Jonathan Woodward's Journal

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Didn't I See That Thing Trying to Off Gandalf?
Apparently volcanic eruptions can call down lightning.

Which is even freakin' scarier than it sounds.

More pics of the recent eruption of Chaitén.

Some video.

I can hear special effects artists across the world going, "Whoa, why didn't we think of that?

(News courtesy the Daily Illuminator, possibly the oldest daily blog on the Internet.)

Books: Dragons, Oaks, Hypervelocity, Devastation

Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton

I think a certain branch of science fiction has fallen into a trap where the MacGuffin of the plot is always, without fail, a mysterious and ancient alien artifact whose powers can radically reshape the destiny of mankind. It's a good and solid way to achieve sense of wonder in SF, but it's showing its age. It was showing its age 20 years ago.

Fallen Dragon falls into this category. That said, I found it to be a page-turner, fun, and lacking in predictablity. The plot: Earth has colonized many worlds, which are not showing a return on their investment. To try and wring a profit out of them, Big Mean Megacorp sends warships to these worlds, with orders to land, establish control, grab anything worth the trouble of shipping back, and leave again, ideally without firing a shot, and definitely without wrecking the world for future "asset realization". Our main protagonist is a sergeant on one of these piracy raids. The author does an excellent job of not handing out too much information too quickly, and also of making all the good guys and bad guys have sympathetic points of view (if not sympathetic methods for achieving them). So, moderately recommended.

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull

One of the classics of urban fantasy, this book suffers from being one of the classics of urban fantasy. I.e., it's been imitated again and again, particularly by my one-time publisher, White Wolf Games. I found it difficult to stop rolling my eyes, despite knowing intellectually that she wasn't being derivative. Plot: A down-on-her luck rock singer/guitarist finds out that she's pivotal in a battle between the Light Fae and the Dark Fae, and gets a charmingly annoying pooka as bodyguard. Lots of descriptions of music rehearsals, concerts, Fae battles, and what everyone is wearing, every day, in detail ensue. Like I said, it's been done to death in the 20 years since it was published, but it is still quite definitely worth a read. Strongly recommended.

Iron Man: Hypervelocity by Adam Warren, Brian Denham

What with the movie being so cool and all, I picked up a few of the comic collections. This is a self-contained story by Adam Warren (Empowered, Dirty Pair, Gen¹³, Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone), with Denham on ~~keyboards~~, err, art. Like most of Warren's work, there's technofetishism, hyper-hip dialogue, pop culture refs dropping like rain, and an unusual club scene. Oh, did I mention the technofetishism? Warren must have been salivating at the opportunity to design his own helicarrier, let alone a new suit of Iron Man armor. Plot: Iron Man has to deal with an attempt on his life, and being attacked by the U.S. Government's "capekiller" squadron (due to a false flag situation), while a pretentious computer virus named Absynthe tries to invade his armor. However, what made it treh cool in my eyes, was . . .
( Cut for spoiling the end of Chapter 1. )
Plus, in how many comics do you get to see Iron Man try to sneak into a club while wearing a Honda?

Transformers: Devastation by Furman, Su, Roche, Musso

Volume 4 of IDW Comics' reboot of the Transformers mythos, in this one their covert war on Earth finally spills over into the open, as every faction (Autobots, Decepticons, Reapers, Machination, and the U.S. Government) decides to start kickin' skidplate. This is the volume where the threads Furman has been weaving throughout the first three volumes, and the companion Spotlight series, start coming together in chaotic glory. If you think giant robots are cool, highly recommended.

In Other Coolness
Courtesy me bro-in-law,

inthatoneway, a street map for the contiguous 48 states. All the streets, and nothing but the streets, for the entire nation at once.

A Modest Proposal
Herein, a suggestion: Friendly Local Game Stores should set up a system of exchange, whereby when certain older (but still excellent) game books are to be Marked Down or placed in the Dreaded Sale Bin, someone in each store can look them over, find any by Local Authors, and exchange them with Marked Down books of equal value from far distant stores. This way, when a Local Author walks into his (allegedly) Friendly Local Games Store, and roots around in the Sale Bin, he doesn't find four distinct books by his noble self mouldering within.

[sob]

Stupendous Movie News
The grapevine sez that J. Michael Straczynski is doing a trilogy of Lensman films for Ron Howard.

