Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Jason Venter's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
10:42 pm	A change in departments In the unlikely event that I find myself going back through and using LiveJournal entries as a record of my life, I should make a note here that tonight I worked my last day in the home improvement section at my store. Starting next week, I'll be working in home electronics. That feels rather momentous to me because I know a great deal more about electronics and such than I do lawnmowers, hand towels, curtains and such. Hopefully, that knowledge helps me to enjoy working with customers more and hopefully my new coworkers in that department will be as easy to work with as the ones I'm abandoning. *fingers crossed* (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
12:04 pm	Modern Family What I like about my recent addiction to Hulu is that it allows me to see whatever shows are "big" right now on my own schedule. Since the service shows up to 5 episodes back, I can miss a few days or weeks and still catch up. I've been really enjoying a variety of shows in this manner: The Office, Community, Family Guy, The Cleveland Show and now Modern Family. I actually only found Modern Family because I was looking up information on The Cleveland Show and there were a lot of references to Modern Family because both shows are new this year. Someone was saying that The Cleveland Show is good but not great, not as funny as Modern Family. After watching four episodes of Modern Family, I have to agree. I am enjoying The Cleveland Show, but it is derivative of Family Guy. Modern Family, meanwhile, is derivative of The Office and Arrested Development, two shows that I generally prefer to Family Guy. The first episode of Modern Family is actually quite funny while laying a lot of ground work. As I watched, it wasn't hard to pick out the things that the show is trying to do in order to find an audience. There is Sofia Vergera (or however you spell that name), who is considered one of the 100 sexiest women of all time by one magazine or another. She's quite the looker, at least, and married to Ed O'Neil's character. Then there are two gay men who have just adopted a baby and there's another family that is headed by a father who thinks it's more important to be a friend to his children and their overbearing mother than it is to be a well-rounded father figure. None of that is particularly promising by itself. It sounds like slight twists in the interests of appealing to wider demographics, an almost by-the-numbers approach to "off the wall," if such a thing is possible. I wasn't sure that things would get very good, but then I realized that I didn't care much because I couldn't stop laughing. Honestly, there hasn't been a family this interesting to watch since Arrested Development, and the mockumentary style in which things unfold, while reminiscent of The Office and lacking Ron Howard's narration that made Arrested Development so compulsively watchable, works wonders here. I don't want to spoil the gags from episode to episode, or the great lines that you have to see unfold to appreciate, but I hope that if you have a few spare moments you'll head on over to Hulu and watch the first few episodes, possibly right up to and including the fourth one. If you're like me (and apparently a large number of viewers, since the show got picked up for a full 22-episode season), you'll likely choose to keep watching. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
12:20 pm	The Office In case you wondered, my opinion of season 6 of The Office thus far is that we're seeing the series at its peak. There were some moments in previous years where things were starting to falter. Parts of season 3 and 4 come to mind in particular. However, the writers seem to be having a lot of fun now. I just watched episodes 4 and 5 on Hulu and they were incredible. I love this show! The end of the fifth episode had me all choked up because it was so perfect. My wife doesn't get how I can watch the show, what about it is supposed to be funny or interesting. I meet people all the time who volunteer that they hate it and I know they're not just saying that to be cruel because they don't even know I like it. I don't bother informing them. For me, however, there aren't really a lot of sitcoms out there that connect on that level. So thanks, I guess, to the many talented people responsible for putting each episode together. I can't imagine things continuing on this level for much longer, but I'm sure enjoying the ride while it's available! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
4:21 pm	I got a new(ish) customer review on Amazon.com! I was checking books on Amazon.com and I happened to check mine again. Defiant Light is no longer listed new, but there are three used copies available. It also turns out that there's another review for it--beyond the first one, I mean--that was written in 2008. Here's the text: --- One Word. Boring... (1/5 Stars) I found this book in a used book store, I usually read about 400 books a year. So I know what a good book is, and this isn't it. It's very repeditive and fails to keep the readers intrest. It had a good base to work from and completely falls apart shortly thereafter." --- It's neat that something I wrote more than 10 years ago is still finding new readers through the wonders of used books. I really dig that. This guy obviously didn't dig my book, but I know people who did so I'm not heartbroken about it or anything. In other news, Amazon.com has the first three books from Karin Lowachee and their price was higher than I expected. I thought the book was just getting rare, so I bought the third one (Cagebird) before it wasn't possible to get it. There were only two copies left. It just showed up today and it's a trade