I caught Blood Work last night at the Somerville Theatre. Much to my relief, the central theater is still there; I’d been worried because the listings showed five movies playing there at once, and in my previous Bostonian life, there was only a single large auditorium. But it seems they’ve simply added small screening rooms on the sides, and the main theater (with balcony) remains intact. Good. Alas, the movie didn’t benefit from my resulting good mood. I hadn’t truthfully been expecting all so much, since I wasn’t overly fond of . The bones of the plot worked better on the screen than on the page for me, perhaps because Michael Conneley’s prose isn’t very fluid, but the acting in general wasn’t terribly strong. Jeff Daniels as the guy next door was good, and Eastwood himself was passable, but everyone else — even Angelica Huston — was strident and strained. Big drama with big declarations and horrendously arrhythmic patterns of speech. Not so good. ...

Almost all packed, which is a darned good thing considering that the movers are showing up in about 12 hours. It’ll be down to the wire, yep. Posts will be very sparse for the next little while.

Adventure Strips looks just amazingly cool; it’s a subscription-based webcomics site focusing on — well. Adventure Strips. Gotta love the straightforward branding. I wouldn’t be quite so excited except that the art samples look wonderful. Mike Barr is doing one of the titles, too.

The Hugo vote breakdown (original) is now online. Bujold fans like Gaiman, no surprise. You can always get so much out of poring over Australian Rules voting results. Perhaps a better use of time would be reading the Hugo nominated stories. You won’t find the novels there, but almost all of the other fiction is online. Nice. I remember when Clarinet did a CD containing all the stories (and some of the novels), and that was a big deal.

I’m going to like living in Boston. There’s apparently a bus trip down to the 9/21 RoH show; Dick Togo’s gonna be wrestling a tag match. Also: Low Ki, American Dragon, Steve Corino, Mike Modest, Donovan Morgan, Takao Omori, Christopher Daniels, the SAT, The Amazing Red, and Jay Briscoe. And Spanky. Yeah! Addendum: I’ve set up a LiveJournal Boston-area wrestling community. My enthusiasm runs wild!

In a fit of automation, I have abused the excellent MTMacro plugin to create an tag. <amazon title=”Monster Manual II” asin=”0786928735”> would be blithely transformed into the appropriate link to Amazon. I do this, yes, because I’m too lazy to build affiliate links by hand each time. The macro code, for those even lazier than I: <MTMacroDefine name="Amazon" tag="amazon"> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/<MTMacroAttr name="asin">/unofficfengshuih/ref=nosim/"><MTMacroAttr name="title"></a> </MTMacroDefine> Mind you, I’m also too lazy to implement this in all the site templates, so until I get unlazy and do a bunch of editing, the feature’s pretty worthless.

Somehow I missed the news that John Malkovich was playing Ripley in an upcoming adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. Excellent casting choice; I have to remember to keep an eye out for this.

49% of Americans think the First Amendment goes too far. (original) No, there’s not really anything I can add to that.

The road signs are marked with secret codes which instruct the military where to go when it’s time for the coup. Quintessence of the Loon has more of the same.

The Hugo Award results are in! BEST NOVEL (486 ballots cast) The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (HarperCollins/Eos) American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Morrow) Perdido Street Station by China Mi