(If you haven't read the Lensman books, picture Star Wars, but bigger.)

Duuude.

News courtesy

sharrukin.

Go, Speed Racer, Go!
Short review: Kinetic, cartoony, and not for everyone, but definitely for me.
( Longer review behind cut, for minor spoilers. )

Speed Racer Predictions
We're going to see the above in a few minutes. Here are my guesses about stuff that will be in the movie, based solely on my knowledge of the original show, and the current toyline:
( Cut for possibly good guesses . . . )
Now to see if I should be writing these scripts . . .

Anthropomorphism Run Amuck
My Chase credit card bill just showed up, with the same -$2.26 balance it had last month. Apparently, I said the following out loud:

"That's right, I didn't use you all month! How's it feel, huh, huh? Hurts, don't it?"

. . . Sometimes Bey looks at me funny. I think I'm figuring out why.

While I Try To Be The "Good Cop" . . .
. . . sometimes I get fed up with vandals on the Transformers wiki.

(Hmm, is Wiki humor a new genre?)

In Other News, Freak Out!
Ooo, they're finally releasing Freakazoid! on DVD.

(And, uh, also Tiny Toons, for which there is also happiness, but not as much.)

And now, to the tune of the Freakazoid! theme song:

Elder god extraordinaire!
Cthulhu, Cthulhu!
'Neath dread R'lyeh makes his lair!
Cthulhu, Cthulhu!
Not dead which can ever lie!
Cthulhu, Cthulhu!
Someday even death may die!
Cthulhu, Cthulhu!
When stars are right he's risin'
We are so appetizin'
Chowin' down on me and you.
Cthulhu, Cthulhu!
Cthulhu!

On the Morning Drive

buxom_bey: Sweetie, shouldn't we be over there? (Indicates carpool lane.)
Me (aggreived tone): Okay. Fine. (Pulls over to the left.)
Bey: It's just, you forgot once.
Me: And, I was going to forget this time, too! What's your point?!
Bey: [snicker] I love you.

My Gym, She is Seized
Walked past Mike's Gym, our gym of choice here in Medford, and discovered a bright orange sign stuck to the front door reading "SEIZED by the Middlesex Sheriff's Department."

That, and a couple of vultures from Gold's Gym handing out free trial memberships.

Ah, gotta love the greater Somerville area.

Books: Eloise, Tiffany Aching, and THE FUTURE!

Eloise: The Ultimate Edition by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight

Kay Thompson, actress and singer, also wrote a series of books inspired by her excuse for being late one day: "I am Eloise. I am six." Eloise lives at the New York Plaza with her Nanny, her pets, and conspicuously without her jetsetting mother and utterly unmentioned father. She doesn't mind, and proceeds to make the Plaza her playground. This book collects the original Eloise story, along with its out-of-print-for-decades sequels, E. in Paris, E. at Christmastime, and E. in Moscow.

One can easily be of two minds about Eloise. On the one hand, she's a brat. On the other, she seems genuinely devoid of malice, and you have to admire her ability to find fun in everything. Plus, Weenie, Skipperdee, and Nanny all delight me, even at second hand. The two volumes set at the Plaza are the highlights, though Moscow is a fascinating reminder that, yes, once upon a time, people were really scared of Communists. (Though not Eloise, who enjoys playing with the various eavesdroppers and followers who bedevil her.) Highly recommended, though if you want to pick up just the first book and not the set, that's okay.

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

This is the third Tiffany novel in Pratchett's Discworld series. Apparently, there's money in novels about junior witches. I remain delighted by the Feegles, ambivalent about Granny, and reasonably charmed by Tiffany. If I need to recommend Discworld to you, start with, oh, Pyramids, or The Truth, and come back to this one.

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction, The Formative Period, 1926-1970 by Thomas D. Clareson

Just what it says from the title, and to my eye not critical (in the "evaluative" sense) of Campbell, too freaked out by Starship Troopers, and nicely informative about the conflict between the "old guard" and "New Wave" in the 60s. Suffers a bit from having been written in 1990, before the Cold War was over (and SF writers stopped regarding nuclear war as inevitable), and also before the New Wave became Old Hat.

Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived by Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D.

A gift from my bro and sis-in-law, if I recall correctly, this is a light non-fiction survey of 30 or so SF ideas, and where we stand in developing them. E.g., jetpacks? Been around since the 60s, if you don't mind only 60 seconds of fuel. Fun, mildly recommended.

