The Secret Lair

This is supposed to be a review of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, along with a brief comparison of the books to the movies. The trouble is this: instead of watching The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest last night, I had to kick George Washington’s ass.

In my defense, he pretty much had it coming. I had a good thing going and then he founded Philadelphia right between Osaka and Kagoshima, cutting off my trade route to Kyoto. That’s not the sort of thing good neighbors do. Oh, sure, he griped when I founded Osaka. “You’re encroaching on our territory,” he whined, and right away started in with the saber-rattling. Whatever.

So I established Kagoshima waaaay to the north of his territory. He had no claim to the lands on which I was building my city. None. But next thing I know he’s at my door, Mr. Crabbypants. On the inside, I was all, like, “Stuff it, George,” but I kept it cordial. I apologized. Yeah. Even though I’d done nothing wrong—at all—I still did a big mea culpa to try to untwist his undies. And I thought we were good, Washington and me.

But no sooner do I get a trade route established between Kyoto and Kagoshima then he sends a Settler into my backyard and founds Philadelphia, isolating Kagoshima and effectively bifurcating my burgeoning empire. Phil-a-ducking-felphia! Dick move, George.

George Washington: kind of a dick.

So we went to war. Twice. The first time, I just smacked him around a bit to let him know that I didn’t appreciate Philadelphia, cream cheese notwithstanding. When he realized that he was outmatched, he came to me with a peace offering: open borders, a tribute in gold and horses, a run at Martha—it was a pretty sweet deal, so I took it.

But when the treaty expired, there was Philadelphia, still in my way; still impeding commerce between Kagoshima and my capital city. What lesson had Washington learned, really? There I was, sitting in Kyoto, and I could hear that smug bastard in Washington—yeah, he named his capital after himself; talk about an ego—snickering at me. Snickering! And probably tittering, too. Huge titterer, Washington.

It was an implicit insult, and I couldn’t let it go by unanswered, so I kicked his butt. I trounced his ground forces and annexed Philadelphia, then New York, then Atlanta and Chicago. Then I grabbed Boston before swooping in for the coup-de-grace. The man himself tried to defend his ego-made-metropolis, but he didn’t stand a chance. If anyone ever asks you why George Washington wore wooden dentures, tell them it’s because I kicked his teeth in.

With Washington out of the way, I should be able to watch The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest in the next day or two and post my thoughts on the Millennium trilogy next week.

Unless Rameses II keeps giving me the stink-eye.

Not my hand. Not my Kindle, either.

Once upon a time, our own Secretary of Artistic Propaganda, Natalie Metzger, reviewed the Kobo eReader from Borders Booksellers.¹ When I decided it was time to acquire an eReader, I thought it might be nice to get something different for the purposes of objective comparison. As Overlord Miller owns a Sony eReader and I couldn’t bring myself to own a product named the “Nookie Reader,”² I asked Santa for an Amazon Kindle for Christmas.

The latest generation of Amazon’s eReader comes in three flavors: the 6″ wi-fi, which runs about $140, the 6″ wi-fi + 3G, which will set you back $190, and the Kindle DX, which measures 42″ diagonally, comes mounted on a Segway and costs roughly the Gross Domestic Product of Paraguay.³ I asked for the 6″ wi-fi version and received the 6″ wi-fi + 3G model along with a black leather cover.⁴

The cover is pretty much a must-have. I carry my Kindle in my laptop bag, or tuck it under my arm. Without the cover, the screen would have been smashed to bits on day one. For sixty bucks, you can get a cover with a built-in reading light, but just as I’ve never been a fan of reading pulp and ink books by anything other than natural sunlight or a nearby lamp, I don’t find the idea of a special reading light for the Kindle particularly attractive; I’m also lucky to have a wife who isn’t kept awake if I’ve got my bedside lamp on while I read.

To date, I’ve read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, issues of The Onion newspaper Asimov and Analog magazines,⁵ the MaximumPC blog, and sample chapters of several dozen Kindle novels including Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard and Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Right now, I’m a little over halfway through The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second novel in Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.

Prior to getting the Kindle, I wasn’t 100% sold on the idea of an eReader as an everyday device. I could see using it while traveling—I tend to cart one or more books around in my carryon when I fly, and almost inevitably buy another novel at the airport bookstore—but not as something I’d want to use while sitting around the house. After reading just one novel, my attitude changed completely: I found myself wishing that the books I received as Christmas gifts (or purchased with my Borders gift card) were on my Kindle; I even went so far as to purchase Boneshaker prior to a family vacation in Florida, even though a friend had loaned me his paperback copy to read. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that I can pass my copy of The Best of Joe R. Lansdale on to Overlord Miller when I’ve finished reading it.

