A bit of this, a bit of that

I keep neglecting my blog and depriving it of random, incoherent nonsense! Naughty me!

Must correct behavior...

Thanksgiving


So how was your Thanksgiving, fellow Americans? Mine was gluttonous, as usual. Sucks to be back to work. Sucks harder to have Xmas music playing in full force in the stores. The hell of the Holidaze is upon us. Oh well, apparently North Korea's missiles can now reach DC, so I suppose nuclear conflagration and self-destruction may trump (hah!) that problem.


Things Breaking


What the hell is it with misfortune happening in clusters, anyway? First my phone jack in my apartment dies a mysterious death, then my computer chair breaks (maybe that extra slice of pumpkin pie was a bad idea?), then a goddamn storm drain breaks (flooding my balcony), then lightbulbs on the back of my building (including my balcony) burn out (not ominous at all), then my key-holder breaks (causing said house keys to stab me in the thigh - AWESOME!). I swear, if this is related to offending those pagan gods while breaking a mirror under a ladder I'm gonna be miffed.

BART Weirdness


This morning, I swear to the FSM, my BART car smelled like cotton candy.

Do you have any idea how weird that is? On a good day, BART just smells like unwashed train car and possibly marijuana. Most times one notices an odor, it's extreme body odor, feces, urine, or some combination of all those mixed in with indescribable horror.

Cotton candy just isn't a BART smell. I'm really curious what that was about.

A Job Medium Rare


Hah! I made a funny! Get it? Medium rare instead of we... oh never mind. Anyway, I've been deluged with projects over the last few months and actually managed to complete the big one two days ahead of deadline! I'm giddy enough that I am actually mentioning a semi-positive work thing!




Yeah, okay. It sound stupid when I see it written out.

Futility


Few things are more fun than finding out you've spent an hour of your life doing testing on a product by using an unsupported browser. So all those nasty issues you found? That nice, long list of detailed notes? Totally useless.

Yup. Great fun.

Review: "Thor: Ragnarok"

Let's be honest here: this is more of my reaction than a proper review. Kind of like everything I post, really.

So I just got out of a showing of Thor: Ragnarok and HOLY SHIT WAS THAT MOVIE A BUCKET OF FUN!!!!

If one were to be honest, Ragnarok is more of a spiritual cousin to one of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. It's got goofball humor, a fair amount of '80's nostalgia, flashy space opera craziness, campy villains, and a lot of snark.

A lot of snark.

Chris Hemsworth continues to knock it out of the park with the perfect combination of arrogant badass and snarky humor as Thor Odinsson. Tom Hiddleston returns as Loki, the villain who is sometimes just an anti-hero. Mark Ruffalo returns as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. And this time we get classic, comic book Hulk. Idris Elba returns as Heimdall, the Asgardian who is as badass or more than Thor. And there's other returnees from the previous Thor films. They also introduce Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, a fairly obscure heroine from the Defenders comics in the Marvel universe. An interesting take on the character in this film.

On the villain side, we get Kate Blanchet who rocks every scene she's in as Hela, Goddess of Death. With her is Karl Urban playing the villain known as Skurge the Executioner.

I won't bother going into the plot. It's pretty crazy and I really don't want to spoil it. Suffice it to say, the story doesn't have many slow points. There's always something going on. When there isn't, the film cuts away for some villain to chew the scenery or some hero bonding and snark.

I honestly think this was the best of the Thor movies, hands down. A low bar, sure. Still, I would put Thor: Ragnarok up against possibly one of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies for well-paced fun.

As a bonus, I got to see trailers for Justice League and Black Panther. Until Wonder Woman, I really had no desire to see any of the DC movies. The previous ones were largely crap. The last Batman film I liked was The Dark Knight. Now that I've seen the Justice League trailer, I have to say I'm sold on seeing it. As to Black Panther, that just looks like a massive ton of fun. It's good to have films to look forward to.

Review: "Eutopia" by David Nickle

To be honest, this book caught me off-guard. I'd seen a review of the sequel, "Volk", on BoingBoing and the premise intrigued me. I got "Volk" and "Eutopia" off of Amazon after skimming the reviews. I got "Eutopia" first, which is just as well and...

Damn.

Set in rural Idaho (and bits of Colorado) in 1911, "Eutopia" is essentially a tale of a would-be utopian community set up by an industrialist in Idaho, as seen through the eyes of two protagonists: the first is Andrew Waggoner, an African-American surgeon educated in Paris. As one might imagine, he encounters no small amount of discrimination and trouble being a "Negro" (this term is used constantly in the book) doctor in rural America a little bit into the 20th century. The other is Jason Thistledown, an orphan of a terrible plague that kills everyone in his flyspeck town in Colorado, save him.

The two wind up meeting one another in the town of Elidia,the aforementioned would-be utopian community just as shit goes sideways. You see, there's not just your backwoodsman, Klansmen (the early part of the book has Waggoner nearly lynched by KKK dickweeds), outlaws, and the like. Oh no. This book is a horror story. It's got non-human monsters to go with the human ones.

In this case, there's parasitical creatures known as Jukes who can alter one's perceptions and induce people to worship them as gods.

And it gets worse, but why spoil the story?

"Eutopia" is a horror tale told through an interesting filter of early 20th Century America. It's got eugenics (and all the racist baggage that comes with that), straight-up racism (above-and-beyond the eugenics), and just a lot of fairly horrible examples of humanity in it. Nickle's story almost doesn't need the Jukes in it to be a horror tale, truth be told.

But he's got 'em in the story, and they're creepy as fuck.

"Eutopia" was, at first, a slow read and not really the sort of thing I'd pick up, but I'll be honest: I couldn't put it down. It was gripping and fascinating. Andrew Waggoner and Jason Thistledown were engaging protagonists and the rest of the cast were fascinating in their own way.

If you're looking for a bit of Americana horror, go no further.

I'll be interested to see if "Volk" can keep up the intensity.