Maybe I’ll be able to keep up with it, maybe not, but right now it’s an awesomely fun toy. Besides, I’d really love to have a listing of our books for insurance purposes if nothing else—who’d ever believe how many books we have in this house?! $25 for a lifetime membership is really very cheap, and $15 for the bar code scanner is something I’m more than willing to shell out with the number of books we have.
Besides, there are cool features. I’m having fun posting a few brief versions of some of my reviews, and looking up other folks’ opinions of books, and who’s reading what.
I knew I shouldn’t try it out. I just knew I’d never be able to resist if I did!
I don’t watch most game-related videos. To be honest, I find most of them supremely boring. The majority of them are exactly what you’d expect to get from a video-maker whose true interest is gaming, not the making of videos. I.e., the focus is on nigh-meaningless (or at least fairly uninteresting) numbers flying across the screen, or showing off some supposedly ‘uber’ character, rather than on making a good video. However, there are three very notable exceptions to this that I can easily think of.
I don’t even play Guild Wars. But dang, Zack’s videos are good enough that I love them anyway! I’ve never pretended to have any skill whatsoever at reviewing anything related to movies or music; I tried it once or twice and quickly realized I should never do that again. But since this isn’t the reviews blog anyway, here’s my attempt at explaining what makes Zack’s videos so different from most of the ones out there.
For one, he has a perfect sense of editing. The movements utterly match the music. This is far and away one of the top reasons I love his videos.
One of the reasons I think his GW videos work particularly well is that the GW emotes are entertainingly spastic, particularly in contrast to the fancy outfits the characters wear, which inherently makes the videos funny to watch.
Zack also picks catchy songs that work well with video game emotes, and then he’s smart enough to stick with those emotes. So many fan-made videos end up as a bunch of ‘talking heads,’ where they somehow try to make it look like the characters present in the videos are speaking things from the songs for five minutes, and frankly that’s boring and dull.
Not that Zack is the only good game-based video maker out there, of course; of particular note is spiffworld, who makes fantastic Warcraft videos based on Jonathan Coulton’s music. If you prefer spastic and hilarious Zack is the better choice; if you like entertaining stories set to original music, spiffworld/Coulton is great:
And finally, no such list would be complete without Cranius’ inimitable “Big Blue Dress”. While it does have a bit of the “heavy on the numbers” problem, that takes a back seat to the more fun stuff. Keep an eye out for the gnome backup singers, and remember: a man who’s truly skilled can look quite good in Twill!
First, yesterday’s book review was of Sebastian Beaumont’s unique and captivating Thirteen. Up next should be the Pastry Queen Christmas and Red Lion Inn cookbooks! Somehow my Amazon reviewer rank is in danger of cracking the top 1,000 (I’m at 1,007 this morning exactly 1,000 this evening), which is a little surreal since I’ve never made it a focus of my reviewing; I just cross-post brief versions of many of my reviews there so the books get a little more exposure. I can tell our Google pagerank must be recovering from the switch to the new domain name, since suddenly we’re getting lots of requests for reciprocal links from random unrelated websites.
I found the following hilarious video at Books and Other Thoughts. The costuming and detail are incredible, and the spoof is spot-on:
While that video is for the tech support weenies, computer geeks, and book nerds among you, the following is a World of Warcraft video: IRL. It’s for anyone who’s ever had to group with a jackass, and the sheer proliferation of wacky props alone makes this a hysterical view (found at Massively):
It’s been a while since I last posted a video of any kind. I don’t even play Guild Wars, but there are some great videos for it. I once posted a link to a GW/WoW dance-off video set to MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” which was just awesome; my other favorite is the GW video set to “Beverly Hills,” put together by the same guy. He has true editing talent. I have to say that one thing I love about GW is the… enthusiasm… in the character emotes.
Anyway, I was bad this weekend and signed up for the PotBS stress test. I’m waaaay impatient about it coming out, and got my husband to pre-order me a copy for my Christmas present!
Just a reminder that Dewey’s 24-hour readathon is this Saturday the 20th! You don’t have to be available for all 24 hours to participate; part of the day is fine. It starts at 9 am Eastern time in the US (my time zone); I’ll probably be a bit late to the party so I can get groceries done. Here’s some of the most important info from that post for readers:
People who sign up to be readers are committing to reading books, posting updates in their blogs, and if they need breaks, visiting the blogs of other readers and encouraging them. The most hardcore among us will stay up the entire 24 hours and do nothing but read and update, even going so far as to skip showering and eat meals while reading. However, not all of us are that hardcore, and it’s ok for you to customize this readathon to meet your needs. … All I ask is that you be honest in your updates, and that’s about the only rule for readers.
