we're going we can only fit in one of them every week.
Another reason to wish for summer, I guess.
One of my co-workers was talking about Eragon a couple of weeks ago, comparing the book to the movie, and seemed surprised when I told her I hadn't actually read the book. She just assumed that I'd read all the big books out there, especially the big YA books. But I haven't read that one, or Artemis Fowl, or any of the Geronimo Stilton, though I have read a bunch of Secrets of Droon and Magic Treehouse, and am working my way through the Lemony Snicket books. (Still not up to The End yet.)
So, thinking of that, I started reading The Merchant of Death, the first book in D.J. McHale's "Pendragon" series. I'd bought a special $2.99 promotional copy of it a while back. So far...it's not doing much for me. I mean, for one thing, if you're gonna have a character who has a secret destiny in another magical world, he should be a misfit, right? Someone who's never fit in? In this book, he's a basketball star at his school(he's 14), and the book starts with him kissing the girl of his dreams. Okay, his friend back on Earth(who keeps receiving missives from him, and investigating the mysterious disappparance of his family on his end)is more of a misfit, but he doesn't get a secret destiny, does he? At least not so far... I'll tell you, what's the point in being an outcast if you don't have the consolation that at least the cool kids don't get cool secret destinies? Only half kidding here. But this makes our protagonist reluctant to get involved and more interested in trying to get home (since he doesn't know it's not there anymore), which is a bit annoying.
As a result, I've been going to my nonfiction backup book, which at the moment is Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, subtitled "How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity." Lessig is, among other things, the chair of the Creative Commons Project, and an actual bona fide lawyer, so he has some interesting thoughts on copyright law and its implications for culture. And it's conceivable he won't be that sympathetic to the RIAA, given the fact that he's already brought up the Jesse Jordan story, of a university student who got sued for music piracy because he built a search engine. It's full of bits that I have to stop and tell my wife, so it promises to be a good read. Sorry, Pendragon.
Is it just me that gets annoyed whenever networks muck around with their TV schedules? It's not just moving a show from one timeslot to another one on a semi-permanent basis(which caused me to miss a lot of "Scrubs" episodes), but the one-time things, especially the ones that they don't announce in advance.
I mean, on Sunday I was expecting "Studio 60" to be on at 8:00 on CTV the way it usually is, which is when the VCR was set for. Instead, probably because of that stupid football game I couldn't care less about(though it did make a funny "How I Met Your Mother" episode), it was on at 9:00. After "HIMYM", I happened to notice that it was on, halfway through. We knew it was also on on Monday, but we're already watching and taping so much other stuff on Monday that we weren't sure we'd be able to fit it in, so we watched the second half of the episode. We did tape the first half on Monday night(it's on at 11:00 on the American station, which is just one of many reasons why we watch the Canadian broadcast instead), and we'll watch it tonight and see if we missed much.
Last night it was also announced that "Heroes" was going to be on at a "special time" next week, 8:00 or something. Except that according to my usual TV lookup site, it's still listed for 10:00, so I don't know what the hell's going on there. Is the site just working on old information? It didn't say anything about the "Studio 60" rescheduling when I checked it later. I've started setting up weekly recording schedules on my VCR, but that only works when the same shows are on at the same time every week... Do TiVo people have problems when shows are rescheduled? Do they get the updated times, or tape the wrong thing? Just wondering.
Oh, and next week there's two hours of 24, for some reason, as I was just reminded. That'll be wonderful. I mean, I like all the shows we're watching, but I like my non-TV time in the evenings as well. That's why I'm not really weeping for "Six Degrees" and "The Nine", or most of the other swiftly-cancelled shows from the past. We're still watching "Battlestar Galactica" and "Angel" on DVD, but at the rate we're going we can only fit in one of them every week.
Another reason to wish for summer, I guess.
