Ravenweb Blog

I don't read that much Fantasy these days, but if Graceling is any indication of what's out there now, maybe I should read more. In the world of Graceling ,  some individuals are born with graces, or heightened talent and advanced skills in various areas, such as archery, swimming, or dueling. Physically, graced individuals are distinguished by different colored-eyes. Of course, some graces are deemed more useful than others, such as the (apparent) fighting grace of the novel's main character, Katsa. The conceit of graces works well as Katsa learns more about her grace as the novel progresses, and she begins to distance herself from those who would use her abilities for their own ends. She also befriends and later falls in love with a fellow graceling, and together they travel to confront an evil king with a powerful and far-reaching grace. Overall, Graceling is very enjoyable and I recommend it to anyone looking for some Fantasy. For a more detailed review, check out Ran...

Portal is one of those innovative, ground-breaking games that's been so popular that even infrequent and casual gamers have played it. The praise is well deserved. Fundamentally, Portal is a classic first person, puzzle level game in which you must get through various game levels. What radically differentiates the experience, though, is that in Portal you are equipped with a portal gun that you use to make portals in the walls, floors, and ceilings. This enhancement forces you to reconsider the typical spatial awareness in game levels and think in portals. The implications are fun and far-reaching. For example, you sometimes need to create two portals on opposite sides of a room to bypass a chasm. Or you may have to create a portal on the floor a few levels down and an exit portal high up on a wall so you can jump into the portal below and have your momentum take you from the portal above to a high, previously inaccessible ledge on the other side of the room. You are led through th...

I actually played Half-Life 2: Episode Two shortly after it was released, in October 2007. Like its predecessor, Episode Two continues the Half-Life story and provides another four to six hour adventure in which you battle the Combine as Gordon Freeman, sometimes on your own and sometimes with the assistance of Alex Vance. As an installment, I enjoyed Episode Two a little more than Episode One - I thought the levels and environments were fun and a bit more varied, and the pacing was just right. I thought the ending with the timed Strider sequence was too difficult, though, and could not beat it initially. After two dozen or so tries, I gave up and only tried again recently when I replayed the game. My luck was no better the second time through, and I ultimately resorted to cheat codes to finish the game, one of the only times I've ever done so. My difficulty with the ending is the reason I did not blog about the game after first playing it, and am only posting now, following the r...

I never post about sports, but I had to post something about Terrell Owens signing with the Bills [1]. My first reaction was utter shock and disbelief. Terrell Owens is a high-maintenance, bright lights, football celebrity. Buffalo is the last place one would expect him to land. Granted, it's a business and money is a powerful lure, but it's still surreal, like a philosophical category mistake: green ideas sleep furiously. Or, in football parlance, epicanthic footballs prevaricate fulsomely. [1] For those of you who don't know me, I reside in Buffalo, NY.

I'm not a big fan of audiobooks and only under rare circumstances will listen to one. Last Thanksgiving was one of those occasions, when my wife and I were driving back to Buffalo from a holiday getaway in Montréal and had a long stretch that was perfect for an audiobook. For One More Day is in the tradition of It's a Wonderful Life and tells of Charles "Chick" Benetto, a man who was once a baseball star with a loving family, but who has since fallen far, and is now out of baseball and estranged from his family. When the text begins, Chick has hit rock bottom and is contemplating suicide. As with George Bailey, though, before Chick completes the act, he encounters the supernatural in the ghost of his dead mother. This is the setup for the rest of the novel as Chick gets to spend "one more day" with his mother and recall crucial events from his past. Along the way, he'll ask and tell his mother all the things he wanted to express but didn't before s...

The album Synchronicity came out in 1983 when I was in junior high and just getting into music. I was immediately hooked by the lyrical density and blending of rock, reggae, and jazz, and quickly became a fan of The Police. Sting's first two solo albums -- The Dream of the Blue Turtles and ...Nothing Like the Sun -- came out when I was in high school. To this day, I remember listening to songs like "Message in a Bottle", "King of Pain", "Don't Stand So Close to Me", and "Russians" over and over. With Sting's solo albums, I remember reading the liner notes and how impressed I was with Sting's simple yet expressive writing, and the narrative behind the songs. As I'm sure it was for other cerebral teenage boys, to me, Sting was the epitome of cool, literate and brooding, yet debonair and adored by women everywhere. Broken Music is Sting's memoir and recounts his life up to the formation and early successes with The Police. I...

Mickey Rourke is exceptional as an aging broken-down wrestler and delivers a memorable, bravura performance. Go see The Wrestler, if you haven't already.

I love the Half-Life franchise , so I thought this short movie was great (not to mention remarkable considering the budget).

Ordinary Heroes is an introspective WWII action drama that follows a young US Army JAG Corps lawyer assigned to investigate the alleged insubordination of a Major in the CIA-forerunner OSS. I don't read many WWII novels and had never before read anything by Turow, but I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to any fan of war fiction.

The conceit of Dear American Airlines is brilliant: a novel in the form of a complaint letter to the airline from a man who missed his flight to the wedding of the daughter he's not seen since she was a baby. Of course, the letter begins as a rail against the airline and missed flight and then devolves into a fugue that encompasses everything that went wrong in the narrator's life that led him to this point. Jonathan Miles is a talented writer and there's no doubt that the novel is clever, but it felt a bit too indulgent at times, and I had no sympathy whatsoever for the narrator. Perhaps that was the point, but at times it made reading his account not unlike being stuck on a long layover.

