Bryce Moore's Blog, page 160

Upgrading the Home Theater

With a new room in my house, the time has come. I’ve long dreamed about having a real movie theater-like experience at home, and this time I’m going to try and make that a reality. It’s not going to be a room just devoted to movies and nothing else (my house isn’t that big), but I just bought a projector yesterday, and I have a wall all picked out for the screen.

It’s good to start a project like this out with a definite goal in mind. My goal? 120 inches of 7.1 surround sound goodness. 3D movie nights with the family. And the best thing is that after looking at what I need, I don’t think I need that much. The biggest speed bump was always having a place to have this all set up. For most projectors, you want a room that doesn’t have too much light, or where the light can be controlled. You also (obviously) need a big empty wall for the screen to hang. I had curtains for windows, but no place to put the screen.

Once you’ve got that taken care of, you need the components. I already have a surround sound system, so that can be moved for free. I also already have all the things I need to be able to play the stuff I want to watch on the screen, so that’s also free. Buying a nice 3D television that is 120 inches big would cost me . . . an impossible amount. The best I can find would be a 90 inch screen, and good luck paying for that. (Best Buy has a 75 inch screen on sale for $3800. It has 4k picture, which is nicer than I need by a long shot. I have no 4k content to display.)

Buying a projector? I got a nice refurbished one for $540. It’s a BenQ HT2050, which is one of the best reviewed less-expensive models out there. The ceiling mount cost me a whopping $24. Once they arrive in a few days, I’m going to set them up and see how big I can make the screen on the opposite wall. Once I know that for sure, I’ll buy a screen. That costs around $100-$200, though I could also make one, it seems. I’ll have to investigate that option. 3D glasses (active shutter, so they work with my projector) come in at $25 each. My trusty PS3 already reads 3D blu-rays, so all I’ll need beyond that is to buy a couple 3D discs . . .

I should be able to do the whole thing for under $1000 easily. Though one thing that budget doesn’t cover? A couch to watch it on.

We can’t have everything, folks. But if I do this right, then come Groundhog Day, I’ll be watching Phil see a much bigger shadow this year than last.

Kirkus Reviews The Memory Thief!

I’ve had a lot of great reviews come in for THE MEMORY THIEF since it was published back in September, but I was disappointed to date that none of the big review publications had taken the time to review it. (Of course, that’s a double edged sword. I was also worried they’d review it and then end up hating it. That’s always a possibility.) Since the book is also coming out in a wide release in March, there was always the chance they were just waiting until March was closer before they did their reviews.

And lo and behold, yesterday Kirkus posted one. Better yet, it’s a really great one. (Kirkus has been known for really trashing books. They can be pretty harsh in their reviews sometimes.) Here’s a link to it on Kirkus, but here’s the whole thing for those of you who don’t want to click through. (Which, by experience, is most of you.)

Memories are slippery things.

Twelve-year-olds Benjamin and his fraternal twin, Kelly, look forward to the Adams County fair every year. There isn’t much to do in their corner of Maine besides listen to their parents bicker. This year a new tent appears on the fairgrounds: the Memory Emporium, where a wizened man says he can take and share memories. Narrator Ben hopes that he can help his parents forget their anger. But when he returns to the tent, a young tattooed woman has taken the old man’s place. She promises to help the white preteens with their problem if she can have a few memories in return. Her solution seems to harm more than help, though, as the memories of the fairgoers are disappearing, including Kelly’s and their parents’. It’s up to Ben to figure out how to restore the minds of his family and town before he is forgotten as well. Moore crafts a compelling premise and a plot that delivers more than might be expected. Ben initially believes that a memory is an objective moment in time, but the quest to restore memories brings him to a deeper understanding of how they affect a life. Memories are not separate—they are integral to who we are.

With interesting twists, captivating action, and a down-to-earth lead, this adventure is sure to become a new favorite. (Fantasy. 8-12)

That last bit is the best: a super one-liner that sums up their response to the book. The sort of thing that can go on a cover. I love it.

