FOB

I've looking for fantasy to read on an upcoming trip, so I Googled "all-time best fantasy" just now. I carefully inspected eight different lists: specifically all the relevant lists in the first page of search results. Of those eight lists, six were trash. Here's a meta-review…

A friend recently lent me the M. John Harrison novel Light. Sadly, it didn't work for me…

It seems like I've been posting a lot of negative stuff lately. I'm a naturally cranky, opinionated person, but there's lots of things I enjoy. I should report on them too.

I recently reviewed the worst juvie novel I've ever read—the "banned book" The Transall Saga. Today I have the happier task of reviewing a well-written and intriguing novel intended for a slightly younger age group. Gordon Korman's Swindle came to my attention today when my son brought it home from the school Book Fair, where apparently every kid in school bought a copy. I'm always suspicious of these sudden hits, but I read a couple of chapters of Swindle this morning.

I'm hooked…

This is a review of the first few minutes of the first episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It contains a spoiler—indeed, it spoiled the whole series for me—so please don't read beyond the break if you want to keep some badly-written TV SF fun until you see it for yourself…

So Minimus 2 is out. That took literally a day or two. I'm calling it "2", because it's now Minimus: The Two-Page Roleplaying Game. Please see my previous blog entry for my very recent review of Minimus. The download URL for the game itself remains the same. What follows is my Minimus 2 re-review…

Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary posted a pointer to the Ad Astra pencil-and-paper roleplaying game Minimus today. The schtick of Minimus is that it attempt to define a complete, playable RPG on one side of one sheet of paper. The game is being sold as $2 voluntary donation-ware.

Sometimes dumb is OK. Even juvenile dumb. MMORPGs take themselves too seriously, and they require lots of money and weird client-side software to play.

The Kingdom of Loathing is dumb and juvenile and awesome and absolutely free and you play it on your web browser. What's not to like?…

There was a big flap recently at my son's elementary school. Apparently, one of the teachers had been reading aloud to her 5^th and 6^th graders from Gary Paulsen's The Transall Saga, something she'd done many times before in her classes.

This time, though, some of the parents decided that even though it was written for and has been reviewed for readers in this age group, it was nonetheless too violent and mature (quote "for their girls" endquote). So they went to the teacher and asked her to stop. In the end, the whole thing ended up in the newly-installed Prinicipal's office. Unfortunately, rather than tell the parents to take a hike, the Principal "left it up to the teacher." Faced with this fairly explicit show of non-support, the teacher, though upset to the point of tears, backed down.

So of course, when my parent/friend and I heard of all this, our first reaction (even though our children were not in the class in question) was to obtain and read a copy of this piece of banished fiction. It was hard for us to imagine any merit in the claims of inappropriateness, but we thought we knew an easy way to find out…

Spoiler alert: I briefly review The Transall Saga later on in this post. If you plan to read it and don't want it spoiled, I recommend that you stop within the first few paragraphs of that review.

Summary: don't buy the Creative MuVo N200 256MB MP3 Player…

It's been a week or more since my boy and I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe at our local theater. I keep getting sidetracked by other topics, but I thought I should make some comments before my memory of the movie goes entirely stale...