The Kindle supports a variety of file formats, including PDF, text, rich text, structured HTML and Microsoft Word. Many of these formats can be converted to the native Kindle format by e-mailing them to {username}@kindle.com or {username}@free.kindle.com. The latter address is handy for 3G Kindle users who don’t want to pay a small fee to have their personal documents delivered over the 3G network; sending the file to the free.kindle.com address ensures that the document will only be delivered when the Kindle is connected to a wi-fi network.

I’ve had good luck converting PDFs to the Kindle format, though the maps standard to most epic fantasy titles don’t convert well. Still, anything beats trying to read a PDF on a mobile device. Since a PDF is essentially a series of images, one per page, there’s no good way to read a PDF formatted for a large page size on a small screen. The result is a lot of zooming and panning, which is a pain. Converting to the Kindle format allows the page layout to scale to the screen, shifting line breaks appropriately.

Unfortunately, not every PDF can be converted. Files with embedded DRM, for example, won’t work, nor will files with some advanced features. When I attempted to convert Roger Ebert’s Awake in the Dark, which was offered as a free download from The University of Chicago Press a few months ago, I was informed that the PDF contained features that were not supported on the Kindle…yet.

Also unsupported is the open EPUB format, which puts the Kindle on a (very) short list of eReaders that are incompatible with most library e-book lending systems. Both the Nook (Barnes & Noble) and the Kobo (Borders) support the EPUB format, and the ability to borrow e-books from my local library would have been nice.

When I was doing my research into eReaders, lack of EPUB support was definitely a strike against the Kindle, but the major competitors had bigger strikes against them. First, Barnes & Noble introduced the Color Nook, which abandons E Ink (more on that in a minute) in favor of a backlit, touchscreen color LCD. The Color Nook wants to be more than just an eReader; it wants to be the Apple iPad’s cheap cousin. Borders hasn’t tried to make the Kobo anything more than an eReader (yet), but my experience with Borders as an online store has been less than stellar; Barnes & Noble’s website (in the most recent iteration I’ve seen) is even worse. Amazon, on the other hand, has been an online retailer from day one, and they do electronic sales very well. It was this, more than almost anything else, that convinced me the Kindle was my eReader.

But it was E Ink that sold me. After taking a co-worker’s Kindle for a test drive one day, it was clear that E Ink is ideal for reading on a mobile device: crisp, clean text, almost no glare, and best of all, no backlight. I’ve had the Kindle app installed on my laptop and desktop computers for the better part of a year, yet I’ve never read a book on either device. Why? Because I hate reading on a computer screen. Anything more than a few paragraphs of a blog at a time and it’s a chore. Once my Kindle was in my hands, I found that I could read on it for hours at a time without strain. The form factor helps—it’s just a little larger than a standard paperback—but the E Ink brings the magic and keeps me reading.

The Kindle is not for everyone. If you think spending $140 on an eReader will somehow magically grant you access to all the free or dirt-cheap books you could possibly want for the rest of your life, you’re absolutely correct—as long as you’re content reading works that have fallen into the public domain. New books on the Kindle will cost almost as much or more than their paperback counterparts (though rarely anywhere near the hardcover editions); if you’re of the opinion that the medium, not the content, should drive the price, and believe (incorrectly) that there is little or no publisher cost involved in offering an e-book edition, the Kindle probably isn’t for you; nor is most any eReader.

If you’re looking for an eReader that doubles as a web browser or gaming platform, the Kindle is probably not for you. There is an “experimental” web browser included on the Kindle, but it’s not particularly enjoyable to use. A quick lookup on Wikipedia once in a blue moon, perhaps; everyday web browsing, no way. And there are games on the Kindle as well—I have a few word games (Scrabble, Every Word, Shuffled Row) and a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure game, Choice of Broadsides—but the response time while playing games is slow (even though pages turn very quickly when reading a book) and playing games kills the battery as fast or faster than turning on the wireless connection. Still, I did work through thirty New York Times crossword puzzles while I was going through my serious “Kindle-as-gadget” phase about a week after Christmas. I’m happy to report that I’ve moved beyond that phase, and my Kindle is now just an eReader. A very, very good one.

1. 15 Feb 2011. Edited to add: I woke this morning to learn that Borders has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I’m sure this is not Natalie’s fault. [↩]
2. What? Oh. Nook eReader. That makes much more sense. [↩]
3. Okay, it’s a 9.7″ screen, retails for $380 and has free global 3G access. [↩]
4. The cover without the built-it light used to run somewhere in the $35 range, but doesn’t appear to be available new at present. Used ones start at $47. [↩]
5. Analog magazine on a digital reading device. That’s practically ironic! [↩]

What you need to know about Episode 0041: In 3-D!

