Kids are awesome

I've been sick of all the political talk since it started, what, 3 years ago? But this video totally made my day.

Where I've Been...

After reading a post by Joyful Student about how many states she had visited in her lifetime, I decided to see where I have been. This is what I found:


visited 26 states (52%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or determine the next president

WPM

84 words

Typingtest

Homemade pretzels

I'm often a little hesitant about making certain things from scratch, not because I don't think they'll taste amazing, but because they just taste different. Clam chowder, for instance, and cheesy biscuits—I've never gotten them to taste like they do in restaurants. However, sometimes a perfect recipe will come across my path, and I came across one yesterday.

This pretzel recipe turns out flawless pretzels with a minimal amount of work. I was astonished to have them come out of the oven looking gorgeous, and tasting exactly like the best pretzel you could get at any pretzel stand. The crust was perfectly chewy-soft and a dark golden brown that only egg-wash will make it, and the dough inside was moist and soft.

This was just the first try, so I'm not sure how far this recipe will go, but we're already thinking about trying to replicate pizza pretzels we have by replacing the egg wash with tomato sauce and covering them with cheese. Even if that doesn't work, I'm positive that we'll be making these again...and will never have to feel compelled to buy them for $3 a piece elsewhere.

Sand improv art

These are amazing...I wish I had even this artistic talent for simple pictures.

Pie recipe

I was so happy to find time to make this... It was one of the best apple pies I've had.

Gotcha

With the recent fairly regular appearance of new posts, did anyone get their hopes up for this to be continual? Well, sorry, then school started. I had forgotten that while I'm technically only in school and work for a total of eight hours a day, exactly like when I was working full time, all the time needed for study makes my schedule much tighter now.

And unfortunately, blogging isn't going to be my biggest priority. Other than studying and a little reading/music/other forms of entertainment, my main task that fills those few hours of "free time" is writing. Not the blogging kind of writing, though. I'll try to something for the blog every week or so, but if it goes a couple weeks, it's not because I've forgotten but because I've used up all my inspiration for that week already.

So, sorry to my readers (all three of you ;), and I wish I could say this was just a short phase.

Sanctuary review

While I was bedridden earlier this year I couldn't make it upstairs to the family dinner table, so they joined me down in our family room. Before the accident, we had been watching through the TV show Stargate Atlantis, and with all the down time the accident gave me, we started through the ten seasons of Stargate SG-1. It was great to watch it all as a family together, and we grew pretty attached to it. Unfortunately, the show was canceled, but the actors moved on to new projects. And one of them is now a new TV show partially written and produced by one of the main Stargate actors, Amanda Tapping.

Sanctuary started off as a pet project of Tapping's, and she got together some of the friends she had made in the media business over ten years to help her create a show that would air only on the internet. I caught the "webisodes" when they first aired a while back, and thoroughly enjoyed them, so I was thrilled to hear that they had become a big enough phenomenon that a TV network picked up the idea for an actual TV show. Well, the pilot of Sanctuary just premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel this Friday, and here are my thoughts.

To be honest, I missed the short and fast-paced storytelling style of the webisodes—they were short and snappy, and sure, there wasn't much depth then, but I was hooked by the characters and the story. The pilot makes up for this lack, but it goes a little too far in the opposite direction. There is a lot of backstory and information for this show, and they decided to cram most of it into the first episode; many plot twists and revelations abound, some of which probably should have been saved for later episodes. Most shows start of with something interesting and full of action to get you hooked, and then viewers are willing to delve into deep character issues later. Purring Piggy, who watched it with me, said it wasn't too bad, but I wonder if I would have been bored if I wasn't already familiar with the characters.

The basic story is this: there are monsters and mythical creatures living in our world, but because we would be frightened of them and seek to kill them, a Dr. Helen Magnus operates a secret facility called the Sanctuary to either keep them safe, or keep us safe from them. Along with her Sasquatch bodyguard/butler and her gun-toting daughter, she also recruits forensic psychiatrist Will Zimmerman to help her with the various creatures. She has dual goals of scientific study and offering understanding or protection.

Though I said the pilot was a little boring, I greatly enjoy the characters and hope that I get to see more of them. Amanda Tapping played a serious, conscientious military scientist called Sam Carter on Stargate, but her character here, Helen Magnus, is miles apart. Apart from the visual change, with Helen having long dark hair and dressing in an almost-period and very feminine style (the opposite of Carter's camo and jeans), the characters' personalities are very separate. Sam started Stargate quite young and enthusiastic, a little inexperienced in personal matters, and though she grew over the ten years her character never lost all of that. Helen, on the other hand, is 157 years old, head of a secret facility and a mother of a young adult, and Amanda Tapping brings a sense of class and maturity to her that Sam never had. Tapping herself is a new parent, and it's obvious in her portrayal—the emotion in her face when her daughter is threatened went straight to my heart, and was totally believable.

