Ravenweb Blog

I saw Al Gore on Friday (4/29). Gore was in Buffalo as part of SUNY Buffalo's Distinguished Speaker series and he delivered, with some modifications and updates, his global warming lecture that was featured in An Inconvenient Truth . Seeing Gore live was interesting. He projects so much more humor, earnestness, and passion in person than I ever picked up before from his televised speeches or interviews. I guess this shouldn't be too surprising given how much spin and character assassination, there is in politics today. Still, you could literally feel Gore's outrage from the 40th row when he referenced the current administration's poor tract record on the environment or when he cycled through some slides he and Tipper took during a recent visit to New Orleans -- pictured that showed a New Orleans still sagging and anything but recovered from Katrina. I'm glad UB invited Gore to speak and very pleased I was able to attend the event.

Excession is set in author Iain Banks' multi-volume Culture series and tells of a mysterious black-body alien artifact. The novel turns out to be less about the titular alien excession than the responses the artifact provokes, especially from the Culture's Minds and a sadistic species, the Affront. Stylistically, the novel is dense at times, with alternating narratives and facsimile electronic correspondence from many different Minds and the principal human characters. Still, Excession comes together and, in a sense, the novel's elusiveness fits well with Banks' signature theme of ambiguity (moral and otherwise).

It looks like a Hulk sequel is in the works , with Edward Norton to play Bruce Banner! I'm not sure how I feel about the casting of Norton yet, but I'm thrilled that director Ang Lee and writer James Schamus will not be involved with the new movie. What a disaster their imagining of The Hulk was, with a plodding story, too much deviation from the source origin story, and an unforgivable over-reliance on CGI. Good luck to Louis Leterrier and the new creative team on the sequel. Get it right, or Hulk will smash!

I saw Grindhouse last weekend. From the start, I enjoyed the double-feature setup with fake trailers and celluloid cigarette burns that led into a full-bore, over-the-top pastiche of 70s action/horror schlock. I especially liked the Rodriguez's "Planet Terror", which came first, and featured an insane mutant-zombie attack fest. The Tarantino feature, "Death Proof", was good too, but this was more of an ode to gearheads and muscle cars, and is not a genre I enjoy quite as much as the first one. Grindhouse is worth seeing in the theaters, and I recommend the film, but there are some caveats: You really have to buy into the premise of the film, that the features are both cheerfully imitating and mocking their pulp predecessors. Humorous or not, the film is gory, and if you've been turned off by the violence in previous Rodriguez or Tarantino films, you likely will feel the same about Grindhouse. You'll need some movie theater stamina, as, combined, the...

We took some pictures of our new house during the home inspection last week. Enjoy! Some pictures of the front. Trees! The attached garage: Two views of our yard:

As I mentioned a few days ago, we bought a house. The property is in West Seneca, NY (a suburb of Buffalo, NY), just a few blocks from where we live now. The house is a 1700 square feet raised ranch, with three bedrooms and two and a half baths on a nice over-sized corner lot. I'll post some pictures soon.

Details to follow.

Phoenix is the fifth book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series and centers around Vlad receiving an assassination job from his patron goddess, and the consequences that follow after Vlad commits the act. I enjoyed the novel and the familiar humor, characters, and fast-paced action that have been present throughout the series. I also enjoyed that Brust was willing to move the series along, with Vlad's renunciation of his position and role in the House of Jhereg and departure from his wife and the city of Adrilankha at the end of the novel.

As much as I like our new 2007 Volkswagen GTI , I was surprised and bemused to see that the GTI and VW brand have inspired a PC racing game GTI Racer . Too funny!

Taltos is the fourth volume in the Vlad Taltos series but is chronologically the earliest in sequence. This is a simple novel that details a very young Vlad and his first encounters with many of the recurring characters in the series. The text alternates between vignettes that precede each chapter, the main narrative about Vlad's journey to the Paths of the Dead, and anecdotal stories about Vlad's first forays as an employee in the (criminal) "organization" arm of House Jhereg. The three narratives come together by the end of the text. By this point in the series, you'll likely only find yourself reading (and enjoying) Taltos if you've read the other books in the series. If you are a fan of the Vlad books, you'll find this a light but enjoyable addition that nicely fills in many of the gaps in Vlad's backstory.

Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives collects his short novel The Atrocity Archive and the Hugo Award winning novella, The Concrete Jungle . Both stories provide a fun blend of nerdboy tech and supernatural espionage. In addition to the Lovecraftian elements like mathematically brewed gates to other dimensions and transmutative security cameras fitted with gorgon-harnessed firmware, Stross also mixes in very funny asides, mostly in satire of federal and office bureaucracy.

Eastern Standard Tribe is an entertaining but flawed near-future novel about online "tribes", the convergence of new technologies, and a corporate conspiracy. The book's strong points are its ideas and extrapolation, which come through despite a conventional and rushed plot. The entire text of Eastern Standard Tribe was released under a Creative Commons license on Doctorow's website and is free to be read without the publisher's permission.

As many of you know, my wife and are looking to purchase a house. In the interest of choosing wisely, I wanted to reach out to those of you who own a home and ask for your suggestions and tribal insight. We know the basics, but we were wondering about the lesser known truths, for example, anything you learned about your home or the purchasing process after you bought your home, but that you wished you knew beforehand.

As comic book movie adaptations go, Ghost Rider was a middling effort, with good action sequences but a weak plot, uneven pacing, and forgettable villains. The CGI was imaginative but not as good as it needed to be to really sell the flaming skull and bike scenes. I did think the penance stare was pretty cool. The actors did the best they could with the material and the film fortunately didn't take itself seriously. It even featured a number of intentional camp humor bits where it seemed to be making fun of its own schlock.

Teckla is the third novel in the popular Vlad Taltos fantasy series, and much darker in mood and style than its predecessors, Jhereg and Yendi . The novel begins as Vlad learns that his wife Cawti has joined a group of reformists, who are actively pushing for greater rights for the underclasses in Dragaera. Vlad struggles greatly with Cawti's new affiliation, as he does not share her political ideals, and the two argue bitterly and drift apart through the course of the narrative. Their dissolving relationship is paralleled against the rising reform movement that threatens to become an all-out insurgency. Atypical themes (for fantasy) of personal dissolution and political unrest combine to make this a very memorable novel, with genuine emotion and verisimilitude not characteristically found in books of the genre.

I had an opportunity to see Kathy Griffin live last week (on February 12th, actually) at Shea's Performing Arts Center in Buffalo. I must say, her stand up is even more snarky and irreverent as her television routines. Maybe it's a guilty pleasure, but I enjoyed her riffs at Paula Abdul, Donald Trump, Star Jones, and others and succumbed to many delightful paroxysms of laughter. I also liked when she showed her serious social political side, and skewered George Bush and Mel Gibson. All proceeds from the show went to a local Buffalo AIDS clinic. Say what you want about Kathy Griffin's style and celebrity-baiting humor, but that was a very cool move on her part.

Though released after Jhereg , Yendi is a actually a prequel and recalls a younger Vlad in a turf war with a rival crime boss. Like its predecessor, Yendi is a lot of fun, with rich characters, witty dialogue, and an enthralling fantasy world.

Jhereg is an entertaining, fast-paced fantasy that introduces Vlad Taltos and his constant companion, a leathery-winged jhereg. I recently reread Jhereg , and though I hardly read any fantasy anymore, I was pleased that I still enjoy Brust, and his humorous, anti-epic, wry blend of fantasy. I'm looking forward to finally reading the rest of the series.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a superb, captivating novel about Christopher Boone, an autistic boy, and his quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog. What makes this novel so amazing is its narration. Told completely from the point of view of Christopher, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time illuminates and makes real a complex mind that knows geography, math, and science exceptionally well but that cannot relate well to people or understand human emotions. If you haven't read this yet, go read it right now.

Rainbows End is a near future SF novel about a dawning virtual age and the threat of a deadly biological weapon. I had mixed reactions to the book. While I liked the main character Robert Gu (a former Alzheimer's patient now cured and younger thanks to breakthroughs in medicine) and his attempts to assimilate to a new world where people interface directly with computers and silent message each other, I found myself wondering at times if the novel's setting, circa 2025, was far enough in the future for the kind of deep medical and software innovation present in the book. I also thought Vinge's use of markup to denote silent messaging was awkward. I know what he was trying to do, but markup is for web geeks and programs to process it, not prose! Still, you could do far worse than reading this novel. The story is engaging and the technological extrapolation is always interesting though unlikely to happen in the next twenty years.