All at One Point. Complicated Stuff and Fish.

Until about five minutes ago I had never heard of this short story and I 'm still not even sure I read it at all if that makes sense. I'm not entirely sure of what happened at all, really all I understood was something about making pasta and people with unpronounceable names that had numbers in it. First off my question is what kind of maid is going to take the time to make pasta noodles from scratch, I feel like something like that would take all day. Then when we talked about it in class, somehow it seemed everyone but me related it to the big bang and the beginning of the universe. I fail to see how this story has anything to do with space or the universe or the beginning of anything other than how to make noodles which I pictured as Ramen noodles but now that I think about it its probably Spaghetti noodles. That was my big story question, what kind of noodles.

The second story "The Aquatic Uncle" was much more interesting and easier to follow. I didn't get to finish it though before we started to talk about it. It was an interesting subject matter, no one really writes about fish and mud guppies and primitive mammals. I liked how they were talked about as if they had advanced thought conscious. Like it was a family decision to either go on land or stay in the water. We follow a family that decided to go onto land and while they haven't fully developed as much as some, the're still far from the water dwellers. THe main character of this family then falls in love with a far more advanced mammal, one I pictured as a meer cat of some sort.

If you really want to look into it then this is more of a story about acceptance and not really about evolution. You have to be able to love your family no matter what, even the grumpy great uncle that lives in the swamp.

Johnny Mnemonic/ Cyber Punk

This was a surprisingly entertaining story. I would always see the Johnny Mnemonic film to check out at the library but it looked so bad that I always ignored it. Maybe not so much anymore. For some reason I always seem to have a thing about cyberpunk ever since The Matrix. I like how there's the relatively normal setting, a modern day or believable/plausible futuristic world which is immediately easily relatable.

The idea of storing information inside your head seems like a closer possibility as the years go on. Right now we have blutooth headsets that sit in your ear and allow you to talk to people. Sooner or later those headsets are going to have storage capabilities. I can imagine that within the next 20 years we'll have the option to implant ourselves with different technological capabilities. Imagine having a memory storage implant in your head, you'd never forget anything. Marriages could possibly be saved because husbands would no longer forget anniversaries or birthdays. Kids would never fail tests because they could always remember the answers. But thinking of that does that mean we're no longer human? Is using technology to our advantage mean we're no longer human, would we have lost touch with humanity?

The Yakuza was also an interesting enemy, I feel you don't see it often enough in books and films. They're just one of those things you don't see too often. They're usually just forgetting about and seen as only existing in Japan. The fighting was decent too, I didn't expect it to be so violent and realistic. Being part of the sci-fi genre I automatically start to think that lasers and phasers are going to be involved. Overall though I was satisfied with this story

MULTIVERSE!!!!

Aye, and Gamorrah was a weird story and I didn't quite understand what was going on the entire time. As far as I could understand there was something about a sex change or that the guy could be whatever you wanted him to be.

The focus of the story almost seemed to be about the guy but it was being told from what seemed like the womans point of view. It was really hard to find out the point of this story, why anyone would want to tell it. It is interesting however to think of a future where people can become whatever sex they want. Not that its something I would want to ever do but I can see how some people would. This story actually got kind of annoying for me in its lack of direction and subject matter. Thats the biggest thing that gets me when it comes to stories, stories that don't go anywhere or seem to have any purpose. This story would have been a hundred times more interesting if there was a more clear conflict with the two characters in the story. Maybe if one was trying to run away from the other or something.

Jaunting!

Space Opera, aside from in films (with the exception of Dune, too cheesy for me) is not a very appealing subject to me, and I can't figure out why. I like all the subject matter contained within such as space, and war, and women and spaceships and action. But something about it all just doesn't sit well with me.
The Stars My Destination was a bit surprising though, especially for being made in the 50's. Something made in the 50's automatically makes me think of films like Forbidden Planet, which was shown in class.

Stuff like this is too bad for me to get into. Even in a "so bad its funny" kind of way. Its just tasteless. But this book surprised me, the whole tattoo's that glow idea is something that obviously influenced some modern day sci-fi action stories and even video games. Even at first the story was reminding me of the Count of Montecristo minus the lover part. Then it seemed to take a turn in the direction of the Matrix where this one guy is the savior only he doesn't really know it yet. Its only when he unlocks his true powers and manages to teleport from planet to planet (or jaunt as they call it) that he realizes he's "the one" and has to lead the people to freedom. Even the back tracking to his birth is kind of like 2001: A Space Odyssey where in the end we see what could be perceived as either God or Dave as a newborn baby floating above the earth.

