Derik Badman's Journal

Finished up Molly Tanzer's Creatures of Will and Temper yesterday afternoon (spend a long time reading in the afternoon, since I finished my video game). It's a gothic fantasy that draws from Picture of Dorian Gray in a way that I'm sure I did not totally pick up on since it's been decades since I read Wilde's book. The obvious things like "Dorina Gray" and a prominent portrait (though not of her) and aspects of long life, but I don't remember the Wilde well enough to pick up on anything more. I enjoyed the novel as a fun read, finished it in probably 3 sittings, but it felt like it ended as a different book than it started as. A very slow build-up of romance and a bit of mystery ended up as a sudden climax of action and violence. It was a rather jarring change in the mood. I see there is a second book that is... not a sequel, but... I guess just a book in the same setting, that has gotten better reviews. I'll see if the library has it.

My next read is Geoff Dyer's Zona which is all about the movie Stalker. I'm maybe a third of the way through at this point and... I'm not totally convinced. I'm not really getting much out of it to increase my enjoyment of the film itself, and I'm finding Dyer's voice rather annoying. Now that I've actually written that out, I'm realizing I should just cut my losses and move on. The library has two more books waiting for me anyway. And it's good I just went the library catalog to look up the Tanzer book as it turns out the branch is closed for Veteran's Day. That saved me a failed errand today.

Watched the latest Watchmen episode over breakfast and coffee this morning. It occurred to me, in watching it, that this is a very rare tv show that features pretty much no teens or twenty-somethings. All the major characters are adults of at least slightly older age. There are a few small kids and one character introduced this episode who is maybe a tween, but otherwise no one with a major part to play. That actually feels right in relation to the original comic, since that too was about a bunch of characters who weren't still so young.

This episode has some interesting though sort of ostentatious transitions between scenes. One really quick one transitioning from a kitchen in the one character's house to the yard of another's, had a close-up shot of a waffle maker closing and then a close-up of a circular gate latch opening. It was so fast I almost missed it, but the matching of shape and the opposite movements was really nice.