Media

Rome Season 1 and Season 2: Julia and I watched this series over the last couple of months via Netflix. We both really enjoyed it. I loved seeing history played out before us (even if it wasn't wholly acurate (it's not like I'd know anyway)) and I loved the arcs of the two Legionnaires. I wasn't sure what to think of the series before I starting watching it, but now that I've seen it I think I'd recommend it to almost anyone; the stories and setting are great. Gamers would especailly enjoy it.

Alias Season 1: I only saw portions of a couple episodes of this when it was on TV, but Julia was a big fan of it, so we added it to the Netflix queue (and thanks be to Netflix for exposing the correct spelling and usage of the word queue to a much wider portion of the population!) and have watched the first couple of disks in the last couple of weeks. It's fun and I can't get over the breakneck pacing -- especailly when compared to J.J. Abrams pace on Lost. Again, I recommend this for gamers who want to learn a thing or three about pacing and the proper use of MacGuffins.

Mad Men: Thanks to the capabilities of Comcasts' On Demand service we've been watching Mad Men. For some reason we always miss it when a new episoe airs, but On Demand has saved us. We both like this show and I find myself really wanting to know more about the characters. They're not all "good guys" by any stretch, but they're all interesting. There have been a number of interviews about how they tried to make the show as "realistic" as possible with regards to how an office in Manhattan in the 1950s was, but I really can't get over the amount of smoking, racism, sexism, and sexual abuse. Seeing how the gay characters deal with their place in society has been a bit heartbreaking as well.

Flashman by George MacDonald Frazer: I read this during breaks at work and at night before going to bed over the past couple of weeks. If I'd read this as a teenager I think I might have been a bigger history buff. Some of the people I've talked to absolutely love these books and others can't get past the racism, classism, sexism, and rape. I think I'm more in the first camp than the latter, but mostly because Flashman always gets his comeuppance (at least to some extent). As a novel the book is paced wonderfully and each chapter feels like an important part of the whole. I may read another book from this series soon.

Drops of Corruption, a Shadowrun novel by Jason M. Hardy: This is what I'm currently reading. I wanted a bit of mindless fiction and this fit the bill. The writer doesn't quite have his style down and he repeats a motif a couple of times without realizing it, but it's enough fun that I'm going to stick it out. I also like that it's a standalone novel instead of part of a trilogy or continuing story. I'm already 100 pages in, so I think I'll finish pretty quickly. I'm discovering that 250-page novels go pretty quickly after you've spent some time reading a bunch of 600+ page novels.

More later.