Tag: Earth

Seeing Redd

Reviews

Back in March I read a book called The Looking Glass Wars.  I enjoyed it enough to pick up the sequel, Seeing Redd.

We are back in Wonderland, and its been… well, some short period of time since the end of the first book.  The book uses “lunar cycles” to measure time, but its unclear if a lunar cycle in Wonderland is the same as one on Earth, but I suspect it isn’t.  Here on Earth, a lunar cycle means from full moon to full moon (or new moon to new moon, if you wish), which runs about a month.  In Wonderland, I am guessing that its much shorter, perhaps that the author might in fact mean just one day, as is the moon comes up and then the moon goes down.  In some places the book says its been a full lunar cycle, and you can easily imagine a month having gone by, yet in other places when an urgent task is required to be done in two or three lunar cycles… well, would waiting two or three months really make the task urgent?

In any event, the book keeps with that same similar style from the first book where things are said but not explained, which is good that the book isn’t bogged down with explaining exactly what an orb generator or a scorpspitter is, and yet, given the way that I read books, constructing the world in my imagination, without details I’m left to fill in the gaps myself, or just to have gaps.  Filling in the gaps myself often leads me to having to revise my image of something later when a new detail does emerge, which then causes me a little confusion concerning earlier events…

Despite those issues (which might be my issues alone), the book still reads well.  It moves along at a good clip, hits the high parts and delivers a decent punch.  I enjoyed it.

Earth Day

Random Thoughts

Today is Earth Day.

So, being that that is what today is, I figured it was time for another edition of what I will from now on refer to as “Probably Not Saving The World!”

Previously on the blog, I’ve mentioned my efforts to reduce my junk mail. The first couple of steps I took helped, but it always seemed to be a momentary slackening of the flood, not a stoppage. Then I was pointed at GreenDimes. I signed up for their $20 premium package, and the junk mail has all but stopped. At this point, the only things I get that I consider junk are a few local items, which I can excuse because they are local advertisements of local businesses and not big chains. Its nice, and it makes me feel better about not wasting all that paper.  With the GreenDimes service, you can even get the names of previous tenants dropped from lists, which is great since at this point nearly a third of my junk was for people who don’t live at my house.

We still keep up on the recycling, but even more so, I recently suffered through caffeine withdrawal in order to stop drinking Cokes, and have pulled way back on the number of canned and bottled beverages I drink. With a decent filter, tap water is just as good, if not better, than anything you can buy at the store. Plus, the more things you buy at the store (like sodas and bottled water) are more things that need to be trucked around the country. While I haven’t gone totally for “buying local”, I am trying to cut back on all the things I buy where I can.

Next up, we are looking to have an energy audit done on the house. That’s where someone comes and inspects the house to find all the places where you can improve efficiency, mostly for heating and air conditioning, to cut back on usage. As it is, we are trying to let the house stay cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer if we can stand it.

I’m really hoping that within the next five years I can get solar panels put on the house. You can even get money from the government to help with that, and get a tax write off.

So anyway… Happy Earth Day! Even if you don’t believe in “Global Warming”, garbage is still garbage, and less garbage is good.

I Am Legend

Reviews

Normally, I am not a vampire guy. Except as bad guys. That whole Anne Rice immortally tortured gay blood sucker thing just put me right off. About the only time I have ever liked a vampire as the hero has been the TV show Angel.

Luckily for me, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend isn’t about do-gooder or tortured vampires.

The story tackles an idea normally reserved for zombie movies, what if the world were overrun by vampires. A virus of some sort has swept the world and slowly the world succumbed. There are two kinds of vampires, dead ones and live ones, but there is only one man left. Robert Neville is the last man on Earth, and with no end in site, with everyone he loved gone, for some reason he just won’t give up. He keeps garlic on his doors and windows by night and goes out for supplies and to kill sleeping vampires by day.

Given the bleak subject matter, its a true testament to Matheson’s writing that the story doesn’t spiral into a morose somber mess. Instead there is an odd sense of hope, and even humor, in Robert Neville’s life. The end left me a little wanting, I understand what Matheson was doing there, but some part of me just felt a little… cheated. But the rest of the book is good enough that I’ll forgive him.

