Recent Entertainment

First a report on Serenity. Yes it was just as good the second time. It has been long enough that I didn't remember every little detail before it happened, which made the experience more enjoyable. The extras were also quite nice. The easter egg on the main screen contains a short documentary about the Fruty Oaty Bars commercial (the one with the subliminal message that sets River off) and a full screen version of the commercial it self--all great stuff.

I was also reminded again how much I enjoyed both Firefly and Serenity for their dialogue. Joss was a genius writing the stories. The dialogue captures a sci-fi angle that yet feels archaic and western with splashes of Chinese not seeming out of place. This along with the constant humour is great. I can understand his pain in cutting some of the deleted scenes as they contain more excellent ripostes of wit.

Well my last reading of two books simultaneously went quite well. Phobos was a great sci-fi mystery and reading it along with We'll Always Have Parrots only heightened my enjoyment of both books. I'm at it again now. First I'd started Owls Well that Ends Well, but I don't want to finish it too quickly as it is the last of the Meg Langslow series from Donna Andrews that I have to read.

It works out great because when I went to Borders yesterday I not only purchased Serenity but I picked up four books by Michael Stackpole. If you're into Star Wars you may recognize him as the author of the X-Wing series. I've not read them yet, but if they're anything like his other books (including I, Jedi which I have read) they're probably quite good.

Unfortunately I ran across some of these books at a Cincinnai Public Library book sale a few months back and for one reason or another I didn't buy them. It breaks my heart (and wallet? ;-)) to think that I could have had two or three of these books for fifty cents if I'd only bought them then! I did get one 15% off for answering a phone survey from Borders and one using the weekly 25% off coupon, but still more than $0.50 a book! *sigh* Well I've just caught up to Owls in my reading of The Dark Glory War so I'm now switching back to Donna Andrews for Chapter Ninteen.

I leave for work at 13:30 so I think I'm going to go pack my lunch and then get in as much reading as I can. Or perhaps I'll just reverse that order... :-)

~Matt

PS This post reminds me that I haven't updated my library in a bit. I think that as I'm not likely to buy any books for a while I'm going to have to export my library to html and upload the new version. Hmmm...I might even post about the statistics later--they're quite interesting. I can't wait until I have all my books unpacked and I can know that every book I own is listed in my computerized listing!!