So today I received my new laptop.  It’s a Dell XPS m1530, Intel Core II duo 2.2 GHZ processor, 4 gb RAM, 300 gig hard drive, GeForce 8600 video card, and the best sound card I could get for this baby… she is beautiful.  Easily four times the machine the Aberrant-001 was.  And slimmer and lighter, too.  Also, despite the fact that the screen is a tad smaller, since it has better resolution, I get better viewing size.  And the keyboard doesn’t suck.  There’s a bunch of other side benefits, too – fingerprint secured login, 802.11n wireless, Vista (which, I must say, while I’m still getting used to the Mac-like elements, I don’t see what the hate is all about.  So far, everything has been smooth as butta.)  This is one beautifully sweet machine, and though we’re still getting used to each other, I have a feeling we’re going to have a very beautiful relationship.

I’ve been pretty busy with life and school, so I haven’t had a terrible amount of time to settle and let things sink in, but today I’m bringing you three things from the front lines of awesome for you to peruse.

Cloverfield: Fresh on my mind is Cloverfield, the 21st century’s take on Godzilla.  Produced by J.J. Abrams, the guy from Lost, and written by Drew Goddard, Mutant Enemy alum.  So, there’s a couple of things to talk about in this movie.  First off – it’s a very good movie.  Let’s get that right out of the way.  The writing is very well done – all of the characters speak in more or less exactly the same way you would expect a person to speak.  It’s all very real, in the moment kind of thing.  The story itself is the type of story I would write – it’s not just a simple “world is blowing up, let’s leave” thing.  There’s simple heroic moments in the film.  So all in all, good times.
Now, the bad. The worst aspect of the film for me was the camera.  I get the whole Blair Witch everyman documentary type film they were going for.  But… wow.  They took that way too far, and I think to the point where it took me out of the movie far too much.  This is especially jarring in the first act of the film, before everything goes to hell, because here I felt they were just trying to say “Look!  This is the worst camera guy ever!  Look at all of the amateurish mistakes he makes!”  He makes mistakes that no one in their right mind would make.  (Seriously?  If you’re videotaping a guy giving a speech, no one would simply stand still while the idiot in front of you puts up a cell phone that completely blocks the guy you’re taping.  No one.  Not even a retarded chimpanzee.)  All of the tiny little purposeful mistakes took me out of the context of the film to remind me that I’m watching someone pretending to be a bad cameraguy.  It was, in effect, the equivalent of overacting.  That being said, once the main characters are off on their own having their “adventure”, the camera thing works.  (Unless you’re susceptible to motion sickness, that is.)
Finally, the other bad, the monster.  The movie follows the Alien style of shooting the monster – fast glimpses, bare shadows, small fractions, all of which help to paint in your mind some horrible, freakish thing.  For the most part, this works, and they do it very well.  Until the end, when they finally pull back the curtain and reveal The Creature… which looks like a Colossal Gollum mutated with a lizard-fish.  The freaky lice things that eat people?  Awesome.  The final monster?  Not so much.  But, luckily, the monster isn’t the point of the movie, so at the end it doesn’t detract that much from the final product.
At the end the movie was a very good example of a monster/disaster movie.  It’d get the gold but for the mistakes mentioned.  As it stands, if you’re thinking of watching it, you won’t be disappointed.  Cloverfield gets a silver recommendation.

Gaming Night, by Johnny Nexus.  Johnny Nexus is awesome – he’s the author of Critical Miss roleplaying web-zine.  So right out of the bat, I was going to like this.  The premise of the novel is a group of gods sitting down to roleplay… really badly.  The novel is very amusing.  At times, it is hillarious.  It doesn’t quite reach the level of a Pratchett book, but it’s very similar in its sentimentalities.  So it should be pretty clear that Johnny Nexus will make a very fine novelist in a few more books.  This, however, should not be his ouvre.
The bad is pretty simple – there’s so much potential here in the book, but a lot of it goes wasted.  Some of it is due to the characters in the book being really stupid (or just really bad roleplayers), but there’s more than enough other times when it’s simply just wasted opportunity.  There are way too many characters that are just played for laughs, and there are times when there’s hints that there’s more to the characters than what’s shown, but it’s never paid off.  So, overall, the book’s not going to appeal to anyone who hasn’t done the roleplaying thing.  Johnny Nexus’ Game Night gets the bronze recommendation.

Confessor, the final novel of the Sword of Truth series, by Terry Goodkind.   There’s very little to say about Confessor, actually, now that I think about it.  The first 250 pages of the book are a totally unnecessary extended recap of the last eleven books in the series, with a couple of chapters necessary to set up the rest of the book.  The socialist-hating in this book is a lot less, much more attention is paid to the actions of the bad guys as opposed to merely their ideals, which is always far better.  And once you hit around page 300, the book takes off like a rocket, and more or less doesn’t stop except for a minor lull there between the middle and final acts to get all of the players where they need to be for the finale.
Like Wizard’s First Rule, the ending is clever.  Unlike Wizard’s First Rule, it’s not 100% satisfactory.  It gets to about 95% of what I wanted to see happen, but just falls short of perfection.  An A is just as good as an A+, however, so it’s pretty well settled now that Goodkind did not fuck this book up.  Overall, I think, the book is pretty good – certainly not his best, but a good enough send off to the series.  Not recommended for anyone who has never read a Sword of Truth book, but if you’re a fan of the series, you will not be disappointed.  Bronze recommendation.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I lost my IU Class Ring.  This still saddens me despite it being about two months now that I haven’t been able to find it.  I just took it off one day in order to clean my apartment, and now I can’t find it.

I bring this up only because last night I had a dream wherein I found the ring.  At first I was just happy that I had found it, and then put it on like always.  (The ring wasn’t in my apartment in the dream, it was in my house back in PR.)  Then I realized, talking with my mom, that the ring was actually broken.  So I looked down at my hand and realized that the ring was split down the middle where the gem was located.  I pulled it apart and the ring came off in two pieces.

It was a strange dream.

What’s the point of the Real Housewives of Orange County?  This show has to be the most pointlessly vapid show on television.  I mean, the Girls Next Door at least are Playboy models, you know?  (Although, if I had to guess, I’d go ahead and wager money on the Housewives beating the Girls Next Door on a straight up intelligence test.)

Life is full of small successes that make the larger lack-of-progresses (I won’t say failures, as I haven’t quite reached a stop state, but dang if it’s not hard to see the positives) that currently haunt me very pleasantly bareable.  The coquito turned out to be much better than previously anticipated – indeed, it is even very good.  You really need to wait for it to settle and thicken before you can get a full taste for its final flavor.  So, needless to say, I am happy.

I made a pecan pie yesterday, which likewise turned out delicious.  I altered the recipe a tad, and the results were pleasantly mild in their manifestation.  It is times like these that I kind of wish someone could bask in my glory.  Although my apartment sucks in terms of cleanliness right now.

Also, the Planescape session last night was fun times.  (And I apparently am getting good reviews, see comments to last post).  There were some serious technical issues with the loading of the maps on MT, so we wasted about an hour trying to hash those out.  (For some reason, Maptools didn’t appear to appreciate my use of city street maps.  I’ll have to look into this.  Actually, I’m thinking now I know the reason, and will probably try to find a way to rectify that.)  Because of this time loss, I had to rush the wrap up of the session, as I wanted them to get back to the first “act break” of the adventure, and so ended up losing a few more flavor bits in the Abyssal tavern.  Overall, much more fun was had than I had expected, especially since it was a low-combat session and the RP-heavies were missing, though those present stepped up quite handily.