Friday Random Ten CXXIV

The “Going to Des Moines” edition.

Friday Random Ten

  1. Spoon • Don’t Make Me a Target
  2. Avenged Sevenfold • Eternal Rest
  3. Ben Christophers • The Drinking Tree
  4. Fifths of Seven • Rosa Centifolia
  5. Guster • Ruby Falls
  6. Nick Drake • Cello Song
  7. Explosions in the Sky • So Long, Lonesome
  8. Mono & World’s End Girlfriend • Palmless Prayer/Mass Murder Refrain 1
  9. Leaves • Should Have Seen It All
  10. Nine Inch Nails • I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally

The smell of sunshine / I remember sometimes:

  • The Smedley Log (whose lyrical quote reminds me of the much longer “Sisters! Brothers! Small boats of fire are falling from the sky!”, an excellent song by A Silver Mt. Zion)
§1878 · July 27, 2007 · 1 comment · Tags: , ,

From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain

From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain by Minister Faust
Publisher: Del Ray
Year: 2007
Pages: 390

Having only recently added Soon I Will Be Invincible to my list of books to read, it seemed an unlikely coincidence that I would stumble upon another curious-looking novel about superheroes. Intrigued, I decided to try it.

Don’t waste your time. Minister Faust, be that a pseudonym or the poor bastard’s real name, reaches for the stars and only makes it to about 14th Street. I understand what he intended: by chronicling the travails of a team of superheroes in therapy, he’s making points about history, race, politics, and fiction. The book, told as though it is a self-help book written by the therapist/narrator, Dr. Eva Brain, depicts the psychological troubles of superheroes after Götterdämmerung, which, as I take it, is supposed to represent the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of a clearly unified and labeled threat. Left to their own devices, superheroes become bored and disillusioned and descend into racial and political political squabbles which I’m sure Faust intended to mirror those of the world at large.

But it’s all so un-subtle and pedantic. Add to that the constant psychobabble of the narrator (purposefully oblique, I’m sure, but it gets damn old after 400 pages) and you’ve got a book that I felt like chucking after 100 pages.

At its simplest, From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain is a satire of comics themselves, but in the most unimaginative way: Faust makes obvious analogs of known characters and then gives them a fetish of some sort.

Hero to Character Correlative Table
Faust’s Hero Original Hero Note
Flying Squirrel Batman A multi-billionaire septuagenarian who’s a racist and an ultraconservative
Iron Lass Wonder Woman A superwoman who struggles with tenderness
Brotherfly Spiderman An insect-powered stereotype of black people
X-Man ? A Malcolm X with extraordinary mental powers
Omnipotent Man Superman A dumb-as-dogshit hero with incredible strength and potency
Powergrrl ? (Jubilee?) Teenage brat who’s one part superheroine, one part Britney Spears

&c. Faust drops so many names, as well as so many acronyms, that it gets hard to keep track of them all. It fact, it gets downright tiresome, and I feel like the book is a parody of itself by the end. The author tries for so many different tricks all at once that none of them work to their full potential. The epilogue drives home the idea of narrator reliability, which had languished for the entire novel under the weight of parody and exaggeration.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh: Faust, after all, at least aimed high, and I can hardly fault him for that. And perhaps you’ll be more appreciative of his buckshot narrative devices than me. I just can’t recommend it personally.

§1874 · July 25, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , , ,

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine
Year: 2007
Pages: 784

The following review may contain minor spoilers. It will likely contain more severe spoilers for readers who have not yet finished Book 6. Read on at your own risk.

And so it ends. It seems like a lifetime ago that I stumbled upon Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on the “New Young Adult Fiction” shelf at the public library and picked it up on a whim. Millions of people would do the same, and that whim would inspire six sequels and a franchise that would net its creator more than a billion dollars.

I’m going to be brutal right off that bat and say that this is by no means the best Harry Potter book. If you want the truth, it lulls terribly in the middle; in fact, it’s not particularly interesting at all until the last 150 pages or so. Rowling seems to have invented another arbitrary piece of magical lore (Deathly Hallows) that, while it ends up becoming a focal point of the book (of the entire series, really) is unsuitably fleshed out and not particularly interesting in the first place.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is remarkably different, in many ways: it retains the very dark style that has become the norm since Book 5; there’s a lot of death and Cruciatus curses; finally, there’s very little mentioned of Hogwarts at all (until the very end). As Harry announces at the end of Book 6, he drops out of Hogwarts in order to pursue Dumbledore’s assignment. Speculation has flown wildly ever since the twists of Book 6, and Rowling manages to more or less do exactly as predicted. This includes including several mutually exclusive plot directions at once. And no, it’s not as impossible or difficult as it sounds.

Thus, on its technical and literary methods, Deathly Hallows ends the series with a whimper, but my guess is that no one will particularly care, since everyone is merely slavering for its conclusion—which, though a tad confusing, and probably reaching a bit, is rather conclusive enough. Add to that a brief and maddeningly unspecific epilogue, and I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that 6 large books worth of carefully chronicled canon was so casually and insufficiently wrapped up.