Fantasy and Fantasy Gaming

While I haven't finished Warbreaker, so far about a quarter way in I'm a bit skeptical. I've never been a huge fan of science fiction novels and often find them hard to read. On the other hand I love science fiction movies. I like how it usually has imaginative locations and situations no human will ever see in real life. It also says something to my interest in space, you know looking into the sky an wondering which planet has this science fiction stuff actually happening. I know it likely isn't but its fun to think about at times. The movies seem to do a good job of conveying things you would read in books.

For books, the reason I don't like the too much is because when reading it, it seems to make everything one hundred times cheesier looking than the movies do. But I think thats because the people that make the movies realize how cheesy the imagery created looks and make altercations. Thats also part of the reason why I think Star Wars works so well, George Lucas seems to have done a good job of staying away from the cheese and making things appealing.

Warbreaker so far for me is cheesy. I don't understand why it has to be breathing on something that gives it life or why he has a talking sword or why his name has to be Vasher. Its all cheesy and makes it hard for me to read or care about. Every time I read this book I think of the image below. I mean honestly who thought that image was cool or appealing? Thats what I think of when I read this book. Maybe I'm being harsh but i'm very picky when it comes to imagery created in my head, if its not easily created and appealing then I don't care or want anything to do with it. Or at least hard to pay attention.

Modern Fantasy.

I'm going to write about Coraline, its the only Neil Gaiman story i've had any experience with aside from his short story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties". Found here: http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Short_Stories/How_To_Talk_To_Girls_At_Parties/How_To_Talk_To_Girls_At_Parties_(Text)

I have very limited knowledge of writers and new books and such but Neil Gaiman seems to be at the forefront of modern day fantasy writers. His stories in context to history are fresh as well they don't contain the usual elves and dwarves and dragons associated with other fantasy books.

Coraline for me is about a child's need to explore and be a kid. Here she is having just moved into a foggy boring town where she doesn't know anyone. Her parents have become too pre-occupied to pay any attention to her and because of this she gets herself into a load of trouble. So if you will this whole ordeal thats about to fall upon her is the fault of her parents. But non-the-less she goes off exploring her new house where she finds a modern day rabbit hole. A little door in an empty upstairs room. In the beginning its made clear Coraline is bored with her parents and has a general distaste for them at the time. Through this rabbit whole is where she finds an opposite world. Everything is the opposite of what it is in the real world. In this fake world the cat can talk, her parents are energetic and exciting and give her all the attention she could hope for. Something all children can probably relate to. In this modern society too often are adults caught up in their own problems and work to really pay any mind to the problems of a child. They are even seen as mundane silly problems when attention is paid, but the mistake is made in ignoring them. To a child these are the worst things imaginable in life because their experience is limited due to their short life.
Back to what happens. After several visits to this other world with her other mother and other father they tell her in order to stay she must sew buttons over her eyes. Sounds painful. Coraline doesn't want this and escapes, eventually leading to a final showdown with the spider version of Other Mother.
Overall if Coralines parents had paid attention to her none of this would have happened. If only her real mom would have been a mother and her father a father Coraline wouldn't have been bored and maybe they would have been able to solve her problem.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is an interesting short story. From the title it sounds pretty mundane and really when you think about it nothing out of the ordinary happens aside from the strange girls at the party. But i've been in similar situations, I end up following a more outgoing friend to a strange house i've never been to where I don't know a single sole. Its like talking to aliens, everything feels different. At this party while never said you start to get the feeling these girls aren't human. They have very large eyes and one talks about swimming around in the sun. At the end just as the main character is feeling comfortable amongst these beings his friend Vic hurriedly says they must leave, and on the way out we see why. The girl he was there for was standing at the top of the stairs in a mess. Vic had gone too far, his eagerness to mingle turned against him. Its left up to the reader to decide, but I believe Vic tried to have sex with this girl but soon discovered she was an alien. But in the end, even if you think you know a girl they really are all aliens.

His Dark Materials.