(And as a general reminder, if you’ve read THE MEMORY THIEF and enjoyed it, why not post a review on Goodreads?)

The End of Fun

I’m always pretty down the day after Martin Luther King Day. Why? Because it’s official: the fun season is over. Sure, there are some things still to look forward to. Groundhog Day is coming. The Oscars are at the end of next month. But those are small islands of fun in a vast empty sea of Routine.

Each year, I’m ecstatic when September rolls around. It means we’re approaching my favorite stretch of the year: September to Mid-January. And each mid-January (today), I’m just . . . bummed. Because that favorite stretch is now over, and it won’t be back for 9 months. This year seems to be worse than normal, because I also decided to take a break from the no-sugar rule and the diet over the holidays. Each day after New Years, I’ve been telling myself that I need to start those up again. And that resolution lasts for a day or two (or maybe an hour or two), but then it gets broken. Again. And again. And even before that, it was a super fun season, since there was a Disney vacation involved. The higher the highs, the lower the lows.

I think I’ve been trying to pretend this day wasn’t really coming. That the holidays hadn’t ended. But like all good things, they’ve finally come to a close.

So here I am. Kind of counting down the days until September again, and trying to look on the bright side. I live in Maine. Summer isn’t that hot, right? (Yes. Even in the middle of January, I still much prefer winter to summer. That’s just how I roll, folks.)

What’s your favorite time of the year? What’s your least favorite?

Somedays You Just Have No Time

And today is one of those days. Sorry peoples. I blinked, and the day ran away from me. Catch you all on Tuesday.

Fake News vs. Real News

It’s interesting to me, as a linguistics major, to watch the evolution of words. To see how they change and adapt over time. How they’re invented. How they’re commandeered by one group or another. There’s a battle over words sometimes, and other times they just sort of inch their way from one meaning to another.

The term “fake news” has garnered more and more attention lately. So much that I started to think about its evolution. It started with the Onion, right? The satirical news site that published clearly fake news. Except once those new stories were shared on social media, not everyone could tell they were fake. And then there were more and more of the sites, and some of them were designed to look as real as possible, and so people began to be fooled more often. Enough that warnings were circulated. Facebook was going to monitor “fake news” and keep it out of feeds.

And now, of course, we’re to the point where anyone can take whatever news they want and choose whether to believe it or not. If it says something you don’t like, call it fake and move on. Or (apparently according to Trump) just call the entire news organization fake and move on.

But as I thought more about it, maybe the root of this fake news came with Wikipedia. With people knowing they could just alter the site the way they saw fit. It reminded me of Colbert’s fairly famous “Wikiality” segment:

Reality itself turns into a sort of popularity contest, where all you need to believe is what you choose to believe, and facts are pieces on a board that can be manipulated and moved as you see fit. This is anathema to me. The whole concept behind it just makes my skin crawl. I love doing research and looking at things with as unbiased an eye as I can, and then making my own mind up based on that research.

So, of course, I had to research “fake news.” And I found out that this is much older than I guessed. That news has been tweaked and stretched and lied about for as long as its been reported. (This article does a great job summarizing some of it.) Our propensity to lie in the news or elsewhere is matched, apparently, only by our willingness to believe what we want to believe.

The thing is, either side of an argument can use and believe this phenomenon. Take global warming. Environmentalists can point fingers at the unwillingness of their opponents to believe the research the scientific community has produced. Their opponents can point fingers at the willingness of the environmentalists to believe the lies they’re being fed. It’s the “lamestream media” argument. The very existence and pervasiveness of fake news in the popular consciousness seems to have made it so that it’s even easier to just believe the preconceived notions that appeal to you the most.

How depressing is that?

