K-Squared Ramblings

Doom!

It’s a strange feeling, when someone you live with gets sick, and you know, just know that in a week, two weeks at the most, you’re next. I’m not looking forward to coughing, sneezing, and living on Ny-Quil, although spending the day in bed sounds nice…

No Updates This Weekend - Might and Magic instead

I’d been planning to add a whole bunch of alternate realities to the Flash site, but I finally installed Might and Magic IX and started playing it instead.

I’ve played and enjoyed games 4-7, and I’d heard bad things about #8, so I went straight to #9. So far it’s interesting and immersive, although there are some things about it that are really frustrating.
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Book Review: The Waterborn and The Blackgod

J. Gregory Keyes has fast become one of those authors whose work I will pick up knowing nothing more than who wrote it. I enjoyed his work in the Babylon 5 and Star Wars universes, but after reading the four novels of The Age of Unreason and these two, I can say I’ll definitely be picking up The Briar King when it comes out in January.

Now, The Age of Unreason is probably Keyes’ most well-known work to date. (If the title doesn’t sound familiar, chances are you’ve heard of the first novel, Newton’s Cannon). It takes place in an alternate Eighteenth Century in which Isaac Newton discovered the key to alchemy, transforming the world with new technology… and setting off an arms race of sorts. What begins as an alternate history becomes an epic battle for the future of the world, and ultimately of humanity itself.

While I’d recommend someone curious about Keyes’ writing start with Newton’s Cannon, I’d like to call attention to his earliest published novels, The Waterborn and The Blackgod, collectively known as The Chosen of the Changeling.
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“Lessons” and speculations

Yay! New Buffy! And quite promising new Buffy, too. Despite the unpursued beginning sequence and the shopworn “something big is coming” talk, it looks to be more than just an intro for the Dawn/Kit/Carlos (wow, normal names!) trio or an attempt to return to the series’ Sunnydale High roots.

I like Spike with the William hair. William the Bloody Crazy, that is. Interestingly, that wasn’t an option in the survey I saw: unchanged, tortured, superhero, or William? Should get some good lines off him this season. Quoting off-their-rocker vamps is great for scaring your friends. I wonder what he’s been eating? Can’t be too many rats in a new school. Oh, and Harry Potter, anyone? First Giles is “go[ing] all Dumbledore,” then there’s crying in a bathroom that leads to a secret passage opening up, and you have a trio forming on grounds where another famous group once walked. I’m not against this by any means, but if it gets to Dawn going to an international Academic Decathlon with dragons and merpeople involved, I’ll be the first to say it’s gone too far.

It took me way too long to twig to the villain regression at the end. Took me till the Master said it, in fact. But in the beginning, there was Buffy. At least it didn’t turn into Tara–Kelson and I were both afraid of that. But the big questions: is Spike’s headmate, in fact, the seventh big bad? How did it get there? Why Spike? It could be like Buffy’s hitchhiker from the grave, or something different. One of our co-watchers put forth that maybe it’s just Spike’s demon in invisible-friend form, as his way of dealing with the war between his good and evil bits. I like that one a lot, but it doesn’t have much potential. I do find it interesting that Spike referred to “the three of us” as being the only ones who ever come down to his little cell. At the time I thought he meant Buffy and some unseen person (or headmate) as the other two, but now I wonder if he might not mean there’s something besides his headmate in the area–maybe the person responsible for the talisman? (Or the spirit responsible for making Spike put the talisman there.)

Prediction: Dawn will discover Spike. She’s on campus more regularly than the rest, she had a connection with him before, and it’d be interesting to see if the new loony version of Spike can see her as glowing green energy. It’d also be interesting to see if the Villain Morph-O-Matic knows anything about Key powers. (Caution: may be volatile when combined with Slayer blood.)

And they better get Willow back from England before her Paraguayan flowers crowd out the native wildlife.

New journal

For a while now I’ve been thinking of setting up something where I can just post random thoughts or opinion pieces without taking the time to write an HTML page and update bunches of links. Some sort of blogging software seemed ideal, so I looked at a few, noticed they all seemed to use MySQL, and left it for a while.

Well, I moved the site to a Linux server a few weeks ago, and so I started looking again. And since Katie’s site is currently under the same domain name, we both figured it would be cool to have something we could both post to.

I settled on b2 (shortly before the site ran out of bandwidth), mainly because it was simple, it used PHP, and it allowed me to set up more than one user.

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