I think I've mentioned Film Crit Hulk and his interesting essays a couple of times recently. Here's a video essay that's especially interesting: Why Star Wars Works: A Scene-by-Scene Breakdown. (The closed captions on the video seem reasonably decent, but you can also read the scriptIt doesn't focus on the themes or meaning or lore, but on the ( Read more... )

I've enjoyed most of Kate Elliott's books, so of course I checked out her new novella The Servant Mage as soon as I could. I...mostly really liked it. Fellian is a Lamplighter, a fire mage bound to indentured servitude under the relatively-new Liberationist regime. The Liberationists overthrew the dragon-elemental Monarchy in the name of equality ( Read more... )

I've been alternating between watching episodes of the 1980s Miss Marple with Joan Hickson and the 2000s Marple with Geraldine McEwan, and it's been fascinating to compare their approaches to adapting the books. The Hickson version is mostly faithful, with a few tweaks here and there, most of them things to dramatize something that might have been ( Read more... )

I haven't read any Frog and Toad since I was about six year old. Based on this short (under four minutes) claymation adaptation of one of their stories, I've been missing out. Look how perfectly they capture the eternal struggle not to binge on cookies in just three lines:

FROG: *puts cookies in box* There. Now we will not eat any more cookies.
TOAD ( Read more... )

There is a lot to like about Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma series, but also plenty that is... well, bad. Every time I read one, I am annoyed and wonder if I should just quit reading. Yet I have read about thirty of the damned things, and am almost certainly going to read that new one my library just got an ebook copy of ( Read more... )

The TOS episode "Requiem for Methuselah" has got to be one of the best examples of giving the designated "smart" character random knowledge for plot purposes. Okay, Spock can play the piano--that's fine. He already plays the Vulcan lute, and it's not uncommon for musically-inclined people to play a second instrument ( Read more... )

I'm a few of hundred pages into Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars, and I'm finally starting to feel like the characters might be people and that I might care what happens to them. The plot has also started to pick up, and I'm a little more invested in seeing how it all plays out. (I expect tragedy, of course, but it's all about how they get there.) ( Read more... )

My book to read on the bus the past two weeks has been Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia by Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat. This is about twice as long as it would ordinarily take me to read xvi + 307 pages, since I have a decent-length commute. I'm just tired, I kept telling myself. I'm distracted by the story about the light rail being late because there ( Read more... )

Conveniently over-engineered air ducts and lawsuit-waiting-to-happen fire sprinklers are not the only pesky details that throw me out of a story. The unbelievable lack of narrative respect for the fragility of human skulls and brains also makes me forget about whatever the characters are supposed to be doing to fret about hematomas instead ( Read more... )

Via Tobias Buckell's blog, this article on the pitfalls of brainstorming offers interesting evidence against traditional brainstorming techniques, and alternatives which seem to work better. (Working alone is one. At last, I am vindicated! All those poorly-constructed group projects in elementary school I had to suffer really did lead to fewer ( Read more... )