Various Thoughts

The wedding plans are underway in episode seven. After Rita asks him to come up with a list of friends and family he’ll want to invite, Dexter starts thinking about who actually qualifies as a friend and can only really come up with Miguel as an answer. Miguel, however, begins pushing him against the Code that has guided his life up until recently. Elsewhere, Debra has uncovered a lead on the skinner murders after taking the time to re-examine all the case files.

Episode eight has Dexter and Miguel teaming up to clandestinely investigate a suspected murderer while Lieutenant LaGuerta seems to becoming inseparable friends with Ellen Wolfe, the defense attorney who acts as Miguel Prado’s main rival. This relationship seems to be the polar opposite of, and yet still similar to, the one between Dexter and Miguel. There are several side-stories flitting about on the sidelines here as well; Debra gets closer to Anton only to have him mysteriously disappear, Angel’s new relationship seems to be picking up, and Miguel’s wife Sylvia strongly begins to suspect that her husband is having an affair. The episode concludes with Dexter showing Miguel the full extent of what he does and the Code he follows.

The ninth episode begins with Sylvia appearing at Rita’s house, distraught because Miguel didn’t come home the night before. Dexter wonders what he could’ve possibly been doing after they had finished and heads over to find out. Miguel gives some rather evasive answers and Dexter begins to suspect that he may have gone and killed someone on his own. The skinner’s face is then finally shown after it’s discovered that Anton was abducted from his apartment. Back with Dexter, he hears that Ellen hasn’t been returning LaGuerta’s calls and begins to get a nasty suspicion about what Miguel was doing the night before. And after a thorough investigation makes a distressing discovery. After gathering himself, Dexter decides that a lesson is in order to show Miguel exactly why it’s important to follow a specific Code… only to find out that his entire perception of Miguel was flawed from the beginning.

Swallowing Darkness is the most recent addition to Laurell K. Hamilton‘s Meredith Gentry series, and interestingly enough, sort of feels like the last. While her Anita Blake series had been getting bogged down in its new-found focus on the sex lives of its characters, this series has more or less always been focused on its characters’ sex lives and used that focus to advance the overarching storyline rather than distract from it. Of course, this story actually having both a solid plotline and defined goal certainly helps. Speaking of the plotline (Meredith getting pregnant so that she can become the next queen of the Unseelie before her cousin Cel gets someone pregnant to become the King); it reaches its climax in this installment. I must say that I was somewhat shocked. I expected this to be drawn out for ages and yet most of the former threats that get the series moving have been dealt with. This isn’t to say there’s no room for it to continue, certainly not, but that when/if it does Hamilton has given herself an essentially wide-open playing field to work with and could send the series in any direction.

Legacy, by Jeanne C. Stein, is the latest addition to the Anna Strong series. I still have very mixed feelings about this series. Its characters are interesting enough, but the storyline and general ‘mood’ seem a bit too carefree. Even during the supposedly dramatic or tense sections, the book feels somewhat detached, as if there really nothing to worry about and everything will turn out fine. It’s somewhat difficult to explain the feeling but I guess you could say that the series lacks depth and relevance. Though that’s not exactly a precise description, I can’t think of the proper word and so it will have to do.

So yeah, I’ve been sucked into the Modding Scene of Fallout 3. Just had a small piece of free time available to watch the Lucky Star OVA.

The OVA is broken up into several sequences. The first sequence revolves around Minami‘s dog Cherry, the second follows Konata, Nanako, Tsukasa, and Kagami as they play a new MMO, the third deals with Konata and Kagami as they recreate a reluctant Cinderella story, the fourth is a volleyball game at school, the fifth has the four main characters on a hiking trip, the sixth is some weird horror-story thing, then there’s a short scene involving the Comic-store owner encountering Konata in the earlier MMO, and finally a live-action version of the Lucky Channel segments closes things out.

The first sequence is the most boring of the bunch I think. It just drags the entire time without anything to really liven it up. The second was somewhat amusing, but didn’t really reach the same levels as the main series (this could be a side-effect due to the fact that I intensely dislike MMOs). The third is quite good. Kagami decides to stay at home while her mother and sisters head out to an event of some sort, but Konata appears dressed as a wizard and uses various magicks to force her into going to the event.

Kagami as Hatsune Miku

The volleyball one is okay, but again, not really up to the standards of the main series. The fifth one follows a hike during a camping trip in which the main four characters get lost thanks to Konata having forgotten the map and compass, and could easily fit into the main series without a ripple. I found myself enjoying the semi-horror-story sequence. I think it reminded me a bit of Ren & Stimpy. The Comic-store owner interlude is essentially the same as all the earlier ones and isn’t particularly notable. The live-action Lucky channel segment was… live action. I don’t really like live action at the best of times, so I skipped the majority of it. It should be noted that Akira‘s voice doesn’t work well in such an environment though.

Overall; it was decent enough with a few particularly good parts to it. I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it though.

