Review: Frozen

I just watched Frozen the other night, and AAAHH!

Oh--I should get this out of the way early. I make no pretense of avoiding spoilers in my reviews.

Okay, the movie was merely okay. Maybe a six? (This brings to mind that I don't have a baseline for movies reviews. I'll have to fix that.) Not quite as good as I remember Tangled being, but I saw Tangled a while ago. Although it's possible I missed some early context that would have let me appreciate it more. But the music, gah, WEEEEEE!

Is Disney getting better at doing musicals, or am I at a temporal disadvantage of some sort for appreciating their older stuff--don't have context to appreciate it because I'm to young or like that? Or have I simply never heard it? Tangled and Frozen both had really good music.

But this is about Frozen, not Tangled.

Okay, first off, no villians. What? It's a Disney Musical with no villians. How weird is that? I guess there's a guy who's kind of a villian, but he's second-string stuff and more of a self-centered jerk than a real villian. (Although he acts really well, at least in-universe.)

Incidentally, kids: there's a moral about 'true love' and 'love at first sight' here. Pay attention to it.

For once, Disney has made a movie that approaches this 'true love' thing somewhat realistically. And I think they managed to double-subvert their romantic-movie conventions while they were at it.

Oh, Elsa's was the frozen heart healed by the act of true love, not Anna's. Just sayin'.

Final Verdict: A solid 6/10 for the movie itself--that was nothing much special, except maybe for Disney--but brought a 8/10 by the soundtrack. Though honestly, if you get the soundtrack, I recommend getting the movie; you should see them in context. I think the soundtrack is lurking at an above-nine "copy please" currently.

Review: Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk

Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk is a wonderfully preposterous bit of exquisite nonsense. Well. I say nonsense. Once you accept the time-traveling stegosaurus, and the goopy green space aliens, everything else makes perfect sense. (Well, except the piranhas.)

The father, the main character of the story, gets interrupted on the way back home with some milk—all-important for breakfast cereal and tea, you see—and in the course of his adventures ends up saving the world almost, but not quite, entirely by accident. Along the way he meets pirates, dinosaurs, aliens, space police, wumpires, and one Angry Volcano God. (But no piranhas.) He meets them all out of order, of course, and timey shenanigans are used multiple times to save the day. Twice, at the very least. (Hey, that's high for (what's nominally) a children's book.)

The book is illustrated in a Seuss-like manner. Well—. The illustrations don't look at all like Seuss's work, but otherwise they've got the same kind of absurdity look to them. Unfortunately, as I'm writing this review from memory, I don't have the name of the illustrator at hand.

Final Verdict: 8/10. Well worth reading, but may not be worth buying if you don't have kids who'd enjoy it. I liked it, but I don't expect I'll be buying a copy. I've been very spoiled by fanfic. (Mind you, I probably 'should' buy a copy, to support the existence of such books. But....)

Stuff I've read this week

Maps in a Mirror (center): 675 pages. Read cover to cover in eight days. I think there may be something wrong with strange about me. Contains a whole mess of Orson Scott Card fiction, and bits of him commenting on it. Quality is all over the map, because this spans his entire career at least up until publication. (But does not cover his entire career. It's only a collection.) I could probably comment on individual stories, if asked.

Epic (left): 364 pages. Read in a day or two, but certainly under 48 hours. Took a break from Maps in a Mirror to read this. Set on a distant planet where economic life and a large fraction of the economy are based around a video game. YA, but there are strong undercurrents of moral and economic philosophy.

The art of Thinking Clearly (right, open): around halfway through, I've read something like 150-160 pages. A collection of short essays (generally 3-5 pages) on thinking errors. Each prevents the error in a colloquial way, some evidence and/or arguments for it, and usually some clues for how to avoid it. I'm not sure how useful it is. It's generally not perscriptivist, but I don't know whether that's a good thing. Though it probably is.

Not mentioned: the large amount of internet reading and downloaded computer-only reading I did this week. Nor the chunks of magazines I read.

Also not mentioned: The first three episodes of season one of Star Trek: Voyager I watched, the first three episodes of BBC's latest Sherlock I watched, or the episode or two of Star Trek: TNG I watched. I'm pretty sure I watched a bit of TNG, anyways. I liked Voyager better, so that's what I stuck with.

Using slock

I've been using slock¹, from the suckless tools collection, to lock my computer recently. And I gotta say, it's really doesn't suck. Using it literally couldn't be any simpler: at any command prompt (ie, in a terminal emulator, awesomeWM's "run" box), you type "slock".

