Bookstooge's Reviews On the Road

Monday, December 05, 2022

Black Mana Battery - MTG 4th Edition

Sunday, December 04, 2022

Event Horizon (1997 Movie)

Event Horizon is a 1997 Space Horror movie directed by Paul Anderson, who later went on to direct many of the Resident Evil movies.

I really like this movie. If you had told me beforehand that I’d like a space horror movie that involves a possessed spaceship that kills it crew, well, I’d probably have looked at you funny and suggest you get your head checked.

The basic story is that in 2040 the Event Horizon, utilizing a new gravity drive to break the speed of light, disappears with all crew. The movie starts 7 years later when it mysteriously re-appears. A rescue ship is sent with a small crew to find out what happened. Along with them is Dr Weir, the creator of the gravity drive. They get to the ship, it’s abandoned but something is on board and begins killing them. Dr Weir gives in to be with what appears to be his dead wife and only 3 members of the rescue crew survive and make it back to earth. The Event Horizon goes back to the alternate dimension of hell that it came from.

On this rewatch, I realized that part of the reason I like this so much is because there are little flashes from the hell dimension that remind me of the cenobytes from Hellraiser, another horror movie that surprised me by how much I liked it. Nothing big mind you, just these very quick, almost too fast to process, images of the former crew and the current crew, going through tortures with chains and spikes, etc.

Of course, being a horror movie, there are some really stupid, illogical parts that you have to turn your brain off for. First and foremost, how does the entire scientific world forget the latin language in 50 years? The last message from the Event Horizon has the captain saying something in latin but no one on Earth recognizes it? Secondly, most of the crew do not act like seasoned space rescue operators. They act like the jomokes down at the local Cumberland Farms who hang out in the parking lot smoking weed, thus turning themselves into dumb as bricks idiots.

On the plus side, Sam Neal as Dr Weir, going off the deep end, is fantastic. He has guilt about his wife committing suicide way back when because he chose work over her and how the entity mimics her is a joy to behold. His unravelling is superb, as he’s a jerk to begin with. Laurence Fishburne is the captain of the rescue ship and he’s appropriately hard nosed yet caring.

The only part I wish had been different would have been the ending. 3 of the crew survive and are rescued. One of them thinks the rescuers are the possessed Dr Weir and has a break down but the movie ends very clearly with them having escaped. What I would have appreciated is a scene showing them still on the Event Horizon, living their rescue over and over and it failing each time. THAT would have been much more inline with the tone of the movie.

Man, can you believe I am suggesting a worse ending instead of a happier one? Surprises me too! I guess that plays a part in why I like the movie so much.

Saturday, December 03, 2022

The New Golden Rule

Ye have heard it said “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” but I bring a new Rule for ye to follow.

If ye would be healthy, wealthy and wise, prepare for thyself a libation. Measure out in equal portions milk, golden eggnog and the ground remains of one fruit of the vanilla met-rx tree. No more, no less lest my wrath fall upon all the congregation and ye suffer a plague for thy willful disobedience.

Blend together at high speed in ye olden blender and thusly pour out the libation into ye olde thyme’y mug. Drink to the health of thyself, thy neighbors and thy nation, that it shall go well with ye and ye shall live long and prosper in the land I have given ye.

But if this seem too hard for ye, then stick ye head in a bucket.

Amen and Amen!

Friday, December 02, 2022

Duty Calls (WH40K: Ciaphas Cain #5) ★★★✬☆

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Duty Calls
Series: WH40K: Ciaphas Cain #5
Authors: Sandy Mitchell
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 317
Words: 101K

Cain gets in another scrap on some world and finds a weapon that is capable of turning regular humans into psykers. A rogue priest (? I simply can’t keep straight what various non-soldiers in the Imperium are called. There are so many!) wants to use it to turn humanity into a massive psyker fist and punch out the lights of Chaos. Of course, he’s tainted by Chaos and ignores that psyker abilities are an aspect of Chaos. Thankfully, the woman who Cain hangs out with (not a clue what her name is at the moment) is involved and she’s got some power armor. Plus a genestealer fleet is invading and the world is full of chaos cultists as well.

