Fuzzy's Media Consumption

It was a fun little experiment, but I've folded the content from Fuzzy's Media Consumption back into the main FuzzyCo blog and new updates will appear there, mixed in with regular posts.

Marathon - The Ultimate Training Guide by Hal Higdon

This is kind of the book when it comes to Marathon information, and it is indeed a smorgasbord of advice, tips, anecdotes, and inspirational stories. I'm glad I wasn't relying solely on this book for my marathon plan, but it's a great reasource.

Well, there's that, then. I was impressed right off the bat with audacity of the flap blurb -- in lieu of any plot summary or such it simply read "We now present the seventh and final installment in the epic tale of Harry Potter." In other words, "look, if you don't know who Harry Potter is at this point, we don't need your business -- just go crawl back into whatever cave you're living in."

I found it somewhat darker and heavier* than the first six, but it's been a build to that I suppose. Now I'm off to read all the sites I was avoiding for the sake of spoilers.

* Including, of course, literally.

Oddly, because of the circumstances, it's hard to think of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as anything expect a prelude to the final book, which I'm about to start. I suppose it'd be different if I had to wait a year for the next one instead of five minutes.

I read the first four Harry Potter books and then bought the fifth (i.e. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) while I was in Scotland in 2004. I promptly never read it. But now that the last book is out, I figured I'd better finish up the series quick before all the shocking revelations were just out there in the zeitgeist. As Penny Arcade and Threadless* have noted, there's a statue of limitations on spoilers.

So, you know, pretty good for the cliched kind of wizardy young adult lit that it is. And hey, I did like sweetkealoha and found out which House I'm in:

* In fact, I just noticed that there's a sixth-book spoiler on that shirt.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron's affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine's editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

When we saw 500 Clown Frankenstein last month, the Clowns used the text of the novel in a rather physical fashion. It made me realize that I had never read the original novel. So thanks to Dover Thrift Editions I soon had a copy for $2 (if you can stand to read on a PDA or computer screen, the novel is available for free from Project Gutenberg).

There are, as you might expect, a ton of differences between the original story and the Universal Studios movies that are most people's source for the Frankenstein story. And of course, it's the product of a different era. But I have to say that Victor Frankenstein's passivity and whininess drove me crazy.

I was impressed by one authorial trick -- the novel is narrated by a British explorer who is writing letters to his sister relating the stories that Victor Frankenstein is telling him (think about the layers of meta there for a second) and Frankenstein never actually says how he built a person. Since it turned out to be such a mistake, he doesn't want anyone else to try, he says. But it's a delightful bit of hand-waving that prevents Mary Shelley from having to explain how it actually would work. (Unlike the movies, there doesn't seem to be any electricity or dead bodies involved, though. He just builds a man from scratch. Interestingly, after he's already built a working man he needs to go consult some English scientists when he's trying to build a woman -- evidently lady parts are different.)

I'm signed up for the Chicago Marathon and I'm training by myself using the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer.

This is a book that comes out of a class at the University of Northern Iowa that is a joint class between a psychology professor and a phys. ed. professor -- the phys. ed. professor brings the training you need to complete a marathon and the psychology professor brings a lot of self-helpy stuff about the mental preparation you need to get through the training process and then the race itself. I'd make fun of the self-helpy stuff, except that it seems to be helping already. And the book is aimed squarely at the non-runner and getting you to complete a marathon. Not do it with a great time or lose a lot of weight or any other side goals -- simply complete a marathon. Since that's what I'm trying to do, it seems like the perfect training program for me.

You can follow along with my Marathon progress on my main blog, if you like.

Your Movie Sucks is a sequel of sorts to Roger Ebert's earlier I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie -- both collections of his reviews of movies he enjoyed the least. The earlier book covered a few decades of reviews and so it had the stringent requirement of one star or less; the new book covers just the 21st century and so, I assume to pad out the book a bit, includes 1.5 star movies. It does mean that some of the reviews are less vitriolic and more Ebert basically saying, "eh."

But when Ebert is on a tear, ripping into a terrible movie, it's quite a sight to behold. The book opens with an extended introduction detailing a few reviews that resulted in public exchanges with the director or stars, like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (from which review comes the title of the book) and Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny.

It should be noted that these books are, like so much these days, effectively free online -- just go to the Advanced Search on Ebert's site, set the "Star rating To" field to one or one-and-a-half stars, and click Submit. But it's harder to take your computer into the bathroom, which just might be the natural home for this sort of book. Of course, you might also want to use it as a sort of affirmational -- read one of these reviews right before you leave the house and there will be a certain spring in your step. No matter what you do or don't do during the day, at least you didn't make a terrible movie.

Soon I Will Be Invincible is Austin Grossman's debut novel and it's rather good. It's a superhero adventure told in alternating chapters by an experienced evil genius (he's in prison for the twelveth time when the book starts) and a new cyborg hero. The action of the story is straight out of a silver age comic book (the villian says things outloud like "Who dares?" and "In the coming era I will rule the world, as is my right.") but the inner lives of the two narrators are complex and authentic.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Heaven - Season One by Mur Lafferty was recommended by Boing Boing and I listened to it as an audiobook over the course of a couple runs and bike rides to work. By chapter 8 I was not very interested, but I kept going just to finish the narrative. Which, as you might expect from a book subtitled "Season One", ended on something of a cliffhanger, so I wasn't even satisfied there.

