My spiral notebook was the envy of all...

The subject is TPK.  Today's lecture will discuss appropriate armor choices when adventuring in flooded ruins inhabited by monstrous reptilians.  On the one hand, not wearing plate armor greatly reduces the chance of accidental drowning.  On the other hand, it greatly increases the chance of becoming lunch.

The Secret History; Donna Tartt; 1992

I finished the Secret History, but only by skimming past page 80. I couldn't get past the fact that I couldn't suspend my disbelief that any of the characters were friends with Bunny, or that he could have made it into Julian's class. It's perhaps not quite as unbelievable as Peter Pettigrew being friends with James and Sirius, but Bunny's supposed charm is a complete mystery to me.

I think the problem is that Tartt initially only shows us Bunny's awful qualities, perhaps to soften our hearts toward his classmates, and only later does she start to emphasize his good points, in order that we might feel some regret at what has happened, but at that point she's telling, not showing.

When the last kitchen appliance has been sold and the apocalypse is nigh...

Williams-Sonoma Agrarian

Williams-Sonoma will branch out and have a picturesque chicken coop for you.

Skyfall; 2012

I heard good things about this movie.  We saw it last night, and now I don't understand why there was any positive buzz.  The good things are that Adele sings the theme song, the colors are gorgeous, and Ralph Fiennes is brilliant in a small role.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of god-awfully stupid things the characters do in the service of "plot".  

Javier Bardem purposefully gets captured so that they'll try to crack his laptop so that it will hack their system so that it will open all the doors so that... he can escape from being captured??!!! so that he can go shoot M at a gov't hearing.  Why can't Javier Bardem simply go shoot M?  With nothing other than his freedom at stake, he doesn't have the pretext the Joker has for getting caught in the Dark Knight.

But no worries, Bond manages to stop Bardem, who flees the scene as reinforcements arrive.  With the area secure, it's now vitally important for Bond to rush M away from this secured area to Wayne Manor (I mean, Skyfall) so that they can go mano-a-mano against Bardem, armed only with shotguns, while Bardem arrives on a helicopter and armed with minions, machine guns and explosives.  Why he didn't bring these to his first attempt on M's life?  Your guess is as good as mine.

But no worries, Bond blows up his ancestral home while M and Albert Finney escape through a priest hole.  Bardem is totally confused as to where M went until he sees her torch!  So the head of MI6 doesn't know not to turn on a light when hiding in the dark.  Bardem catches up with M and coos over the wounds she received in the firefight with his henchmen, giving time for Bond to show up and throw a knife in his back. 

Even though she didn't even appear to be in shock moments before, M then dies dramatically, because Dame Judi Dench chose not to come back for the next movie, and Bond returns to the "new" MI6, which appears to have gone back 50 years in time to a low-tech setting of leather-lined walls and Miss Moneypenny at her little desk because... it's been 50 years of Bond, I guess?

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms; N.K. Jemisin; 2010

Broody teenage girl gets involved with an otherworldly powerful boyfriend who seems likely to be the death of her.  Though other guys are interested in her romantically, she only has eyes for her destined mate, and eventually becomes a being like him.

Does this sound like a bit too much like Twilight for comfort?  Especially in a Nebula and Hugo finalist?  Yeah.  Yeah, it does.

Given that the third book in the series is also a Nebula finalist, I have hopes and will probably go back for more.

The Gamers: Dorkness Rising; 2008

I netflixed this for background noise while working on my scenario for PrinceCon, but unfortunately didn't get much work done on the scenario that evening, because The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is as fine a movie as can be made on the subject of tabletop roleplaying.  I'm not being facetious, either.  Yes, the production is amateurish (the sound is especially weak; you can hear when they switch from one recording of dialogue to another), but the script shows a deep understanding of gamer culture, exposing its little peccadillos (so much of the movie is hilarious if you have ever gamed) while also respecting that culture -- I like these characters, and I like their story.

Naturally, since I didn't know about this movie until recently, I missed the Kickstarter campaign... I'd be a little worried that Dorkness Rising was catching lightning in a bottle, but here's hoping.

Google vs. the comment spammers; or, 17th time's the charm

About a month ago, I received the auto-notification that someone had left a comment on my Big Bess! Pariliament! post.  It was clearly spam, so I went to the post to delete it... but Blogger had automatically detected it as spam and deleted it -- cool.  Since then, there have been 16 more spam-a-rific comments made on the same post, and all of them were caught in the spam filters.  

Finally, today, at 7:53pm, the automatic spam filters finally failed, and I'm tempted to leave that comment, and only that spam comment, alone.

Update: At Nikita's suggestion, that spam is now immortalized below.