I'll be honest, the only experience I have with this story is through the movie, and that made little sense. I could tell right away everything was rushed and they tried to do too much in one movie. Although the polar bear fight and the evil bear getting his jaw smacked off was pretty awesome.

Now to say the author Pullman would be an atheist would be a sort of false truth. The book series is really a comment on human morals and religion. I think the whole point he tries to make from the books is that you don't necessarily need religion to tell you how to act. Morals should be an obvious human nature.

That book about little people.

I did not read the Hobbit until I graduated from high school, but it took me about three years to finish the book, but thats not for lack of knowing how to read. Honestly even as a kid I didn't really know about the book and first found out about it through Ralph Bashkis boring The Hobbit cartoon movie, not knowing it was part of a whole epic and deep detailed universe. Once the movies came out then I really took notice and decided to try the Hobbit as part of one of those 'things everyone must do before they die' sort of thing.

I especially like this books theme of unexpected people going on grand adventures for the sake of adventure. You start off with an ordinary Hobbit known as Bilbo Baggins, which can be interpreted as any normal human comfortable in their day to day. Then Gandolf the wizard shows up and causes a ruckus insisting that Bilbo comes with him on a great adventure with a band of dwarves in search of fortune and a dragon that lives in a mountain. As Bilbo goes further and further from his home of Hobbiton he encounters increasingly different characters. Soon Bilbo finds himself separated from the rest of the group and lost in a deep cave, but is soon discovered by Golem who leads him through the cave until Golem looses him, and the ring. It is there in the deepest darkest part of the cave fate convenes and he comes across The Ring. The sources of all troubles in the world, created with a benevolent purpose for evil. Although at first it wouldn't appear as such and if you didnt know about the later three books It would seem like any other magical ring simply granting the wearer invisibility. However we quickly find the ring may have a greater power to it. Bilbo hears Golem off in the darkness screaming and crying and clamoring for the ring. It has a power of humanoids that makes it irresistible. It takes control of your life and it becomes the only thing you want. Its a drug. It has warped and twisted and unnaturally and unflatteringly extended Golems life. Out of the cave Bilbo remarkably meets back with his group and they make their way to the elf village. After a resupply  they make their way to the mountain with the dragon. Fast forwarding they're stuck on the side of the mountain for days with a battle between orcs and men happening at the foot of the mountain. It is here they sneak into the innards of the mountain and steal the gold and slay the dragon.

The everyman has gone on the ultimate adventure. Someone so content in his surroundings has risen to the top and completed the ultimate adventure and done the greatest task known to man, slain a dragon. Thats what I think this book is really about.

J-Horror

A Wild Sheep Chase is a fairly interesting story. Usually when you hear that something is J-Horror you think of a very very dirty young girl with extremely long unwashed hair and a knack for showing up in odd places. Such as a TV screen, computer screen, and a bathtub. This was much more interesting than that though, at least when compared to whats normally expected from this sort of thing.

First off he's not really being threatened or chased by anything really all that evil. He's on a quest to find a wild sheep and really put meaning and excitement to his otherwise mundane life. The first few chapters of the book are spent established showing us the other people in his life, which is odd since he attends a funeral of an ex-girlfriend, the same day sees his ex-wife waiting for him at his house, then later we see him with his current girlfriend with the nice ears. The book never really hits scary territory, but it does involve a supernatural force that seems to have no way of ending it.  Overall though it was a pretty interesting book.

Vampires are Suckin.

For me vampires are usually hit or miss. They can be pretty interesting when in stories such as Interview with the Vampire or extremely lame and laughable in films like Twilight, or even hilarious in movies such as Dracula: Dead and Loving It by Mel Brookes.

Intereview with the Vampire is one of those times I actually appreciate, and enjoy a vampire tale. I enjoyed finding out an in-depth history of a vampire something we don't usually get. Usually its just some mysterious guy that has a lot of money, and after so many hundreds of years I would hope he would be able to accumulate a lot of money, looks handsome I suppose and tends to somehow know how to talk to people despite having to spend most of it locked up inside while the rest of the world is running about. Interview with the Vampire however gave a life and emotional connection to the characters of Lastat, Louis, and Claudia. Interesting thing about Claudia is that she's five years old when she's bitten. And in this worlds laws when you're bitten you cease to age. She is five years old forever, but after hundreds of years of living one is bound to grow up. She grows ever restless and tired of being five. She starts to desire things older women and vampires desire. Such as the urge to hunt. She even goes so far as to feed one of the vampires a dead human, which again in this universe is a really bad things that makes a vampire really sick. But Claudia is not all heartless so to speak. In France when they meet Armand she is sickened by his ruthless feeding of humans in front of humans under the guise of theater acting. She eventually meets a sad end when the theater vampires take her captive after hearing Lastats story of how she and Louis tried to kill him twice. Which in the vampire world is a big no no.