Living With The Dead, by Kelley Armstrong, is the latest entry into the Women of the Otherworld series. This one picks up more or less where Personal Demon left off and has Hope as a secondary character. The main character this time is a friend of Hope’s who has run afoul a cult of Clairvoyants due to nothing more sinister than extremely bad luck. Being human, she had no idea the world she’s just been thrust into even existed and ends up having to heavily lean on Hope and Karl to survive. She does find an unexpected ally in one of the detectives on the police force though, as he turns out to be an untrained Necromancer.

Steelflower is the first in a new series from Lilith Saintcrow, who has become rather prolific lately. It takes her newly minted style and transposes it into a high-fantasy setting. Her main character this time around isn’t quite as damaged as Dante or Jill, but there are plenty of similarities for those that liked those two series. The only real problem I had with it was the dialog style. Saintcrow tried to have the dialog ‘in-period’ and it didn’t flow as well as it probably could have otherwise.

Last, and certainly least, is The Stowaway by R. A. Salvatore and Geno Salvatore. This book has no ends of problems. From the twenty-point font, to the nonsensical storyline, to the incredibly strange time-period it takes place in. It follows the story of a young man who was captured by pirates as he relates his past and how he got to where he was via a series of flashbacks. He’s some random kid who somehow got connected to a mysterious artifact that a demon is seeking for unknown reasons. And when the nature of the artifact is finally revealed in the last few pages, the story unbelievably makes even less sense then it did before.

I’m not sure what it was exactly about these two books, the first two installments of the Ed Greenwood presents Waterdeep series, but I didn’t really like either of them.

Blackstaff Tower, by Steven E. Schend, takes place 200 or so years after the events of Blackstaff. Khelben is long gone, his heir is long gone… and her heir has just died. I always saw the Blackstaff as one of the major forces in the Forgotten Realms, and yet it appears to have been watered down into just another average wizard’s mantle. That may be the root of my discontent with the book, that the Blackstaff has become so… weak. Anyway, the story follows the activities of the son of Waterdeep’s current Open lord, his circle of friends, the daughter of the Cellarer’s Guild headmaster, and the sellsword she hired for a rescue mission as they seek to turn the newest Blackstaff heir into a true Blackstaff.

Mistshore, by Jaleigh Johnson, doesn’t quite invoke the same feeling of disappointment that the first book in the series did. Even so, I didn’t like it very much. The main character, a young spellscarred sorceress, was well-written enough but the storyline unfolded in a manner that seemed contrived at best. The majority of the story revolves around her current situation and her unknown past… which when revealed doesn’t have all that much of a noticeable impact.

Episode four starts off with Dexter trying to figure out how to handle the new dynamics in his relationship with Rita and the incoming child. I’m somewhat curious why they never bothered with condoms or birth control and then seemed shocked that she was pregnant. In any case, he also has to deal with his strange new friendship with Miguel and figure out a way to get Miguel’s remaining brother (Ramon) out of the picture. The police case that goes on in the background serves to give Dexter an idea about how to enhance his ‘good-guy act’ in order to truly convince Rita that he cares about her… though whether he actually does or not is still somewhat nebulous.

The fifth episode deepens the friendship between Dexter and Miguel while focusing a bit on the implications getting married would have on Dexter’s life. On the darker side of things, on Miguel’s urging, Dexter begins to hunt a suspected serial-wife murderer. The skinner murders continue in the background and serve as a means for Ramon to insert himself into the Miami force’s investigation into the Freebo case. The hunt for the wife-murderer ends on a cruise ship, where Dexter is forced to rush his ritual a bit in order to finish things right there in the cabin and get back to land quick enough for his ‘gone fishing’ alibi to hold. Unfortunately, Rita has a pregnancy related emergency which alerts Miguel to the fact that Dexter isn’t where he said he was going to be… and he puts two and two together to figure out that he was murdering the murderer instead of fishing.

Number six begins with a new ‘skinner’ murder. Deborah seems to think that the murderer may be connected to the police force in some way, and may in fact be Ramon, since the two most recent victims died shortly after she had questioned them in relation to the Freebo case. Dexter is preoccupied with his new focus on trying to get Miguel to understand the full extent of what it is he does, so as to distance him a bit from that side of his life. Dexter and Miguel become full co-conspirators while Deborah (who’s been working surveillance) witnesses Ramon beating and abducting some random guy and follows him to an abandoned located where he proceeds to torture him for information. Her partner (Quinn) pops up partway through and they both bring him in for the obvious charges, though it does appear that he’s not the skinner.

The first episode of the new Season begins with a truncated recap of the first two seasons. It then expands a bit by showing how well Dexter’s life has settled after all the hectic events of last season. Of course, this can’t last for long. His deceased father’s birthday is coming up, and as a ‘present’ he decides to take out a guy (Freebo) who killed two college girls and got away with it. Unfortunately, when he goes in for the abduction he runs into a stranger fighting with Freebo and ends up being forced to kill him instead while Freebo runs away… and having to leave the dead body in the house. This stranger turns out to be the younger brother (Oscar) of the assistant district attorney (Miguel Prado), and Dexter’s sister Deborah has been put on the case to figure out who killed him. And ironically enough, everyone seems to think that Freebo killed him. Dexter’s heightened interest in the case is not missed by Miguel though, who confronts him about it and ends up being completely taken in by the cover story he thinks up. The episode ends with Dexter again more or less in the clear, thinking about how he’s managed to evolve, and then having Rita drop a pregnancy bomb on him.