As for my take on the latest Trump scandal about the compromising videos and information Russian spies have apparently compiled on him? I have no idea if it’s true or not, and in the end, I suppose it’s not going to make a difference. (It seems.) But a wise man sat me down a long time ago and had a very serious talk with me. And I still remember his advice, verbatim, these many years later. He said, “Bryce, you need to live your life so that if you’re ever accused of paying Russian prostitutes to give each other a golden shower on the bed where the the President of the United States of America and his wife once slept, that everyone who hears that accusation is shocked and comes to your defense, saying how out of character that would be for you. Because if you’re living your life in a way so that when people hear that accusation, they think about it for a moment and then nod their head and shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Yeah. He might have done that.’? If that’s how you’re living your life, then you’re doing something wrong. Bigly.”

Words to live by, my friends. And I’ve done my best to stick close to them these many years later. If only someone had told Trump the same thing way back when . . .

Who Else is Watching Travelers?

A few weeks ago, one of my friends on Facebook mentioned the new Netflix show Travelers, saying it was surprisingly good. I’m always on the lookout for new shows, and so when Denisa and I were deciding what to watch next, I figured we’d give it a shot. It’s always interesting to me, trying out a new TV show to see how good it is. You learn a fair bit about what makes a good show great.

Most shows can handle a pilot episode just fine. They’ve got all sorts of new ground to cover, and you can get by with dropping mysteries and hints left and right: things to hook the viewer and make them want to stay around. But once you’re past the first episode or two, it’s not enough to drop more hints at mysteries. You have to start giving viewers a reason to keep stay with the show. These are the things I look for at this point:

Characters. Are these people I want to spend more time getting to know? Am I rooting for them? Do they behave in ways that make me sympathetic? I don’t mean they need to be nice to everyone, but they need to feel real. If they’re making stupid decisions just so the plot can do something, then no thanks.
Is it avoiding repetition? I gave up on House after all of four or five episodes. Why? Because the show already felt like a routine by the end of those episodes. It was a formula. The same thing made me give up ultimately on Burn Notice, Black List, and many sitcoms. I want to be surprised. I don’t want to sit down to watch a show and have the only thing I wonder be what disease will be fought this week. I understand there are many people who like that out of a TV show, but I’m not one. In my ideal world, the show is about a theme and characters who explore that theme. That’s why The Wire was so awesome. That’s why I enjoyed Lost so much. Why I loved The Crown or Downton Abbey. A great show, to me, isn’t an “episode of the week” sort of experience. It’s a complete story. I love television for its ability to explore even more of a story than a movie.
Is it making progress with the big plot? What I mean by this is does the show start actually having plot progression, or is it artificially maintaining the status quo? The Mentalist is a great example of a show that failed this test. It had the Red John villain that was the supposed Big Bad of the show, and it tried to keep people interested with the mystery: who was Red John? What was the truth about him? But after a while, I realized they weren’t ever going to really resolve that, because it’s the one thing that kept the show running. It was the same thing with “Who burned Westin?” in Burn Notice. The show runs on a formula, with the one thing driving the characters forward from one plot to the next being this supposed mystery. That kind of show will make me watch in the middle of a season. I just gave up on Man in the High Castle for that. No thank you.

It typically doesn’t take long to figure out how a show is doing with those three points. They can fool you with smoke and mirrors for an episode or two, but here’s the thing: for a show to be successful long term, it has to make a pact with its audience. It establishes what the “rules” of the show are. What sort of show it’s going to be. And the pilot can be as awesome as they want it to be, but by the fourth episode, they pretty much have to reveal their hand. They need to, because otherwise they’ll be attracting an audience they can’t keep.

Sometimes there are exceptions to this. Under the Dome was able to run the whole first season with its mysteries, and then in the second season, it all fell apart. The wheels were churning, but it wasn’t going anywhere. No traction. I believe what had happened then was the showrunners knew they had a better thing going than what they’d planned, and so they tried to change the show to make it last longer. Make more money where they could, and so the show changed. It stopped making progress with the big plot and shifted into smaller mysteries that just didn’t matter.

Anyway. This is just a long way of saying I just finished the fourth episode of Travelers, and I’m really loving the show so far. It tells the story of a group of time travelers who have come from the future to save humanity from making a big mistake in the present. Great characters, intriguing situations, surprising plot developments. We could have a real keeper here. I need to watch the rest of the season before I can totally give it a Bryce Approved sticker, but so far, so good.