• Overlord Miller: frozen in carbonite. We’re working on getting him out of there. Really.
• We should have talked about Con on the Cob and The Dead Games Society, but we didn’t. Look for a more in-depth discussion of both on a future episode.
• We discuss (among other things) Frosted Flakes and 3-D movies.
• This week’s promo: The Zombie Podcast. Braaaaaains!

Overlord Johnson and a fine group of manly men (including someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to Overlord Miller—weird) are once again growing crackling virility hedges for breast cancer research. Please visit Beards4Boobs.org or the How Not To Grow a Beard Month website to witness the spectacle and sponsor a beard.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:18:40 — 72.0MB)

There was some speculation¹ that Overlord Miller  and myself had both been transported in the dead of night to a covert, maximum-security containment facility somewhere in the southwestern United States and were either (a) being subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques involving continual exposure to the collected works of Andrew Lloyd Webber or (b) killed while trying to escape. I can assure you that this is untrue on multiple levels. For starters, Overlord Miller is still very much frozen in carbonite;² he remains alive and in perfect hibernation. Additionally, there are no covert, maximum-security containment facilities in the southwestern United States; they’re all in Maine.³

The reason you haven’t heard from me in the past three weeks is that I have developed a sinusa ailment. Not the fun, Mad Science kind of “developed,” either. No, this is a malady, an ailment, a viral affliction that might well be of extraterrestrial origin. I won’t go into gruesome details, but last week I heard a minion refer to me as “The Snot Faucet.” That minion has since “volunteered” to be used as a test subject for our carbonite unfreezing process, but the characterization was unfortunately accurate.

So, the Overlords are both alive and (relatively) well. Minister Lynn and I will be recording a new episode of the podcast in the near future and we continue in our diligent efforts to free Overlord Miller from his carbonite prison as soon as is humanly possible. And if that’s not until after we’ve perfected our memory modification array…well, so much the better.

1. Unconfirmed. [↩]
2. Not to mention a huge ALW fan. [↩]
3. Little known fact: Aroostook County is the Covert Maximum-Security Containment Facility capital of the Western hemisphere. [↩]

There are bad guys and then there are bad guys. In fiction, the villains we love to hate (Cigarette Smoking Man, Magneto, Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader) help keep the story interesting and engaging. A well-crafted villain keeps us coming back for more because he or she is a good match for the hero(es). Every once in a while, though, we encounter a bad guy that crosses one line or another and we just want them to die. We hate them so much that no other fate will be satisfactory; they must get their comeuppance in the most horrible, painful and fatal manner possible. Redemption? No thanks. Returning in the sequel? Don’t even think about it. Eaten by a shark, run over by a train, squashed by a woolly mammoth or sucked into the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space? Yes, please! Death isn’t too good for these fictional jackholes; it’s just right.

Here is a handful of such characters, none of whom have (yet) received their just deserts.

• Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) — The Ministry of Magic High Inquisitor who taught Defense Against the Dark Arts in Harry Potter’s fifth year at Hogwarts is vile from head to toe: not only does she abuse her position to impose draconian rules on the students, she is willfully ignorant in regards to the return of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to the point that she submits The Boy Who Lived to some truly cruel and unusual punishments. Umbridge’s only redeeming quality is that her sheer vileness inspires Fred and George Weasley to revolt by means of some truly brilliant pranks. Dolores Umbridge eventually receives her comeuppance, earning a sentence in the wizard prison, Azkaban, which some might consider a fate worse than death.
• Joffrey Baratheon (A Song of Ice and Fire)  — Never mind that he is an illegitimate heir to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, the product of the queen’s incestuous relationship with her twin brother; Joff could hardly be blamed for what his mother and uncle were up to behind King Robert Baratheon’s back. And if the Prince is somewhat spoiled, well, that’s largely his mother’s doing, too—though, as role models go, his “father” the king left much to be desired. Joffrey has many qualities one might expect in a spoiled, adolescent boy: he is self-indulgent, quick-tempered, mean-spirited and his pride is easily bruised. One quality Joffrey does not possess is self-restraint, and after the untimely death of his “father,” the young monarch finds that—unlike most boys his age—he has the power to see his every sadistic whim become a reality and is not at all sparing in its exercise. Author George R. R. Martin is currently writing the fifth book (of seven) of A Song of Ice and Fire, so Joffrey’s uppance may still be some time in coming.
• George Hearst (Deadwood) — George Hearst is not a fictional character, but he’s included here because the HBO series Deadwood is known to have taken certain liberties where matters of historical accuracy are concerned. Hearst was portrayed (by Gerald McRaney) as a repulsive sociopath for whom nothing—not even cold-blooded murder—is out of bounds when it comes to satisfying his bottomless greed. As casino-owner and former Hearst-confederate Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) watches a triumphant Hearst ride out of Deadwood at the end of the series—having fixed the local election for sheriff and successfully acquired a lucrative mine by way of murder and intimidation—the sense of impotent rage is palpable; the smirking bastard is leaving a swath of destruction in his wake and as much as Tolliver—gun in hand—wants to pull the trigger and wipe the smile off Hearst’s face with brutal finality, there’s nothing he can do.
• The Joker (Batman) — Since the early 1970s, the Clown Prince of Crime has been on a decades-long killing spree that has claims hundreds (if not thousands) of lives, interrupted only briefly by occasional (and always temporary) incarceration in Arkham Asylum. Escaping from that institution is roughly as routine as walking out to the curb to retrieve the Sunday paper; as Forrest Gump might say, “And then I escaped from Arkham Asylum…again.” The Batman consistently refuses to kill The Joker on the grounds that he would (a) become just as bad as the criminal and (b) it’s exactly what The Joker wants him to do. Were Arkham Asylum anything resembling an effective means to separate The Joker from the rest of humanity one might forgive the former reason; the latter—being an unwillingness to allow The Joker to “win”—is just sheer hubris on The Batman’s part.

I’ve always found my office at the Lair to be a sanctuary of sorts; a place to which I can always retreat when I’m not in the mood to deal with yet another microscopic oddity turned into yet another macroscopic disaster. One might expect, then, that having Overlord Miller—trapped in suspended animation until we can develop a way to reverse the carbon-freezing process—on display in a special, lighted niche in my office would be little more than a bitter reminder of one more in a seemingly endless parade of failures. One might expect that his face, twisted as it is into a grimace of—if not outright agony, then at least severe discomfort—would be an unwanted and unwelcome monument to mismanagement, complete and utter lack of communication, and sheer stultifying incompetence.

In fact, I find it rather soothing.

I’m not going to bother analyzing my feelings on the matter. What should fill me with guilt is instead inexplicably calming. Who would have guessed?

Jay “The Kingfish” Lynn, our Minister of Crackpot Schemes and Unfortunate Synergies may be feeling more than his share of guilt over the whole unfortunate incident. The Kingfish joined me in my office for a little discussion regarding Overlord Miller’s immediate future, among other things.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:06 — 58.7MB)

When Jay Lynn, the Lair’s Minister of Crackpot Schemes and Unfortunate Synergies, came to me proposal to build a carbon-freezing chamber in the Lair, my initial concern was not the practical application of the technology, nor was I particularly concerned with resource allocation or budgetary considerations; no, I was just thinking of how cool the giant, mechanized claw we’d use to lower stuff into the chamber would sound. VOOOOO-AH! Honestly, once I heard the words “carbon-freezing chamber,” everything else Minister Lynn said pretty much went in one ear and out the other. I approved the project, using my Overlord’s Prerogative to bump the priority and move forward with design and development sans approval from Overlord Miller.

I don’t recall what Minister Lynn planned to freeze, or for what purpose (almost certainly not a Jedi for transport to the Emperor or even a smuggler for transport to a vile gangster) but he was certainly very enthusiastic about the whole thing. Six months later he had a working prototype and I realized I still hadn’t told Overlord Miller about the project. I asked “The Kingfish” to arrange a demonstration for me, after which I’d loop in Overlord Miller, hopefully armed with details about why—other than that wickedly cool mechanical claw; VOOOOO-AH!—we’d built the thing in the first place.

Granted, Minister Lynn’s purview is “Crackpot Schemes and Unfortunate Synergies” for a reason. That alone should have been warning enough, but I suppose I have to take some responsibility for what happened during the demonstration. I wanted to create a certain menacing mood in the lab, so I instructed the techs to turn down the lights, illuminating the lab only with indirect lighting from the chamber itself and the orange glow of the freezing chamber control console. And, yes, it’s entirely my fault that Overlord Miller had still not been informed of the project’s existence. On the other hand, that mechanical claw is LOUD, so it’s really no surprise that nobody heard Overlord Miller enter the lab until it was too late; by the time he’d stumbled into the chamber, there was no way to abort the freezing cycle. Finally, I should point out that Minister Lynn had not disclosed that he had not yet developed an UNfreezing process, so I had no way of knowing that an accidentally-carbon-frozen Overlord would be stuck in suspended animation until such time as our scientists figure out how to reverse the freezing process.