The hunt for Freebo continues in episode two, with Dexter deciding that he has to find Freebo first since he saw his face last episode when he busted in on the fight with Oscar. Miguel is still tooling about the office fretting about this and that while Lieutenant LaGuerta does her best to calm him down and get him to step back by relating her experiences with Doakes last Season. While Deborah continues to look for leads on Freebo’s murdered girlfriend (Teegan), who appeared up last episode, Dexter has already found her full name and last known address and plans to head over there in the hopes of finding him holed up there. On his way out of the department, he gets waylaid by Miguel who invites him and Rita over his house to ‘discuss’ something. It seems Miguel doesn’t want to take any chances on Freebo slipping through the legal system’s grasp yet again. After their talk, Dexter heads out to Teegan’s house… only to find a frat party fully underway. He resigns himself to having to come back the next night and heads back to Rita’s house to deal with the the pregnancy issue. Which that situation still unresolved, Dexter focuses on finding Freebo before the rest of the department does and lucks out by stumbling across him while casing Teegan’s house the next night. Not exactly prepared for this eventuality, he makes a hasty retreat to gather his tools together before returning to kill him. However, he gets waylaid by Rita shortly after he gets back home;  she’s decided to keep the baby. Thoughts somewhat ajumbled by this, Dexter nevertheless makes his way back to Teegan’s house to kill Freebo… only to get caught by Miguel… who had a very similar idea.

With one bullet partially dodged, Dexter continues on about his business in this episode while the rest of the department continues to look for Freebo (who’s now dead) and the identity of the murdered girl (Teegan). While investigating, they run across another murder. This one is also missing a patch of skin just like Teegan was and so they assume that Freebo killed him too. Dexter of course knows that Freebo couldn’t have killed him, but can’t exactly say anything to that effect without looking highly suspicious. Feeling somewhat bad that Deborah is still flailing around in the dark trying to find out the girl’s identity, Dexter prints out some posters with her picture on it with the impact font; “Have you seen Teegan Campbell?”, and places them strategically around. Even though one of them is almost directly over his shoulder, it takes her something like five minutes to notice it. With that information they find the house, find that Freebo was there, find that he almost certainly wasn’t the one that did the ‘skinning’ murders, and decide that he’s apparently left town long ago. The episode concludes with Dexter expanding his ‘killing code’ by taking out a known sex offender who’s recently begun stalking Rita’s children.

First the bad; Dragon Wytch by Yasmine Galenorn. This book… this book took me something like two weeks to read because I kept having to put it down in disgust. The first three books in this series managed to offset the painful cheerfulness with serious interludes revolving around an impending demonic invasion and the dark past of the vampiric sister. This one though… this one offsets the painful cheerfulness with a near-continuous focus on the main character wanting to have sex. Sex with a dragon, sex with a fox-demon, sex with a dark elf, sex with a rakasha…. the list goes on and on. Unlike Hamilton, who’s characters are either having sex or thinking about how to fix their clusterfuck of a situation, Galenorn’s main characters (sans the vampiric sister) are either having sex, thinking about having sex, wishing they were having sex, or hoping that some sex might happen after they finish dealing with whatever threat-of-the-chapter has currently popped up… all the while bitching about how it’s keeping them from having sex.

Now, the worse; Brimstone Kiss by Carole Nelson Douglas. The only reason I read this was because I bought it at the same time as the first book in the series, before I knew how unpleasant it was to read. Now, the first book in the series wasn’t exactly bad… it was just much more ‘girly’ than I was expecting and not to my tastes. This one, however, is both girly and terrible. The main character, Delilah Street, is supposed to be an ex-reporter turned paranormal investigator. I have yet to see her actually investigate anything though. Her method is as follows:

1. Search Google for information on the subject.
2. Meet some random secondary character in a bar.
3. Drink excessive amounts of questionably-made drinks.
4. Wait for secondary character to give her a Wikipedia-length rundown on everything that’s going on.

The series is composed of nothing but Deus Ex Machina. Her retardedly invincible wolfhound-dog that she just happened to find on her first day in Vegas, the magical cottage she essentially gets to live in for free, the spontaneous pixie curse that was put on her car so that no one would steal it, the magical silver familiar that can do and be everything, the ‘discovery’ of mirror-walking abilities, the ability to bring life back to the dead, the way the most powerful people in town do what she says ‘just cause’ despite her being an orphan from Kansas who just got there, the way she can suddenly decapitate vampires with a broadsword despite having zero combat training….

I’m going to be pissed about this book for months. It’s like Douglas woke up one day and was all like "Let’s just write down whatever comes into my head. It doesn’t need to make sense or care about such trite things as ’cause and effect’. No, everything will just happen the way it does because I wish things would dovetail so nicely for me in real life.".