Aris Katsaris

The past year I started watching many series that previously I had only been hearing about: preeminent among them Battlestar Galactica and Supernatural, but also Farscape, Medium, Jonathan Creek, and the more recent Mentalist and Sarah Connor Chronicles.

In December I saw the whole of "Death Note" and the first three seasons of "Dexter" (only the first two seasons of the latter were any good, btw). Both these series were vaguely depressing, with the serial-killer protagonists and all, so near the end of December I decided to switch to something lighter and checked out "Kim Possible" instead. But Kim Possible won't be the one animated series to stick to my mind from this past season.

( Avatar - the Last Airbender )

( Digital Rights Management annoyances )

( City of Ember )

( Fanvidding )

Back to Athens, and away from Samos, for good this time. *g* About a week ago (or perhaps slightly more) I passed the six-month mark of my service which means I'm more than half through. And ofcourse it was the harder half: basic training at Corinth and the months at the near-border location. It's gonna be far easier from now on. Certainly up to two weeks ago I wasn't posting much to the Internet because I didn't have enough time. These past few days (since Wednesday when I came back here), I didn't post any because I was reading new books I got. That's a definite improvement quality-of-life-wise. :-)

See, Saturday was out to celebrate two friends' birthdays -- while I was picking up gifts for them, I also got myself three new books, the next (and next-to-last) Dark Tower book by Stephen King (Song of Susannah), Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, and the newest Pressfield book, the one about Alexander the Great, Virtues of War. Have already finished the first of these, Song of Susannah. On to the next! :-)

Tomorrow I'm also getting myself an ADSL connection. Cheaper in the long run -- by far.

I'll be getting Harry Potter Saturday noon -- but till then here's one last review I'd been planning to write for a while.

A while ago I got "Peter and the Starcatchers", partly because I've become something of a small fan of the whole Peter Pan mythos. It's supposed to be a "prequel" to the story we know by J.M. Barrie.

It was rather disappointing.

( Spoilers for Peter Pan and the Starcatchers inside )

...

( Peter Pan in general, and Gargoyles-related musings )

Last couple weeks I have been contributing again to Wikipedia, which I had mostly neglected the months before. A week ago I created the article on Color revolutions (though many others have edited it since ofcourse) - today I made a pretty little map for it.

I'm not very fond of the tulip pic I found but I rather like the rose.

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In that website project I'm doing (and which I've completed for a long time now really except that they've not sent me the final texts I need to insert), supervisor told me to make some of the photos (at the photographer's request) so they can't be downloaded. Disabling right-click and the like. Fool's game really -- all pics can be downloaded in *some* way, if only by grabbing screenshots -- and supervisor knew that as well so she just told me to make it so they can't be downloaded *easily*. Still I went to it -- blah blah, disabling right-click, blah blah, making photo that it can't be downloaded with "saved as", that it can't be dragged from the screen to the desktop -- even so that its url couldn't be seen at first glance by someone inexperienced reading the source code of the page. Supervisor would be happy with much less I'm sure, but I took it as a game and went the extra mile. Easy enough.

Only problem is my annoyance at Netscape's incompatibility with IE over some of the most fundamentals of Javascript - like disabling right-click. Still checking to see if (like IE) Netscape and Mozilla allow such disabling to happen only over one specific image (because disabling it over the whole page is *gah* utterly obnoxious).

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I read recently "The Left Hand of Darkness", which is the second Ursula Le Guin novel I've read (or perhaps the fifth, if we count the four stories in the EarthSea volume I have as separate items -- as they probably indeed should be seen).

My impression of it, and my first impression of Ursula Le Guin's plotting as a whole: A crescendo who's climax falls just a tiny bit short. The most interesting elements of the story are the ones she never really delves into. In Earthsea, I'd like us to see a bit more about the nature of names, about dragons. About the ways of magic itself -- but it largely remained in the background. The story tells us that there are many ways for wizards to discover names, but we're not told even one, even though Ged exhibits the power. Dragons appear at times but even at the end we know little about them and what makes them tick. Vaguely disappointing. And in "the Left Hand of Darkness", the things that intrigued me most were the ways that planet Winter would change with their joining of the Ekumen and the foretelling abilities. But both remain undelved into.

Exceptionally cool worldmaker... but her actual stories keep on leaving me vaguely unsatisfied.

Octavia Butler is a new author I've read (two books so far "Wild seed" and "Dawn") and with her the feeling is similar but different. Ursula Le Guin reaches an end with her stories, even if the middle doesn't dig into all the points I'd have liked her to have dug. Octavia Butler on the other hand at the end of both those novels felt me unsure that it was really the end. Sure some events happened that mark it "the end", but events of similar magnitude and importance had happened at many random times throughout the series -- many points where Octavia Butler could have marked her ending -- even though it'd have been just as vaguely disappointing.

In this case though it's not even the sense I get from Le Guin -- namely that she doesn't delve enough. In Octavia Butler's case I kept on feeling she was retreading old ground throughout the story.

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No April's Fools today, though I *had* planned to write about the way the Da Vinci Code talked about Jesus' Martian ancestry and the Illuminati/Vatican conspiracy to hide that little fact. I then thought that people may actually think I was spoiling the actual content of the book and get mad at me for ruining their pleasure. Or else they might think I was spoiling the actual content of the book and not read it themselves. :-)

Read it. No Martians involved, I promise. Cool story, though the ending disappointed me a tiny bit. I may talk about some more in a future post.

You know, if I had just tripped and scratched the surface of my hand, while returning a DVD last night, that wouldn't even merit mention. But when, in the process of using a handkerchief to wipe my hand and checking out the scratch, I am distracted enough that ten meters away I step on that broken piece of pavement that normally ought to contain a tree but it doesn't, and as a result I fall again even worse, and hurt my already hurt hand -- ah, that's a bit of utterly stupid clumsiness that requires special commemoration.

Anyway, new pic above. Like it? Used this which you can download from here.

And a meme. Reminded to do it by eledhwenlin, but expanded to cover the Top 200 books of an earlier BBC meme gacked from synaesthete7.

( BBC's Top 200 Books )

Still haven't talked about Delphi any, btw. Soon.

Edit: New pic wasn't showing previously. Fixed it.