All entries written in March, 2007
March 28, 2007 at 9:17 am · Filed under Reviews, Thoughts
Jeremy Heere wants to be Cool. Not cool, but Cool, with a capital “C.” Jeremy describes the distinction early in Ned Vizzini’s Be More Chill: Coolness is like a caste, and if he wants the finer things in life, he must find a way to gain admission. Fortunately, by bringing $500 to a shady man, Jeremy is able to purchase a squip, a tiny computer that enters his brain and acts as his constant social adviser. Surely this will make him “Cool,” even if the first thing it tells him to do is stop capitalizing the “c.”
Vizzini’s novel intrigued me before I even opened it. For one thing, Vizzini is barely two years older than I am, so I was interested to see how he would handle writing about students, being so close to their age. Also, our society is rapidly approaching the day when nanocomputers like the squip will be a reality. Vizzini must know this as well as I do, so I came eager to see his vision of the near future as played out through Jeremy’s personal, day-to-day experience.
Be More Chill’s most important strength is that it’s an involving story with an appropriate pace, which ensures that anyone who starts reading will want to finish. The form of the novel helps to set this pace: Be More Chill consists of 49 chapters, the longest of which is about 10 pages, so the reader is made to feel like he is tumbling through events with the same speed as Jeremy. Much of the humor in the book is similarly madcap. There is a hilarious series of scenes near the beginning involving Jeremy’s aunt, a long, metal pole, and some Beanie Babies.
Keep reading….
March 21, 2007 at 8:47 am · Filed under On My Influences, Thoughts
I’m telling you, there’s only one way to really enjoy this show, and that’s to treat it as a comedy. House is laugh-out-loud funny…well, except when someone is spewing blood all over the place or somebody else’s baby is on its way to the morgue. Those moments are serious (and often so graphic they border on the TMI range). But I’m sure that even some of the diagnostic scenes must be amusing to, say, actual doctors, they being the only viewers capable of noting how farfetched some of the medical mysteries’ solutions are without doing independent research. I often watch this show with a close relative—when she heard the phrase, “Infantile Alexander’s Disease,” uttered by an ailing woman, what had been a moment of quiet intensity shattered under the assault of her laughter.
“Whaaaat?!” she guffawed at me, doubling over in her chair. “Someone’s just sitting there with the Encyclopedia fucking Brittanica!”
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March 19, 2007 at 9:21 am · Filed under Cast, Guys
March 14, 2007 at 8:57 am · Filed under Reviews, Thoughts
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the Nintendo DS opens with a full anime cutscene (hang out on the title screen for a minute to see it), which showcases right off the bat just
how far handheld gaming technology has come in the last few years. Something else the intro should tell you, from the moment you see the white-haired protagonist toss off a hooded cloak and start absorbing souls, is that this isn’t going to be a traditional whip-slinging Castlevania title. In fact, Dawn of Sorrow is the sequel to the GBA title Aria of Sorrow, and it continues a plotline that feels like an anime or a movie based on Castlevania. I had no problem with this—in fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself more immersed than I might have been otherwise.
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March 7, 2007 at 7:00 am · Filed under Reviews, Thoughts
And I thought my suburban high school was bad.
Jeremy Iversen, however, seems like he managed to have fun at Mirador Senior High 
School in southern California, despite all the drama, conflict, and outright horror that swirled around him there. How did he accomplish this? In his own words: “I knew my core competency…utter and total fearlessness. I was twenty-four years old, and my self-esteem did not depend on what anybody there thought of me…I could handle all situations and people with the perfect ease of knowing it didn’t really matter.” This is far more than most teens in high school can say, and in case you didn’t already do a double-take when you got to Mr. Iversen’s age, let me make it clear that he is no teenager. During his stay at Mirador, he was in fact a reporter in disguise, working on a close-up behavioral and situational study of today’s high school kids we now know as High School Confidential: Secrets of an Undercover Student.
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March 5, 2007 at 12:33 pm · Filed under Extras, Maps
(click image to view full-size)
A map of Mark’s school. The Gauntlet visits almost every single hallway on here, so this is a handy reference to have around when you’re reading that story.
It may seem strange that each of the halls has a grandiose-sounding name, but that’s what happens when you have 30 years’ worth of vigilante warfare–people start getting territorial. I can pretty much guarantee you that it was a vigilante who first drafted this version of the map, hallway names and all.
March 1, 2007 at 1:33 pm · Filed under Cast, Guys
