A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

So Lost ended, and ( poop. )

The rest of you may all commence making fun of me for grousing about this but still liking Battlestar Galactica.

JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL was my train-riding book today because I had no other, and I found that the very next chapter addressed the continuing fates of the characters I had taken for forgotten. I stand by my earlier criticism, because there is a very real difference between a reader anticipating missing characters' return, and wondering if the author's simply misplaced them.

LOST continues to be a soup of delightful and spicy meatballs floating in a broth of stale television cliches. Usually I have no palate for it, and sometimes I just have to have five bowls of it. I slurped down a good half-dozen episodes over the last 24 hours, and have three more to go before I know what half my flist is so happy about.

PSYCHONAUTS is wonderful, and is currently a $15 download for XBox 360 users. (I understand PC users can enjoy it via Steam, as well.) I have a lengthy post about it that I may actually finish someday. Suffice to say it's certainly the best written platformer-genre game I've ever played.

RACE FOR THE GALAXY is an amazing card game and I wish to play it again right now. I will almost certainly be purchasing a copy soon.

After a hard day's work (for serious), watching Lost via abc.com. They upgraded their video player in such a way that the ads are bigger, which is nice, except that it doesn't work on my G5 any more and plays with lotsa sound hiccups on my laptop, enough to drive me kinda bonkers. I'd totally pay $2/pop to iTMS to download and watch pristine Quicktime versions, but since that's no longer an option, it's thepiratebay.org for me!

It's a race; I may end up watching all the current eps online anyway just from impatience, but we'll see.

I wasn't looking forward to season 4, but ruthling gave it the thumbs-up in her LJ recently and that sold me, since our feelings on the show have historically run about the same. (It's got tons of cool stuff, and tons of really annoying stuff. Arrrgh, so much annoying stuff. But... but the cool stuff!)

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Understood that jmac.org/blog isn't as unread as I thought. Very good.

I'm going to resume my hunting for cross-posting solutions later. Someone has to have solved this problem correctly, by now...

I am catching up on Leeorst. I have three or four more to go. As my friends insisted, it pulls way up out of its midseason dip. I even enjoyed "Exposé", the one-episode side-story that tasted like a mashup of Lost with Tales from the Crypt. One thing I do like about this show is that it doesn't go goofball too often, and when it does it succeeds.

Does Lost get in on the good side of Mo's Movie Measure? I think so. When two women are talking, the subject is a man maybe only half of the time. There's another third given to pregnancy or babies, and the remainder to monsters and Others and other Losty topics. Still, though.

Stalled on Heroes. I love watching it with classicaljunkie but the opportunity/mood mesh hasn't come up in a while. I'm not interested enough in it right now to watch it by myself.

I impulse-bought Mario Party 8 alongside some audio equipment with an Amazon order in April, and it finally shipped. Casual single and two-player play suggests that it's lame, repetitive and childish. (No, I hadn't played or even seen any Mario Party games before. I bet they're all like this.) I am not buying another Wii game until either some get cheap enough for risk-free(-ish) impulse buys, or the gamer Zeitgeist says go buy Game X right now.

As was the case with Odin Sphere, a PS2 game that I picked up last week. I finally give it a whirl last night. Yeah, it's pretty neat. It's also very hard, relatively speaking. Seriously, it's been a while since a game presented a fierce challenge from the get-go, the common case nowadays still being rolling, exploration-centric adventures, where battles serve more to pace the story than present you with true do-or-die situations. And this one does it well, with clever nods to some very old mechanics we haven't seen in a while; key to good gameplay is re-learning how to use the radar from Defender, for gord's sake.

The character animation is unexpected, for a video game. Does it remind me a little of Fantastic Planet, somehow? That may not be appropriate but it comes to mind anyway. OK, that combined with Flying Circus-era Terry Gilliam. Seriously. I'm thinking of the creepy and fascinating way it depicts the fast-growing plants that are (in the game's loopy world) central to powering up, with rustling vines and tumescing fruits growing in cardiac pulses, all looking like stop-motion construction paper sliding around under the hand of a master animator.

I foresee myself enjoying this game for a good while.

Man, BSG rocks ass all over Lost. I feel numb after watching the mid-season opener, even though not much happened.

It's still a good time and I will continue paying $2/ep to iTunes until the show ends or I get cable again, whatever comes first. But watching it in small servings over time like this - as opposed to consuming it in heaping portions at dougo's house like I did last year - I feel like I'm being toyed with.

With BSG I feel that I'm told a distinct story every week even though the stories all fit into a much larger storyline. I guess Lost tries to do that with the flashbacks, but the flackback-stories don't really stand out by themselves; they're usually about as deep as "Once upon a time there was a woman but her husband was unfaithful and her mother drank. So she became bitter. The end."

I have been playing too much Ratchet & Clank. I must have just sunk half an hour into this game's version of grinding-for-gold. OK, I have the stupid qwack-o-ray now. Time to hang up the controller for a while.

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The job thing has been resolved! The long delay was, I have been informed, due to egregious internal miscommunication at the company. I am holding a contract in my hot little hands. I have not read it yet. It has been summarized verbally, and I certainly don't expect anything untoward from these folks, but I intend to examine it closely and settle the matter today.

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I got new shoes. They are just like my old shoes, except that they have yellow details instead of blue. Crazy-looking brooks running shoes again. I wish they were more low-key but they feel so good and they wear down evenly despite my horrible pronation.

I still need to get a pair of dressier shoes for business stuff, though. Ugh.

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I watched three more Losts and thought they were great. Shrug. The audience was great, though one of our number has dropped out. Most of the rest of us are going to gorge on the remainder of season two Saturday.

( Small spoiler; actually me complaining about TV tropes again, and reminiscing about 1990s comix. )

I have a mixed bag of observations about the show's treatment of things like race n sex n body types. It does some things that I like and has disappointed me in other ways. This is a post for another time.

Random hypothesis:

In general, and over the whole history of the medium, characters in television shows lie far more often than real-life people would in similar situations. This is because lying is an inexpensive way for writers to introduce plot twists and intercharacter stresses.

This from a conversation with dougo about "Lost", which I've been watching on DVD. Midway through the second season I'm getting pretty tired of how the all the characters turn to lying so easily, even to characters that I'm fairly sure are supposed to be people they trust. It's moved past caution into what I'd call childishness. These are supposed to be complex adults, not little kids who think that the best way to handle an encounter with something weird is to never tell anyone ever (or until you blurt it out when sufficiently harassed or otherwise upset).

I think this is related to why characters in modern-setting fiction never call the cops. But at least Lost doesn't have that problem...

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Also the actor(s, probably) playing Claire's baby are several months too old, at least in some shots. Even I can tell the difference.