Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much. Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own, but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today. Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like…
Tag: villains
The Runes of The Earth
It’s hard to know exactly where to start here, which seems to be how Stephen R Donaldson felt when he decided to take one more trip to the well for The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The Runes of the Earth is filled with the retelling of tales any fan of the earlier books already know-and surely no one would pick this up and start reading here-so why all the backstory? The Runes of the Earth is a pretty bad book on countless levels. It follows in the tradition of the Second Chronicles-give the readers something broken-by allowing long years…
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
What do you do when find yourself past your prime and your bank account not living up to it’s expectations? Retire to a run down hotel in India, of course. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel shows us a number of older folks, all great British actors with familiar faces, do the best they can in a place that doesn’t live up to their expectations. We watch them go about the business of adjusting and adapting. The film’s catchphrase- Everything will be all right in the end… if it’s not all right then it’s not yet the end –pretty much sums…
Tron Legacy-Big on Looks
Tron Legacy was a visually stunning bit of work. The CGI world was rendered perfectly and I liked the way a de-ressed program fell into tiny cubes and sounded like shattered glass. We saw Tron Legacy in 3D, but it was clearly not made with 3D in mind. It opened with a slug screen telling us that parts of the film were in 2D, but we should keep our glasses on anyway. The most impressive 3D effects were in the Coming Attractions trailers. I still like 3D, I just wish people would stop adding it to a film as an…
My Lobotomy by Howard Dully
Article first published as Review: My Lobotomy by Howard Dully on Technorati. It’s hard to read about the good old days of mental health care where chopping up a person’s brain was considered a good idea. Howard Dully’s lobotomy was a transorbital lobotomy, where what amounted to an ice pick was pushed into the brain’s frontal lobes and swished around a bit. It was a very fast and simple procedure that only had a couple of problems-1) it killed as many people as it helped, and 2) it didn’t really help that many people. The NPR radio program is a…