Multimedia Completion November

Books:

#26: Course of Empire. Take Eric Flint’s political intrigue and KD Wentworth’s fuzzy aliens with interesting cultures, and you have a fun little alien invasion tale. It’s very long, but worth it.

#27: Baen’s Universe 2-4: Laws of Survival was interesting. Aliens come to earth to collect dogs because they think they’re intelligent, but finds that none of them behave as they do in the TV shows. Misfits is a Liaden story of a weather specialist. Fossilized Gods started really slow, but had some funny moments and ended well. Second Banana was a fun little metal-gear-solid sort of thing. Countdown to Armageddon continues to be interesting. I really enjoyed Inheritance, but then again, I really enjoy getting in the head of machine intelligences. 

Games:
#4: Mana Khemia. Fun, but rather long… 

Videos:

#39: The Big O Season 1. Interesting concept, but it didn’t really seem to go anywhere. Kind of like a japanese Batman… 

#40: Lord of the Rings: Fun series, perhaps doesn’t follow the book as well as it could. 

#41: Doctor Who: The Next Doctor. I really enjoyed this and can’t wait for the next few episodes… Hope they come out over here soon.

#42: Chrno Crusade: No relation to Chrono trigger or chrono cross, even though the US logo was redesigned to match it. The series wasn’t bad, but wasn’t really great either. The whole 20’s slang thing was fun. Basically, it’s a story of a militant order of nuns and priests using guns to fight demons. 

#43: The Last Exile. This one was a lot of fun, basically a story of a couple of courier pilots that get involved in a war that ultimately changes the whole world. Reminded me of Grandia 3 a lot.

#44: Heroes Season 1: Not your typical superhero show… but it does deliver a complex plot involving time travel and the like. Some of the powers in the show just seem useless though.

#45: Revolution OS: An old show about the origins of linux. I was happy to see them try and debunk the whole communism thing in spite of RMS acting like one. 

#46: Primer: Interesting time travel concepts… I like how they didn’t try and dumb it down for the audience, but expected the audience to rise to the level of the movie.

#47: The Hudsucker Proxy: Very much like It’s a wonderful life. It was fun, though I didn’t enjoy the stereotypical corporation nonsense in it.

#48: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I understand the arguments that people make against Intelligent design about it being a wedge to force creationism in, but this makes the argument that it’s a scientific discussion and that creationism is not, and that by shutting out anyone who mentions Intelligence being involved in the construction of cells, getting them fired, getting them blacklisted, modern science is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and acting very much more like a religion than science. It breaks godwins law a bit though. It also has quotes from prominent evolution supporters like Richard Dawkins essentially saying that it’s possible, but that it would have been another form of life that evolved, then created our form of life, which is perfectly in line with the theory of intelligent design. It doesn’t say that all life is intelligent designed, just that life on earth seems to have no easy start to evolution without some intelligence tying it together. For me? I’m open to either idea. It’s quite possible that we’ll ultimately find some mechanic where the low level proteins of earth-based life could have evolved. We’ll have to keep studying it, as long as we don’t shut the argument down before we have all of the data. Maybe as we explore space we’ll find some primitive proto-protein arrangements that would function as a living cell without the extreme complexity of earth-based cells. Until we find it or replicate it ourselves, we’re shooting in the dark as to the whole issue. (Intelligent design is a bit of a cop-out to not having enough information.)