I've added a link to Mike "Mish" Shedlock's Global Economic Trend Analysis blog in my Blogroll. For the unfamiliar, Mike Shedlock is a registered investment advisor who blogs just about every day about the U.S. and/or global economy, and he cuts through all manner of economic double-speak, forecasts, and other seemingly abstract financial information with hard data and clinical acumen. His blog was recently selected as one of the best 25 financial blogs by Time Magazine . In these grim economic times, his blog is an invaluable resource for economic straight-talk. I should note that Mish does not pull any punches and his posts are not for the faint of heart who may not want to know the depth of the problems with the global financial system.

As has been reported and commented extensively, John Updike passed away today. Though I've never been a huge fan and in fact have resented some of Updike's attempts at SF, I felt compelled to comment because Updike's Rabbit novels were very key for me in graduate school, particularly when I wrote my thesis about coming of age and rites of passage in American literature. Like many modern fictional characters, including Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye , Sal Paradise from On the Road, Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom epitomized the immature adult who is unwilling and unable to articulate or responsibly confront his problems. Rabbit almost gets it of course and Updike's prose is dead on in demonstrating the failed realization: "You don't think there's any answer to that but there is. I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes...

I knew I wanted to read Wicked after seeing the entertaining theatical production inspired by the novel last year . Not suprisingly, the novel was far different from the upbeat and funny musical, darker and brooding, with deeper traces and pathways from the source materials. Maguire's mediation on Elphaba's (the Wicked Witch) formation spans her birth (with green skin that immediately casts her as an outsider) and troubled upbringing, to her headstrong young adulthood when her idealism pits her against the statist propaganda and discriminatory policies of the Wizard, and, finally, to her emergence as the Wicked Witch, when her idealism gives way to cynicism and she becomes no better than those she formerly railed against. I recommend Wicked for anyone who enjoys well-crafted literary fantasy, and, of course, fans of the movie and original story. That said, fans of the musical who are looking for a novel that reads and feels like the theatical production may want to steer clea...

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is lewd, crude, in poor taste, and altogether offensive, but it is also very funny, if I'm being honest. I'd venture that a fair bit of what the author recounted is a stretch or an outright fabrication, but I'm not sure it matters, at least not for the reasons it mattered when James Frey exaggerated events in A Million Little Pieces . To the extent that the stories and vignettes in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell are entertaining -- and some readers will argue vociferously that they are anything but -- it is because of the author's constructed but authentic-seeming tone and storytelling voice, not the alleged facts of the events he recalls.

Charles Bukowski is one of those authors who I've been wanting to check out for as long as I can remember (probably since the mid-90s) but hadn't done so until last month. I'm not sure why it's taken so long. I've read most of his contemporaries, and -- thanks to Amazon and other resellers -- his works are now more accessible than ever before. Perhaps I've hesitated to dive in because I'd heard that Bukowski engenders very strong positive and negative reactions, and I was wary of my own expectations influencing my reading. As it turned out, I needn't have worried and should have got started reading sooner. Post Office is a first-person account of Henry Chinaski, a man who loves racetrack betting, drinking and women above all else, and who works for the U.S. Postal Service in Los Angeles. What follows is an authentic and funny narrative, in which Chinaski relates his (mostly frustrating and maddening) experiences working for a dull, bureacratic instituti...

We're nearing the end of another year, and I wanted to highlight some of the major posts and blog stats from the past year. Most Popular Posts 1. Scrubs Finale? 2. Configuring a Wireless HP Photosmart C4380 3. Seinfeld 4. Embedded Blog Comment Form Most Popular Book Posts 1. How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill 2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz Most Popular RSS Posts 1. How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill 2. Slam by Nick Hornby 3. Seinfeld

The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick warns of the dangers of eating a diet high in fructose and correlates excess fructose consumption to a number of serious medical conditions, including high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and kidney disease. The book covers all aspects of fructose in detail, including how it's absorbed into the body, the relationship between fructose and uric acid, how fructose doesn't satisfy an appetite, and the significance of high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener in which fructose is a key component. One caveat/disclaimer: while the lead author (Richard J. Johnson, MD) comes across as sincere and presents a persuasive argument with ample data and research, he clearly has a vested interest in the success of his argument and even has developed a Low-Fructose diet and submitted several related patent applications. So, as always when at the intersection of an argument and a possible business venture, stay wary ...

Earlier this year, I attended a project kickoff meeting for a large website redesign project. There were many attendees, over two dozen if I remember correctly, from various business units and departments, and a vendor team was also present. One of the recurring themes of the meeting was the importance of diverse groups in large, complex projects. To reinforce the point, the Project Leader distributed a copy of The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki to every meeting attendee. I was interested in the concept presented at the meeting and followed up by reading the book. The Wisdom of Crowds very much endorses the notion that groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them or a single brilliant individual. But not just any group. As Surowiecki demonstrates, not all groups are wise and some become mobs. For a group's collective intelligence to rise and produce better outcomes than a single or small group of experts, four conditions must be ...

I previously blogged about my friend Travis Belrose, who has recently completed The Samurai Poet , a historical novel set in Japan. Since then, Travis has established a personal website containing more information about the novel, and links to further topical reading and images of the Shisendo temple in Kyoto that inspired the creation. Check out the website of Travis Belrose at http://www.travisbelrose.com/ .

The Sociopath Next Door is a fascinating study of individuals who seem to be born without a moral conscience and make up 4% of the population. Author Martha Stout describes the defining features of sociopaths, including superficial charm, deceitfulness, impulsiveness, and a lack of remorse, and offers three examples of such people. In the final analysis, the text is interesting and arresting, and provides telling insight into sociopaths and some of their common behavioral patterns.