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Nov. 4th, 2005 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2I've never actually done the NaNoWriMo thing, but this week I've at least come up with a plot and written a couple of scenes -- not the most amazing start, and I don't know if I will continue on, but you know, at least I've written something this week. ^_^
When I was young I read all of the John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I loved them. I read them several times. Even though I can laugh at some of the sillier aspects of the series now (John Carter was such a good swordsman that he could hold of ANY amount of enemies and be completely assured that nothing could penetrate his defenseive web of steel... or something like that, he was just THAT good), there was still some really cool things about the series, not the least of which was the whole world he created, with massive ancient abandoned cities, ships that flew through the air over dried up ancient sea beds, secret kingdoms that had been cut off from the rest of Mars for untold eons... all very imaginative and still wonderful.
I also read some of the author's other series that were in a similar vein, and for a while I collected anything else that was similar. And there were several authors out there that were writing very similar stories -- ordinairy man transported to another, primitive world, becomes fantastic hero, gets all the girls, the fame, the fortune, the sports chariot or flying sports ship, or whatever. Most notable of these were the Dray Prescott books, which went on for well over 30 volumes before the guy finally lost his contract, or stopped writing, or died, who knows. These were pretty well written and much more carefully plotted -- it was like a soap opera for the swords and leather straps crowd, or something. I have most of the books, and have made several attempts to read the whole series, but my last best attempt only got me up to about volume 16.
And then, there were the Gor books. John Norman fused the whole John Carter of Mars plot device to a world of sado masochistic bondage, where women learned that their greatest role in life was to become someone's slave. Something like that anyway. I actually read the first five books of this series when I was a kid, and the thing is, they were pretty well written for genre adventure stories, at least from what I can remember. This was when I was in grade school, it really is amazing to think I read this stuff and had it in my room and my parents didn't realize it. But then, as a kid, I didn't really fully understand it either, I just knew that the bondage/sex stuff became more prominent with each book, until I decided I didn't need to read any further. I got rid of those books soon after.
The only reason I'm thinking of all of this is because there is a prominent "Gorean Society" active in Second Life. I've heard about them a few times, mostly from people who think they're weird (which, I guess I do too ^_^ ). I also accidentally visited one of their private islands once by accident... there was a mall there, but once I realized what the place was, I decided to leave. ^_^
There's a lot of other weirdness in the world, of course. Right now my character Mint is living on an island where one resident owns a "pony girl" ranch (if you don't know what that is, then you probably would rather not know ^_^ ) and anotherlikes to build Stargate-style teleporters, temples to an Egyptian god, and things like giant 30-foot tall penises, or tentacle plants with penises at the ends of the tentacles. Practically everyone on the island is furry and gay, but to me a 30-foot tall penis statue does not so much say "furry gay pride" as it says "really tacky lawn decoration".
Ah well. I don't really know why I'm writing about this.
On another completely unrelated subject, I listen the radio sometimes on the way to work or on the way home, and I might be doing more of that because my cd player suddenly doesn't want to eject the cd that is currently in it. But anyway, on the way to work I have the option of listening to news shows on NPR or Dave Grozby and Mike Gastineau on sports talk radio. Groz and Gas are two of my favorite sports talk show hosts -- I can barely tolerate the late-night host David Locke, and I absolutely cannot tolerate the moring host Mitch whatever his name is or the daytime host Softy. Nor can I tolerate most other sports hosts that I've listened to. So it really used to suck when my drive home at night was a choice between NPR's Diane Rehm show (a talking heads political discussion show -- I'm rarely interested in it) or a sports talk host, I can't remember his name now, but he called himself "The Brick" and would blather on about how cool he was because he gave YOU the voice and it was YOUR show. What this really meant is that he took more calls from fans than anyone else. I thought he was an opinionated one-sided hyperventilating windbag idiot, which coincidentally enough is what most sports talk call-in fans also are. Listening to call after call after call from people who think their team walks on water and everyone else sucks, and they want to scream at you why this is so -- well, this is what the Brick idiot's radio show was all about. Bleah.
So when his show was replaced by another, Todd Wright All Night, I was pretty happy. Todd Wright had his own problems. He was sort of a prima donna, he liked to interview every beautiful woman he could get ahold of and drool over them on the radio, and he has several other odd quirks. He couldn't ask a question without adding multiple parenthetical statements, asides, and comments into it, so that his questions were typically whole paragraphs that were 2-3 times as long as the guest's answer and sometimes you had trouble remembering what his question was by the time he got to the end of it. He really liked to hear himself talk, at least as much as he wanted to hear what any guest had to say. And he loved to go on and on about what sporting event he'd just been to, who he'd met or hung out with while there, etc.
