It rained a lot today, except for when it didn’t, and the air conditioner in my bedroom quit working. A new one will replace it on Wednesday, so I suppose I won’t have to swelter too long.
personal
The Walking Zed
I wish I could say I’ve been exceptionally busy since last Sunday, and that’s why I haven’t written here much since then, except to post the occasional song and song lyric. But it’s really more that one day has been just like the last, and there hasn’t been a whole lot to write about. Lots of things happening at work, lots of projects underway, but nothing that necessarily bears mention.
Yesterday, I finished reading World War Z, which was surprisingly entertaining. Today, I went to see the movie version, which, maybe unsurprisingly, was not.
The movie has its moments, but far too few of them, and I was bored more than anything else by the end. (“More like World War Zzzzzzzzz,” I joked on Twitter, until some madwoman suggested it should be pronounced “Zed.” I know, right?) The book works a lot better than it ought to, given that there are no central characters or even, really, what you would call a plot. Brooks is great at introducing a lot of neat ideas, and surprisingly adept at wringing tension out of stories that we know, right up front, are going to end at least reasonably well. (It’s an oral history told by the survivors of the zombie war, after all.) He’s not quite as skilled at making the authors of each of those stories sound like a different person, but it’s a clever concept overall and engaging enough that I could forgive the book its occasional faults.
I’m less forgiving of the movie, which bears only a passing resemblance to the book. Not that I think the book is especially cinematic, or that I can’t understand all the changes that they made to it. It’s just that those changes don’t add up to an exciting summer spectacle, or a good time at the movies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of extras on screen — super-fast zombie swarms, one of many deviations from the text — but it’s remarkably bloodless for a zombie movie, with only a few genuine scares. (That’s what you get with a PG-13 rating, I guess.) It’s not an awful film, and I don’t think it quite unseats Survival of the Dead from its place in my heart as most disappointing zombie movie. But I honestly think I would have been better off going with my first impulse and seeing Fast & Furious 6.
Yes, that was my first impulse. What? Don’t judge me.
Last night, I watched another somewhat disappointing movie, The Awakening. As the AV Club review says, “the film does include a few effective chills, thanks to its elegantly creepy setting—an old manor house turned boarding school—and its use of period paranormal-detection equipment.” It takes a real turn near the end, however — one that’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the entire movie — and one that I’m not at all convinced really works. As the AV Club also points out, “the unraveling is a letdown, not just because it diffuses the frightening mystery, but because it treads on the wistful, doomed sense of longing the film built up.”
Today I also had my weekly writing group, where a set of pictures and words pulled from a magazine prompted this for some reason:
In theory, he was already dead. He could stay inside the capsule for another year, maybe longer if he managed to stretch what was left of the supplies, or he could swing open the hatch and let what would inevitably happen, happen now. There would be no rescue, even if Tabitha reconsidered, and he knew there was little chance of that. And even if she did, even if right this minute she was telling the others where to find him, and they were plotting a course, it would be the better part of a decade before they reached him, at best. He had only two options: face death now, the brutal cold of the planet’s surface, hypothermia or asphyxiation — he was not entirely sure which would claim him first; or delay the end, for a little while, push it off with few short months of solitude and exile and nothing but his own thoughts and corps rations for company. There was only one logical choice. And yet, it was logic that had found him in this place to begin with. He would be an even bigger fool not to realize that. There was only one choice, but that did not mean he had to make that choice today.
He was lucky the rest of the crew had died on impact or in the explosion before. It would save him from the tiresome chore of having to kill them.
There was still the on-board AI to contend with, only a vestige of what had been destroyed in the main ship, more child’s toy than super-computer, but it could still pose a threat if it was running the code that Tabitha had written into it. He had heard nothing from the AI since crashing; the capsule’s internal diagnostics suggested it was inactive, likely inoperable if not destroyed, but he did not know how far to trust that. The diagnostics had already been fooled once by his wife’s clever sabotage.
He didn’t think she had meant to kill McKenzie or Parish, who had escaped in the capsule with him, or any of the ship’s modest crew. The AI had disabled the fire suppression system during a routine refueling, then allowed a short-circuit in one of the hydroponic bays. If the bay had been empty at the time, if they had been using the refueling stop to also restock their supplies, they might have remained at the station long enough for everyone aboard to escape. Instead, he had…
It feels rushed near the end, not least of all because it literally trails off, and I don’t really have a handle on the character (much less the others he mentions). But what can you expect from forty minutes in a crowded Panera Bread?
Oh, and I started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’m about a third of the way into the novel and really quite enjoying it so far.
Until next Sunday, then?
Sunday
Last night, I watched Æon Flux, which was not very good. I mean, not awful, except perhaps in all the ways that it was awful, but not a successful movie by any stretch. It’s best when it rises to the level of interesting and colorful mess. I can’t really blame it for being so very untrue to the original cartoon, if only because the original cartoon was so often untrue to itself. (It’s not exactly a spoiler to say none of the episodes are directly connected…or even that Aeon dies in a lot of them.)
