(no subject)
The Hilliard Ensemble concert tonight was excellent, and definitely worth the drive to Duke Chapel in the snow. Turns out that this 40th anniversary tour is also a farewell tour, so I'm glad I got to hear them a last time. My favorite of the mostly unfamiliar works was Pérotin's Viderunt, a 12th-century work that somehow sounded more modern than the 20th-century works on the program by Gavin Bryars and Arvo Pärt.
On Blu-Ray, I watched Phillip Glass's newest opera, The Perfect American, about the highly imperfect character of Walt Disney. Musically this doesn't break any new ground for Glass, but it's perfectly enjoyable and the Teatro Real production is quite good.
In other news, the Xbox One's Kinect sensor was already gotten flaky. On the plus side, Microsoft's warranty coverage seems to be pretty good, and supposedly a new console is already on its way (and then we ship the old one back). Also, The S-4 and S-5 license tests in Gran Turismo 6 are really painful.
There was a thread a few days back on Facebook in which Gardner Dozois mentioned Avram Davidson's "Full Chicken Richness" as featuring "perhaps the stupidest reason for time-travel in the entire corpus of time-travel stories". So I had to go dig out my copy of Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection and read it, and indeed, it is a pretty silly use for time travel. And a really funny story. I might have to reread Ian Watson's "Slow Birds" and Greg Bear's "Blood Music" while I have this volume upstairs (and maybe the Tiptree and Bruce Sterling and Connie Willis and Jack Dann and Gene Wolfe and GRRM... What a year 1983 must have been!)
I'm three weeks into my physical therapy for my frozen shoulder (idiopathic Adhesive Capsulitis) which I had finally gotten around to having diagnosed right before New Year's. My range of motion in my right arm seems to be coming back reasonably well, which has been nice.
And now I should go kill the fake High Priest and free the Temple of Dharma from the monsters. Yes, with a PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U having been added to the household in the past couple of months, I've found myself with a hankering to play the 13-year-old PS1 Dragon Warrior VII. I've never actually finished DW7, though this is the 3rd or 4th time I'll have started it. Somehow the first 20-30 hours are always really fun before it succumbs to the tedium of random battles (or so I recall). I really wish the industry would make some more good old-fashioned turn-based JRPG's.
On Blu-Ray, I watched Phillip Glass's newest opera, The Perfect American, about the highly imperfect character of Walt Disney. Musically this doesn't break any new ground for Glass, but it's perfectly enjoyable and the Teatro Real production is quite good.
In other news, the Xbox One's Kinect sensor was already gotten flaky. On the plus side, Microsoft's warranty coverage seems to be pretty good, and supposedly a new console is already on its way (and then we ship the old one back). Also, The S-4 and S-5 license tests in Gran Turismo 6 are really painful.
There was a thread a few days back on Facebook in which Gardner Dozois mentioned Avram Davidson's "Full Chicken Richness" as featuring "perhaps the stupidest reason for time-travel in the entire corpus of time-travel stories". So I had to go dig out my copy of Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection and read it, and indeed, it is a pretty silly use for time travel. And a really funny story. I might have to reread Ian Watson's "Slow Birds" and Greg Bear's "Blood Music" while I have this volume upstairs (and maybe the Tiptree and Bruce Sterling and Connie Willis and Jack Dann and Gene Wolfe and GRRM... What a year 1983 must have been!)
I'm three weeks into my physical therapy for my frozen shoulder (idiopathic Adhesive Capsulitis) which I had finally gotten around to having diagnosed right before New Year's. My range of motion in my right arm seems to be coming back reasonably well, which has been nice.
And now I should go kill the fake High Priest and free the Temple of Dharma from the monsters. Yes, with a PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U having been added to the household in the past couple of months, I've found myself with a hankering to play the 13-year-old PS1 Dragon Warrior VII. I've never actually finished DW7, though this is the 3rd or 4th time I'll have started it. Somehow the first 20-30 hours are always really fun before it succumbs to the tedium of random battles (or so I recall). I really wish the industry would make some more good old-fashioned turn-based JRPG's.