The holidays have been another giant mound of DVDs, which I'll be talking about for weeks, assuming I actually update. The only book I got was a book of puzzles from Games Magazine, a couple which I recognized because my dad used to subscribe and periodically (hah!) I'd go reread the old issues and do the puzzles I wasn't old/smart/patient enough to try on the previous go-through. (These would the puzzles that were too easy for my dad to bother with, obviously. Or possibly he just did them in his head.)

But the lack of books was okay, because I finished The Three Musketeers. Yay me. I had been reading it in Vegas (Note to self: I should tell the Vegas stories before I forget them entirely.) and then when I got back there was some panic and exhaustion and such, but after a week off I finished it. It's good. Now I want to see the Lester movie again (in order, instead of first seeing the very end, and then later seeing two thirds of the middle), and read Twenty Years After. And reread The Club Dumas. But let's stick to things I've actually done or this will trail off into "why am I writing when I could be reading?" The book is very fun, and it was particularly satisfying to discover that d'Artagnon is The Smart One in addition to being The Impetuous One. In the movies I've seen, he tends to just seem like the one who keeps getting into trouble. Mostly because people sitting around trying to think of a plan doesn't make for good cinema.

This reminds me of my general belief that it's always better to see the movie first, then read the book. If you do that, you can enjoy the movie on its own merits and then you can enjoy the greater depth in the book, and often it's still surprising because the movie has to omit things. If you read the book first, you'll know what's "supposed" to happen and be either bored by the movie being predictable, or annoyed that it's different from the book. (Of course, if it's a bad movie, it may kill off your interest in the book. But with some books, that might be a good thing.)

Now I'm reading Three of Swords, a collection of Fritz Leiber's Fafhred & Grey Mouser stories/novels. They're fantasy. Sword & sorcery fantasy. Not one of my favored genres, but I am enjoying it so far -- although occasionally I do skim over a paragraph that's all exposition about the world. But there's not too much of that, which is good. I've finished the first book, Swords and Deviltry, which goes over Fafhred & Grey Mouser's history and how they became friends. Now I'm in the second book, which is a collection of short stories about them, and will probably be faster going now that the exposition's out of the way. They're fun characters -- they sort of fit with the Musketeers since they're basically adventurers-for-profit. There's a lot more emphasis on the swords than the sorcery (as you can tell from the titles) which is all to the good. More on them when I'm done with the stories.

I got the first three seasons of Homicide: Life on the Streets. Yay. Then I got to throw away a giant pile of videotapes, which is always satisfying. And I think that means I've got all the Homidide I need (heh) since season 4 is when things started getting ridiculous. There were danger signs in season 3, what with the serial killer and the whole dull Russert & Felton romance, but it's still a very good show. The most interesting thing to me was seeing how normal the show looks now. The shaky camera and the grainy look and the jump cuts and the muted colors -- that was bizzare ten years ago. Now it looks perfectly normal.

Speaking of visuals... I also watched Night of the Hunter, which was a Neflix rental. It's pretty odd. I knew the bare bones of the story: Robert Mitchum is after some kids, because they know the location of the money their father stole. The movie takes a while establishing things, and even the chase takes a while, but it gets creepier and creepier. And then, sometimes, it just gets goofy. I sorta want to read the book just so I know what the heck was going on with the lynch mob and the free-lance orphanage and all. And the ending seems a bit anticlimactic -- after menacing them throughout the movie, Michum is wounded, squeals and runs, and then they call the cops. It's another thing that sort of works in one way -- in the daylight he's not so scary, kinda -- and it could seem abrupt just because he doesn't keep on coming like a slasher flick monster. Anyway, if you take it as a very dark fairytale, it kind of works: the kids go through all kinds of horrible traumatic stuff, but then they're fine at the end because... boy, kids can deal with anything. Or something. If you view it more realistically, it seems a bit incoherent, though.

Ebert's review here is kind of helpful since some of the weirdness is stylistic. There are touches of German Expressionism (and I feel really pretentious just writing that, but when it's obvious enough for me to say "Hey, that's some German Expressionism right there!" I think it's worth mentioning) which is particularly jarring when you've been watching, say, Homicide. There's a scene that is really on the border between chilling and goofy -- Mitchum is chasing the kids up the basement stairs, and there's a very quick shot of him stretched out to grab them, his hands catching the light from the door so that they look like long white claws. I think it's partly the suddenness of the shot that made me laugh for a second, because instantly it cuts away. And then after my brain had a second to process what I'd seen, I thought it was creepy. And it's sticking with me a few days later, so I think there's something to it.

If you've been wondering, Stephen Hunter's still out there, and still crazy. He spewed out another essay for the Arts section of the Washington Post. It's about war movies. Again. What exactly it's about is, as always, hard to determine. And frankly, I just read the first few paragraphs, which was long enough to find this:

These films, you may have noticed, all are built on old methods of warfare, back when the movies thought war was fun and heroic. No nukes, no M-16s, no RPGs, no complications of gender, ethnicity, creed or race, like our messy modern affairs. Also, no ambiguity, no peace marches, no talking heads or torrential blogs zigging this way and that ideologically.

The movies he's talking about include Cold Mountain. The Civil War has long been considered one of the jolliest bits of American history because it was so uncomplicated. Oh, he makes me so tired.

In other deranged writing news, I'd like to announce that this morning I heard, if not the worst song ever, at least the worst song lately. It should not be a surprise that it's by Nickelback. (Okay, I will reluctantly admit that "How You Remind Me" has a catchy bit in the chorus, but I tend to like anything that features someone spitting words out as fast as they can. I just like the challenge of trying to sing along. They're still a terrible band.) The song is called "Figured You Out." Go on, peruse the lyrics. It's like a Nine Inch Nails song written by a drunken Dr. Seuss. Except Dr. Seuss would invent words that did actually rhyme instead of rhyming "feet" and "knees." That's putting the "ass" in "assonance."