So in the end we learn that immortality isn't all fun times free of death. It becomes a burden you can't get rid of. While you may have fun from time to time in the end you never see the end of war and murder and suffering.

Zombies R Awesome!

I'm part of the crowd that loves zombies, in fact its probably the only genre of horror I really truly like. Most other forms of it annoy the crap out of me to the point of where I can't stand watching them anymore. The thing about zombies for me is that despite how fragile and weak they are, they still keep coming. There's a certain heir of superiority when dealing with a zombie, particularly when they're in small groups or on their own. Watch any zombie movie and any experienced survivor almost always dispatches a single lone zombie with little emotional change. While in most universes a head shot is the only way to "kill" one, taking out the legs or any other part of the body is usually enough to slow them down to where a head shot can relatively easily be taken. Its in large groups or when encountered in confined/dark spaces that zombies are really truly a threat.

For me the whole zombie genre can say many things about society. Take for instance Dawn of the Dead. Taking place in a shopping mall infested with mindless beings aimlessly wandering around. It almost resembles malls today of mindless zombie shoppers wandering from one store to the next to buy the products the TV brainwashed them into thinking they need. There's also something there about being able to kill another "human" without remorse. Its one thing to hunt and kill an animal, but we don't have an emotional connection to that animal. But with zombies, they resemble humans, they essentially are humans. Zombies allow us an opportunity to shoot every bully that ever picked on us in school, the dismember the asshole guy that cut you off on the highway on your way to work, the d-bag at the bar that tried to fight you. And then all the while we get to use an arsenal of any type of weapon we can think of, and we don't need a license. Everything's open and free. Zombies bring with them a world that allows us to steal without second thought because now its in the name of survival, and who hasn't thought about just taking something. The zombie world allows us to go steal a Ferrari from the dealership and not matter. In a way the zombies allow us to live out our dreams, we can finally own our dream car, we can have all the nice clothes we want, we can live in any house we want (given its defendable and empty of all threats). Its a world of true freedom, but as with any freedom it comes with a cost.

Frankenstein.

Like most my knowledge of Frankenstein didn't extend much past seeing short clips of the 1931 film with Boris Karloff, and while I knew ahead of time that Frankenstein was not the actual monster we see all over it had often slipped my mind while reading this. I think this is partially due to the title of the book. You read Frankenstein and since the monster is the most interesting part of the book you automatically associate the two.

The book also had a small connection with myself and I found it easy to paint a picture in my head for parts of it. I have actually been to both Lake Lucern in Switzerland (staying in the city of Lucern) as well as staying in small village on Lake Como in northern Italy.

It was also kind of surprising to see there is no Igor or any of the other themes often found in movies based off the book. The whole science of it is hardly even touched upon. All we're told is that he had to collect body parts and make the monster much larger than planned. This is due to smaller parts of the body being harder to replicate. Ending up with the monster being eight feet tall and having nearly translucent skin.

After life is given to the monster we start to feel sorry for it. It was never asked to be created and didn't have much of a choice in the matter. Yet here it is stuck with a creator appalled and disappointed by its appearance. Soon after Frankenstein abandons his creation hoping to go back and lead a normal life. It is at this time the monster angered and confused by its creators abandonment goes on a quest of sorts to understand humans and eventually take revenge on Frankenstein. Really all the monster wants to do is understand its own existence, find a way to co-habitat with humans. But we as humans are so guarded towards things we don't understand or find appealing we automatically go into a hostile state without questioning it. The monster can be compared to a social outcast simply trying to make friends. Eventually the constant rejection by what you seek to be apart of is going to create hatred.

Really I feel this book is about the human condition and loneliness and the basic human desire to belong to something. The monster is simply lonely, and like all humans wants a companion.