FuzzyCo rating: eh.

Now that I've started running, I'm trying out listening to audiobooks. The first one I listened to is Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker, released as free audiobook by Subterranean Press.

The book is in Baker's "Company" series, about time-traveling immortal cyborgs, but this one is a stand-alone comedic adventure, set in 1930s Hollywood. It was delightfully read by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke

There's code here and there on FuzzyCo that goes back to 1994 or so, when I built my first webpage by hand and hosted it on my personal account on schenectady.ecn.purdue.edu (try typing that five times fast). And HTML 1.1 served me just fine for the next 10 years. Right around the time that I would have probably needed to really dive in and modernize things around here, I moved much of the site over to MovableType, which took care of enough that I could put it off for a little bit longer. But there are things I want to do with FuzzyCo that are going to require that I get up to, say, 2003 web design standards. So I'm slowly getting up to speed on the current state of web design.

This book is not a beginner's how-to level book to CSS, and so I didn't understand half of how I would actually implement the examples given. But I really glad I read it first, because it gave me a lot of great ideas about how to approach the workflow of redesigning my site(s), rather than just diving in and replicating my old tables structure with a bunch of divs and calling it a day.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

What a great new children's novel this is (grades 5-9, says the publisher). It's a grand adventure story of four extraordinary children brought together by the mysterious Mr. Benedict to save the world from impending doom. Each of the children has different strengths -- Reynie is a hardworking puzzle solver, Kate is strong and acrobatic, Sticky remembers everything he reads, and Constance Contraire is... contrary. But mixed in are some fairly serious explorations of the notion of family, of how far you can go fighting evil without compromising your ideals, of bravery.

A great review by Jessie at What We're Reading Now.

(Disclosureville: Trenton Lee Stewart is my co-worker Kenner's brother-in-law Trent.)

The Atrocity Archives by Charlie Stross

Charlie Stross mixes Cold War spy fiction with "nameless horrors" stories ala HP Lovecraft, with a healthy dose of Douglas Adams' Bureaucracy and modern computer geekiness mixed in, for an engaging read with a surprisingly sympathetic main character.

In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Revised 2nd Edition) by Walter Murch

This book was recommended in an aside in the DV Rebel's Guide and since editing is the area of film-making (other than, say, scoring) I'm most insecure about, I thought it'd be worth a read.

The first part of the book is a long essay, adapted from a 1988 lecture, on the nature and philosophy of editing. The second half is a discussion of the difference between analog and digital editing -- Murch knows this terrority well, having won the first editing Oscar for a digitally edited film.

The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap by Stu Maschwitz

We've made some action movies before, but FuzzyCo has recently decided to film an action movie that takes longer than 24 hours to make -- we'll see if the quality goes up in any proportion to time spent. Reading this book was step 1 in the new process.

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow is a spare and affecting work from Chicago comic book writer and artist Anders Nilsen. It's snapshots of his relationship with his girlfriend Cheryl Weaver, culminating in her sudden illness and death in the winter of 2005. By no means an exhaustive memoir of their life together, instead we get illustrative moments -- postcards they sent each other, a letter to his sister detailing a comically disastrous camping trip, a short list of Anders' faults as a fiancee. And almost before it's begun, the book is over -- returning from France, Cheryl is diagnosed with cancer and then treatments fail and then she dies. To the reader, it's devastating.

Cancer is something of a hot-button topic around our house these days, but I don't think that's a requirement to appreciate this book -- as Anders says in his afterword, "it's just love and loss. And everyone, for better or worse, can relate to that."

"The new graphic memoir, "Don't Go Where I Can't Follow," breaks a great many rules of form, concluding with what might be the most devastating 16 panels of artwork in Anders Nilsen's career." [LA Times]

"It's very difficult to deal with Don't Go Where I Can't Follow from any sort of objective or critical viewpoint: simply put, it's the best graphic novel to be released this year." [Tucker Stone]

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen

I think the two things that mark this as a Hiaasen book for younger readers is that the cast isn't quite as huge as usual, there's no sex, and the ending is much unabiguously happy.

Penny Arcade Volume 3: The Warsun Prophecies by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik

Penny Arcade is a webcomic with lots of video game in-jokes, strong language, and juvenile humor. I love it. This book is a collection of every strip that appeared on the site in 2002. Let me emphasize that those strips are still online -- you can read them for free. But I like having them around in dead tree format. I sometimes laughed re-reading a strip that I had read a few minutes before. There's something about PA that (often) plugs straight into the humor receptors in my brain.

The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld

I read a lot of Westerfeld last year, enough that I think I'm pretty much out of books until he writes more. Fortunately, he's prolific. The Last Days is a sequel to Peeps, set in the same world, but focused on a different group of kids, who are more concerned about getting their band together than the looming apocalypse.

A fast, fun read.

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.

It took me several months to finish this dense, rich novel, but it was well worth the time. It's just a freakin' awesome read.