2006 Already

Sheeyit. This year got here too damn fast. Rolled through another birthday, did Christmas, slept through the New Year. All the things your mother tells you do come true.

The year so far in books - finally started working on the ongoing classic series The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Had this recommended to me by several people, looked at it a few times, but never got around to starting. I am impressed. Rich text, possibly hundreds of plot threads, with a fully developed world and mythology that serves as a backdrop against which fascinating characters full of potential and power move in world-changing paths. I am seriously excited about getting further into this series - we'll see how things develop over the course of the next 10 or 11 books (!), with additional threads being explored in a soon-to-be published prequel and companion books. So far, the books provide a satisfying density without the stilted tone that Tolkien's works (for all their incredible depth and breadth) sometimes found themselves mired in, or the brain-bending complexity of Herbert's Dune novels that occasionally left the reader gasping for breath under the sheer weight of the socio-political exploration going on. Recommended.

Flicks - heavy, light, and in-between. Let's start light:

• More great stuff from those wacky Brits - Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Technically impressive stop-motion animation, great character design, all topped off with pitch perfect caricatures of all things British. Funny, touching, exciting, just an excellent family movie from start to finish. Nick Park and his animation team at Aardman have released consistently hilarious work. Their first theatrical release, Chicken Run, was not everything it could have been, but the misses of that movie have easily been converted to hits with this one. Great stuff, even if you don't have kids to take to it.
• Say what you like about les Québécois, as long as they release movies like Les Invasiones Barbares, I say we hold off on the invasion. A frank, fascinating look at mortality and how it affects a group of old friends and their families. Veering from explicit discussions of exactly how much sex went on to how best to start off on using heroin, covering the decline of intellectualism and every other topic under the sun. A touching, beautiful movie about life and all the things that make it worth living.
• For every good movie that I see, there's at least on piece of crap rolling around out there, waiting to stick to my brain like chewed Bubble-Yum in the grocery store parking lot. Taxi is the most recent of those. Queen Latifah does everything she can to get past it, but Jimmy Fallon just plain sucks. He can't pull off any of the things he tries, and winds up being a pathetic, sniveling loser that you just want to see thrown off a building. Not that I was expecting something classic here, but when comedy doesn't work, it can be agonizing to watch. Hope for some chuckles to burn some daylight - get lemon juice poured into the paper cuts on your eyes. Ahh well, maybe I'll learn some day.

Games - my bane. I have seen the eighth wonder that is Half-Life 2, and it is every bit as good as they say. Incredible graphics, level design, sound, music, story - a cinematic experience that rivals or exceeds pretty much anything that has come before. Every time I run across one of these games, I get more and more pumped about the future of interactive gaming. Games like this, The Chronicles of Riddick, Morrowind, the Halo series, and others continue to stretch the limits of what gaming is, and it's only going to get better. On a more visceral and less intellectually engaging level, the beauty of Quake 4 has held my attention for a bit - a well-done and worthy successor to the classic id games, moving the impressive Doom 3 engine into the light. With better voice-acting, a slightly deeper storyline, and some great level design, this one is an excellent run-and-gun shooter with enough variation to keep things interesting. Sliding over to the platform space, I've finally pushed my way further into the Tony Hawk Underground series. While never as graphically stunning as some of the monsters above, this series has been consistently entertaining, challenging, and just fun to play. I'm hearing ill winds about the choices made in the American Wasteland entry, but I'm still one title away from that one. We'll see.

Well, I'm off to get some fresh air and daylight before I return to the grind. Until later.