paperback, something that the Amazon.com listing didn't explicitly mention. I was a little upset because my copies of the first two are regular mass-market paperback and I'm not usually a big fan of trade paperback... but this one is so nice, the pages so crisp and the text so sharp... I kind of want to go back and get the first two in that format now. I dunno, though. They're good stuff, but $20/book is the reason I didn't like trade paperback in the first place. I'll have to see how I feel when I get a bit more money. Oh, and I also got the second and third books in C.C. Finlay's trilogy, since it looks like no one around here is going to carry them. I guess I was just lucky to find the first one in stores. Either way, I now have the whole set. Hopefully I'll have time to read them soon. They sound so dang interesting and I already know that I enjoy Charlie's writing! (Comment on this)
11:35 am	My employer continues to get grief for corporate policy I just checked my mail and there was a postcard waiting for me, addressed to the "postal customer" with my PO Box. Presumably, this is going out to everyone in my residential area, and perhaps even throughout the Pacific Northwest (the mailing came from Washington, not my state). Here's what it said... --- Terminated without a Prior Warning NITA SENDS YOU THIS MESSAGE: My name is Nita. I worked for [store name] for over 19 years. I am 70 years old. On June 29, 2009 I was called into my store director's office and told that I had handed a customer back their check in the amount of $12.30 and was being terminated for this. I told my store director "You know I'm raising my granddaughter." He told me it was out of his hands, it's a corporate policy. I asked him about my medical coverage and he responded that I only had medical coverage for 2 more days. During my 19 years with [store name] I was a very dependable employee, reeived great reviews and had no other disciplinary issues. I had built relationships with customers and coworkers and considered [store name] my family. I worked hard for my job and loved it. [store name] never gave me a penny. I worked hard for every penny I earned. How am I going to find another job with these wages and benefits? --- This message could easily have come from one of my coworkers, though it didn't. I personally know several others who have similar stories and I've even mentioned one here, a fantastic employee who worked with the company for 8 years and was dismissed for the same offense. There were others. Mind you, it's an easier mistake to make than you might think. I've caught myself about to make it a few times, and if I had another customer or two jockeying for my attention at the time--not uncommon for a cashier here, since most people don't really give a rat's ass if you're directly engaged with someone else when they want you to tell them how to find something on the opposite side of the store in some other department--I very well may have! This corporate policy is unjust and it places no value whatsoever on the human factor that many of the store's loyal customers have come to admire. This campaign is sad not because my employer is being unfairly targetted, but because this corporate policy goes against the very ideas on which the company was founded and on which it has built its sterling reputation. It's sad because of the people affected, the lives ruined, all over the occasional missing check. The postcard that I received today promised more stories to come. I know there's no shortage of them available. I'm glad that someone cares enough to get this message out to the public. I can't afford to join in because, like Nita, I can't afford to be without a job right now. Unlike Nita, I still have one. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 18th, 2009
10:17 am	"The Defiant Muse" or "How I Wrote 514 Words at 12 in the Morning" Last night I was really, really, really in the mood to write something creative. Have you ever had one of those moods where suddenly you feel your muse suddenly slapping you around and screaming "Write, write, write!" and there's no real justification? That was me last night. So even though it was 12:30 in the AM and I knew I didn't plan to be awake for more than another two hours or so, I sat down and wrote the first chapter of a novel I've been planning to start for quite awhile now. The resulting chapter is only 514 words long right now, but at least for now I'm not terribly worried about chapter length conventions. That first chapter is part of a novel that is part of what I plan to be an extensive series set within the same universe as "Defiant Light" that I got published through Xlibris. Returning to that world may sound like a waste of time given the fact that I never found a traditional publisher, but I think that in some respects, "Defiant Light" is the best fiction that I've ever written. In part, it was the result of a comment from Charlie Finlay when he read the first chapter of "A Crescent Mark" on the Del Rey Online Writing Workshop--my favorite of my own work up to that point--and commented that the story was decent but that there wasn't really any reason to read it instead of a bunch of other stories. I think he said it with more tact and he has since encouraged me to write what I want to write even when I hear comments like that, but I took his point and somehow "Defiant Light" was born. Years later, I still see a lot of potential in the world I created and its mythos. I've had a bunch of ideas for that world for years now, things I've never really explored because it felt like something I'd already done and left behind me. There were also a few false starts on sequels that met with mixed success, mostly because there wasn't a lot of thought behind them except that "Hmm, I should write a sequel." In spite of those botched