If you don’t care to read the book, it has been made into a movie a number of times in the past, although always under another name (The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston directly, and I’m sure the story influenced quite a few other films), but this year we’ll see a more direct adaptation in I Am Legend starring Will Smith. I suspect it will deviate from the book much like Mr. Smith’s previous I, Robot did. But I would still recommend reading the book.

There had better be a 2fort map

Gaming

The news has been out for three days. How on Earth did I not know about this already?

The only game I ever played for longer than EverQuest was TeamFortress for Quake. It freaking owned. I really hated deathmatch games, and bland Capture the Flag wasn’t too much better. But TF… that was awesome. Nine classes, allowing a player to play to their strengths, made for incredible strategies. The leagues for TF were some of the most intense things I have ever experienced in gaming. But when TF Classic came out for Half-Life, well, it was a little disappointing to me. It just seemed like a straight port of the game into the new engine. It was fun, but I just didn’t get into it, in fact, I kept playing TF.

TeamFortress 2, as you can read in the article I linked, has been a long time coming. And I love the new style of graphics they have going. Lots of games have come out over the last couple of years, but nothing that made me want to upgrade my PC. This… this will do it. Now I just have to figure out a way to afford it.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Reviews

It has been a very long time since I read through the 1985 DC Comics event, but last year Marv Wolfman decided to write a novelization of the comic. Crisis on Infinite Earths tells the same tale of the original comic, only this time largely from the point of view of Barry Allen, The Flash.

If you’ve read the original, or if you read the first chapter of this book, you know from the get-go that Barry Allen dies. If you have followed The Flash comics since the original Crisis series, you also know that Barry didn’t really die so much as join the Speed Force (well, first he skipped off into the future, had a couple kids with his wife, Iris, and then permanently joined with the Speed Force, but that’s not really important right now). So from the first pages you know Barry is dead, but somehow and for some reason, the Monitor and the Speed Force are keeping him around in some sort of super accellerated ghost state. Appearantly he has something important to do.

The story is fairly confusing as it leaps from Earth to Earth and through time all over the place telling you things out of order and upside-down. But the snippets are still interesting, and the end of the book ties everything together nicely, adding a new dimension to the old comic book without destroying it.

If you liked the original Crisis, then I recommend this book.

However, I do have one complaint. The original series was published in 1985. This book was published in 2005. Twenty years. Alot has changed in those twenty years, and Marv lets slip in a number of current and recent pop culture references that simply didn’t exist then. Then again, comics have always been a very weird art form since their characters tend not to age while their world usually stays fairly up to date with the times, so I can overlook it a bit but I strongly feel that every one of those references could have been removed form the book and it would have worked just fine. It didn’t need pop culture. Still, it was a good read.

The Wish List

Reviews

I really enjoyed the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, so when I browsing through Barnes & Nobles’ “Books under $3” deal a few months back, I picked up The Wish List for $1.

The basic plot is this: a girl, who was in the midst of being bad after having done a number of bad things in her life, dies after doing something good, which winds up with her having a fifty-fifty read on the good-evil-ometer. So since neither Heaven nor Hell can take her just yet, she is allowed to go back to Earth and help out someone who needs help. If she succeeds, she goes to heaven; if she fails, she goes to hell. And while Heaven agrees to let her make her own way, Hell cheats and sends someone to stop her… the spirit of the man who did her in. When she gets to Earth, two years have past and she ends up having to help a man complete some items of his wish list before he shuffles off to the afterlife himself.

Okay, so its not so basic. But it was a good read. I thoroughly enjoyed the tale as she, Meg, deals with the man she has to help. I guess with this book Mr. Colfer hops over on to my “good author” list, which means if I see his name, I’ll probably enjoy it.