Anyone else out there watching?

Meryl Streep, Donald Trump, and Speaking Past One Another

Meryl Streep made a passionate acceptance speech at the Golden Globes Sunday, and I’ve seen two responses to it on my social media news feeds. Trump supporters are annoyed by it. They feel this is another example of Hollywood elites trying to tell normal people what they should think and how they should act and what they should believe. The anti-Trump crowd loved it. They feel like she made a wonderful plea for accountability from our leaders and the press.

This post isn’t about her speech, though. It’s about my dismay in the inability of both sides to be able to come to the middle and find ground for discussion. I haven’t made any effort to hide the fact that I’m against Trump and pretty much everything he stood for in the election. I was very disappointed he won, and I’m concerned about the direction our country is headed under his control. But at the same time, I also see people I know and respect who like Trump and believe he’s going to fulfill his promise of improving America.

Some of my friends would say that those people should be unfriended right away, or that I should stand up to them and confront them. Make them see that they’re supporting a racist, sexist troll of a human being. There’s a popular sentiment that everything Trump and the Republicans try to do for the next four years must be fought, tooth and nail. That now is the time to dig trenches and do our best to survive the coming years, so that when Trump is voted out of power in four years, we are in as good a place as possible to try and move forward again.

But trench warfare does nothing but destroy the ground its fought on. I’ve watched the Republicans try the same tactic for the last 8 years as they did their best to obstruct anything Obama tried to pass. It made me mad then, and Democrats using the same tool against a different foe is no better of an idea.

Politics seems to be a game where the speeches and accusations remain the same, it’s just the people making them switch sides periodically. We need to move beyond that somehow, even if it seems impossible. Here are a few suggestions I have for ways we might achieve it.

Avoid ultimatums. Telling the other side they need to do X, or else.
Don’t label the other side (or yourself). We’re all complex human beings. We all make what we believe are rational, sane choices. We all think other people make some truly terrible, impulsive reactions.
Get to know people who disagree with you. Don’t try to jump straight to a debate. Let them speak. Listen. Don’t worry about changing minds, and don’t accuse. Listen.
Find common ground. I guarantee it exists. It will be in different areas for different people and groups, but it’ll be there.
Don’t accuse or point fingers. Even if you feel justified. You don’t always know the whole story. Acknowledge that.
Don’t speak in absolutes. They’re (almost) never right.
Don’t give up.

The more of these bullet points I wrote, the more I realized that what I was advocating for was no different than the same basic principles of any relationship, be it friendship, co-workers, a marriage, parent/children dynamics. You name it. Go figure.

I understand the fear that Trump is breaking the rules and that he must be treated differently. And that might well be true. But Trump shouldn’t change the way we treat each other. I certainly understand and sympathize with the people who are afraid and upset about what might happen to them and their family under a Trump presidency, and I want to do everything I can to help them and keep the many good things I see in this country. But I believe the path to that is through dialogue, collaboration, and compromise.

When we start going against those bullet points I mentioned above, we get nothing done.

Book Review: Extreme Makeover

Extreme Makeover by Dan Wells

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s rare that I come across a book that’s unique. As in, something unlike anything I’ve ever read before. But an apocalyptic science fiction book where the world is destroyed by a hand cream lotion?

Yeah. I dare you to find me another one like it.

The concept sounds ridiculous, and Dan Wells clearly knows it is. He plays it for laughs now and then, winking to his audience, but the amazing thing to me about this book is that he managed to think through the implications well enough to make the rest of the book (other than those occasional winks) play out realistically enough to cause me to question if something like this could actually happen.

Maybe I’m just becoming paranoid.

The concept is straightforward: a cosmetics company scientist stumbles across a lotion that switches the DNA of anyone it comes into contact with. So if an Asian man puts on some that had been imprinted with the DNA of an Irish woman, then he becomes a copy of that Irish woman. (He retains his memories and personality, though.) And the cosmetic company (naturally) tries to figure out the best way to make as much money off this (potentially illegal, and not properly tested at all yet) product.