attempts, my brain and my acquaintances won't let me give up on the "Defiant Light" world. When I talk to a few family members about my writing and about maybe doing some more fiction, almost without exception they ask hopefully if I'll be writing another "Defiant Light" novel. They're not all that interested in the general idea of me writing more fiction, just more "Defiant Light" stuff. Maybe there's something to that, so I'm giving it another shot and I plan to do it properly. For me, properly means going back to the beginning. Jim Butcher once posted a challenge on the workshop, calling for me and others to explain how the world I created in "Defiant Light" might have reasonably come into existence. My prologue for "Defiant Light" explains how it DID come into existence in my mind, but it's a rush job. There was so much more to the person, to his world and to the specific event that I want to tell. My new series will hopefully do precisely that with enough interesting detail to perhaps attract more readers. Something that excites me about the story that I'm trying to sell is that it's as much about people as it is about the story. My fiction tends to work the other way around, even though I realized some time ago that tales of the human condition are what make people enjoy fiction, not so much the settings and action that tend to interest me personally. The people-first dynamic is something that I believe the first half of "Defiant Light" got right more than 10 years ago, despite my best amateur efforts, so I'm happy that my new ideas again focus on characters as much as they do setting. I'm also pleased to report that I'm happy with those first 514 words that I've written. They accomplish an awful lot in a short space. I don't know when I've ever been happier with an introduction. Anyway, that's enough blabbering. I'll conclude by saying that I'm happy to be writing in this world again, to be reworking one of my very best ideas from its inception. If the project that I envision comes into proper existence, I expect nothing but the best from it. I owe it to myself to give it a shot. Besides, I think my muse might kill me if I don't. Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: "That's Not My Name" by The Ting Tings (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
10:14 pm	And Section 8 makes six... Well, my newest guide is finished and up at IGN, meaning that I've now written six proper guides for the site (in addition to some beefy FAQ content). This one is for Section 8, the recent Xbox 360 and PC release. You can find it here: http://guides.ign.com/guides/746148/ I can't say that I'm really loving writing these guides, but there are much worse things in life... like my day job. So this is a great way to earn some extra money doing something that actually interests me--even if it's not always fun--and it builds my portfolio while getting me closer to the day when I can say "Adios!" to that awful day job. Now I just need to write another 10 or 20 and I'll be all set. One guide at a time, though. One guide at a time. Fortunately, my next one is already lined up and I'll be starting in on it later this week or early next week at the latest. It'll be a much meatier one than the Section 8 one was, so excuse me if I'm difficult to tolerate for the next few weeks. It's for a good cause! Sort of. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
1:02 am	The death of video game magazines I have the profound misfortune of working at a large retail chain in the Pacific Northwest, a series of stores much like a Wal-Mart or a Target, with a surprisingly significant presence--at least for the area--in the "books and magazines" sector. It's no Barnes & Noble and it doesn't try to be, but you'd probably be surprised by the amount of variety. I'm not sure who stocks the store, but they do a good job. There's usually a nice selection of fantasy and sci-fi stuff, plus I've often found fiction by people I kind of sort of know online. The magazine section actually has several shelves and they are stocked with magazines of all sorts, including familiar names like Wired, Rolling Stone, Maxim, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, National Geographic, tabloids and about 50 million magazines for women and hobbyists. Lately, I've heard a lot of discussion about how print is dying, to be replaced by the Internet. No one wants to buy magazines anymore, people say, because they can get it all online much more quickly and without spending any money. I believe that there's some truth to that, but tonight I noticed something rather interesting: while the store stocks something like 4 or 5 magazines relating to video games--a huge industry with many rabid followers--it also stocks the same number relating to (wait for it)... horses. Yes, horses. Equus, Western Horseman and a few others were in display. Some were quarterly, some were yearly specials and some (three, at the very least) were monthly publications. All devoted to the love of horses: raising them, riding them, admiring them. Now, some of that no doubt factors in my regional location. I'm not in the middle of Los Angeles, after all. But there's a similar selection of magazines devoted to tattooes, metal bands, anime, Robert Patkinson, knitting, woodworking and so forth. This leads me to the conclusion that while video game magazines certainly are becoming something of an endangered species (a point driven home when Electronic Gaming Monthly folded, as if there hadn't been enough surprises up to that point), it's only certain types of magazine that are no longer deemed necessary by the constantly evolving market of willing spenders. Maybe instead of saying "No one wants to read magazines anymore," we should start saying "No gamers want to read magazines anymore" and then from there ask ourselves why that might be the case. It would be a different sort of discussion than the one I see so often these days, and probably a great deal more productive. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 31st, 2009