And that's it. Your computer is now locked. Mouse input is ignored, to unlock it you simply type your password at the blank screen. There's no password prompt, no screen saver, no options to mess with, nothing. Just your locked computer and a blank screen. If you're worried about burn-in, turn your monitor off---you should be doing that anyways.

¹Getting slock: slock is part of suckless tools, from suckless.org. In Ubuntu, it's part of the package suckless-tools:
sudo aptitude install suckless-tools
It's probably in the same package for most Ubuntu or Debian derivatives.

Google+, revisited

Oh, gee, thanks a lot, Google. I'll just go through a crap-ton of work to delete my entire Google+ account AGAIN.

Seriously. You'd think they'd mention when they're offering to create a Google+ account for you, but noo...

Leaves

My (library) copy of House of Leaves came in today. I already know that mainly I don't know what to think of it. I bet it could make for a great (La)Tex leaning tool, trying to re-create it. Whoever double-spaces their sentences, though; I like that^[1].

Apparently there is also braille which my edition does not have. Has anyone got notations or pictures or somesuch of those?

Footnotes:

^[1]Their monospaced sentences, at least. I can't tell about the other ones (I haven't gotten to them yet, but I doubt I'll be able to tell even once I do get there).

Review: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Title says it all, really.

Interm review: The Book Theif

I've been reading The Book Theif recently. Dunno if I'm going to finish it, though. "Poised to become a classic" (USA Today) or no, I really don't know how to feel about it. It's got little formating quirks that really bother me. For example, around page 49 there's this thingy:

* * * AN IMPORTANT NOTE * * *
ABOUT FRAU DILLER
She had one golden rule.

Nothing wrong with this factoid, of course. But it's offset like this, and I think it would be better put intergrated into the narrative. There's no reason it couldn't be. The book has pictures in it too, and the whole thing could just be a stylistic thing. But it's jarring and, in all the cases so far (that weren't in the prologue), in my opinion completely unnecessary.

Current Rating: 3/10 Dump it. The offset chunks are jarring and gratuitous. The message may well be good, but the writing style is off-putting.

Review: Of Mice and Men

I've heard about John Steinbeck for a while, but I've never read any of his stuff. A writer friend recommended him recently, so I finally picked up Of Mice and Men to give it a read.

Steinbeck. ZOMG Steinbeck. Where to start...

Review: Michael Vey: Rise of the Elgen

There are good books, and there are bad books. And then there are books that make you want to throw them across the room. This... is one of the later kind.

Plot-wise, Rise of the Elgen is ... okay, I guess. It's the second book in the Michael Vey series, and I've read the first one. I'm basing mostly on that, because I didn't finish this one.

Why? Because I've seen trollfics that were better-proofread.

Review: Legend

There are lots of books out there. Big books, little books; fantasy books, science fiction books; optimistic books, dystopian books. Legend doesn't do a whole lot to add to the collective definition of 'book'. It's just a book. But it's a pretty decent book.

Review: Hero

I love my books (well, reading materiel anything, but that's not the point just here), and I'll pick up anything that sounds interesting enough. Sometimes, that can get me into trouble. It's happened before, and there's flat-out nothing preventing it from happening again. This time, it was a book called Hero.

Review: The Wizard Heir

I picked up this book, The Wizard Heir, at the local library recently. It's got a nifty coverimage of a fancy magic staff, and a fascinating description that really made me want to read it.

It turned out that I'd read another book by the author in the same 'verse. I didn't notice this at first, I picked it up from the author description in the back some time after first picking it up. This was okay, I only very vaguely recalled the other book, and Wizard Heir recapped more than well enough to stand on its' own.

I rather kinda liked this book. The plot works quite well, it occasionally taking a while to get around notwithstanding, and she's got an interesting magic system going. The world is quite believable, and no, not because she uses real-world locations; it has to do with how it's written. I'd say she's put a good amount of thought into how this verse works.

Final verdict: I liked it. Go ahead, give it a read. I'll encourage you to check out The Warrior Heir too, but you don't really need to have read it to get this.

Briefly on Reviews

For my own reference, I figured that I'd better gave some sort of scale written out somewhere. When I sat down to write one, I realized that there's really two different factors I'm trying to convey here.

