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I read Mira Grant's Feed last year and loved it. I'm actually not a HUGE zombie story fan, preferring my supernatural stories on the vampiric side of things, but since romance authors co-opted the genre years ago, it's been tough finding a good vampire story that doesn't involve some kind of tortured love triangle. So I'm open to branching out into other venues. Feed hooked me right away, making me laugh out loud in the first few pages, requiring that I buy the book immediately and find out more about these characters. I was not disappointed. (No, the book's not a comedy—quite the opposite—but it's not afraid to have some fun, along with a healthy dose of social satire, in the midst of its zombie-outbreak horror story.) I just finished the sequel, Deadline , today (equally entertaining) and picked up the next book, Blackout . To my surprise and delight, I found this on the back cover: Blackout is the conclusion to the epic near-future trilogy t

(Update courtesy of my local gas pump video screen.) In other news... The Earth is Round! Ice is Cold! Fire Burns! (Sadly, all of the above probably IS news to Tea Party politicians.) 

While browsing through Stephen King books today, looking for his book On Writing , I came across this thought… Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling the seatbelt and letting the story take over… that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing. Plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration. I found this quite reassuring, and kind of exhilarating… I've never been good at plotting out my stories, though I've lost count of the classes I've taken and books I've read that recommend (or flat out require) it. Frankly, buckling in and letting the story take over is how I've written everything I've ever felt good about. Now I've got some backup for my lack of plotting. Let's face it, Stephen King knows a little bit about storytelling. Ironically, I found this in the intro to 'Salem's Lot (probably still my favorite Stephen King novel ever) and not in On Writing. But that ju

I don't mean to take anything away from Brave . It's a beautiful film, and a wonderful story. The ending is suitably dramatic and exciting, with a strong emotional impact. It's almost everything one would want from a Pixar film, meeting a standard they've maintained for an astonishing 13 films in a row. Almost. The only thing I can't say for Brave is that it was fun . It's far too serious and straightforward a movie for that. Oh, it tries, with its trio of foolish suitors and a father/king that's prone to reacting first and thinking... well, not often. But these moments amount to little more than the cast of fools and bumpkins that populate Shakespeare's plays... the comic relief included to entertain the groundlings. I know that Pixar's films have always had serious themes running through their main stories. I don't expect their films to be non-stop laugh riots (or I'd have been seriously disappointed long before now.) They're not a

Maybe overselling that one but, despite the only relatively average (though still decidedly rotten) score on Rotten Tomatoes (I've seen many better movies get less than the current 41%), Rock of Ages gets my vote. But why, you may ask? Allow me to elucidate... First and foremost, the choreography. Which was, simply, staggeringly bad. Shockingly bad. So bad that when Catherine Zeta-Jones and the church ladies kicked off "Hit Me With Your Best Shot", I literally jerked back in my seat. (And yes, I literally mean literally .) So bad, I swore to myself I'd look up the choreographer so I'd know to avoid anything they do in the future, though it looks like I won't have to worry too much there, since the director (Adam Shankman) is listed as one of the choreographers (and now I know better then to ever see anything he's directed again) while the other choreographer is busy with seasons of So You Think You Can Dance, so I don't think I'll have much tro

It's kinda funny. I've been looking forward to playing L.A. Noire since I first read about it a couple of years ago. An open-world game, set in 1940's LA from the company that virtually defined open world gaming in the current gaming generation? I get to PLAY in the world of L.A. Confidential ? I am SO there. So much so, that I'm not dissuaded by the occasional tepid review, especially since most of the trepidation seems to stem from the combat elements of the game… the actual "police work" end of things—interrogating suspects, looking for clues, etc.—seems to work, albeit not at the fastest pace ever. (And let's face it, the review I linked to got an Editor's Choice rating and its MetaCritic score is currently at 83, so it's not like there's that much negative to go on.) But maybe that "minor trepidation" should have been a clue, at least as far as that whole pacing thing is concerned. I finally got around to buying the game re