On the plus side, he was very knowledgable about sports, he was willing to talk about any and all sports, he had a very different and I'd say "high brow" approach to running a sports talk show (which in itself was not just unusual, but probably unique). He had style. And perhaps most importantly, he could run a radio show for five hours, from 1 am to 5 am East Coast Time, and almost never take phone calls from fans. And that's difficult to manage -- it's very easy to just open up the phones and let the idiots speak. It's much harder to line up guests and work in various show segments to fill in the time more creatively. Whatever else you might think of him, Todd worked very hard at his show, and had on a lot of informative or entertaining guests. He annoyed me sometimes and I often chose not to listen to him, but he was a thousand percent -- no, ten million thousand percent -- better than the idiot who proceeded him, the guy who thought he was special because all he ever did is take phone calls and put idiots on the air.
So naturally ESPN got rid of Todd Wright and replaced him with some idiot who doesn't know much about sports, has trouble lining up very interesting guests, and who takes a lot of phone calls and fan e-mails when he can't think of any other way to fill in airtime.
Last night I finally remembered to do an online search and see if I could figure out what had happened to Todd Wright, but of course, the answer is simple -- he got replaced. It was interesting to me that, while some people said they loved him and missed him, while others said they had always hated him or were annoyed by him, and good riddance... absolutely NOBODY thought that the new guy was worth listening to.
Meh. Are you still reading this?
I watched Batman Returns last night. I would have never thought that any Batman film could improve on Tim Burton's first take on the dark knight, but I have to admit, this new film is probably my favorite Batman of all. It's true that the action scenes are not well choreographed -- there are a few flaws. But the film does such a wonderful job of fleshing out Bruce Wayne, of exploring his whole character, how he came to be who he is, how he formed his sense of justice, how he chose to become Batman, where he got all of his training and gadgets... and the plot itself is pretty clever too, where one criminal boss leads to a more psychotic criminal kingpin, and eventually to the real criminal mastermind. Very nice film. It's kind of scary in a way, how many good superhero films we've had in the past few years. Of course, it's very easy to forget the less successful ones that we've also had... heh. ^_^
When I was young I read all of the John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I loved them. I read them several times. Even though I can laugh at some of the sillier aspects of the series now (John Carter was such a good swordsman that he could hold of ANY amount of enemies and be completely assured that nothing could penetrate his defenseive web of steel... or something like that, he was just THAT good), there was still some really cool things about the series, not the least of which was the whole world he created, with massive ancient abandoned cities, ships that flew through the air over dried up ancient sea beds, secret kingdoms that had been cut off from the rest of Mars for untold eons... all very imaginative and still wonderful.
I also read some of the author's other series that were in a similar vein, and for a while I collected anything else that was similar. And there were several authors out there that were writing very similar stories -- ordinairy man transported to another, primitive world, becomes fantastic hero, gets all the girls, the fame, the fortune, the sports chariot or flying sports ship, or whatever. Most notable of these were the Dray Prescott books, which went on for well over 30 volumes before the guy finally lost his contract, or stopped writing, or died, who knows. These were pretty well written and much more carefully plotted -- it was like a soap opera for the swords and leather straps crowd, or something. I have most of the books, and have made several attempts to read the whole series, but my last best attempt only got me up to about volume 16.
And then, there were the Gor books. John Norman fused the whole John Carter of Mars plot device to a world of sado masochistic bondage, where women learned that their greatest role in life was to become someone's slave. Something like that anyway. I actually read the first five books of this series when I was a kid, and the thing is, they were pretty well written for genre adventure stories, at least from what I can remember. This was when I was in grade school, it really is amazing to think I read this stuff and had it in my room and my parents didn't realize it. But then, as a kid, I didn't really fully understand it either, I just knew that the bondage/sex stuff became more prominent with each book, until I decided I didn't need to read any further. I got rid of those books soon after.
