A Collection of Reviews

In an effort to combat the boredom that is sitting at home filling out job applications and worrying about getting a job (after all one can't write all day, and really, when I think about it, the writing is another attempt at combating the boredom) I have been catching up with the current episodes of House M.D. and Heroes. I only had to catch up on a few episodes of House since I watched a lot of House over Easter Break, but those episodes were as good as ever, I enjoy watching Hugh Laurie who I first saw as Bertie Wooster in the Jeeves and Wooster TV series play the sarcastic, brilliant chronically rude Dr. House. I don't like the new crew of doctors as much as I liked the original spread, but the writing is still pretty good and Hugh Laurie is the one who carries the show

I had heard that the second season of Heroes wasn't as good as the first, but I thought it was still pretty high quality. The same complex interweaving plot that involved seemingly disconnected characters worked just as well in the second season as the first, though I am a little disappointed that the season was foreshortened by the writers strike. Peter Patrelli has grown a little too powerful, but they did a pretty good job of keeping him in check by having him work with the bad guy. I was a little disappointed that they brought Sylar back, even if he is one of the most impressively creepy villains that I have ever seen. I never really liked the way villains are so often resurrected in fiction in general, I like to believe that a particular threat can be dealt with permanently.

I have also been reading a lot of Webcomics as I mentioned earlier. Ctrl-Alt-Delete is an highly amusing computer-gaming comic. And Applegeeks is a quite entertaining apple-influenced counterpoint to Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Megatokyo is a well developed continuing storyline that imitates the manga style and uses a highly imaginative version of Tokyo (with ninjas-for-hire, rent-a-zillas, scheduled disasters—such as Zombie invasions—and a mech-equipped disaster police force) that draws on many ideas from many different varieties of Manga (from magical-girl stories, mecha and such) and conveys a serious and interesting message through all the silliness.More recently I have been reading Ozy and Millie , which is a highly intelligent web-comic done in a traditional old-style newspaper daily comic format. The characters are all anthropomorphic creatures (the MCs are Foxes but there are raccoons, rabbits, sheep and even a handful of dragons) and the artist uses them to convey a level of intelligent humor that has been sadly missing from almost all conventional newspaper comics that survive.

Last week I read Orson Scott Card's Empire. A look into the possibility of a civil war between the right-wing fanatics and the left-wing fanatics in America. The story was good, as is to be expected of Card, the characters were well-developed and the plot was fairly plausible and well-thought out. The only real problem I had with it was that it was too blatantly political (close to non-partisan, but not quite) and too close (and while still plausible still completely impossible) for me to be completely comfortable with it.