It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Camelot: The Very Secret Diaries, in the fine tradition of those other Very Secret Diaries, takes the piss out of Arthur. Not really as good as Cassie Clare’s work, but amusing nonetheless. I’m sure the Very Secret Diaries of Sherlock Holmes will show up next.
Watson will kill him if he tries anything.
Landmark Theaters is rolling out digital projectors in all their theaters. In Boston, this means the Kendall Square Cinema; in San Francisco, it means the Embarcadero, the Bridge, the Lumiere, and the Aquarius in Palo Alto. Biggest indie cinema chain ever. This has huge implications for independent film (good ones), which John Tynes explains better than I.
If you happened to read Global Frequency this week, you might be interested to hear that Le Parkour is not something Warren Ellis made up — it’s a real little urban subculture, originating in France but spreading to England, Russia, and no doubt other places.
If you didn’t read Global Frequency, Le Parkour is a sort of extreme athletic activity that involves doing incredibly foolhardy things on rooftops without a net. If you’ve seen those Nike commercials, that’s Le Parkour. And of course Luc Besson’s gotten his hands into it. Cool looking stuff.
The Dixie Chicks are still #1 on the country charts, but Home took a dive on the Amazon rankings lately. Wide Open Spaces and Fly both dropped back down from the dizzying sales heights generated by the controversy, but then trended back up again just as Home was diving. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone pointed out that there really wasn’t all that much boycotting, and Rosanne Cash is appalled. By the media, not by the Chicks.
However, what everyone really wants to know: are they any good? Um… OK. Wide Open Spaces really was not anywhere near anything I want to hear, and while I’m not a country fan I did try and give it a fair shake. Lots of preprocessed strings, gloss, and so on. Nice close harmonies but man, if I want good close harmonies I can find ‘em someplace with some genuine feeling.
Being diligent, I loaded Home into my CD player for the drive back into work the next day. And, surprise, not actually half-bad. It’s not my favorite kind of music, but the production was stripped down and free of gooey studio backing the Chicks were a lot more palatable. From the lyrics sheet, they wrote some of the songs themselves, which is at least a start. Not recommended per se, but I wouldn’t leap through a plate glass window to avoid it either.
A while back I noted the Pattern Recognition annotation effort. t.rev pointed out that it sucked so far. It continues to be more criticism than annotation, but you know, it’s the kind of thing obsessives like me read. And it’s done, except for the Themes section.
E! Online has this to say about Polanski’s Oscar: “Only in Hollywood can Roman Polanski be a convicted felon and an Oscar winner.” True enough, since — as far as I know — Hollywood is the only place they give out Oscars. It would be difficult to be any kind of an Oscar winner in, say, Des Moines.
Not much else to do with my night but mock the Oscars; I wasn’t gonna, but the opening montage reminded me of how painfully bad some of the Oscar winners have been. Thus, they deserve it. It’ll all go in this post so anyone reading this on Livejournal is missing all the fun.
Whoof, that was a whole lot of Malazan Empire. Yep, you betcha. I liked Deadhouse Gates a lot, and I am pleased to report that it continued to progress along lines quite different than Gardens of the Moon. The differences in setting and characters are most obvious, but around halfway through the former I realized that whereas Gardens is a novel about places, Deadhouse Gates is all about journeys. The centerpiece of Deadhouse Gates is the deeply harrowing march known as the Chain of Dogs, while Gardens revolves around the struggle for Darujhistan.
I can’t say I agree with Erikson when he talks about how his novels confound expectations about who’s good and who’s evil; I guess compared to the banality of Robert Jordan they’re pretty revolutionary, but Erikson’s far from ground-breaking. Indeed, at a certain point, the desire to subvert the reader’s expectations regarding such matters becomes fairly pedestrian itself. The Malazan Empire books aren’t there, but I do hope Erikson continues to focus on interesting plots and characterizations and doesn’t get too deep into making sure everyone has a dark and a light side, yatta yatta.
I’m going to take a break before the next book. One could overdose.
So, how are those wacky Bush-hating Dixie Chicks weathering the storm of controversy surrounding their recent comments about our fine President? Sales plummeting? Losing money?
Well. Actually, no, not in any sense. Their newest album is still #1 on the March 22 Billboard Country charts. That album, Home, is #3 on the Amazon popular music sales chart — and rising, up 11% from yesterday according to JungleScan. Wide Open Spaces is #39 on the Amazon charts, and Fly is #49.
I added Wide Open Spaces and Fly to JungleScan, just for the fun of keeping track.
Edit: Bah, Atrios scooped me. Props to the mad liberal.
I bought some Dixie Chicks CDs today. If the best argument one can think of is “I don’t agree with you so I’ll punish you economically,” one doesn’t really have much of a case, does one? Come to think of it, one would — in that hypothetical case — mostly be pouting. The only thing which could make it complete is calling one’s antagonist names.