4:41 pm	Disney to acquire Marvel It sounds like, barring objections from anti-trust folks, Disney is set to purchase Marvel for $4B. To which I say... Wow. Article here: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/35611/Disneys-surprise-4bn-Marvel-swoop That's from a video game site, one of several reporting the big news today. I'm not sure what I think, except that I don't actually see this as a good way to improve or maintain the quality for which Marvel products have recently been known. The executives are thrilled about the Disney marketing muscle, which is definitely a force with which to be reckoned, but I thought that some of the recent superhero movies (made by Disney's competition, mind you) have been really fantastic. Still, this does make a lot of sense. Disney needed something to compete with Warner Bros. and its DC Comics alliance. This is the obvious route to take. And since the previous deal worked for Time Warner, I bet this Disney venture goes through without a hitch. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
9:52 pm	Arrested Development I only just recently got around to watching "Arrested Development," a television show I'd heard a fair deal about but never really got to watch because during its run, I didn't even have reliable television and my wife tends to own the area in front of the television set whenever she's home. Anyway, DVD is a way around that. It has allowed me to see a lot of shows I otherwise wouldn't have. Curious because of the many favorable comments I've heard about the show--which for some reason only lasted for three not-quite-full seasons despite its loyal following--I snatched it up when awhile ago the store where I work had the first season for only $13... before my helpful discount! The show is great. It's a sitcom, of course, but not a typical one because there's really an ongoing story arc through each of the three seasons, and a really interesting one at that. Single episodes can be fun to watch, but the real fun is in following the hilarious soap opera from week to week. There's so much that can't be said without ruining best bits, but general comments would be that the narration by Ron Howard is hilariously excellent, the jokes are so absurd that sometimes a person doesn't even realize they're jokes until he's suddenly laughing out loud a minute later and the end-of-episode previews of the next week's festivities often have nothing to do with what actually happens. Really, it's great stuff. If you haven't seen "Arrested Development," I encourage you to do so. Start with the first season (which I think may still be available online at hulu; I know it was a few months back) and watch two or three, then see if you're ready to stop. You likely won't be. Tonight, I just finished the last episode. While not every single one was perfect, I liked them all well enough that I'm anxious to see the movie. It's currently in pre-production with a 2010 release planned and it seems that all of the regular actors are on board, so I'm hoping it'll be great. However it turns out, you can count on me seeing it shortly after its release. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 28th, 2009
1:59 pm	A lot of things make sense now I bought a Big Mac for lunch today--just the sandwich, not the fries and drink--and I happened to read the packaging. Suddenly, the world made a bit more sense. "There is only one 100% Beef Big Mac," it read, and I realized that given the number of them that McDonald's sells, odds of me finding that one 100% beef Big Mac are pretty slim. The same is true for you, unfortunately. What we're probably getting is something without all of that beef. At least, if the advertising is to be believed... and I don't know why we'd mistrust a company's own claims! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
3:29 pm	AP photo files I have a question: do the AP photo files contain a single photograph where the person being photographed isn't presented in close to the worst possible light? This may seem like a facetious question, but it is not. Time and time again, I'll read a story on Yahoo! or some other news aggregation site. It'll be contributed material from the AP, and next to it there's a picture from the AP files where the victim looks much worse than I can imagine they would even on their driver's license. Case in point: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090827/ap_on_re_us/us_jenkins_great_white_hope I could probably go through the list and just keep finding more and more stories with similarly awful shots. Either someone with political and/or other agenda gets to choose the shots that accompany these stories, or AP photographers really do suck that much. It's not just stories where the person is being villified, either, by the way. That's why I'm genuinely curious as to what the problem is. Seriously, I bet even the tabloids are jealous of the AP tendency to make people look like crap. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
1:56 pm	Brett Favre is back! Again. I'm disappointed. I looked through my "Friends" page here, fully expecting to see some sort of commentary on Brett Favre's decision to come out of retirement again, this time to play for the Vikings... and found nothing. Do people just not care now that he's retired so often, or are most people on my list like me and mostly oblivious to the goings on in the NFL? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