Rest assured that Overlord Miller is alive and well, and that we are doing everything we can to restore him to his former state. For the time being, he is in a special niche in my office, where he will remain—a reminder of the importance of thorough and timely communication—until we can unfreeze him.

Given our track record regarding The Secret Library—not to mention our proclivity for inadvertently altering the time-space continuum—it is entirely possible that we selected Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates for discussion well before the Puritans departed England for the New World. Whether this will have any lasting implications upon the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Colony, only time will tell. In any case, we enclose the aforementioned discussion herein for your examination and (we can only hope) approval. Astute listeners will note that we are joined once again by Madame Overlord Johnson, who is entirely too literate for her own good.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:12 — 31.3MB)

Not so terribly long ago, Overlord Miller and I gathered an elite group of minions in a conference room and asked them a very important question: Who is Jared Axelrod? We were informed that Mr. Axelrod is responsible for, among other things, The Voice of Free Planet X, Aliens You Will Meet and Fables of the Flying City. As is often the case, we were not entirely confident that the information our minions provided was accurate, so we took it upon ourselves to consult a more authoritative source, that being the man himself, Jared Axelrod. Little did we suspect that Jared Axelrod would use his Tricksy Mind Rays to distract us from exploring his innermost secrets, subtly veering the conversation toward other topics, all the while making us believe that it was our intent to discuss said topics in the first place. Beware! Should you dare to listen to this episode of the podcast, you, too, may be entranced by Mr. Axelrod’s Tricksy Mind Rays. No one is safe…

• Overlord Miller’s plans to attend GenCon were ultimately foiled, possibly by rampaging mega-nanobots.
• Overlord Miller recently finished reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).
• Overlord Miller’s beard currently resembles a Recognizer from TRON.
• Overlord Miller also read The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer.
• Overlord Miller is researching the history of Medina County.
• Overlord Johnson accidentally learned about William Stinchcomb, founder of the Cleveland Metroparks.
• Who even knew Billy Squier had a castle? Oh, Squire’s Castle. Well, that’s different.
• Overlord Miller has been re-watching The X-Files. That Charles Nelson Reilly episode? It’s called “José Chung’s From Outer Space” and it is made of win and bleeping dead aliens.”
• Nuketown’s Monster Week.
• Overlord Johnson recently listened to A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin.
• Overlord Johnson is reading Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.
• …and On a Pale Horse (Book 1 of the Incarnations of Immortality) by Piers Anthony.
• Overlord Miller recently listened to The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. [Link goes to YouTube trailer.]
• Overlord Johnson stumbled across an unaired trailer for Power Pack.
• Overlord Johnson recently watched the first (and thus far only) season of Gravity, an original series from Starz.
• Both overlords have seen Inception, which is not a documentary about how babby is formed.
• Overlord Johnson really enjoyed Between the Folds, a documentary about origami and paper-folding.
• Not to mention Helvetica, a documentary about a font.

Discussion: Kids’ Movies That Appeal to Adults vs. Movies for Little Boys Who Never Grew Up

• Show notes coming soon. Honest!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08:23 — 62.6MB)

Is Mr. Kenneth Newquist’s so-called Monster Week 2010 an examination and retrospective of movie monsters or a damning, behind-the-scenes exposé that will bring all of the Overlords’ schemes into light? Is Jaws a ground-breaking horror film that set the trend for summer blockbusters or a misunderstood documentary? Just how blurry is the line between fantasy and reality? Answer: Not Blurry Enough.

• No one, not even SyFy, has made a creature feature spotlighting a havoc-wreaking shetland-bonobo hybrid, but the Overlords may be willing to option them for the screen.
• Overlord Miller reveals the shocking true origin of St. Patrick’s Day.
• Technically, it’s DOCTOR Mega John Cmar.
• “ant fungus exploding head” can be simplified to Cordyceps.
• Cat sharks and chipmunk spiders. You’re welcome.
  
  
• Did we miss any Monster Classifications?
  • Mythical Monsters (hydra, minotaur)
  • Natural Monsters (Jaws, Lake Placid)
  • Science (Man-Made) Monsters (Godzilla, Sharktopus, Them!)
  • Extraterrestrial Monsters (The Thing, Critters, Predator)
• Perhaps we shall do a monster contest. Nominate your favorite monster in the comments.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:10 — 38.7MB)