Wednesday, August 17, 2005

40 Year Old Update

Well,

Royale got a teaching fellowship from the New York Board of Education, which apparently comes with a free Masters degree, so huzzah! And also Damn You Weber-Flink! You'll have more academic prestige than me!

Life and work have been pretty much steady, work is getting interesting as the design phase creepingly approaches the development phase (wherein I become the hero of the story).

Bookupdate:

I've recently read the first three novels in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, on the recommendation of a newsgroup friend.

        

It's an amazingly complex and mature epic fantasy modeled after the War of the Roses, the name given to the British civil war between the House of Lancaster and the House of York for the British throne in the 15th century. The two main houses in the novels are the Lannisters and the Starks.

Martin writes fantasy like nobody I've ever read before, primarily by avoiding any and all deus ex machinae (there is some magic around, but it is not much more effective than a score of knights, and very few people can use it). His characters are vivid, deep, and well defined, and Martin never betrays their motivations. Main characters die regularly, to be replaced by new characters, and each chapter is written from a different point of view. While Martin jumps around in time occasionally, the series is mostly in chronological order; however different accounts of the same events are often presented from different points of view.

The fourth book is due out in hardcover next month, when I shall devour it, but in the meantime here's what I have on my bedside nightstand:

   

MovieUpdate:

I went to the arclight last night to see a preview of 40 Year Old Virgin with the tiny israeli. I'm not particularly critical when it comes to film, but I think it was an entertaining 2 hours. There was very little degeneration into absurdity, and the main character's anger and frustration at his own fear of women and physical intimacy made him more human than a 2D high school sex romp virgin. On the whole, I enjoyed it, although Lee ate more than her fair share of the toblerone.

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