Living With a Nerd

I didn’t do much gaming this weekend, but there was a media marathon overload over the past 72 hours.  Over the weekend, we watched/went and saw: Sherlock Holmes, Pandorum, Burn After Reading, discs four five and six of Ergo Proxy, about three hours of Bill Nye the Science Guy, and about two hours of Clone High.  Numerous South Park episodes from the 4th and 5th seasons were also watched.  I continued with reading Cerebus, and on Brittnie’s recommendation started reading The Host written by Stephenie Meyer (yes, that Stephanie Meyer).  I have been pleasently suprised so far…although I couldn’t stand even just the 5 minutes of Twilight that I heard while Brittnie was going through the audio books (she hated them too, thank the goddess), The Host is a well written and entertaining story.  I’m only about 70 pages in, but I’m interested enough to finish it out.

The most exciting media happenings out of the weekend was that my copy of Warren Ellis’ first novel Crooked Little Vein showed up on our doorstep.  Ellis’ stories are always really twisted, and his writing style magnificent.  I can’t wait to dive into it…there will 100% for sure be a review of it on the main site after I finish it.

I finally took the plunge.  I wiped the hard drive that had Windows XP SP3 32bit on my gaming system, and installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit…and wow, what a big difference!  The whole PC feels like it is way faster.  I’m not sure if that is just how it “feels” or if it actually is, but I DO know that according to dslreports.com both my download and upload speeds have increased by about 300k.  Since I never did Vista, it is taking me some time to get used to where everything is in Windows 7, but suffice it to say it is awesome.  As an added bonus, I didn’t have to install a single driver for any of my hardware…I was even able to pick up and connect to my wireless network during the setup process!  I’m still a bit of a noob when it comes to Windows 7, but it is showing a lot of promise.

Taken at 3 PM with 7 hours of snow left. By the time it was over, both of those cars were completely encased in snow.

The big snowstorm this past weekend here in Maryland wasn’t the only major event…Brittnie got me a PS3!  I was planning on picking one up around the time that God of War III came out, but this works just fine for me.  Haven’t really decided where I’m going to start, but it will likely come down between Resistance 1 & 2 or Uncharted 1 & 2.  I’ve found that when used for streaming purposes, the PS3 is superior to the 360; easier to setup, built in wireless…oh, and being able to copy entire folders of videos from my computer onto the PS3 over the network plus more extensive codec support help to seal the deal.  It will be interesting to see how the exclusives compare to the 360 exclusives…although the 360 controller is still far more comfortable.  I’ve never been a big fan of the Dual Shock design, and even though the modified L2/R2 buttons are a good step in the right direction, it still has a long way to go.  This sounds lame, but the Dual Shock is part of the reason why I don’t have as much time /played on my PS2 as I do with my other gaming systems.

Speaking of other gaming systems, the addition of the PS3 brings our full list to the following: Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, SNES (two of them), Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Xbox, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS Lite (3 of them), PSP-1000 (aka the first-gen PSP), Game Boy, GBA (one original, one GBA SP), Game Gear, and a relatively up-to-date gaming PC.

I’ve put a couple of hours into Torchlight.  The resemblance to Diablo is nearly overwhelming.  I know that many of the Diablo team members worked on Torchlight (including the composer and sound designer for Diablo), and it shows.  If Titan Quest was Diablo 2.5, Torchlight is Diablo 2.7.  With no attempt to hide the similarities, Torchlight feels more like a trip down memory lane rather than a new single-player experience (but in a good way.)  The graphics are a bit jagged, but for an independently produced game, it looks damn nice.  Oh, and did I mention that it’s a hell of a lot of fun to play?

Brittnie left to go visit her sister for the holidays, so I decided to take a couple of days off from Living With a Nerd.  The next article (which will be a review of Torchlight) will post on Christmas Day.

My comic binge continues…I just got Asterios Polyp in the mail yesterday, and plowed through it in one night.  I couldn’t put it down! Very unique, both in dialogue and in drawing style.  Highly recommended.  You can check out my full review of it here.

In addition to Asterios Polyp, I also got I Kill Giants and Desolation Jones in the mail.  Desolation Jones pisses me off though…I didn’t realize that the singles were released so infrequently, and they are still at least three singles away from releasing another trade…oh well.  It still looks awesome.  I Kill Giants was one that I knew I had to have though.  You can read my full review of that one here.

Currently, however, I am going back through Y: The Last Man.  I only read the first five trades, and since the series has been finished for a fair bit of time and there are plans to bring it to the big screen, I figured now was as good a time as any to read through the whole thing.

As an avid fan of science fiction in movies, books, and other media, I am always searching for gems that defy the norms in the genre, especially as the genre has grown into such a commercial behemoth.  An author I discovered in my late teens has kept her place as having written some of my favorite stories in the genre.  The series that jolted to life in my mind is the ‘Pattern Master’ books, written by Octavia Butler.  If you’re not familiar with her, she broke barriers not just in the content of her writing but also by being one of the few (if not only) black women to break through into a largely male dominated genre.  In her works themselves, she breaks down racial and gender barriers and submerges us all into the human experience.  She explores and lays open sexuality, leaving not as something scorned but as part of the natural expression of being human.

 Her characters are real, believable, and serve as exciting vehicles for the journeys that she takes us on.  The language is typically gritty and well paced, with well captured, believable dialogue.  Even more so than her style is the content that she explores.  Without spoiling much of it, she has written some of the best psi-combat scenes that I have read.  She pushes the envelope on the imagination, and even though her books were written between 20-30 years ago, they are still very relevant today.  There is a certain timeless quality about them that transcends the generations and evolution of society.  We still have many of the same problems today that were present when she wrote them decades ago.

My recommendations:I also enjoyed Parable of the Sower and some of her short fiction collections. 

If you read only one series from her, read the Patternist series (available in a collection called ‘Seed to Harvest’).  If you read only one book, read Pattern Master.  This is the first one written in the series, last one in chronology, but by far the best. 

Overall, most of her books are quick reads and not more than 200 pages.  Enjoy!

I have had a penchant for science fiction for as long as I can remember.  I grew up reading novels and stories written by authors such as Issac Asimov, Kevin J. Anderson, Dafydd ab Hugh, Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Arthur C. Clarke, Phillip K. Dick, William C Dietz…the list goes on.   My preference for a science fiction story isn’t specific; the mode of transportation has never been important to me, so long as the destination provides a spacey, far out feel.

I am currently reading “Steel Beach”, by John Varley.  I had never heard of either the book or the author prior to finding it buried in my bookshelf, but apparently Varley has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards multiple times, plus he has been writing novels since the 70’s.  I suppose this would make me a bit late to the party, given that I am only now discovering him, but better late than never. 

Within the first 10 pages of starting Steel Beach, I felt like I have known Hildy (the main character) my entire life.  Backstory is trickled out at a perfect pace, and the more I learn about him the more he feels like some lost family member rather than just a protagonist in a story.  Varley’s writing style is flawless, and elicits a particular brand of happy chemicals I didn’t realize my brain had the capacity to manufacture.  He somehow manages to squeeze entire paragraphs into a single sentence.  Even within his descriptions, every word has a purpose and seems to be necessary for the story to be told.  Typically, it only takes two paragraphs for me to get “sucked in” to a novel’s world, in which my perception of my world disappears and the novel I am reading becomes “reality”…it becomes similar to The Matrix, where they are just looking at raw code but “see” a blond, or a brunette, etc.

With Varley’s writing style, it only takes an average of two sentences for my world to melt and for his world to become my reality.  If you enjoy science fiction in any capacity, be sure to check him out.