It does, however, finally strike me how was it was for Rowling to specifically limit the length of the series from the beginning: the breadth of her invented world could have carried on ad infinitum, but the opera’s would have petered long before. It’s unfortunate that Rowling’s previous works opened so many jars that she had to break a few this time around instead of closing them.

§1875 · July 24, 2007 · 6 comments · Tags: , , , ,

New computer plans

It’s that time again: I’m planning out a new workstation for myself. Those of you who have seen this since the beginning my remember my first foray into PC-building (not to mention its disastrous consequences).

Here’s my just-ordered layout:

Case
LIAN LI PC-V2000Bplus II Black Aluminum Server Computer Case
This massive aluminum server case from Lian-Li is a massive 24.6″ x 8.3″ x 24.3″ (D x W x H) and sports 12 internal 3.5″ drive bays. It’s got 3 120mm fans and a CPU vent
Power Supply
SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-650HT ATX12V/EPS12V
After reading Jeff Atwood’s excellent article about high efficiency power supplies, I looked into “80 PLUS” certified units, which should save money on my electricity bills. These SeaSonics get high marks in all the reviews I’ve seen, offering rock-solid performance along with their high efficiency. This particular units is 650W.
Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-N680SLI-DQ6 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
This high-end Gigabyte model is probably overkill for me—it’s geared to gamers, primarily—but its 10 SATA ports are a must, as I’ll have a lot of hard drives and don’t want to pay a premium for a decent add-in card. Better to pay the overhead on a high-end mobo. It’s also get pretty good heat-pipe tech and all the various features and widgets that have become standard for this sort of thing. The only thing it’s missing is WiFi.
Processor
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor
After the July 22 price drop by Intel, this Quad Core processor is suddenly sub-$300, so I figured I’d future-proof my machine. Rather than worry about the Dual Core chips with faster processors, I’d rather have better multi-tasking capabilities.
Accessory: CPU heatsink
ZALMAN CNPS9500 AT 2 Ball CPU Cooling Fan/Heatsink
Zalman aftermarket coolers are some of the best I’ve ever used. This copper beast can lead to temperature drops of over 10°
Accessory: thermal grease
Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound
I used this on my last build and love it; much better heat conductivity than the standard postage stamp of thermal compound that comes on retail CPUs.
Memory
CORSAIR XMS2 4GB(4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Quad Kit Desktop Memory
Rather than buy the 2x2GB kit, which costs $100 more, this 4-stick, 4GB memory kit from Corsair will be perfect for my Quad Core system: 1GB stick for each core. I’ve never had any problems with Corsair memory: their XMS line is rock-solid, so I’m using it again in this build.
Hard Drives
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (x4)
Four of these drives will be RAIDed into 2 separate 1TB arrays: one for audio and one for video
Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600YS 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
One 160GB drive will serve as my system drive, holding the partitions for the various operating systems that I’ll run
Optical Drives
LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model LH-20A1L-05
This inexpensive dual-layer DVD burner is SATA, and made by Lite-On, whose drives I have had good success with in the past.
LITE-ON Black SATA DVD-ROM Drive Model SHD-16S1S-05
This vanilla DVD-ROM drive will be my workhorse, and is also SATA, which means I will no longer have any EIDE/PATA drives in my system.
Video Card
EVGA 320-P2-N811-AR GeForce 8800GTS 320MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Video Card
Only fairly recently, EVGA has become a top-of-the-line board manufacturer for nVidia, and yet their products are still cheaper than competing brands like Asus (my first Radeon 9800XT was an Asus, and it kept failing). I chose nVidia because of their better-than-ATI driver support in Linux (hello, AIGLX!) and their excellent performance. The 8800GTS is a very middle-of-the road card, and its specs don’t seem like much compared to the bleeding-edge cards, but it’s got the best cost/performance ratio of all available products, and it routinely matches or outperforms more expensive cards.

I won’t bother telling you how much it all cost.

Now I just have to wait until all the parts arrive and then I can delight in the sheer geekiness of it all.

§1876 · July 23, 2007 · 4 comments · Tags: , ,

Friday Random Ten CXXIII

The “Can’t think of a tagline” edition.

Friday Random Ten

  1. The Dillinger Escape Plan • Pig Latin
  2. Samuel Jackson Five • Honest Abe
  3. Insomnium • Bereavement
  4. Evereve • Passion and Demise
  5. The Gathering • Locked Away
  6. The Sea and Cake • Exact To Me
  7. Rufus Wainwright • Hallelujah
  8. Isis • Hym
  9. Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire • Some of These Days / Chinatown My Chinatown
  10. Ours • Dizzy

If we beat him down will he stay down?:

  • The Smedley Log (I initially misread “Ryan Adams” as “Bryan Adams” and had visions of Kevin Costner dancing in my head)
  • Ratlands (My god, most of those songs are older than me…
  • Faux Real, Tho (A lot of old standbys)
§1873 · July 20, 2007 · 5 comments · Tags: , ,

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