2:04 pm	I'm lazy about cleaning out my e-mail Yesterday, I cleaned out my inboxes for my two e-mail accounts that I regularly use. My Yahoo! account hadn't been cleaned out in that fashion for more than a year. I'd only been casually deleting e-mails now and then but otherwise just being lazy and letting them sit there. I'd been a lot more proactive about my account related to my web site, but it still had well over 10,000 messages built up. Since I had a clean slate, I decided to see how the accounts perform in terms of spam. In a 24-hour period, I received 36 e-mails on my Yahoo! account, which I've been using since 1998. Of those, 7 were arguably messages of my own doing: e-mails I don't quite want from IGN subscriptions of one sort or another that suddenly seem to have turned on for reasons unknown, Facebook notifications and a digest e-mail from the Online Writing Workshop. Half of that number were automatically sorted into my "Spam" folder, which was good. It means that only around 11 e-mails slipped past the blocker that shouldn't. For 11 years in use, that's not bad. My HonestGamers e-mail didn't fare quite as well. I don't have filters set up there because every time I do, I miss important e-mails from industry contacts. So I kind of have to take the good with the bad. I didn't count how many I got, but every day I seem to get around 15 or 20 spam messages during a certain three-hour period (whenever China and other such places are busiest, I guess). Part of my daily morning routine is going through and deleting any obvious spam, then going through a second time and deleting industry mailings that I don't want to bother with, then going through a third time with a closer lens and then going through a fourth time to post press releases on my site and then delete the messages I don't need to save. E-mail has really become a bit of a nuisance. I probably manually process something like 40 or 50 e-mails in a given day. That's time that I could be spending doing other important things online like... uh... posting on my LiveJournal, I guess. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, August 7th, 2009
2:50 am	Willow Tit Willow When I was in the second grade, I attended a small-town school in the farming community of Perrydale. I remember it as a rather ideallic, almost magical part of my life. There were adult concerns around me, of course, but I didn't notice them. My life wasn't so very different from some cartoon depicting life on a farm or in a small community with white-washed fences and huge bales of hay in the sunshine. The school put on a play that year, and I had a reasonably integral role. I was the first swordsman who got to hold up a sword as the high executioner passed underneath, a task I took very seriously. I got to sing "Willow Tit Willow" and "Behold the lord high executioner..." with my classmates, but there was that one moment where I was a star. The night of the performance, we showed up late. The families from around the area had been assembled in the gymnasium and we came in from the back doors, slinking toward our seats (in the case of my parents) and rushing to join classmates (me). I had my nylon braid in place, made of pantyhose, and a fake sword with tin foil around it. Minutes late though I was, I was able to play my role as the moment came and the lord high executioner walked through. It's funny how music isn't something you really forget. I remember the play being a tale of tragic romance, and I remember lines about throwing oneself into the billow waves, but I don't remember much else. Yet tonight when I watched an episode of season-10 "Frasier" on DVD, a lot of those old memories and lyrics came flooding back to me. One of these days, I think I'm going to need to see the play--whatever it's called; probably not Willow Tit Willow--performed by someone who knows how to do it properly, or perhaps just by a second-grade class at some elementary school in a farming community most people don't even know exists. Clearly the story resonated with the people who wrote that episode of "Frasier," and maybe now that I'm old enough to understand things I can enjoy it as more than just the kid that got to hold up a tin foil sword. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
12:42 pm	Updates on The Wheel of Time video game Chris Morgan is leading the writing team for the Wheel of Time video games: http://www.honestgamers.com/news.php?article_id=4597 Obviously the news story is posted on my own site, but it's really just a press release. As such, I was surprised by a lot of what I was posted. I'm clearly out of the loop because I didn't realize that Sanderson's effort to conclude the series is the first of a trilogy. Last I heard, it was going to be one huge volume as Jordan had intended. I can't say I'm extremely stunned by the development, given the nature of Jordan's books to never quite end, but it still means the series isn't winding down any time soon. We've already been waiting for this first volume from Sanderson for years! As for the games, they're presumably in decent hands. Morgan's credits aren't bad, though they're probably a bit more mainstream than some fans might like. I really enjoyed Wanted and even liked elements of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, but I know a lot of people who despised both of those, with much of that hate coming courtesy of the writing. It'll be interesting to see how the games turn out, and the movie too. I'm cheered by the well-regarded teams that are coming together to turn the books into other types of media, but this is one of those cases where I can't help but hope for the best while realizing that "the best" isn't particularly likely to occur. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 1st, 2009