Another brilliant character is Helen's nemesis, John Druitt. People who have seen Stargate Atlantis should recognize the voice if not the face of Todd the Wraith. It's really nice to see Christopher Heyerdahl not under prosthetics, and his voice is amazing, like a cross between Christopher Lee and Alan Rickman. As a character on Sanctuary says, "He had an accent like [Helen's], only more evil." The character moves with a quiet, smooth grace, and he's the sort of evil that charms you before he kills you. We find out that he was engaged to Helen in the past, and it's not surprising given the chemistry between Heyerdahl and Tapping. There's this dance between them of still wanting to get closer and then backing away because of the conflict.

The other characters have a lot of potential, but nothing outstanding in this episode. Setting and plot are nice, especially the visuals for Helen's sanctuary—I love how they blend the old with the new in her dress and style, living as a modern woman but literally remembering the past. The visual effects are outstanding much of the time, but there's no overworking when it would be obvious no matter how good they were. All the actors do well against the green screen, and since acting covers a multitude of effects sins, the show looks very sharp.

All in all, the pilot wasn't as great as the webisodes, but I have great hope for the series when it continues in a shorter timeslot which will make them amp up the pace. We don't have cable, but the Sci-Fi Channel is offering the episodes streaming on www.hulu.com for a limited time—you can still watch the pilot for Sanctuary there, but it will be gone in a couple days.

Dalek Invaders 2008

Too cute! A family's homemade Doctor Who video starring their kids:

Fantasy writers changing lightbulbs

If you've read any variety of fantasy books, these should make sense and be funny:

Q. How many fantasy authors does it take to change a light bulb?

A1. Only one. But it'll take a long time. They have to prepare an obsessively and redundantly detailed map of the whole room first.

A2. Fantasy authors can't change light bulbs. Only orphaned farmboys, destined from birth to change the light bulb in accordance with ancient prophecy can do it.

A3. Dozens. JRR Tolkien has to go first, to show everyone how to do it right, and then all the rest take turns removing and replacing the light bulb, in very slightly different and generally inferior ways.

TV vs. books

The more I write and read, I realize that I have been fully disillusioned when it comes to adaptation for screen. As a former member of the pure bibliophile club, I scorned at television and movie adaptations of books, bemoaning how the adaptors felt this need to "translate" the story into a "different medium". The book was perfect how it was, there's no need to change it!

Alas, no more. I've watched more movies and television. I've partially written screenplays based on books. I've written novels. I've tried writing original screenplays. And unfortunately—they were all right. All those writers and directors? They were right, I'm telling you.

What do you get in the novels and oral tales, in the good ones? You get narrative description, character thoughts and introspection, and opportunity for stylistic turns of phrase in other places than the dialogue. You don't get chapters and chapters of pure dialogue, but you learn more about the characters through what they say and do than how they move or look.

What do you get in television or movies or theatre, the good ones? You get dialogue, action, subtle visual clues, and opportunity for stylistic tricks with camera movement and other audio-visual gags. You don't get the characters' thoughts or a narrator to explain the history of everything, but even the smallest second of emotion on a person's face and the lighting or sweeping move of camera will tell you more than a thousand words could.

You can't take a verbal and mental medium like literature and translate it word for word into film—it's like trying to translate an idiom literally. Take a book like The Lord of the Rings: the story revolves around using words in poetic and beautiful fashion to set mood and atmosphere, using the thoughts of the characters and the point of view of the narrator to explain the story, with dialogue only when really necessary. Can you take that and turn it to film? Yes. Will it be good? No.

How do you take the Battle of Pelennor Fields and turn it into film? If you take the written words and the dialogue and translate them directly, you'd end up with a play-by-play battle with confusing character interaction. Can we understand simply from actions and words what motivates Merry, Eowyn, Eomer, and Theoden? Not really—the text relies on the narrator and the God's-eye perspective into their minds. In film world, we have to see what they're thinking on their faces—the dialogue could stay the same, but the narrator has to come in the form of acting, camera work, editing, and music. It can be surprisingly effective, but takes just as much work as trying to convey the same messages with words without it appearing forced.

