C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 98

Picoreview: Shadow Recruit

Picoreview: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit: muuuuuch better than I expected.

I mean, it’s a popcorn movie, don’t get me wrong, but I like popcorn movies and this one served up nicely. It turns out I rather like Chris Pine, maybe especially when he’s not being lit by lens flares along his razored cheekbones (I already knew I liked his voice better when I couldn’t see him, thanks to his voicing Jack Frost in Guardians of Easter or whatever that movie was :)), and he was more approachable and endearin...

questionable content

I tell you, I look at Questionable Content all the time and think, “If I did a web comic five days a week every week for ten years I too would improve hugely with my artistic skills. That would be so great. I should do that!”

Then I go “ahahahah in my copious free time ahahahaha ideas ahahahah :p” and that’s pretty much the end of that.

Still. It would be cool.

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Kitsnaps: Birds of Paradise

Birds of Paradise

Birds of Paradise

All the tropical flowers in the greenhouses at the Botanic Gardens are currently in bloom. I’ve never caught them in bloom before, and had a fairly wonderful time going through and taking pictures in the warm serenity of the greenhouses.

Of course, this is one of like two pictures that I actually know what I was taking a picture *of*, and mostly I didn’t think to take pictures of the accompanying labels, either (primarily because it’s never really clear to me...

Picoreview: American Hustle

Picoreview: American Hustle: better than I expected, even given all its glowing reviews.

Much of that is because I was expecting to hate all the characters but instead found myself enjoying them all to a fair degree. Brad Cooper plays an FBI agent who’s not as smart as he thinks he is; an almost unrecognizeable Christian Bale plays a con artist who *is* as smart–at least about cons—as he thinks he is. I was basically expecting everybody to be about as sympathetic as the characters in August: O...

Recent Reads: The School for Manners

My reading lately has not been going so well. I’m bouncing off a lot of well-reviewed books hard, and I’m retreating to fun and easy reads.

I’ve said before that I enjoy reading MC Beaton’s books because they take me about 70 minutes and therefore allow me to feel like I’m reading a lot, even if in wordcount I’m not really. I’d been reading Agatha Raisin and Hamish McBeth, but I picked up one of her Regencies lately and it was great fun, so I’ve recently blown through the whole School for Mann...

Picoreview: August: Osage County

Picoreview: August: Osage County is a story about a wildly dysfunctional family, with an absolutely dreadful matriarch played by Meryl Streep and–primarily, although really not at all singularly–her personal war with her oldest daughter, played by Julia Roberts. The real skill of the performances is that although many of the characters are just awful people, they’re all *understandable*. At moments they’re all even sympathetic, which, given how dreadful most of them are, is pretty impressive....

Reader Questions: Doing it all

Thirzah asks keeping kick-ass real? Why is it ok to have a hero/ine shoot people in fiction, when we’re opposed to guns & violence in real life?

Well, I write about a god-fighting shaman, so I’m not sure how *real* I keep kick-ass, but… :)

I think it’s all right for us to explore violence in fiction precisely because we don’t in real life. It’s a way for us to imagine and experience things we actually really hope we don’t encounter in real life. A lot of fiction is about heightening experienc...

GGK Book Club: The Wandering Fire, ch 9-12

AKA “the first time I ever threw a book across the room.”

Cutting straight to the chase here, I was about 17 when I read THE WANDERING FIRE (in fact, I was 17, because I was in my dorm room at UAF sitting on my bed reading when I pitched the book across the room, and remember it quite vividly), and I was enraged at Kevin’s death.

Nigh unto 25 years later, coming into it again, I obviously knew what was going to happen, and had a really vague idea it had…something…to do with the goddess, but…I w...

Scrivener

When I first encountered Scrivener I thought, “Wow, this is a really great way to spend a huge amount of time doing work that isn’t writing.”

I still think it’s that, but I’m coming around to seeing how it’s also got the potential to be an incredibly useful tool. I’m working on a couple of projects where I need to be able to keep track of a lot of names and relationships, and my general method (methos) of doing that is by keeping document files with random information inserted into them, and n...

Patreon update :)

So I logged into the war room after launching the MAGIC & MANNERS Patreon project and got hit with a bunch of suggestions on how to improve the page, which I’ll be doing, but one of them was “more explaining about how the funding works”, so I’ll do that in a blog post.

So. Funding with Patreon is Not Like Kickstarter. Patreon does not ask for one large donation; it asks for many small ones. And when we say small we can mean “ten or five or even one cent”–micropayments are totally cool with the...