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indigozealI wanted to like Monster House, and I mean, it's not bad - it's an all right film with a few smart lines, a premise that appeals to your inner child detective, and, in the first half, a good feel for a suburban neighborhood - but it's straining at the edges of its cheap CG (particularly with whatever eerily accurate facial expression-capturing software they used), and jokewise, I wish they'd gone for the broad and obvious a bit less often. In other words, it's more a kid's film and less a true family film that can be enjoyed by all members of the household.
Incidentally, I rented Monster House at the local video store, and between the depressing prevalence of straight-to-DVD turkeys and the forced chit-chat with antipathic neighbors, this was the visit where I learned that Netflix and Amazon are the video outlets for me. And full-screen? Really?
Angelique: Love Call, meanwhile, is the point where I discovered Hideyuki Tanaka was never going to do it as Clavis for me. We all know about the lack of Shiozawa Clavis's sarcastic edge, but there's a core of...fragility? sensitivity? just plain soul? that's also lost. Tanaka's deep in timbre, but he's flat and innocuous, almost grandfatherly - he reminds me of Victor more than anyone. He also has no chemistry with Lumiale whatsoever.
Anyhow: the rest of the drama is the usual Trois-and-on candy fluff where the Guardians have to pretend that the slightest of disturbances constitute the gravest of crises (here: the Guardians vacation on an island during a shooting-star festival - but what will happen when Limoges & Rosalia decide they want to come along?!?), and I lost my patience a little bit into the second half. The songs, save for "Force of Passion," are passable "meh" (the lack of effort in the Ernst-Mel collaboration is particularly frustrating, given Morikawa's voice and the cuteness of the characters' interactions in drama tracks elsewere). The real attraction here, oddly, is the LoveLove tracks, which were recorded using a 3-D microphone and, if you wear headphones, sound spookily like the characters are moving about while talking to you in your very room. So if you've come across any "AAAH OSCAR IN MY EAR GET HIM OUT" tracks in your downloading adventures, this album is from where they come.
Paranormal Activity 3: My audience liked this well enough, and I can see from where the enthusiastic reviews are coming - a lot more happens in this installment, that's for sure. We seem, though, to have lost the idea of staring at the mundane until we notice the something out of whack that's been staring us in the face - the casual, unassuming presence of evil; now, we're just watching typical horror setpieces through home video, and even though there were several bits that were perfectly creepy individually, the aggregate just seemed like goofy overload after a while. The initial installment had its problems, but when they at last arrived, the moments of violence had real impact after all the quiet that had come before. Another problem: the seams are showing in some of the performances and the directing (read: it seems stagey).
Also, those beds at the end. Those were Bert & Ernie's beds, man. And why was the purported '80's babysitter dressing like Sandy from Grease?
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is one of those books that'll never be read by those who most need it: it uses the accessible tool of the newspaper to teach statistics and how to apply them to make sound decisions and process information in everyday life. An excellent concept for a book, and a breezy read - the book is segmented like a newspaper (world news first, then the local section, sports, and special interest), and each chapter, centered around one faux headline and a single statistical principle it illustrates, lasts only two to four pages. The author delves a bit more into stuff like combinatorics and calculus than he perhaps should for a general audience, though, and his personal prejudices and blind spots bring it down - no, John Allen Paulos, I don't think extended consideration of a hypothetical future where every human pregnancy resulted in 50 embryos would end the abortion debate. (Also, it could use an update providing more background on some of the mid-'90's stories it cites for those not offhandedly familiar with, say, who Lani Guinier was.)
You may have heard tales of Opinion Outpost hooking up SomethingAwful members with $70 survey panels, but they are not going to come true for you if you are not an 18- to 35-year-old male, sorry. (Not even dreams of occasional $5 Amazon gift cards are gonna come true.) I know; I'm not going to get rich filling out surveys. I can't believe it, either.
I certainly see enough icons & avatars from Homestuck in my forum travels, and the comic's simple, clean clip-art style and gimmick of being "played" like a text-parser adventure game would certainly seem to account for a great deal of its popularity. The game's opening act, though (about a PC game in beta that seems to be destroying the world), is a heckuva slog to get through, bloated with a lot of internetty Extruded Humor Substitute (the hero's into Matthew McConaghey films; his dad's obsessed with painting harlequins, etc.). After several hundred pages (!), once there's finally substantial plot progression, the author instead skips ahead a few hundred years to an apparent postapocalypse, then jumps around between a couple shrouded protagonists there, then jumps back to a girl who apparently is the same age as the hero but is communicating with an older version of him, all while juggling three different simultaneous-kinda perspectives in the apparent present, and... There seems to be a possibly intriguing story here, but danged if the comic's ever gonna get to it.
This may be a stupid thing to rate, but I had recent occasion to try the Peach & Granola Sundae from Burger King, and oh my goodness - what have they done to these peaches? Instead of the canned-in-heavy-syrup slices I was expecting, there's this Pixy Stixish jell-o jam glop that tastes like no fruit from any loving god. I'm cheap and weak-willed and will normally finish any sweet in front of me given enough time but I couldn't finish this.
While we're on the subject of orange food, though - the first question a bag of Gimbal's Harvest Mix jellybeans might prompt is: did they nail the Pumpkin Pie bean? Well..sorry, no. It's an honorable attempt - you get a good deal of pumpkin pie spice in one bite - but there's none of the fruit there, and it tastes more like marshmallow than pastry (kinda redundant when there's already a Roasted Marshmallow in the mix). Gimbal's is particularly strong with their fruit juice flavors (pick up their Cherry Lovers mix if you get a chance), so I don't mind their stretching the fall motif to include the ("Harvest") Berry and ("Goblin") Fruit Punch flavors, and they know how to do Peach, at least - plus, their Red Delicious even has a waxy appleness to it (even if Harvest Spice just tastes like a slightly spicy Chuckles). Perhaps not worth searching hither and yon, but a nice slight change of pace for autumn candy.