On Earth As It Is In Hell

Reviews

I picked up the new Hellboy book On Earth As It Is In Hell warily. I really enjoyed the last two by Christopher Golden and seeing a new author on the books, well, I wondered if they’d have a similar touch to the tale that I found so interesting in the previous books. My apprehension was unwarranted in the end as the book proved to be quite good. Excellent in fact. Brian Hodge did a great job putting you not only into Hellboy’s head, but the heads of all the members of the BPRD. In fact, this book reads more like it should be titled a Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence book instead of a Hellboy novel.

The short version… Seraphim show up at the Vatican and try to burn a priest and the document he is studying. Turns out the document may or may not have been written by an elderly Jesus Christ, who survived the crucifixion and ended up in a place called Masada (real place, about which a number of odd stories surround). So the Vatican, or rather a small group of priests who want to protect the document and actually reveal it to the world, calls in the BPRD to protect the pages until they can figure out who wants them burned. Only, as usual, Hellboy and his team get in a bit deeper than intended, and don’t sit on the sidelines where the Vatican wants them to stay.

A good solid read, and kept me turning pages all the way through. Another book I highly recommend.

NASA and the Moon

Random Thoughts

I’ve always loved the space program. I’ll watch any movie or documentary on the subject, and I’ve done many a school report on both its successes and its failures. I want us, the human race, to get out there iin the Universe and travel. As a step to that, we, NASA that is, is planning on going back to the Moon.

Now, this is one point where I disagree with lots of people as I don’t think we should go to the Moon. For one, there really isn’t anything there. Sure, we might be able to put a base up there, but it will be about as self sufficient as a space station, only much further away and more expensive to travel to. Second, going out into space, seeking out new life and new civilizations and stuff, we need to get over our reliance on Earth based launches. See, in space, you don’t need aerodynamics much… a brick flies as well as anything else in a vacuum. So, in my opinion, we should be focused on building three things… Cargo launch rockets, large capacity as efficient as possible to punch through the atmosphere and take supplies to orbit; Lander crafts, nice aerodynamic space planes for taking people in and out of the atmosphere; and Flying Bricks, for hauling cargo and lander crafts across the universe, built in space and never intended to enter atmosphere. But forget all that, and lets just stick to NASAs “the Moon is the key to space travel” idea.

They unveiled their plan… Apollo on steroids. They put up the lander module in space with one launch, then launch the crew capsule with crew later, dock in space and head to the moon. Fine, sounds like a nice plan, and they’ll be on the Moon by 2018. They plan on sending unmanned probes to the Moon to do some scouting too, in 2008 and 2011… and this is where I have a problem.

We’ve got these rovers on Mars. We launch them from here, rocket them to Mars and land them, and now we have these little motorized dune buggy science robots roaming around the planet looking at cool shit. Its a good design… so, why not just adapt the existing Mars lander probes to do stuff on the Moon? Are they saying its going to take over 2 years to build a Mars lander? Or are they going to needlessly go back to the drawing board and start from scratch?

We should have a Moon lander in less than a year, period, end of discussion… why? Because, given what we’ve been able to learn about Mars using the landers, we’d probably be able to tell if its even possible to build a functioning base on the Moon and we won’t have to wait until 2018.

One of the issues with living on the Moon will, of course, be oxygen. One of the cool things about the Moon is that there is already oxygen there, in the rocks. I know it sounds funky, but one of the more common substances on the Moon is called ilmenite which is made of Iron, Titanium and Oxygen. Currently there is a contest going on, like the X-Prize they did for putting a man in space, where the object is to design a functioning process to extract the oxygen from the rocks. This is also why we need a probe on the moon within a year, to make sure we can do it, because in two or three years we will need to be sending unmanned robot vehicles with test equipment to see if it really works on the Moon. I’d hate for us to design and test, on Earth, a process for making oxygen just to get to the Moon in 2018 and find out that it doesn’t work out there. Now, maybe this is what they are planning for the 2008 and 2011 probes, but they only mentioned searching for suitable landing places.

Anyway, enough from me… my main point here is that we already have the technology, why design the same stuff over again? Just rig up a Mars lander and get thee to the Moon already!