Tag: Single post review

Worm

  06/21/2014       Farla      Add Comment

Worm is an long story set in a world with superpowers, and those superpowers are probably the best thing about it. They’re inventive, they vary wildly without seeming like a mush of several different universes (no blend of magic artifact, alien technology and random mutation here), and the way the characters wring all the use possible out of their powers is even cleverer than the powers themselves.

The rest of it isn’t so hot.

If you’re a fan of a good character being endlessly treated terribly and unfairly with everyone assuming the worst of her even when she’s the real hero, you’ll love this. If that’s nails on chalkboard for you, avoid. (more…)

   Webfiction      ,

Lavender Legend

  05/03/2014       Farla      15 Comments

So, I just read this webcomic called Lavender Legend. It’s about the very serious maid of a bubbly but lonely princess who’s forbidden to ever even lay eyes on a man. She likes to hear about the maids’ love lives, give them cute uniforms, etc, while serious maid just wants to seriously do her job, isn’t interested in romance and hates the frilly stuff. (more…)

   Comics, Webcomics      , ,

Free Four (Divergent)

  04/06/2014       Farla      4 Comments

Divergent actually contains a total of eight books at the moment due to the ebook cashgrab thing. Four of those take place before the rest of the books, so I’m not sure what they might have spoilers for and when they should be read, but one is a retelling of a scene that happened in the middle of Divergent, so I figured it’d be fair game.

Remember that knife scene? It’s time to hear what it was from Four’s POV! (more…)

   1. Divergent, Books, Divergent Trilogy      , ,

Divergent movie

  03/24/2014       Farla      4 Comments

The Divergent movie is exactly what you expect out of a movie – the plot is more streamlined and a lot of the poorly explained bits work better, but they had to be papered over by standard cliches, and it starts a lot stronger than it finishes. The end result is not particularly interesting. (And since the no-plant-life thing was just an artifact of bad writing and this city is covered in green, I can’t even enjoy the question of wtf happened to mess the world up so badly.) The opening sections were great and an all-around improvement, though. (more…)

   1. Divergent, Books, Divergent Trilogy      , ,

Delirium

  03/01/2014       Farla      Add Comment

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photo Delirium.jpg

Good lord Delirium is a terrible book.

You know Matched? This is basically the scifi original movie of Matched, only shortly after being hired the writer went on a bender, forgot the plot along with their own name, and just threw every dystopian and YA cliche into the pot to try to pad it out and hope no one would notice. Also, worse acting. You may wonder how anything, let alone a book, could have worse acting than made for TV movies, and the answer is I don’t know but somehow it’s happening. This book is kind of like the Necronomion that way, except somehow it’s hideously boring and bland despite warping reality in its failures.

(more…)

   Books      ,

Skyline

  02/22/2014       Farla      13 Comments

My dad watched this and decided to share it with me.

In the movie, aliens drop these big glowy things down, and if you look at them your skin and face get all black and zombie-corrupted, and you walk out the nearest window, but it goes away if you get them away from the light. After the light balls go away, the survivors head out and see these giant ships which turn out to have caught and are now sucking all the people into them. It’s at this point I began my argument that the aliens are not trying to kill us. These are alien conservationists.

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   Movies      , ,

Mortal Engines

  02/15/2014       Farla      11 Comments

photo Mortal_engines.jpg photo 1280709.jpg photo predator-cities-1-mortal-engines-philip-reeve-paperback-cover-art.jpg photo engines.jpg

Writing-wise, this is a children’s book, not YA. It’s simple but quite serviceable writing and has a really gonzo setting. The characters are kind of simple, but are pretty good, particularly the part where the female ones exist. My biggest issue with it is it doesn’t spend enough time engaging with the setting and it gives the wrong amount of info about it, but it still does surprisingly well there.
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   Books, Recommendations      ,

UnStrung (Unwind novella)

  02/01/2014       Farla      27 Comments

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UnStrung, the 1.5 novella that I won’t call a cashgrab because it’s actually some pretty substantial racist garbage and not a couple pages like Seeds of Wither, says it’s cowriten with a Michelle Knowlden, who seems to mostly write detective stories. I don’t know if it’s her fault this is so terrible or if it’s just that he was testing the water with his Old Umber Talking black kid before he really went for it. (more…)

   1. Unwind, Books, Unwind Series      , ,

Two and a Half Men is worse than Big Bang Theory

  01/28/2014       Farla      7 Comments

So in the interests of fairness(?), Two and a Half Men is also a very bad sitcom. I have only seen the end of an episode, where Longsuffering Hot Chick was planning to get breast reduction surgery because of the minor issue of being in pain and Guy I Hope She One Day Kills managed to convince her not to at the last second, to his joy. When trying to find the clip for you, I instead found something from the middle of an episode featuring the two of them.

You’ll notice it’s in a playlist that’s for the best scenes from the show. But really, even if this was universally reviled by the fans, nothing short of every other episode just being a woman reading from selected works on feminism could help. (I guess it could be, because the fact I’ve now watched four whole minutes of this show is bad enough and I’m not going to look at anything else.)

So: Two and a Half Men is worse than Big Bang Theory. This doesn’t change that Big Bang Theory is terrible. But I guess if you’re ever at someone else’s house, and they say they want to watch TV and let you pick which of the two it’ll be, and for some reason you can’t sprint through a window to escape, and you don’t hate them for some reason so punching them out isn’t an option, then you’ll know that Two and a Half Men is the worse one to pick.

   TV Shows      , ,