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  J M Beal

Creepy kids and Space-Moth's Ahoy! 

3/5/2014

3 Comments

 
I gave in and watched Ender's Game the other day. And before someone points it out, yes, I know the 'bad guys' were closer to ants than moths, but if you've seen the movie you know what I'm talking about. 

You can't swing a cat on the internet without hitting an opinion, and I'm going to smack into a few of them talking about Mr Card. But for the moment we're talking about the movie, not his personal opinions on (insert subject of choice here).
Edit note, the first time I wrote that last sentence I said 'her' because apparently I like to randomly re-assign pronouns to famous people.

Now that I've said that I have to say something intelligent about the movie, don't I?


I've never read the book. I never even heard of it until I read his book on Character and Viewpoint and it was part of his author blurb. And before we get sidetracked on that whole 'nobody suggests science fiction books to girls' thing it's probably more to do with nobody ever suggested books to me at all as a kid. I read what I read. If there'd been dinosaurs in it, believe me I'd have found it. 

So I went into the movie with basically no information. I knew it was about kids fighting war, and that the author had foot-in-mouth disease according to the internet. And for a long time I debated trying to read the book first, because I like sci-fi movies and I have this weird issue with book/movie adaptations where whatever I see/read first is the state I attach to. With like two exceptions if I see the movie first I can't get through the book. There are a whole list of titles this has happened with that I'm sad about. Eragon, and LoTR. InkHeart.

I'm not sad this time. According to the person who's read the book they stayed close to it, and I wouldn't have made it through the beginning. Ender's brother is a psychopathic sh*t and the over-all military society it's set in would have shut me down before any potential problems with his treatment of female characters could have manifested. Maybe in the book we meet Ender's parents (we see his tearful mother for like half a second), or see if he had friends before they shipped him off to battle-school. Maybe his squad-mates had personalities. I know a lot of that get's lost in the five seconds you get in the scope of a movie.

But it wasn't bad. The cinematography and artistry were good, and it's a decently presented story-line. The female characters all center around Ender, but the entire universe centers around Ender so that's no sort of surprise. I did have a moment where I thought it would have been much better if his brother got to be the compassionate one, and his sister was the psychotic reject.

So, the ultimate question. If they made more movies in the Ender Universe, would I go see them in the theater? Probably not. But that's more to do with my general malaise about sequels than with anything they did wrong.

Now. Post note about Mr Card and his expressed views. I can't decide if I care or not. He seems to have retracted a few of them, in the last year. Maybe that was in preparation for the movie, maybe he had a change of heart. I don't have a knee-jerk 'evil' response to Mormonism, but I'm not forgiving either. I have a whopping giant button about hypocrisy that frequently gets an exercise in regard to the Church of Latter-day Saints from about every direction. And on good days when I'm calm and rational all of that means precisely zip. If he wrote books I liked to read I'd still read them (he may, when my to-read pile gets shorter Ender's Game might wind up on there). For better or worse, I always feel like the content should matter more than author context.


But there's something to be said for a persons attitude mattering, on the whole. I find his religious viewpoints and unpopular views much less damaging and off-putting than all those authors who try to nuke people for disagreeing with them. He expresses his views and clearly, frequently, I don't agree with them. That seems an extreme reason to decry everything he's ever done. Authors who plagiarize, who bully reviewers or anyone else who gives them a critique, who vastly over-react to being disagreed with I wholeheartedly support  boycotting. But we're so quick to claim the moral high-ground on the internet, and I think sometimes that happens at the detriment of remembering that equality means sometimes leaving space for people who don't agree with us. Screaming 'YOU'RE WRONG' never convinced anyone of anything.


I'll still suggest his book on Character and Viewpoint to people because it's one of the best writing books I've ever read. And maybe if I read the book I'd feel differently, like his religious viewpoint was more agitating than it was in the movie. 


Crap. I'm gonna have to read the book now. I love how I talk myself into these things.


ps. I was totally going to leave a teaser about Friday here, but I honestly don't remember what I wrote. Yep, it's been that kind of week so far.
3 Comments

Dromedary Dragoons 

3/3/2014

0 Comments

 
And you thought last Monday was random...Today's post comes to you from the files of weird crap I've learned about history. 


On this day, in 1855, Jefferson Davis (then Secretary of War) got approval from Congress to appropriate $30,000 for the purpose of buying camels for use in military and other situations. 
Picture
The thought was that the camels would handle the arid regions in the west better than horses or mules would. There's a rundown of the program on Wikipedia here if you'd like to learn more particulars about the US Camel Corp. 

So why didn't I grow up watching Dragoons on camel-back prance around my home-town at Good 'ol Days? Well, the easy answer is they asked for the full measure of support from Congress in 1860. I'm sure that wasn't the only problem, since it took them five years to get through their initial trials, but that equates to asking your parents for a large chunk of money while they're trying to decide if they want to be married anymore. I suspect a lot of things didn't happen in 1860.

Now I kind of want to know if Jeff Davis was ever sad he couldn't get the Camel Corps to take off.

Picture from here under this license.
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Lions and Lambs and the Nature of Failure

3/2/2014

2 Comments

 
It's March now, and I'm seriously tempted to just slide right on past talking about what I had for goals last month and go right on to this month's goals. 

That probably makes it pretty obvious how well they went. 

On the editing front I got about halfway done. I've marked up the entire book, and figured out what major changes I'm making, but I'm only about four chapters into actually making them. I'm at that stage in editing that gets sort of consistently crippled by self doubt, and unlike the initial writing I can just tell myself it's okay for it to be crap.

My writing goal from last month was just.. No. Just no. Two chapters doesn't even count as failure. 

I finished The Fault in Our Stars and all I can say about it was that I cried a lot and John Green frequently makes me feel inadequate as a writer and a person. I like him very much.

The socks I made for my mother-in-law were about three-quarters done at her birthday. 

And obviously the blog front is the one thing I haven't failed at this month. 

Below are picturey things. 
So. What's the plan for this month? Basically a second crack at last month, only with the tea-cozy my mother requested for her birthday. Also I'm going to finish John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony.

But March is also my husbands birthday and my wedding anniversary and... No worries. It'll happen this month.

Tomorrow resumes normal programming, and we're talking about Camels so you've got that to look forward to.

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