And unfortunately, you don't understand how this works until you've tried to analyze why exactly you were crying at a certain scene in a movie (when you had no previous attachment to the story or characters), and even then, until you've tried to faithfully adapt one of your favorite books to screenplay form. Even if you aren't good at either, the simple act of trying opens your mind to how complex an art film is, separate and apart from writing.

"The movie's not as good as the book." What is that supposed to mean? If it means you liked the book better—sure, that's a valid criticism. If it means that the movie is different than the book, though, then that is not the way to say it. Different does not mean better or worse. There are good books that have made terrible movies, and there are terrible books that made good movies. (And some stories were just meant to be told in one form: not every great movie would have made a better book and not every book would make a good movie.) When one is adapted to be another, they may have the same story and characters, but storytellers for millennia have been borrowing from each other and weaving new stories from old ingredients. The separate stories can and often should stand on their own, and while comparisons are sometimes useful, often they are harmful.


As much as you scoffed when they said it, film and literature are two different mediums that serve two different purposes. Paintings are not the same as songs; books are not the same as movies. They shouldn't be compared as if they were apples and apples. So the next time someone makes a movie out of your favorite book—remember that it will be different. It has to be. When someone translates a German piece to English, no matter how faithful the translation, something will be lost and perhaps something will be gained. It's inevitable, and it serves no purpose to worry and complain about it.

Slippery slopes

The more I drink, the more I feel thirsty.

The more I write, the more I want to write.

The more I exercise, the more I want to be physically active.

The more I blog, the more blog posts ideas come into my head.

The more I read, the more books get added to my to-be-read pile

The more I practice patience and self-control, the more I truly want to be patient and controlled.

The more I sleep, the less sleep I feel like I should be getting. Sigh. Patterns were meant to be broken.

My favorite new music

"It's Dead, Jim" by Warp 11. I'm not a Star Trek fan, but for some reason I really like this song.

"Dark Waltz" by Hayley Westenra. Hauntingly gorgeous.

"Battlefield" and "Storm" by Cirque du Soleil

"End of the World" by Great Big Sea

"Hands of the Potter" and "Wings of the Morning" by Caedmon's Call. Lovely folk Christian band.

"Take Me In" by Kutless. I love this group's worship songs.

"Re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton. Who would'a' thought that a zombie song could be so plaintive? Also his song "Ikea" is great.

"So Insane" and "Everyday Superhero" by Smash Mouth. Just plain fun music.

"Within" by William Joseph. Gorgeous piano music.

"Coultergeist" by Phil Coulter. Ditto.

"Sport Utility Vehicle" by Veggie Tales. My favorite of the recent Silly Songs, but I have no idea why.

"Wizards in Winter" by Trans-Siberian Orchestra

"Forgiven" by Relient k

"Take My Life" by Jeremy Camp

"This is Home" by Switchfoot

Chuck Norris facts...Stargate style

I'm pretty sure everyone knows about the Chuck Norris facts: the usually cute, often cheesy, sometimes LOL exaggerations about the power of Chuck Norris. Even if you (like me) don't really know who Chuck Norris is, the format is witty enough to pull most of them off. And then I found the Stargate version...not only are these more specific to certain character traits (whereas the Chuck Norris ones encompass everything), they make more sense to me because I know what they're referring to, all the inside jokes (plus some more general ones). Again, some are just plain cheesy, but if you know the show and characters, I found a lot of these very funny.


We all know the answer, 42. Daniel Jackson knows the question!

Daniel Jackson is so bad*** that even the afterlife is scared of him.

Teal'c can kill two stones with one bird

Samantha Carter knows the exact location of Carmen SanDiego

God originally wanted 5 horsemen for the apocalypse, but Teal'C refused to ride a horse.

Teal'C and O'Neill played rock, paper, scissors. Teal'C shot rock, and O'Neill shot paper. Teal'C refused to lose. When O'Neill protested, Teal'C punched him in the face saying "I thought your paper would protect you, Colonel O'Neill."

The Dinosaurs laughed at Teal'c, and look at them now...

After the nuclear apocalypse, all that will be left is five cockroaches and Daniel Jackson.

Samantha Carter understands the teacher in Charlie Brown.

Lemmings think Teal'c is behind them.

Someone once told Ba'al that "gullible" was written on the ceiling. Ba'al then wrote the man's name in blood on the floor.

Anubis let the dogs out.

Daniel Jackson doesn't cheat death. He wins fair and square.

If it looks like chicken, tastes like chicken, and feels like chicken but Teal'c says its macaroni and cheese, then it's macaroni and cheese.