Yeah, well I had to say that, didn't I? When am I ever going to have another opportunity?

But you really need to hear it to understand how aggressively bad this song is. It's just as monotonous as the lyrics make it look, but hearing it for the first time this morning, I had fun guessing what the rhymes would be. I kind of thought that he was going to wind up with "neck" as soon as a line ended with "check," and yet I was still amazed when he went ahead and sang about choking someone. Call me naive.

Also: "I love your pants around your feet." Feet? Not around your ankles; around your feet. Are they wound around both feet like a scarf? And why use "pants" there, anyway? "Your skirt around your feet" at least sounds slightly less like a demented tailor was improvising bondage equipment. Or, wait, are they gay? I don't want to promote stereotypes, even favorable ones, but I just can't believe they're gay because they're such a bad, bad band. Also, the lead singer looks like a dropout from a Styx cover band. No offense to gay people who may be in a bad Styx cover band. Okay, some highly scientific research indicates that there is some dispute about just how gay Nickelback is, but not in the sense I meant.

That's all for the moment. After tomorrow, I have four free days in a row with no commitments at all (whoopie!) and my goals are to clean just about everything I own, and work on the site. And, well, probably play PuzzlePirates sometimes. It's important to have at least one goal I'll definitely achieve.

The obligatory excuses are, in order: Thanksgiving. Brother's birthday. Went to Vegas. Very sleepy.

In slightly more detail...

I got a new computer! An eMac, instead of a super-adorable new iMac, because I'm cheap, But it's shiny and Safari is great and you don't know how excited I still am to have actual current technology on my computer. I'm always getting something that's a year old at best. So, gosh. And now I get to figure out Tinderbox all over again! Oh boy. Well, not completely, but there are a few things I've tried to do the way I used to, and they don't work. Most of it does, it's just finding the changes and figuring them out that's irksome. On the other hand, it fills in the urls for links automatically now. Gosh, that's lovely.

Does it mean anything if the first song I got via iTunes was "Something I Can Never Have"? Actually, nearly all of the songs that I've gotten have been pretty gloomy. I think that has more to do with them being songs I liked off of albums I didn't want to buy, but maybe it also means that it's winter. But man, it's nice to listen to "Can You Forgive Her?" whenever I want. Which is often.

Oh, and I finally got Nirvana's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," which was another "I like it, but not enough for the album" selection. And now that I can hear it whenever I want, I really like it. But see what I mean? Depressing. It's like being back in high school. So many things are, sadly.

For his birthday, my brother made me watch The Two Towers. Well, my mom wanted to see it, and we were all there; I don't think it was part of his birthday celebration to torture me specifically. I suspect that I would have liked the non-extended version more, since after a while I was looking over the DVD to see which scenes were Brand New, and invariably they were the scenes I thought were especially dull. It was pretty. I guess it was good. I just hate the whole sword & sorcery genre. I don't say I like Gollum just to be contrary, despite what you may think; he really is the only character I find sympathetic. Or even remotely comprehensible. And the whole concept just tires me... oh, I don't know. I keep trying to put my finger on what exactly puts me off about most fantasy, and failing, but there are exceptions. Dunsany, yes. Tolkien, no. It might be the sheer epic-ness of it all, rather than the fantasy itself, now that I think about it. There were a lot of times in the movie when I wasn't really sure why there needed to be quite so many characters when most of them weren't doing anything. Sagas are a problem that way. So anyway, I liked the bits with Gollum. And sure, Viggo's hot, but he's not all that interesting to me otherwise. Cool battle scenes. But lord, they're all very talky, aren't they? Also: fucking elves.

It was kind of neat being the non-geek in the room for once. My mom was asking my brother & sister-in-law about the changes from the book, and what happened where, and all kinds of stuff I didn't understand because I read The Gathering of the Fellowship twenty-odd years ago and that was more than enough for me to be sure it wasn't my thing. I kind of wish I cared more, because they do look impressive, and I'm glad someone did a sweeping SF epic that doesn't suck, but... I just can't make myself care about the story.

And there was Vegas. So much spending. So much eating. And even a little gambling. One of the programmers at work helped me rationalize that by pointing out that he'd have spent a lot more per day taking his kids to Disneyland. I'm basically rationalizing it on the grounds that I spent maybe $200 more than I thought I would, and I'm normally pretty frugal. It's just that usually I overbudget, so spending more than I anticipated hits my panic button. I will work on a day-by-day detailed gloat about how I got to hang out with people who are cool, but the short form is: yay.

Hey, speaking of hanging out with cool kids: next year's JournalCon will be in DC. So everyone's coming to visit me! Hi, everyone. Did you know it was all about me? You didn't? Harumph. Okay, it's possible that I have nothing to do with it. Fine, be like that. Props to booger and co., since they did a very impressive job putting together the bid, and were much more organized than I could ever hope to be. I kinda wish they'd had some competition, because they would have trounced it. Trounced, I say! So, anyway, y'all should come on out. DC's fun. So's Baltimore. And I need to get out of the house.

There's also a ton of stuff in the paper I wanted to talk about, and I'm about three-quarters done with The Three Musketeers, and it's possible that I've even seen a movie or two in the past, er, month or so. If I can stop playing Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates for a few minutes, I'll get into all of that. And I'm entering the slacker portion of the year so I'll have more free time and I'll actually have time to do about one-third of the things I intend with the site here. Stay tuned.