Thoughts on Alita: Battle Angel

I caught Alita: Battle Angel the other night. If you've seen the trailers, you pretty much understand this movie. If the trailer didn't illuminate you, the movie isn't really going to help. It was a fun action flick with great effects and fantastic fights. It would have been greatly improved by removing all speaking scenes outside of battle-banter. Any and all attempts at exposition or plot development should especially be purged.

Get past all that, and it's a solid flick. Loved it.

A Random February Brain Dump

Well this has been a peculiar winter. After a few years of unseasonably-warm Januarys and Februarys, I have to admit I'm taken aback by actual cold weather in February! Hell, there's snow on the mountains around the San Francisco Bay Area! An uncommon occurrence.

2019 has brought me a new fiction series I'm hooked on: the Shattered Sands series by Bradley P Beaulieu. A story of Ceda, a young, badass, warrior woman hell-bent on avenging her mother's death, the story's got some fascinating (and sometimes disturbing) twists and turns in the rich, vaguely Arabian/Persian world Beaulieu has created. I've burned through the first two books ("Twelve Kings in Sharakhai" and "Blood on the Sands") and now await the remaining two books in the series, out this year. There's novellas that are doing a delightful job of keeping me busy as I await their publication.

Going to be a good year for reading material, all told. The next Expanse book is out next month, along with John Gwynne's next novel. I've finally given in and started reading "Red Sister" by Mark Lawrence (recommended by several friends). I'm hooked and plan to get the rest of that series as well.

So I guess next week we find out if we're having another government shutdown while the orange man-baby debates having another tantrum over funding his medieval ego-toy. Sigh.