The Transformers films would be sooooo much better if they were edited down about 30-45 minutes each. The last one was ridiculously bloated. I didn't even mind the obscenely obvious product placement. It was just too overstuffed with plot.
Gaming stores selling used rpgs at full retail. Granted 2E D&D matetial is still somewhat popular. Yet selling a used 2E boxed sets at 46$ is a rip-off imo. I might as well buy the PDF and print it out on my own. Then they wonder why their used 2E stuff is not selling as well as it could. My grievance? Actually finding a store that sells used RPG's in my area. There's ONE, an hour and fifteen minutes away. I'm trying to find a decent copy of 1st edition AD&D books to run some of the classic campaigns, and coming up with squat. Go go rural living.
See, if it's bad Arnold movies we're talking about, then I love Last Action Hero. It's awesome, and it manages to be both a typical action movie and a commentary on action movies, at the same time! I love it.
I agree with a lot of the points here, but even the last few books had a number of WOW moments for me: Spoiler:
- When Demandred arrived with the army of Sharans through the massive gateway that spread across the battlefield. I really have an epic picture in my head of that moment. - The closing of the Bore. I really liked the description of Rand weaving closed the hole in the Dark One's prison. I finished the series last year, and those are the two that still stick out in my mind. Maybe that's not much, but they were satisfying to me.
Well, to be honest, I've seen both the movie and the mini-series of Dune at some point (can't remember if I got all the way through the mini). I think that makes it harder to jump into because there's already some knowledge of the story to come spoiled. I think it's the same reason I have trouble reading Tolkien, in that I saw the Lord of the Rings movies first. I would like to come back to Dune, though, as it's a pretty sprawling series, and I don't currently have something like that on my plate. A few months ago, I finished doing the audiobooks for The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. That took me about a year to get through, and I'd like something equally involved. As for Ancillary Justice, one of the early things that really put me off was the inner monologue about gender not being relevant, and then proceeding to just refer to every character's pronoun as "she." It felt shoehorned in as an attempt to be current-culture relevant, and that annoyed me. I don't mind playing around with social concepts in science fiction, but if you need to preach at the reader almost directly like that, I feel you're doing it wrong. It was the same criticism I had with Ready Player One, where at various points it just felt like the author, Ernest Cline, wanted to really make sure his readership didn't miss his point on issues of religion and sexuality. It was so on-the-nose, but given the Mary Sue nature of that whole book, I wasn't really surprised at the choice to broach the topics in that manner. It's why I feel so refreshed reading Lovecraft right now. Sci-fi (or the macabre) should be a challenge to read, but those other books really felt dumbed-down. |