Iron Man
Well worth seeing. Especially if you have even the slightest technophilic streak, 'cause the suiting-up sequences? Treh sexy.

(Oh, and: Stay through the end of the credits.)

Books: Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, Volume Four
I've talked a lot about Jack Kirby lately, and would have let this book pass uncommented, except for the very interesting fact that it includes Kirby's Hunger Dogs graphic novel from the mid-80s.

Kirby's Fourth World books were canceled in the early 70s, but by the mid-80s, DC Comics wanted to give him a chance to wrap up his epic. So, they offered him a one-shot regular comic, 23 pages, to do so. He gave it a try, submitted the art, and it really didn't work too well. It was like compressing The Return of the King into a couple chapters. There were some negotiations, and DC agreed to expand it into a 64-page graphic novel, The Hunger Dogs.

Now, comic books in the US have been about 16.5cm by 26cm for decades. During the 80s, however, those newfangled graphic novels were 20.5cm by 27.5cm, much squarer. The original 23 pages needed to be widened. Kirby did so.

The recent Omnibus reprint, however, is at normal comic proportions again. What to do? Well, the 23 original pages were restored to their original size (filling the page), and the 41 new pages were done at graphic-novel proportions . . . leaving big white gaps at the top and bottom of many pages.

This is probably for the best. Comparing the Omnibus to Hunger Dogs side-by-side highlights the places where expanding the art really didn't work. You look at those pages, and you can see how all the word balloons cluster toward the center of the page, and how many panels had their layout affected by being made wider. Nevertheless, I think I'll keep the original graphic novel for comparison purposes.

Oh, almost forgot to mention, the Omnibus also includes reduced-size B&W reproductions of the original pages for the 23-page comic, in which the pages are in a dramatically different order than in the graphic novel. And the story is incredibly abbreviated and altered, of course.

So, overall, this is a fascinating look at the collision between storytelling and printing practicalities in the comic book industry.

Department of Izzard Studies
On Wednesday, the Wikipedia article Eddie read from was Soup.

On Tuesday, per

cathijosephine, it was Bread.

Anyone have further data points?

(This way he avoids the danger of someday linking to the Soup page on stage and discovering that it says, "Hi, Eddie!")

A Joke Only Accessible to a Subset of the Boston Area
. . . Monkey Monkey Monkey Monkey Monkey Monkey You!

Gadgets
So, what do people think of the Zeemote? (Compact wireless thumbstick for remote gaming.)

And, what do people think of the Kindle? (Amazon.com's wireless reading device.)

Books: Shadows Linger, Coming Race, and Jim's Big Uncle

Shadows Linger by Glen Cook

This is the second book in the Black Company series, which are about a mercenary company in a fantasy world where the choices are between black and gray. In this, we initially follow the story of innkeeper Marron Shed, who is desperately trying to stay financially afloat while his loanshark makes increasingly edged demands. His story is a fascinating slide into evil, which dovetails with the Company when we discover what Shed's evil has created. Highly recommended.

The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

EBL is best known as the originator of "It was a dark and stormy night," and has (not entirely justly) become synonymous with bad writing.

ratmmjess talked him up, and this book is historically relevant enough that I picked it up. In it, our unnamed protagonist falls through the bottom of a mine, and is discovered by an advanced race of humans who live within the Earth. As soon as they learn to communicate the novel promptly turns into an encyclopedia, as he discusses their pseudo-utopian society for about half the book. (With emphasis on the weird differences between the sexes.) Then the locals begin to recognize him as a danger to their society, and he flees back to the surface. Like Gulliver's Travels this is far more social commentary than it is anything like a novel, but it's interesting on that level. And it's occasionally funny, possibly even on purpose. Mildly recommended.

The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino

Infantino is a famous comic book artist, best known for co-creating the Silver Age Flash (and thus inaugurating the whole Silver Age of comics), and for a few years in the early 1970s, being President and Publisher of DC Comics. This book is a series of reminiscences about his career from the 40s through the 90s. I found it particularly interesting to compare the POV in here with Mark Evanier's recollections of the same time periods in the Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus series. Recommended, but mostly of interest to the serious comic book fan.

The Future of the Past, Today!
Cool retro t-shirts.

I know women who need the "Ask me about my death ray" t-shirt . . .