Leviathan Hit The Snooze

So, I watched that first Expanse episode (it's On Demand, it's own website, the SyFy site, YouTube, and probably a dozen other places).

In an of itself, it did its job: I want to watch the next episode.  If you like reasonably hard sci-fi and you're not familiar with the books, you should definitely check it out.  Ignore the idiots saying it's "Game of Thrones... IN SPACE!".  It's not.  For one, it doesn't have nearly enough rape to qualify.  For another, it features actual human characters and doesn't feel like an author working out his extensive issues (and his frankly disturbing obsession with rape).

For fans of the book, it should still be enjoyable, unless you're extremely hardline with your expectations on adaptations, in which case you've probably never seen an adaptation you've liked.

There's Something Under There

I'll admit, the Tremors series is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine.  The first is a pretty classic creature-feature and was a great little horror-comedy flick.  I've always liked it.

They, unsurprisingly, got worse as the series went on.  2 was a serviceable direct-to-video sequel.  3 was not particularly good, but that might have just been me really disliking that they named the creature form "assblaster".  It felt like they were trying too hard.

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins was an odd duck, but enjoyable in its own way.  I think I liked it a little more than 3, if for no other reason than because it fleshed out the lore of the graboids and I can be a sucker for that kind of thing.

Which brings us to Tremors 5: Bloodlines.  The fact that there are five of these movies kind of blows my mind, especially since it's been 11 years since 4 came out.  And 25 since the first.  Let that percolate a minute.  This series has been around for 25 freaking years.

Cal's Back

A little over a year ago, I wrote a short review for a pair of novels, Confessions of a D-List Superhero and Origins of a etc.  Towards the end of that review, I mentioned that I had seen that the author, Jim Bernheimer, was planning a third book.  At the time, I said,

"I'm not entirely sure where he's going to go from here.  He can't really do another prequel unless he plans to spend a couple hundred pages on Cal's college days, and the story was pretty much wrapped up at the end of Confessions."

Well, now we know why Jim's a published author and I'm just a goof with a dopey theme and a Blogger account.

What I'm trying to say is, this book impressed me.

Pulp Pile: Nick Carter #216

So, while on vacation, we went to 2nd and Charles, a pretty neat used book store.  A rather huge used book store, in fact.  While there, I wandered the isles, looking at spines, hunting for some good old fashioned pulp.  One of the ones I found was a series of Nick Carter books.  The one I decided to grab was today's subject, Nick Carter Killmaster #216: Terror Times Two.

Just look at that cover!  It just screams pulp, doesn't it?  We have Nick Carter in a nice Archer-esque tactical turtleneck, a brunette babe with a gun (who doesn't really appear in the book, she seems an amalgam of two characters), and a tank crashing over either waves or some snow, which really doesn't appear anywhere in the novel.  Seriously.  There's no tanks in this book.

This is some glorious spy-pulp here.

The End Is... Well, You Know How This Goes

So this was a neat concept.  Three collections of short stories, the first collection set to the lead-up to the apocalypse (whatever form it may take), the second collection being stories during the apocalypse, and then the third collection being after the apocalypse.  And, on top of it all, a good number of the authors wrote three stories, giving us a few linked trilogies within the triptych.  All in all, it worked out very well.

The Hugo Mess

So, the other day, Marko Kloos and Anne Bellett declined their Hugo award nominations. This is bad enough on the surface, but I think it also demonstrates something a little bigger, and represents a need for Kate Paulk to reconsider Sad Puppies 4, and indeed, the entire Evil League of Evil should take a moment to think long and hard about what they want to accomplish with Sad Puppies and where they want to go from here.

Now you, dear reader, are probably a normal person; a sane person. I can only assume that the above made little sense to you, so I'm going to go ahead and give some background information about what's going on here. Now, I'll come right out and say that, at the very least, I'm amused by the Sad Puppies hullaballo, if not outright supportive of it. Or at least I was. Anyway, with all that in mind, I'm going to try to be objective here. There's already been more than enough hyperbole and misrepresentation as is (looking at you, EW).

Presidential Campaign Season on Facebook (Oh No!)

We now have a handful of people who have announced their intention to run for president. As such, weather we're ready for it or not, it's now Presidential Campaign Season. Yes, yes, it's 19 months away, but that just means we're in for a long 19 months, not that we can hold the line against this. Hell, I'm hearing reports of campaign ads already airing (attack ads, naturally).

So, like it or not, we're stuck with it. And, furthermore, like it or not, some of us are much more involved and interested in politics than others. Now, we it comes to family dinner, it's likely to be less of a concern, because uncomfortable silences or credible threats of physical violence, tend to blunt the worst of it. And, in theory, you're less likely to make a complete ass of yourself in front of loved ones. In theory.

But then there's Facebook. Yes, there's other social media, but you're more likely to have your mother and fifth cousin twice removed on Facebook than on Tumblr or Flickr or whatever other intentionally misspelled mish-mash mess of a social media platform you use. Unfortunately, Presidential Campaign Season doesn't play well with Facebook, and it's just waiting to bubble over with invective and hostility.

So, with this in mind, I've come up with a sort of manifesto or creed for surviving Presidential Campaign Season while on Facebook. Or rather, to make things easier on those on the other side of the political divide and those who don't care (either through apathy or, you know, not living in America).