I have always had a passion for games. I have intense vivid memories of board and yard games from my youth that still bring a smile to my lips. Today, with more than half a century of life behind me, games are still an important and vital pastime.
As I sit here composing this missive, I can look up from my desk straight to my board and card game shelving, and to the right of that my bookcase with numerous Role Play Gaming books. Continue reading
SOULLESS by Gail Carriger
Published in 2009 to great reviews and tremendous sales Gail Carriger’s Soulless, is a whimsical steam punk paranormal romance with Vampires, Werewolves, and Parasols 
(please, never umbrellas.) It is the first of the Parasol Protectorate series, which concludes this March with the publication of Timeless.
The book’s protagonist is Alexia Tarabotti, who lives life under a number of difficult conditions. She is soulless, though that is a guarded secret from most of the world, her father, with whom she shares a complexion, was Italian, an ancestry hardly praised in Victorian London, and she’s a spinster, her marriage prospects considered to be non-existent as totters on in the advanced age of twenty-something.
Alexia’s London is not our Victorian setting, but one where the werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and other unworldly creatures of the night have become part of English Society, influencing fashion, politics, and colonialism.
Alexia’s comfortable if somewhat boring life is disrupted when an unknown, hiveless vampire attacks her and she is forced to dispatch the creature. Being soulless, a trait the unfortunate vampire seemed terminally ignorant about; Alexia’s touch negates all supernatural abilities. QueenVictoriadispatches an investigator, the Scottish werewolf Lord Canall Maccon whom harbors ill feeling towards Alexia over ‘the hedgehog incident’. not only to probe into the unlawful destruction of this vampire, but into his mysterious origins as a hiveless vampire is the best knowledge, impossible as all vampire are products of the a hive queen.
Alexia is quickly drawn into a adventure of mysterious appearing vampire and mysteriously disappearing werewolves while dealing with the infuriating Lord Maccon and bothersome American scientists.
Soulless is a fun read, wonderfully free of angst and best described as whimsical. The book is a light, fast read that promotes giggling and isn’t afraid to look silly. Escapism gets a bad rap in entertainment, but there is a place and a need for escapist fare. One cannot dine happily upon staid state dinners every evening, the occasional good times, good drink, and good food with friends are also good dining and Soulless is to books what these fun diner days are to posh restaurants. The characters are well drawn and distinctive, each bringing a set of traits that promotes comedic effect rather than having comedy forced upon them. The plot moves quickly and yet takes the time to hint, display, and illuminate Gail’s marvelous world building. While her vampires are inspired from the same traditions of Dracula and her werewolves are clearly derived from, as are nearly everyone’s these days, Sidomak’s Wolf-Man, she adds more than enough to make each fresh and her own.
The most memorable misstep in the novel was that Gail explained the ‘hedgehog incident,’ an event that should have forever remained unknown and therefore of limitless possibilities in her fans’ minds, but really that is a very small flaw in my opinion.
This is a book I would have not read had I not known the author personally, and I would have been poorer for that loss.
I have no idea what happened but the digital demons have eaten this post.
The other day I had the urge to look upon my childhood home. Now, that home is in another state that happens to be located on the far side of the North American continent from where I currently reside. This being the 21st century those things were not insurmountable problems. What was more of a problem was that I had no idea of the address.
After consulting with my brothers and sisters, they were able to give me the data I needed in order to not only find it on google maps, but see it through the google map street view function.
A few weeks ago a couple of friends and myself sat down and watched on Blu-ray the remake of 90’s vampire flick, Fright Night.
I had seen the original film during its first run in 1985 and while I didn’t haste the film, nor did I love. My friends were more favorably inclined towards the original. Continue reading
I know a number of people who do not approve of the Obama presidency, and I can tell you that stating it that way is as mild as it gets. IT has been interesting watching them shift from potential Republican nominee to the newest acceptable nominee candidate as the field shrinks and their prefer choice is eliminated.
There is no doubt that when the election rolls around many of these friends will walk into the voting booth and pull, punch, mark, or otherwise indicate that their selection is for the Republican candidate.
What I wonder is if any of these people, or anyone else out there who has been really animated against the current administration, can argue for me why we should vote for the Republicans, without mentioning Obama or democrats? Can they make a positive case for their side, instead of a case based upon, “The other guys are worse?”
p.s.
For what it is worth I consider Obama to be a merely mediocre president. He could have done better, he could have done more, but I don’t consider him to be the abject failure that some paint him to be, or the sainted hero people wanted him to be.
1/23/12 20:04 started developing a headache. Took 1 dose of treximet.
Last night movie-wise I was certainly in an odd mood. My potential selections, based on time constraints, ranged from the light hearted, (The Hudsucker Proxy) to the serious genre film, (Village of The Damned) thru the blockbuster (Jaws) to what I finally settled upon, 
1975’s espionage thriller, The Eiger Sanction.
This was the fourth time that actor Clint Easton had stepped into the director’s chair on a film. In the decades that have followed Eastwood has been nominated several times and has won the Oscar for Best Director. While The Eiger Sanction is a good film, it’s not up to his recent standards.
Eastwood plays Dr Jonathan Hemlock – we never learn is that is an assumed name or not – a government assassin, now retired to teaching art as a college professor. When the Agency has need for an assassination or ‘sanction’ requiring Hemlocks unique skill set, they ruthlessly press him back into service. Continue reading
Mitt Romney’s career as a venture capitalist has become a point of attack by his political enemies, both Republican and Democratic.
His supporters have fallen back on the defense that these attacks are about class warfare, envy and a hatred of success. It is an understandable, if misguided defense.
I have sympathy for the people trying to defect this line of attack. This is an emotionally very charged and very effective line to use against Mitt Romney, but why is that? Are these charges generated by class envy, by people who are jealous of Romney’s success and vast fortune? Continue reading
One of the perennial questions is can men write believable and credible women characters? (It is rarely asked if woman can do the same for male characters, the answer is generally assumed to be yes, but that’s a little afield from where I want to go in today’s essay.) I have an author friend, NYT bestseller and all, who feels that she has never encountered a well written female character emerging from a male writer’s prose. I know other women readers who are quite the opposite, adoring some male writers for their depiction of females.
(If you want to start an unending argument at an SF convention, in a mixed audience, praise Heinlein’s female characters. You will ignite women passionate on both side of that questions.) Continue reading