the tuesday nerd round-up

So, after long-lamenting the lack of literature where kids kill kids, society has finally recognized just how exceedingly common such books are.  All of the Hunger Games books are in my “finished reading” list but until this past week I’d never actually sat down to read Battle Royale. (I love how a Google search for “Hunger Games” or “Battle Royale” also yields the result of “Lord of the Flies” and a bunch of other ‘kids killing kids’ novels.) While the Hunger Games books and Battle Royale certainly have commonalities, they’re not the same. Obviously both evoke a conversation about fighting tyranny and unjust regulations but they do so in different ways.  Without evaluating spoilers, let me just state that I’d happily see both of these side-by-side as examples of a certain genre in much the same way that Frankenstein and Dracula are considered classics of horror/monster literature. (This is not an endorsement of either of those books as being the ‘best’ in said category.)

I recently re-watched the first season of Eureka because it had been years since I saw it and I wanted to move onto later seasons now that it’s all available on Netflix. I really wish that this show had a bigger following because I think more things could be done with it if it had a wider audience. (Anything on the Sci-Fi channel [[note– calling it “SyFy” demeans me as a geek and as a person]] does seem subject to minimal popularity, though.) What makes this show enjoyable isn’t that it’s overly intellectual or that it’s got action so intense that it’s unavoidably tense. What actually does it is the quirkiness of the characters. Even when they’re silly, they’re enjoyable to watch.

Lastly, Caledea. I had a chance to play this last weekend and it’s fun and not terribly difficult to learn. It’s got some flaws, though, in that it doesn’t really leave enough room for skill and strategy once battling begins. The game relies a bit too much on luck and with its limit of four players, this makes it harder to get invested in the early strategizing. I may have won the first game (all of us were first-time players) but I pretty much attribute that to the luck of the dice rolls I made.  (Okay, not entirely, but enough of it was luck that I can’t go around legitimately calling myself the “master of Caledea,” even though that may be what I kept crying out in the immediate aftermath of the game.)  Still, not a bad use of 90 minutes or so. (It may honestly have been longer. I lost track of time.)

A Comics Roundup

Back to the comics.  I got off track with reading and with updating because my work life decided to make me feel so compressed with other responsibility.  Well, what can you do when real life gets in the way of your fantasy life? You use it as fodder for your own future fantasy stories, I suppose.

Anyway, I finally had time to start catching up on some reading. I’ve been wanting to read Before Watchmen for months.  One issue in. The Minutemen.  My first reaction to hearing that there was going to be a Watchmen made my inner nerd seize. After finishing one issue I’m actually quite okay with it.  The artwork certainly captures the style of Dave Gibbons for Watchmen. And the characters are strong and interesting. Unfortunately I don’t know how well I can judge the overall story without delving further into my stack.

I also read the inaugural issue of Saga. Brian K. Vaughn is all hearts in my head when I hear his name. (Y the Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways are all enough to set my nerd brain fluttering about.) So I got excited that Comixology had the first issue for free. It’s a perfectly weird story but extremely well laid out, connected, and is beautifully done. I loved what I read and I’m hoping to download more soon.

This is also my plug (on a personal level, since it’s not like I’m getting anything for talking about it) for how much I like Comixology. I have a rule about no more physical media (if I can avoid it) and it’s nice to see comics available without having to swoop into a store and pick up paper copies. That said, I wish I had a newer, bigger monitor and a tablet so I could read things digitally in a nicer way. (These are complaints that really have nothing to do with Comixology, though.)