The only reason I'm thinking of all of this is because there is a prominent "Gorean Society" active in Second Life. I've heard about them a few times, mostly from people who think they're weird (which, I guess I do too ^_^ ). I also accidentally visited one of their private islands once by accident... there was a mall there, but once I realized what the place was, I decided to leave. ^_^
There's a lot of other weirdness in the world, of course. Right now my character Mint is living on an island where one resident owns a "pony girl" ranch (if you don't know what that is, then you probably would rather not know ^_^ ) and anotherlikes to build Stargate-style teleporters, temples to an Egyptian god, and things like giant 30-foot tall penises, or tentacle plants with penises at the ends of the tentacles. Practically everyone on the island is furry and gay, but to me a 30-foot tall penis statue does not so much say "furry gay pride" as it says "really tacky lawn decoration".
Ah well. I don't really know why I'm writing about this.
On another completely unrelated subject, I listen the radio sometimes on the way to work or on the way home, and I might be doing more of that because my cd player suddenly doesn't want to eject the cd that is currently in it. But anyway, on the way to work I have the option of listening to news shows on NPR or Dave Grozby and Mike Gastineau on sports talk radio. Groz and Gas are two of my favorite sports talk show hosts -- I can barely tolerate the late-night host David Locke, and I absolutely cannot tolerate the moring host Mitch whatever his name is or the daytime host Softy. Nor can I tolerate most other sports hosts that I've listened to. So it really used to suck when my drive home at night was a choice between NPR's Diane Rehm show (a talking heads political discussion show -- I'm rarely interested in it) or a sports talk host, I can't remember his name now, but he called himself "The Brick" and would blather on about how cool he was because he gave YOU the voice and it was YOUR show. What this really meant is that he took more calls from fans than anyone else. I thought he was an opinionated one-sided hyperventilating windbag idiot, which coincidentally enough is what most sports talk call-in fans also are. Listening to call after call after call from people who think their team walks on water and everyone else sucks, and they want to scream at you why this is so -- well, this is what the Brick idiot's radio show was all about. Bleah.
So when his show was replaced by another, Todd Wright All Night, I was pretty happy. Todd Wright had his own problems. He was sort of a prima donna, he liked to interview every beautiful woman he could get ahold of and drool over them on the radio, and he has several other odd quirks. He couldn't ask a question without adding multiple parenthetical statements, asides, and comments into it, so that his questions were typically whole paragraphs that were 2-3 times as long as the guest's answer and sometimes you had trouble remembering what his question was by the time he got to the end of it. He really liked to hear himself talk, at least as much as he wanted to hear what any guest had to say. And he loved to go on and on about what sporting event he'd just been to, who he'd met or hung out with while there, etc.
On the plus side, he was very knowledgable about sports, he was willing to talk about any and all sports, he had a very different and I'd say "high brow" approach to running a sports talk show (which in itself was not just unusual, but probably unique). He had style. And perhaps most importantly, he could run a radio show for five hours, from 1 am to 5 am East Coast Time, and almost never take phone calls from fans. And that's difficult to manage -- it's very easy to just open up the phones and let the idiots speak. It's much harder to line up guests and work in various show segments to fill in the time more creatively. Whatever else you might think of him, Todd worked very hard at his show, and had on a lot of informative or entertaining guests. He annoyed me sometimes and I often chose not to listen to him, but he was a thousand percent -- no, ten million thousand percent -- better than the idiot who proceeded him, the guy who thought he was special because all he ever did is take phone calls and put idiots on the air.
So naturally ESPN got rid of Todd Wright and replaced him with some idiot who doesn't know much about sports, has trouble lining up very interesting guests, and who takes a lot of phone calls and fan e-mails when he can't think of any other way to fill in airtime.
Last night I finally remembered to do an online search and see if I could figure out what had happened to Todd Wright, but of course, the answer is simple -- he got replaced. It was interesting to me that, while some people said they loved him and missed him, while others said they had always hated him or were annoyed by him, and good riddance... absolutely NOBODY thought that the new guy was worth listening to.
Meh. Are you still reading this?
I watched Batman Returns last night. I would have never thought that any Batman film could improve on Tim Burton's first take on the dark knight, but I have to admit, this new film is probably my favorite Batman of all. It's true that the action scenes are not well choreographed -- there are a few flaws. But the film does such a wonderful job of fleshing out Bruce Wayne, of exploring his whole character, how he came to be who he is, how he formed his sense of justice, how he chose to become Batman, where he got all of his training and gadgets... and the plot itself is pretty clever too, where one criminal boss leads to a more psychotic criminal kingpin, and eventually to the real criminal mastermind. Very nice film. It's kind of scary in a way, how many good superhero films we've had in the past few years. Of course, it's very easy to forget the less successful ones that we've also had... heh. ^_^