Claudia Black would never win an Oscar for her performance as Vala- because let's face it, who'd trust her with a blunt metal object?

If Daniel Jackson sets foot on a planet, whole civilizations perish just to be studied by him.

When Teal´c uses a sarcophagus , the sarcophagus gets healthier

When Vala goes swimming in the sea the concentration of gold in the ocean drops by 74%.

If Carter says something works, the laws of physics consider twice.

Vala actually stopped talking once.......no wait, just kidding.

Sam can build a working Naquada Generator out of Legos.

Jack may play with a yo-yo but Daniel is a yo-yo. (ascend, descend. ascend, descend...)

Ba´al is so difficult to kill..the other Goa´ulds nicknamed him "Daniel".

How evil is Anubis? Every night, he counts his collection of unpaired socks that people around the galaxy still think they "lost".

Despite the popular misconception, Chuck Norris is merely the distortion of the space-time continuum created by Sg1's overwhelming and unmitigated coolness

Everyone in the universe speaks English because Chuck Norris once said, "Everyone will speak the same language as me." 1 planet raised an objection. It is known as Proclarush Taonas.

We only ever see SG-1 and SG-3 team members because all the other 23 teams consist of Chuck Norris.

If you rearrange the letters in "Daniel Jackson", you get "Cloaked Ninjas". No wonder he can't be killed. If you rearrange the letters in "Vala Mal Doran", you get "Amoral Vandal". And if you rearrange the letters in "Teal'C" you get "Chuck Norris"... 'Nuff said.

There is no 'crtl' button on Carter's computer... she is always in control.

Chuck Norris does not ascend. He pulls the Plane of Existence down to his level.

King Midas touched objects to turn them into gold. Vala Mal Doran touches a gold object and it probably is never seen again.

The Ori never invaded Earth because they were afraid to be on the same planet as Chuck Norris.

Teal'C calls his Jaffa Staff Weapon "Chuck" and his Zat-nik-tel "Norris"... which is why he is the most feared Jaffa warrior...

Music videos

I don't normally watch music videos for songs I like, because often they're just artsy shots of the singers intermixed with props and settings of the song, which I find dreadfully dull. Occasionally, there's one that tells the story of the song, and they're worth it. But recently I found two that actually enhanced the song, while being worthwhile on their own. Both of them are songs by Nickelback:

At work yesterday...

We were all having our weekly meeting in the break room, and while some other discussion was going around, one of my coworkers asked our manager:

"So what happens to the books that we throw away? Do they get recycled into paper?"

"No, they're too high a grade for paper," he said, "they get turned into cardboard."

There was a pause as everyone just shrugged and took in the information.

Then Aragorn leaned lazily over the table to look closely at the box of donuts on the table. "Maybe this is one of our books," he said.

There was another pause, and then everyone giggled at once.

"Okay, meeting just went off the track! Dismissed!"

Looking back on Twilight

You might remember that I reviewed Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series not too long ago. Well, I thought I was well and done with it, until our church went camping this last weekend in Olympic Rainforest National Park. We'd been there before, on the eastern side of the penninsula, but this time we were on the western side...right outside La Push and only 12 miles from Forks.

Yes, Forks. Forks, the tiny town of 3175 people that was unheard of until Stephenie Meyer set her books there. Thousands of preteen and teenage girls want to move there now. So, even though I didn't care too much for the books, how could I resist seeing the real setting?

The first thing I noticed about the town was that they were banking on the popularity of the books. Everywhere you looked there were signs with cute Twilight puns or directions to where you could get Twilight merchandise or tours of landmarks from the book.

Secondly, it's obvious that Meyer didn't live in Forks for very long and not right before writing the book. In fact, you can also tell she didn't grow up in the Pacific Northwest. I could sort of tell this before going to Forks, but definitely now. The books make Forks seem both quite a bit larger and quite a bit closer to "real" civilisation such as Port Angeles and Seattle. All those teens who wanted to move to Forks would very quickly change their mind when they realized that it's 5 hours from SeaTac airport and a good hour drive from any store/restaurant they might recognize.

Thirdly, there were no vampires! And I don't think it was just that I missed them, because no one that distinctive could remain inconspicuous in the real Forks. Now maybe Meyer based the Cullens off of the mosquitoes, who certainly had a great hunger for human blood, but other than that—no vampires. I feel cheated.

And that's about it. I'm not a big fan of the Twilight books, but there was something thrilling about seeing signs with names from a book you've read, and getting your picture taken outside of a contemporary literary landmark. You don't get to do that everyday, that's for sure!

Really...how interesting

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