Updating for Readers: This should be individually customized. If you want to spend 5 or 10 minutes updating each hour or every 3 hours, that’s great. If you want to update whenever you feel like you need a break from reading, that’s great, too. If you want to just read and read for 24 hours straight and then write one big update, that’s also great. You do what works for you, ok?
Suggested format for updating: Again, customize this as you wish, but I suggest updating about what you’re reading, how many pages you’ve read since your last update, and how much time you’ve spent reading since your last update. You may want to keep a running total of time spent reading, number of books read and pages read; this could make you eligible for some prize drawings. Updates might also be your typical book reviews, once you finish something.
I’ll probably do little updates frequently, although I might do several per post so as not to clutter things up too much.
So I’ll see you tomorrow!
This week’s BTT touched on Typography. As usual I went around reading a bunch of the entries, because it’s a fun way to spend a little time while drinking my coffee and you never know what entertaining stories you’ll encounter. This week I was lucky enough to come upon book-a-rama’s entry, which included the following video (NSFW language!) on “the impotence of proofreading”. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Chris, for sharing this with us!
Head on over to Dionne Galace’s blog on erotica/romance/erotic romance today. Why? Because Meljean Brook has gone and posted a video—yes, a video—containing her advice for writing an erotic romance. The following is not particularly safe for work, or young children. At any rate, I laughed out loud. Then I laughed until the tears came:
I was going to watch the Bourne Ultimatum this weekend; really I was. But when we got to the mall it turned out the stores were still closed (we like morning showings—fewer people) and the first showing of Stardust was earlier than Bourne, so we watched that instead.
I haven’t yet read Stardust, but I like to take movies separately from any book or story they might be based on anyway. You can’t duplicate a book with a movie; you really need to make some significant changes to make it work and I think of the result as a separate entity. So I like to see separately whether the movie works as a movie. Stardust, to me, was a wonderful movie. It was fun and funny, heart-warming, beautiful, and just plain fun. The actors were great, particularly Claire Danes and Robert DeNiro.
But back to the Bourne Ultimatum. I’m hoping I’ll get around to seeing it this weekend, but in the meantime, here’s a hysterical video parody of the movie. Ya gotta love actors who don’t mind making fun of themselves:
In other news, today’s review is of Douglas Clegg’s The Abandoned. I know people have said lots of good things about Clegg, but honestly, I didn’t really like the book that much. Hopefully I’ll find some better books when I take this and Second Genesis back to the library this afternoon. The Second Genesis review will be up later this week.
I didn’t really start watching Dr. Who in earnest until I was in my teens, and then I was totally addicted to its campy sci-fi wonderfulness. The funny thing is, I later saw an episode that I recognized as one I’d briefly caught part of when I was rather younger, and hurriedly switched away from because it scared the hell out of me—at the time I had no idea what the show was or what it was about. I just knew there were giant spiders biting a girl, and something about a humanoid alien about to get his brain vivisected, and when you’re young those are scary things! It left enough of an impression that I still found the same episode a bit creepy the second time around, even though by then I was quite familiar with the show.
Today, though, I have to share a great little video called “The Complete Dr. Who in Five Minutes:”
One of my more recent blog finds has been Melmoth’s Inferno. I can’t resist it, thanks to such engrossing posts as An undead berry is a Lichee? (which suddenly reminds me that I have a delectable can of lichee nuts in my kitchen, hmm… You know, they actually do kind of look like undead berries):
Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into ‘courses’ will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.
Does it make me a bad person that I think this actually sounds hysterically fun? But then I’m one of those loons who totally enjoys the farming and cooking crafts in LotRO.
Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn’t know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you’re struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.
Go on, read the whole post. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. Make sure to always read the comments on his posts as well, because they’re frequently just as hilarious. Next in my list of new favorite reads is his entry, You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, which brings us the adventures (such as they are) of Timothy and Trevor, two troll guards sent to find out What’s Going On around the troll encampment:
Timothy: “You’re a peon at work. Good. Good. And you’re another peon, well done. Ok”
Trevor: “You’re a guard, that’s fine. And here’s a priest, lovely. Lovely.”
Timothy: “And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good.”
Trevor: “Well I think that’s everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?”
Mark my words, someday this blogger will be getting his books published, if he isn’t already. If the rest of us are lucky, that is.
