Woerner's · Wunderworks

Does anyone have any ideas/thoughts/comments?

Current Location:	work
Current Mood:	chipper
Current Music:	Paint it Black by Sixth Finger

Maybe one day our crowd won't be such anti-social goombas.

Current Mood:

chipper

Anyways, I was trying to decide which rifle to buy when I came across this comparison:

The AK vs. the AR vs. the MN

Even if you don't like guns or know anything about them, you'll enjoy this.  ^_^

Current Mood:

chipper

judd_sonofbert

Be warned though, it's a simile:  

D&D 4th Edition is like a kick-ass little go-kart (I am imagining one of those cool new Mario Kart racers) that you buy full-assembled from Honda and has absolutely no after market products for it.  Whereas D&D 3.0-3.5 are Honda Civics cars that while initially are really crappy can be modded beyond belief and have more after market products for them than anything else ever.

Just because Honda released a new go-kart and called it the Civic doesn't mean that you can't keep playing with you old Civic.  You can't really take the go-kart on the street, since it's technically not a street legal car.  Even though there are still tons of after market products for the old Civics those days are essentially over.  Eventually the old Civics will give up the ghost and disappear.  Every blue moon you'll see a guy driving an old modded Civic but he'll be like the hippie relic who drives the VW Bus.

Now a metaphor:  People had these apples (3.5) and they were really happy with the apples  even though they sometimes got worms in them.  They asked the farmer (WotC) to get them a new Worm-Free Apple, because really getting a wormy apple can put just about anyone off apples for awhile.  The farmer went back to his farm to work on a solution.  However, when the farmer came back a lot of the people were non-plussed when the farmer gave everyone oranges.

Some people like oranges, but others don't.

My final comment about the world and 4E: Ce la Vie.

Current Mood:

contemplative

Thank God we already have the laws of robotics.

Androids deserve to be free.

Current Mood:

contemplative

Madeline L'Engle

I believe that my mother, in one of her moments of religious insanity, deemed Madame L'Engle verboten on the level of those demonic Smurfs, He-Man, and Dark Crystal entities.  I could be wrong, my memory is a bit fuzzy in this regard.  I do remember NOT reading Madeline L'Engle in my sixth grade class because my mother didn't sign the permission form for some special class thing that I was in and I got to sit in an almost empty class and doodle or something lame (not that doodling lame, that was cool, just when they wouldn't let me doodle was lame).

So a few years back Emily discovered that I hadn't read the Wrinkle in Time series and gave me the whole set to read for my birthday.  Which was totally cool.  I like books, and books from Emily are way awesome, she's a great gift giver and quite skilled in the art of discerning the perfect gift.

So with some anticipation I cracked the spine on the first book and began to read.  Nothing major was going on in my life when I started the series, nothing to drag me away from them or anything, but after the first five chapters a dread began to creep over me.  It was the same feeling I got when I viewed the first set of episodes I had purchased of my favorite childhood cartoon "Battleship Yamamoto," - DREAD.

I didn't enjoy the story at all, the characters seemed flat, I wasn't engaged with them, the setting was without detail, and nothing seemed interesting or new or novel.  It was all very vanilla and cheap Kroger-brand vanilla at that.  I gave them up.  Other sweeter fiction beckoned me and I answered the call.  Emily was incensed, rightfully so, that I had quite reading her gift, she had found them so special, but for some reason couldn't convince me to go back to them.  However, a few months later (about a year ago now) I was between my usual five or six books and I grabbed the first book again convinced that I had been temporarily insane.  I was not.

I'm not trying to make an argument for or against Madeline L'Engle, Emily just said I couldn't.  I just wanted to recount my experience, and ask this one question:

Has anyone re-read The Wrinkle in Time books, as an adult, say within the last five years, and enjoyed them?  If so, why?  I may have a deficiency, or it may just be that the books didn't age well, I don't know, but I'm in a weird spot here and need so resolution to this issue.

Will I try to read the books again for a third time?  Maybe.

Current Mood:

contemplative

Why I haven't yet is a mystery.

Current Mood:

groggy

I don't think that this has anything to do with my great love for Science Fiction and Fantasy, but my bad experiences with such low-quality literature that I try and avoid general fiction as a rule.  Having been forced to read such atrocities as, "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man," and, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," I subconsciously swore that I would rather waste my time reading a bad escapist novel where I at least enjoyed myself in a superficial sense than join the Opus Dei of fiction readers.  No offense to Opus Dei members.

I know that GF isn't all bad, or it wouldn't exist, and I've even experienced some excellent books from general fiction (that wasn't a historical epic adventure by Cornwell, Mitchener, Clavell, or O'Brian) like, "Microsurfs," and, "Shampoo Planet."

So today I'm acknowledging that I have a problem (which is the first of the twelve steps right?), and announcing that I'd like some help in discovering good fiction that doesn't come from the sci-fi fantasy section of the book store.

Anyone got any suggestions?  Besides this excellent book I'm going to have to read.

Current Location:	work
Current Mood:	tired