Cain stumbles from one hairy situation to another, always succeeding, always coming out looking good and always knowing he’s a Hero of the Imperium. It just makes me grin 🙂 Plus, the action, while not non-stop, is pretty intense. That always helps keep my interest in a franchise fiction story.

Mitchell (the author) continues to impress me with the workman like writing. Sometimes that can be a bad thing, but for franchise fiction, it is pretty much what I want. Get the grammar right, get the syntax correct and don’t have Cain being in two places at once in the story and I’m satisfied. I know I judge other books harder and hold them to a higher standard, but that simply isn’t done for this kind of book or series.

When I want to judge an energy drink, I compare it to a Reign White Gummy Bear and its 300mg of caffeine. When I drink an 8oz Red Bull, I know I’m only getting 80mg of caffeine and something that I imagine tastes like horse piss. I don’t blame the Red Bull for being weak horse piss. It is what it is. Hahahahahaa. So franchise fiction has its limitations and I judge accordingly.

★★★✬☆

Thursday, December 01, 2022

A Christmas Carol read by Patrick Stewart ★★★★★

Title: A Christmas Carol read by Patrick Stewart
Author: Charles Dickens
Narrator: Patrick Stewart
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Classic
Length: 1hr and 46min
(Pages: 98)
(Words: 28K)

Last year when I listened to this story narrated by Tim Curry, many of my faithful followers recommended the audio version read by Patrick Stewart. I immediately put it onto my google calendar to help remind myself for this year.

And boy howdy, am I glad I did! I will never listen to another version again and I’ll be hard pressed to even justifying reading it. Stewart does an absolutely PERFECT job here and I was completely impressed.

He also reads at a faster pace than Curry did and takes about half the time, so it’s not a big time commitment. It never felt rushed though and his stage training meant his diction and enunciation were a joy to listen to.

In short, and to end, this is now my definitive and preferred edition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Good stuff!

★★★★★

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

November '22 Roundup & Ramblings

Raw Data:

Novels – 12 ↓

Graphic Novels – 4 ↓

Average Rating – 3.09 ↑

Pages – 3141 ↓

Words – 1088K ↓

The Bad:

Predator: Eyes of the Demon – 1.5stars of woke stories about pregnant predators and such.

Jackal of the Mind – 1star DNF for the usual reasons in fiction nowadays.

The Good:

Galactic Odyssey – 5stars of perennial favoriteness that I think I’m done with now.

Hidden Voices – 4stars as the newest entry in the Arcane Casebook series.

Movie:

Didn’t review any movies this month. I am sure you all were as devastated as I was about that 😉

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

The last week of October and the first 2 weeks of November were sunny, warm and work was great. Weeks like these are why I put up with the winters of New England. I was soaking in the sunshine and humming to myself and life was good. Of course, by the end of the month I was wearing my thermal underwear and mountaineering socks, so winter came in fast.

The Author Index is going along quite swimmingly. I’m working my way backwards from Z to A and I’m working on the S’s already. It is already paying dividends as I found another book I hadn’t reviewed on the blog and so added it. I did have to change how the page behaved, as I realized I had over 900 authors and one single page with 900 links was going to be so unwieldy as to be useless. So each letter now opens up to its own page and associated authors. Not what I wanted but I suspect long term it will work out better.

I wrote what felt like was a lot of non-review posts and I HAD SO MUCH FUN AGAIN. Not posting on Tuesdays did mean I had to double up posts on other random days, but it worked for me. I do have to ask, how do you all feel about? Do you care if a blogger has multiple posts in a day or would you rather they were spread out completely? If you have never thought about this subject, I think you should. Being a wiser, discerning blog reader is important and besides, I want to raise the tone here on my blog. So raise that left pinky when leaving a comment please.

Life has been changing, in small ways but more than I was expecting. Upgrading my avatar, buying a new computer, going Dot Blog, the disastrous new theme that didn’t work out, Mrs B becoming a contributor to the blog, all little things in and of themselves, but for someone like me, that’s a veritable avalanche of changes. Last month I joked about reading my old journals being my midlife crisis, but in all seriousness, this much changing in such a short time is not like me at all. But I am enjoying it instead of worrying about it, hahahhaaa. In the words of the Immortal Bill & Ted, Party on Dudes!

