Month: January 2012

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“Suckitudinous Fiction” Isn’t Confined to Books

And Holly Lisle’s rules aren’t the only ones, but Seraphim Falls manages to hit the low spots and add a whole huge bunch of others.

What a piece of crap… and I watched the whole stinking thing. That’s a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back, but at least, after the first fifteen minutes or so I grabbed a notebook and started filling a few pages with brief references to some of the stupidest directing, plotting, staging and other revelations of ignorance and stupidity in this fantasy portrayal of a cast of unappealing–no, mostly unsavory, repulsive, extremely unsympathetic–characters.

Oh, well. At least (absent someone holding a loaded gun to my head) I’ll never have to watch it again.

You may note that I filed this post under “Dumbasses”… and I R one for having waded through this crap, even if I did get a small amount of pleasure from writing down a small sampling of the stupidities it used in telling this worthless, uninteresting, banal story. (No, I’ll not transcribe the FOUR PAGES of notes. I really don’t want to relive the thing even that much.)

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How Does One Miss Something That Is Not There?

I mean, seriously, how can you even acquire a target that doesn’t exist? Aim at a donut hole in a non-existent donut? At a zero with the rim kicked off? No, really.

*heh*

Oh, well, absinthe makes the heart race, or something like that…

In other news, while I like the service in general, Amazon really, really, really needs to take a look at its Cloud Drive limitations. I mean, download only ONE file at a time? Really? How very… 20th Century. For example, whenever I get another 100 or so mp3s stored there, it’d be handy to download ’em in one batch (for local archiving locally, transferring to a super small 8GB mp3 player–for use while doing yardwork, etc., where the Kindle Fire might *cough* not be the right device, etc.) rather than one. At. A. Time. Just sayin’, Amazon…

If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum–or even merely like to read the S. Plum books in order to mock the “life” of a fictional character whose “life” is more dysfunctional than your own *heh*–you might like the less dysfunctional female sleuth found in Dani Amore’s Death By Sarcasm. Some folks might be put off a tad by the constant, repetitious, almost metronomical (notice the scesis onomaton? *heh*) sarcasm–weak, middlin’ and somewhat fierce but constant, unending, continual. OTOH, I liked it. 🙂 Unfortunately for my tiny lil tightwad heart, it was good enough that I’ll soon crack open my coin purse to cough up a carrot ($0.99) for the author. I like to encourage good writing, and the author’s second book (Dead Wood) is also better than some (*cough* Evanovich *cough*) books I’ve paid much more for.

Fun stuff, Maynard. The second novel noted above doesn’t include never-ending lame jokes to accent an overarching ironic theme–perhaps a plus for some–but does have one small structural weakness in the plot. It wasn’t enough to cause anything but a minor pause in my devouring of the book. A $0.99 murder mystery of the caliber of either of these books is a crime… against support of good writing.

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Baby Steps…

A few additions and improvements to the new “Coffee Shrine” in the last week. The bamboo plate rack is installed and holds all the (unbroken *heh*) salad plates, which we normally treat as dinner plates, allowing the open storage of the dinner plates on the counter, using a different, horizontal storage, bamboo plate rack. The “fun” coffee cups are now hanging on the wall for quick access/use, and a bit more trim work is done, leaving just a few bits and pieces of trim, molding and some flooring work to finish things out. My Wonder Woman likes it, which is the single criterion that counts. 🙂

UPDATE: Painted “bowl” shelf and the part of the new (furniture-grade) plywood facing to the cabinet next to it last night. Primed some trim for painting and then application tonight. It’s coming. Still have the soffit above the sink/west wall cabinets to finish (plastering/painting), but it’s all coming along.

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“Noughts and Crosses”

Yeh, maybe Limeys ( ;-)) call it that, I dunno. Sounds British anyway. When I was a kid, we called the game, “Tic-Tac-Toe” and played it only when we were already bored to tears, so its complete predictability didn’t matter so much. Other folks apparently called it by other names, as this off-shoot discovered by Lovely Daughter demonstrates:

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I Don’t Do Book Reviews, But I Do Rant

Really. Well, I do discuss some books with my Wonder Woman and sometimes other family members from time to time, but actually reviewing the books I read would cut too much into reading time to do it. 😉 And, frankly, the voices in my head have spent so much time over the last seven years escaping from my control and putting words down on this blog that I sometimes begrudge the time they’ve stolen from my reading.

But, just read another book Dead Wood by Dani Amore, on the Fire (really nice reading experience, BTW), and one thing really hit me. From my own limited experience with people in the “recording industry” in combination with a better understanding of how music (no, the real stuff) is made and just music knowledge in general, the portrayal of the dirty underbelly of the “music industry” is spot on.

And it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s just as ugly as the crap it churns out and feeds to the ever lower, most common denominator of society, dragging sense and sensibilities ever lower in a never-ending spiral into the sewer of faux “art”.

In case you’d missed it before, I have about two ounces of respect and appreciation (combined) for recording “artists” nowdays, and I reserve that respect and admiration for the very (very, VERY) few who deserve it. Clue: you’ll not find ’em on anyone’s Top 40 list. In fact, most of the increasingly brain dead public wouldn’t even recognize what real musicians produce as music, or if they did would in any way, shape, fashion or form be able to appreciate it, let alone grasp the least bit of it, since it would take a soul not completely seared by lapping up the toxic sewage common in the offerings of the contemporary “music” industry.

rant /off

BTW, How sweet it is to have all my fav recordings of all my fav artists and their performances available to stream to the Kindle Fire while WiFi-ed to any network. Combined with either some very nice ear buds or (the other really excessively nice Xmas present) the Grado headphones, it’s only about three orders of magnitude less enjoyable to listen to them than doing so live. That’s a plus, really. Sweet, sweet, sweet. *ahhh*

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WalMart Should Be All Over This Idea

So, you’ve heard of “rapture pet services”? No? Well, essentially, it’s this scam where self-proclaimed atheists (or pagans, no real theological difference there to the targeted market) who go around to Christian churches or other groups that embrace a pre-tribulation dispensationalist eschatology that teaches that Christ’s return will be heralded by a sudden disappearance of Christians who are “taken” ahead of His return. These con men sell pet care for the pets these folks believe will be left behind.

This seems like a perfect gig for WalMart. Souless corporation (no “rapture” there!) with plenty of pagan/atheist Chicom slaves to export Christians’ pet to for “care”. Bonus: can probably get the Chicoms to pay for the additions to their stew pots, if the event ever comes to pass.

Win-win-win. Pre-trib (most likely segment to be conned) groups will have a salve for their consciences, WallyWorld will continue its march to World Domination and a bunch of hungry Chinese kids will go to bed with full stomachs.