C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 27

Picoreview: Glass

Picoreview: Glass: This is definitely the kind of movie M. Night Shyamalan would make to wrap up his Unbreakable trilogy, and not the kind of movie I would make. :)

I liked it better than I expected to, really. I didn’t see Split, which looked too horror-ish for me, and also because of the political aspect of how badly disassociative identity disorder is portrayed in it. That said, I mean…they’re comic book movies, so if we pretend it’s not intended to be a real-world portrayal of DID and tha...

CE Murphy & the Great Newsletter Tragedy

Ten days ago I accidentally deleted my entire newsletter mailing list, backups, old newsletters, and all, and it cannot be retrieved.

For the TL;DR crowd, you can (please please please) sign up (again) at https://tinyletter.com/ce_murphy/

For those who enjoy stories of epic EBCAK, let me share the sad, mortifying tale.

It was so so so so stupid. I was trying to set up a NEW mailing list for blog posts, and tried using the same email address figuring it would say “that email is already in use”...

Picoreview: Alita: Battle Angel

Picoreview: Alita: Battle Angel : This was much better than I expected it to be. OTOH, I expected it to be very, very, very, very bad indeed.

I thought the story might be okayish but that the CGI would be–I was not convinced by it in the trailers. It just looked creepy, the anime face. The proportions looked wrong. I thought they’d landed squarely in the uncanny valley and had been unable to do anything about it. So I was really surprised to find that the CGI is by and large very good. It’s...

Thinks To Done, January 2019

Last year I tried to make a Thinks To DoDONE post every month to keep myself from feeling like I was drowning under work and not accomplishing anything. I think I managed to post…twice…which wasn’t enough to make me feel very accomplished. :) Trying again!

I finished the second Dublin Driver murder mystery, which was great. I wrote the next section of my REDEEMER/Captain America fan fiction for my Patreon.

(A few days after I posted it, Dad, suddenly, said, “I wish you’d write more of that Ca...

Brexit in a nutshell, from an Irish POV

I posted this cartoon (with sincere apologies to cartoonist Sidney Harris) over on Facebook, and an American friend said they’d been trying to follow some of the Brexit news, but frankly it was all a bit confusing (and as if there’s not enough confusion to sort through in the States), so I wrote a very brief primer and answered some follow-up questions, all of which got a nod of approval from some British friends, so I’m going to post it here, too, for those who are baffled but would like to...

TBR Shelf, 2019

For a few years there I was keeping up on a TBR shelf posting pretty regularly, but the last couple years I fell off badly. However, inspired by

1. an ever-growing TBR shelf (againstillalways)
2. an EMBARRASSINGLY low number of books read last year, and
3. a conversation with a friend

I have decided to declare 2019 the Year Of Clearing The TBR Shelf.

I may also declare it the Year of Re-Reads, as I really want to re-read John Lee’s Unicorn Saga to see if I still need to be carrying those boo...

The Hugo Post

People have asked me, as they do every year, to put together a list of what I had published last year that could qualify for a Hugo nomination. I don’t normally get my act together enough to do this, but a combination of elements, including

1. Worldcon is in Dublin this year!
2. I’m very proud of last year’s novel! and
3. Somebody else did the hard lifting and I’m able to use that for the basis of my post

means I’m doing a proper one this year. I’ll put the cold hard facts up front, and then...

Take A Chance thoughts / Patreon signal boost

I’ve been having a think, and here’s what I’ve been thinking.

I’ve got an artist for the next TAKE A CHANCE story arc. I need to be able to pay him, tho.

If I can get my Patreon up to 250 patrons, at the average of $5/m that people are paying, I could afford to pay him for 4 pages a month. 300 patrons? 8 pages a month.

(I can’t afford to pay him very WELL, but I could at least pay him. :))

It’d be a sneak peek/early, probably B&W, one-to-2-page-a-week release of what would PRRRRRRRROBABLY b...

Fancy Gym: Day One

Well, my first personal trainer workout at the #fancygym this morning went really poorly.

I arrived slightly early and the PT was 15 minutes late. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure he was *only* 15 minutes late because I asked more than once about where he was. On top of that, there’s a verbal quirk in Irish English that probably comes from something in the Irish language, where people often end a sentence with “so” or “like” or “okay”. Normally I don’t mind that, but the guy who was trying to cov...

FancyGym

I got a membership at the fanciest gym I’ve ever been in.

I didn’t really plan to get a membership right now, because the only practical way to get to it is on my bicycle, and I’m not very fit, so the prospect of biking there and back again seemed like enough. But then it turned out it has an obscene membership fee, and because December they had a special that reduced it by 75%, so I…got the membership. I can cancel after 3 months, if it turns out cycling to it is too insurmountable.

Anyway,...