.
Incidentally, I rented Monster House at the local video store, and between the depressing prevalence of straight-to-DVD turkeys and the forced chit-chat with antipathic neighbors, this was the visit where I learned that Netflix and Amazon are the video outlets for me. And full-screen? Really?
Angelique: Love Call, meanwhile, is the point where I discovered Hideyuki Tanaka was never going to do it as Clavis for me. We all know about the lack of Shiozawa Clavis's sarcastic edge, but there's a core of...fragility? sensitivity? just plain soul? that's also lost. Tanaka's deep in timbre, but he's flat and innocuous, almost grandfatherly - he reminds me of Victor more than anyone. He also has no chemistry with Lumiale whatsoever.
Anyhow: the rest of the drama is the usual Trois-and-on candy fluff where the Guardians have to pretend that the slightest of disturbances constitute the gravest of crises (here: the Guardians vacation on an island during a shooting-star festival - but what will happen when Limoges & Rosalia decide they want to come along?!?), and I lost my patience a little bit into the second half. The songs, save for "Force of Passion," are passable "meh" (the lack of effort in the Ernst-Mel collaboration is particularly frustrating, given Morikawa's voice and the cuteness of the characters' interactions in drama tracks elsewere). The real attraction here, oddly, is the LoveLove tracks, which were recorded using a 3-D microphone and, if you wear headphones, sound spookily like the characters are moving about while talking to you in your very room. So if you've come across any "AAAH OSCAR IN MY EAR GET HIM OUT" tracks in your downloading adventures, this album is from where they come.
Paranormal Activity 3: My audience liked this well enough, and I can see from where the enthusiastic reviews are coming - a lot more happens in this installment, that's for sure. We seem, though, to have lost the idea of staring at the mundane until we notice the something out of whack that's been staring us in the face - the casual, unassuming presence of evil; now, we're just watching typical horror setpieces through home video, and even though there were several bits that were perfectly creepy individually, the aggregate just seemed like goofy overload after a while. The initial installment had its problems, but when they at last arrived, the moments of violence had real impact after all the quiet that had come before. Another problem: the seams are showing in some of the performances and the directing (read: it seems stagey).
Also, those beds at the end. Those were Bert & Ernie's beds, man. And why was the purported '80's babysitter dressing like Sandy from Grease?
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is one of those books that'll never be read by those who most need it: it uses the accessible tool of the newspaper to teach statistics and how to apply them to make sound decisions and process information in everyday life. An excellent concept for a book, and a breezy read - the book is segmented like a newspaper (world news first, then the local section, sports, and special interest), and each chapter, centered around one faux headline and a single statistical principle it illustrates, lasts only two to four pages. The author delves a bit more into stuff like combinatorics and calculus than he perhaps should for a general audience, though, and his personal prejudices and blind spots bring it down - no, John Allen Paulos, I don't think extended consideration of a hypothetical future where every human pregnancy resulted in 50 embryos would end the abortion debate. (Also, it could use an update providing more background on some of the mid-'90's stories it cites for those not offhandedly familiar with, say, who Lani Guinier was.)
You may have heard tales of Opinion Outpost hooking up SomethingAwful members with $70 survey panels, but they are not going to come true for you if you are not an 18- to 35-year-old male, sorry. (Not even dreams of occasional $5 Amazon gift cards are gonna come true.) I know; I'm not going to get rich filling out surveys. I can't believe it, either.
I certainly see enough icons & avatars from Homestuck in my forum travels, and the comic's simple, clean clip-art style and gimmick of being "played" like a text-parser adventure game would certainly seem to account for a great deal of its popularity. The game's opening act, though (about a PC game in beta that seems to be destroying the world), is a heckuva slog to get through, bloated with a lot of internetty Extruded Humor Substitute (the hero's into Matthew McConaghey films; his dad's obsessed with painting harlequins, etc.). After several hundred pages (!), once there's finally substantial plot progression, the author instead skips ahead a few hundred years to an apparent postapocalypse, then jumps around between a couple shrouded protagonists there, then jumps back to a girl who apparently is the same age as the hero but is communicating with an older version of him, all while juggling three different simultaneous-kinda perspectives in the apparent present, and... There seems to be a possibly intriguing story here, but danged if the comic's ever gonna get to it.
This may be a stupid thing to rate, but I had recent occasion to try the Peach & Granola Sundae from Burger King, and oh my goodness - what have they done to these peaches? Instead of the canned-in-heavy-syrup slices I was expecting, there's this Pixy Stixish jell-o jam glop that tastes like no fruit from any loving god. I'm cheap and weak-willed and will normally finish any sweet in front of me given enough time but I couldn't finish this.
While we're on the subject of orange food, though - the first question a bag of Gimbal's Harvest Mix jellybeans might prompt is: did they nail the Pumpkin Pie bean? Well..sorry, no. It's an honorable attempt - you get a good deal of pumpkin pie spice in one bite - but there's none of the fruit there, and it tastes more like marshmallow than pastry (kinda redundant when there's already a Roasted Marshmallow in the mix). Gimbal's is particularly strong with their fruit juice flavors (pick up their Cherry Lovers mix if you get a chance), so I don't mind their stretching the fall motif to include the ("Harvest") Berry and ("Goblin") Fruit Punch flavors, and they know how to do Peach, at least - plus, their Red Delicious even has a waxy appleness to it (even if Harvest Spice just tastes like a slightly spicy Chuckles). Perhaps not worth searching hither and yon, but a nice slight change of pace for autumn candy.
.