One is my enjoyment of the book. I can make a scale for that pretty easily. It won't go into the nuances of enjoyment -- Of Mice and Men is really good, but it's a long, slow, savory enjoyment, for example -- but that's what the review is for. The other is more of a technical analysis, rather like a traditional grade. I'm not sure what I expect of this, or why I think such a thing is a good idea.

So anyways, from now on I'm gonna be using a much simpler scale:

Dump it

Anywhere from "Didn't bother to finish it" to "Threw it across the room". I think it's not worth bothering with at best, and may even think it's pretty shit.

F'naa

I'm pretty indifferent overall. Maybe I liked it, maybe I didn't quite finish it. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another.

Like it

I thought it was pretty good, and/or I enjoyed it. I may go around recommending it.

Copy Please

I liked it so much I want a copy for myself. Rare.

Review: Insignia

So it turns out I don't necessarily like doing reviews. Oh, they're great when I can do some sort of snarking or something, but that's about it. Or something.
Anyways, the point is that I'm doing a review because I'm doing a review and for no other reason.

This book Insignia has a very cool premise and setting, don't get me wrong. This kid who's made himself pretty much a professional video-gamer/con-man by necessity gets recruited into the government's remote-warfare program. All the kids in the program have computers in their heads that they use to interface with the bots/drones/whatever. Catch is, these computers can also exert some major control/influence over their minds.

The main character Tom isn't that good of a programmer. Most kids in the program aren't, frankly. Some pretty silly situations result from this, especially when the resident superprogrammer/superhacker goes on a rampage.

Some pretty disturbing situations result from this, as well. A bigwig at one of the superinternational megaconglomeratecorps tricks Tom something bad, and manages to heavily rewrite his brain. Luckily, the superprogrammer is one of his friends and installs a firewall package that cleans him right up. Their revenge on the guy is pretty intense.

However, Tom's one of -- as far as we know -- only two people in the world with a weird, impossible ability to work with any networked devices, not just ones designed to work with their brain comupters. The other person's on the other side. An Tom has to fight her.

Rating: 6.5 out of ten. It's kindof a fun read, but I dunno. I'm kind eh.

Review: Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman

I've been reading this collection of short stories called, simply, Stories, and edited by Neal Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. I try to make it a point to write a review, or whatever these things are, for everything -- or every hardcopy, anyways -- I read, but this presents a new and therefore interesting problem: How do you review an anthology?

Well, here's a li'l not-so-secret for you: I don't write these 'reviews' for you. I write them entirely for me. I read so much stuff, you see, that if I don't keep track of them somehow I will forget them. Which is, at least in part, why my reviews lean heavily towards plot summary. ( I'm sure there's a fair amount of "I'm not a good reviewer" in there too.)

So what happens in Stories? Well: Santa Clause is killed, and alternately revealed to be an alien. A character steps out of his story and becomes real. An author adds two paragraphs immediately after what could have been a "Lady and the Tiger" ending, and leaves us with no fewer questions, but a good deal more closure. Exacting, cold, and calculating retribution is taken for an unspeakable crime. A lunatic is put on trial, as is a sane man. Various forms of ghosts drop by. An impossible flying machine actually flys, and presumably gets picked up by aliens. A man climbs millions of stairs. Another man kills himself. Some rich nutcase gets it in his head that it'd be a good idea to literally give someone the things in the song "Twelve Days of Christmas". Through it all, they manage to stretch your imagination, give your brain a real workout. This is good.

The one I'm the most unsure about in the collection is one called, almost ironically, "Stories". It's got a unique flow, with a good number of commas. It's a little hard to follow at first, but it wraps itself up well near the end. The beginning doesn't make any more sense, but the context pulls it together and throws any need for the beginning to make sense out the window. There's less too it, in a poorly defined way -- I think 'having a moral' may have to do with it -- than with the others, even though it's longer than many of them.

Rating: an easy Seven or Eight for the collection. Not worth trying to rate the individual stories.

Mini pseudo-review: Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath

I finished Scott Westerfeld's 'Leviathan' Trilogy recently. It was pretty good.

The trilogy is set in an alternate history where World Ware One split actually rather neatly along the lines between the 'Clankers', who use technology we'd recognize as rather steampunk -- and quite advanced for the time, frankly -- and the 'Darwinists', who make use of Charles Darwin's discovery of DNA to mold living creatures into forms they can use. It's a handy technique used to cleanly delineate the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys'. However, the story follows two kids from opposite sides of the war -- an Austrian prince named Alek, and a British airman named Deryn Sharp.
But this is (supposed to be) a conglomerate mini-review.