3:24 pm	That's another guide down for IGN... Well, my latest guide is up on IGN and I like it very much: http://guides.ign.com/guides/14325210/ Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships was a fun game and I enjoyed writing the guide. With its publication online, I now have five guides posted on that site, which feels very good. I've always appreciated IGN, so it's fun playing a small role in its continued excellence. With any luck, there will be another five guides... or ten or twenty. Only time will tell how many assignments I can obtain and how long I can keep my mind in a guide-writing mode. Anyway, check out the game if you like brain benders... and consult my guide if you need a bit of help along the way. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 25th, 2009
12:29 am	In case you wondered... One of many differences between a good and bad employer is that the good employer will value its employees and their contributions even in those (hopefully) rare situations where they make mistakes. I clearly can't say that I work for a good employer, because since I started my job I've watched several of my very best coworkers get fired for minor infractions. The latest loss--and one that hits me the hardest--is that of a cheerful and generally efficient gentleman who has worked with the company for eight years. He got fired because he was cashiering and a check wound up not making it to the till bag that was dropped in the safe that night. This is not an isolated incident with that one employee. The system seems almost designed to ensure that at some point or another, any employee working on a register WILL make a mistake that will have that same result. So this guy that has worked there for 8 years made a mistake and was terminated. He's financially comfortable enough that he'll do fine without the job (though the loss of a few benefits might hurt), but that's not really the point. I'm getting really tired of seeing employees fired at the job for genuine mistakes that at any other job I've ever worked would constitute--at worst--the first of several written warnings. I'm tired of watching these mistakes happen because we're working with half the people that we should have for the job at hand (an ongoing situation that makes it tough to have a smile on my face when I show up for work). I have no confidence in my ability to retain a job there because any day I could show up for work and be told that I'm on suspension... which is a nice way of saying "We're firing you in three days." I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the recent string of terminations. At my last employee review, my department head (a nice guy, mind you, but one who has no real say when it comes to who in his department someone higher on the food chain decides to fire) gave me a rave review and shared comments from my coworkers about how everyone likes me and what a fantastic job I've been doing. Then basically across the board--except for cashiering, which wasn't even really part of my job description and wasn't part of the stated job description for the gentleman I mentioned that got fired, either--I was rated 3/5. "Don't worry," my manager said. "We don't really rate anyone higher than that." I clearly need to get a new job. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
11:32 am	I sometimes don't know how to pronounce strange words I see written for the first time. "Clinton was in Phuket to meet with her counterparts in the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations, or ASEAN." Question: how does one pronounce "Phuket"? Just curious. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
2:31 am	Three cheers for poor taste! I'm extremely thankful at times for all the people in the world who have horrible taste in music, movies, literature, video games... they really make me happy because they allow me to continue listening to new music that I like, enjoying new movies, reading new literature and playing new games. Without all those people and their awful taste that critics are so anxious to bemoan, I wouldn't be able to enjoy many of my favorite things. Things like... * New Green Day and Tori Amos albums that don't re-invent the wheel but instead just evolve slightly while giving me more of what I like... and that's okay. * Romantic comedies, sci-fi thrillers and action flicks that keep people like Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Sandra Bullock, Jackie Chan and others involved even when they're not reaching new heights of cinematic greatness... because sometimes all I want is a lot of big explosions or belly laughs and to not have to think very hard as the good guys win the day and the bad guys die horrible deaths. * More books like The Lord of the Rings by authors like Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Stephen R. Donaldson and others... because let's face it: a person can only read through The Lord of the Rings so many times before he wants to meet different elves and dwarves. * More Mega Man, Mario Party, Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania and so forth. A fantastic idea is just as good the fifth, tenth or twentieth time I experience it as it was the first time. Polish might not replace complete originality, but it still counts for a lot! I realize that there's a vocal and charismatic minority that just can't place much value on something if it's not making bold strides into new territory. I'm not knocking the willingness to do something different, to extend comfort zones or to shift the paradigm. But you know what? There's a lot of good stuff out there that'll never please critics who have superior tastes to me and the majority. That same majority might cut me off in traffic, sneer at me when they walk past me in the store where I work or vote for stupid politicians and reforms come election season, but I can forgive them some of those transgressions because they ensure that I can continue to enjoy the not-quite-best that the entertainment world has to offer. Thanks, people! (1 Comment |Comment on this)