Today, I went to see Man of Steel with friends. It’s an entertaining summer movie…and apparently it has something to do with Superman? In all serious, I enjoyed it. (And a whole lot more than that other summer blockbuster that pretended to be the thing in its title.)
In between all that, I wrote this from a couple of prompts:
When they found it, when Jacobs split the final stone with his pickaxe and pulled the artifact from the rubble, none of the others knew that this would be the thing that made each of them famous. They were concerned just with trying to survive the discovery.
“Do you feel that?†asked Jacobs, who would not be so lucky. He held the object up to the light so that there could be no mistake. He was just as shocked as all the others to see this impossible thing. But none of the others, and perhaps not even Jacobs himself, noticed that his hands were shaking or that the impossible thing he held in them was starting to glow. “It’s kind of a hum, you know, kind of low-level. I think maybe it’s — “
But they never learned what Jacobs thought. The artifact, which should have been destroyed — if not by the cave-in that had trapped them there, or by the pressure that had trapped it for centuries inside of rock, then certainly by the clumsy swing of Jacob’s axe as he’d tried to force his way out and back to the surface. It was an impossible thing, ridiculous even, and Jacob had been an idiot to go picking it up.
He had no one to blame but himself when it exploded.
At least, that’s what they would tell themselves in the days and weeks to follow. Murdock, who’d been close enough to Jacobs that she was knocked backward by the blast, then knocked unconcious when her head thudded against the cave wall, would blame Jacobs most of all, even if she knew in her heart that she probably would have done exactly the same thing.
“It was a lightbulb,†she said. “It was a goddamn lightbulb hidden inside the stone. Buried for a thousand years, how did a lightbulb even get down there?â€
None of them could say; none of them even would say for sure if that was the thing they had seen in Jacobs’ hands. It was too ridiculous, and whatever it had been, the artifact was now gone. The explosion had taken care of that. Dawson had his theories — he was the one who’d started calling it the artifact, and who would later popularize the term when the media started calling, when their powers were revealed. But his theories were only guesses — born out by a little research, he would say, even if he seemed unwilling to share that research with the others.
For the time being, they had their powers, and if it had been an ancient artifact, or the energy expelled in its explosion, or dark matter, or time travel, or even mad experiments from the future gone horribly wrong — again, Dawson and his theories — what did it matter? They couldn’t go back to what they had been. Even Murdock, with her fangs, wouldn’t have wanted that.
The blast hadn’t just killed Jacobs, or tossed Murdock against the wall, it had cleared the way for them to escape. That’s what they told her, when she regained conciousness in the woods outside the cave, and she saw bo reason for any of them — Dawson, Phillips, or van Houten — to lie to her. They’d never found their way back inside, of course, even when she suggested there might be some value in investigating the scene, even after their powers had started to emerge and they had good reason to investigate. She knew she was quicker to distrust — sometimes it took all her strength to just not tear them literally apart — so she decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they were lying…
I don’t know either.
Anyway, um…happy Father’s Day!
Friday
Tucker continues to heal, although I can’t say he seems to be enjoying it, much less the collar he still has to wear all the time. There’s no word yet on how many days he’ll have to continue wearing it, though he returns to the vet tomorrow morning to evaluate his progress and the stitches. The estimate on their removal was 10-14 days, but I suspect we’ll know more tomorrow.
Meanwhile, life continues pretty much as normal. Yesterday, I (finally) finished reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome, which is a lot of fun, and above all else a compelling read. It is, of course, a very long book, and took me something like a month to get through. (I get most of my reading done on my daily commute, which only adds up to about six hours a week. Though that’s not a hard and fast rule, and I hope to do more reading on the weekends now that I have half a year off from reading Kaleidotrope submissions.)
Anyway, I really liked the book. I’m much less enthusiastic about the TV miniseries now that I’ve actually seen the trailer for it, since it looks like they’ve taken a lot of liberties with the novel. That said, King himself seems quite pleased with it. Of course, that said, King also seemed quite pleased with the television version of The Shining starring Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay…
Without venturing into spoilers too much, here’s one particular quote I highlighted in my reading:
America’s two great specialities are demagogues and rock and roll, and we’ve all heard plenty of both in our time.
I feel like I want to read a lot more King now…but I also think maybe I should take a break with something a lot shorter.
Good dog
Tucker, our dog, had surgery today to remove a number of fatty (and benign) tumors. I don’t think I was quite prepared for how Frankenstein-y he would look afterward, with exposed stitches down his side and leg (and back and head; the vet figured, hey, while he’s out). He seems to be doing okay, although he desperately hates the plastic Elizabethan collar he has to wear. He’ll be on paid meds and antibiotics, go back on Saturday for a check-up, and likely have the stitches out in 10-14 days. He also won’t be allowed up and down the stairs, meaning someone (likely my mother) will spend the night on the couch watching over him.
I feel bad hearing him whimper, knowing we can’t take the collar off, but hopefully he’ll heal quick. The one tumor — the main one, if not the biggest — was all fat but going into the muscle, so it was really advisable he have it removed.
It’s a lucky thing both my parents are retired, though, and can stay home to watch over him over the next few days.