I can't speak properly to Leviathan, as it's been a fair while since I've read it. The cliff notes is that Alek's parents were killed, so he goes on the run and ends up in the Swiss Alps. Deryn (who's disguised herself as a boy so she could join the Air Force) and her ship end up there too, too badly damaged to escape on their own. They join forces, something that's presented as fairly odd in this book.

Behemoth takes us to Istanbul, which is rather blended compared to Europe. Though rather Clanker under German influence, their designs are heavily animal-inspired, and there's some minor indication that they use animals too. Alek and Deyrn assist a local revolution in order to prevent the war from ending unfavorably. There's lightning cannons and creative improvised weaponry, and apparently Deyrn's been in love with Alek and I missed it. Good book.

Goliath is probably the weakest of the bunch. It ties together a decent number of threads from the other books, and its tour of the Americas shows us that Clanker and Darwinist can get along. But its major plot, while well-written, seems rather cheesy, almost to the point of Deus Ex Machina (well, sortof -- God is the Machine, in the sense that the Machine doctor Tesla calls Goliath is supposedly going to end the war; but God has the machine, as Tesla has something of a god complex), compared to the other books. Still decent, just not as good. I wasn't fond of the way the core conflict was wrapped up.

Ratings:
Pass on Leviathan
Eight of Ten for Behemoth
Five of Ten for Goliath
Seven of Ten overall.

Dasher

Back to the Future is a very good movie.
Dvorak is a lovely keboard layout, and a vast improvement over Qwerty.
Dasher is great fun, admittedly probably a lot better than Qwerty, and certainly much better than not being able to use a computer at all. However, I'm not to certain about Dasher in and of itself.
I will of course grant that it's both the best alphabetic interface I've ever seen (okay, it's the only real alphabetic interface I've seen), and vastly better than anything I think Icould have come up with.

In related news, except for the latter addition of some newline characters (to make my markdown work right), this post was writen entirely in Dasher, despite haveing to go back and fix some parts. Explaines the non-sequitor of an opening surprisingly well, doesn't it?

Oh, right. Dasher is a lovely little program that provides a number of alternatives to a traditional keboard. The most ~~notable~~ obvious is the one where you dynamically zoom in on the letters you want, eventually building up words and paragraphs until you have however, long a string of text you decide you want. It's not replacing my trusty Dvorak anytime soon, but it seems like a great alternative for people for whom typeing is not an option.

Rateings

I realized today that I'm kinda going about rateings all wrong. Yes, I do/will try to maintain a certain level of objectivity to them, but since these reviews are fundamentaly for me, I'm going to increase the weighting of my enjoyment factor.
(Don't get the wrong idea -- there's not a formula or a grade-sheet I'm useing. But how much I liked the book will impact my rateing more.)

I'm gonna go tweak the rateings in my orriginal review post to reflect this change, but that should be the only change. I'll bet that if you even see this, it'll be long after the change and you won't even notice.

Review: Cinder

Cinder is an interesting little mash-up. The title character is a cyborg, and I picked it up because she goes to the ball. Parallels, anyone? Took me fairly by surprise however, it's rather deeper than I expected to go. Being more involved this way means it does have the potential to go a lot further than I expected, though.

Cinder is of course a sci-fi novel. In this future, the world has picked itself up into a fairly small number of large nations following I think it was world war four. Robots and magnetic hover-cars are the norm, and humanity is dealing with a massively infectious and always-fatal virus. Meanwhile, the queen of the Lunars, an offshoot of humanity who live on the moon and have psychic powers, wants to take over, and to that end has been trying to get the emperor of China to marry her for something like decades. How long is never said exactly, but it's been a while. Cinder, who as a side effect of being a cyborg is the best mechanical engineer in the city, gets thrown into all of this when the prince brings her a robot to fix and ends up falling for her.

Maybe I'm just good, but I was able to predict chapter thirty-seven's big twist way back in chapter four. A couple of twists I wasn't expecting, such as Cinder being immune to virus and her doctor being a Lunar. I think it works out okay though, since this turns out to be the first book in a series. The others I expect to veer off in their own direction relative to what I was expecting from this one. I don't normally like reading the first book in a series before the rest of it is out, but this one works pretty darn well as a stand-alone. I'll keep an eye out for the rest (according to the coresponding front panel, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter).

Rateing: Seven and a half out of ten.