Disaster ensues.

It’s a fast read, and yet thought provoking at the same time. Denisa is always telling me how skeptical she is of all the beauty products out there, and this books makes a great case for why she has cause for concern. It’s made even more real by the fact that Wells worked in the beauty industry for about a decade, so he knows about what he’s writing.

I loved the book and finished it in under a day. If you’re looking for something fun, disturbing, and unique, check it out!

View all my reviews

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Back at Thanksgiving when we were at Disney, MC got sick on the plane ride down, or soon thereafter. She gave that sickness to Denisa, who passed it on to the kids on the plane ride back. They then gave it to me, so it had officially made its way through the whole family. Fine. Not fun, but fine.

Except MC got it from me. And she gave it back to Tomas, who passed it over to Daniela, who gave it back to me. And then Denisa got it again, and I have it again now.

Seriously. Since Thanksgiving, there has always been someone sick in my family. I’d really like that to stop, but for today, I’m just lying in bed and being miserable.

So to entertain you, here’s my kids’ current favorite YouTube video. Once it goes in your head, it doesn’t come out.

Goals for 2017

Still playing catch up with my blog posts from vacation. However, I wanted to take a minute to state online what I want to get done this year. Because goals.

In 2016, I was able to do quite a few things I’m proud of. I stuck with my goal to lay off sugar (more or less, though I fell off the wagon *hard* in December). I exercised consistently. I dropped from 217 to 188 pounds. I submitted another book to editors. Big, overarching goals that were all accomplished. I’d like to keep that up. Here are some specifics:

Submit another book to editors. This is the only thing that’s really in my control: working with my agents to get books to the point where they feel comfortable sending them out to editors. I can’t control if editors buy them, but I can certainly control if they exist to be bought. This might potentially be a tricky goal for me this year. I have only one book that I’m sitting on (UTOPIA). Is there a chance I’ll return to it and discover it’s a big failure? Yes. Is there a chance I’ll like it but my agents won’t? Yes. Do I have a plan for if that happens? Um . . . no? Just work on something else, I guess. But I’m hopeful we all like it, though it’s a big departure for me in some ways. If UTOPIA doesn’t pan out, I’d better hope something else brilliant happens, either with MURDER CASTLE or with a new book that comes out of nowhere. (It’s been known to happen.) My hope is that consistently writing 1,000 words a day gets me there, the same way it always has . . .
Get down to 180 pounds. I’d like to build on my success from last year and continue getting in shape. I don’t think this is out of the question. It’ll just take some concerted effort and deciding that hovering around 190 isn’t acceptable. I’d like to hover around 180 instead. Exercise and staying away from sweets should help a lot. And not having another December for a while. (Even though I only put on 4 pounds over the break.)
Read a book a week. This one should be a real challenge. Especially since a lot of the books I read are long books. We’ll see if I can keep up. Basically, I need to get 14% of the way through a book every day. My Kindle can track that for me. I’m already 8% behind on the book I started January 1. Might be a struggle . . .
Improve my Slovak. I’d like to study some Slovak every day. 15 minutes? 30? Something like that. There are online courses available. The trick is just finding time for it. But if I speak Slovak better, I think my kids will be able to speak Slovak better. This has been a goal for a long time. I’ve just always been terrible at actually accomplishing it. (Lest you think I have a perfect track record with goals.)
Continue to declutter my house and life. This one is bigger and more over-arching, in that I’m not sure how I’ll break it down. 15 minutes of decluttering a day is great in theory, but I’ve found I do a bad job of sticking with it. That said, when I went to declutter this winter break, I found that many of the places that often get really bad still weren’t too terrible, so maybe I’m improving on the whole?
Continue reading to DC each evening. She needs the help, and I love spending the time with her. Also, it helps me get toward my reading goal. Win win!

Really, if I can stay on top of all of those goals, it’ll be a miracle. But the great thing about goals is that just by trying to reach them, we improve our performance in the areas we care about.

What are your goals for the year?