Cover Love:

Hidden Voices, book 9 in the series, does not fail to once again deliver a stunning cover. I LOVE these!

Plans for Next Month:

Well, pretty much the same as this month I think. 12 books a month seems to work out well for me in terms of reviewing without burning out and adding 4 comics on top of that was not too much. I’m still not going to be reading any manga though. That’s going to have to wait until January.

I am going to be watching and reviewing Event Horizon for my movie. Starting next year I’m going to have to figure out something as watching and reviewing random movies really doesn’t work for me. The Muppet journey was perfect and if I could find something akin to that, it would be great. I doubt I’ll be able to though. I might even give the whole one movie a month thing the toss.

Got a bunch of non-review nonsense posts queued up. Just need to actually write them. That’s the biggest problem with blogging I have found. I have some great ideas but then I actually have to work and write it out. Totally bogus.

Survive the holidays. Thanksgiving wasn’t nearly as bad as I was afraid it might be, but we’ll see what happens with Christmas and New Years. Speaking of Christmas, tomorrow I’ll be reviewing A Christmas Carol as read by Patrick Stewart. Please look forward to it!

Monday, November 28, 2022

Black Knight - MTG 4th Edition

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Galactic Odyssey ★★★★★

Title: Galactic Odyssey
Series: ———-
Author: Keith Laumer
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 129
Words: 37K

This, along with Sentenced to Prism, is one of my most read books. This is the fourth time I’ve read it since 2000 and I know I read it at least 3 times between 1990 and 2000, quite possibly 4 or 5 times. However, my recent re-read of Sentenced and my reaction to it, helped prepare me for this re-read. I had almost the same reaction, ie, a wistful disappointment but because I was expecting it, it didn’t change how I viewed the book like it did for Sentenced.

At under 150 pages, this is a very short story and so much happens, that its serial roots are quite obvious this time around. I hadn’t noticed it in previous reads, but this time around it was rather glaring.

While I still enjoyed this, I think, that just like with Sentenced, the time of re-reading this particular story is over. I’ve changed enough that this doesn’t engage the same way on the emotional level like it has in decades past. Sometimes getting older and changing isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be :-/

★★★★★

Saturday, November 26, 2022

Thanksgiving Pumpkin

Forget pumpkin pie, look at this guy!

Once upon a time, there was a pumpkin. It sat next to a bunch of spider plants that were grown to look like hair on the flower pots shaped like people. I can almost imagine the plants encouraging the lonely pumpkin, saying “I’m rooting for you!”.

This little pumpkin went to the market place AND this little pumpkin went home!

The little pumpkin sat quietly in November and was behaving itself instead of turning bad. It was the only one left on the shelf and I decided to shelter the little guy.

Shank you very much!

Lil Pumpkin sat quietly on the counter for awhile, until I decided it was time to decorate for Thanksgiving. Time to slim up and go under the knife!

Guts and Glory!

The Pumpkin wasn’t very nice and puked up its guts everywhere.

Fits like a glove!

Lil pumpkin was a fighter. It didn’t want to give up, but I liked how it looked and overcame all objections!

You glow, pumpkin!

Thankfully, when the pumpkin was done, I decided it had a beautiful heart. It practically got glowing reviews from me!

In the end, the little pumpkin didn’t quite make it until Thanksgiving before going dark, but it’s still a bright little memory for me!

Friday, November 25, 2022

The Collected Stories (The Russians) ★★☆☆☆

Title: The Collected Stories
Series: (The Russians)
Author: Nikolai Gogol
Translator: Unknown
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 575
Words: 166K

If peasants getting drunk and doing stupid things amuses you, if the devil being outfoxed by said peasants sounds interesting and if constantly worrying about your class status is something you do, then these short stories are probably for you.

They were not for me. Thankfully, this was the last of Gogol. There are some plays left, but I’m not going to bother.

★★☆☆☆