Picoreview: Maleficent

Picoreview: Maleficent: a worthy re-telling of (specifically Disney’s) Sleeping Beauty, and one that caused me to leave the theatre thinking “Victors write the histories.” It’s not perfect. There’s a voiceover that I think would have been better done as in-story storytelling instead, but to have done that successfully I think the movie would have needed a PG13/12A rating rather than the PG it got. And–this is something I will almost never say–I thought it *should* have been a PG13 movie. That was never going to happen, though, because adults aren’t…

Continue Reading

Recent Reads: Redshirts

I’m way behind the curve on reading REDSHIRTS, but it is, as generally advertised, a fun book. It gets a little too caught up in its own cleverness, but mostly it works. I also presume it’s generally more fun to read if you’re a Star Trek fan, but since I am one, I can’t tell if it lacks if you’re not. Aside from the presumption of more fun/sense if you’re a Star Trek fan, it has too many characters with similar names, which makes it hard to keep track if…

Continue Reading

patreon problem

The payment problem on Patreon was my fault. Twice I set the stupid thing to “patrons only” and totally missed the other place where I was supposed to set it to “paid creation”. I’m in a really bad mood right now.

patreon difficulties

So one of the real problems people are having with Patreon is that it’s non-intuitive. Maybe this is partly because my project, crowdfunding a book one chapter at a time, is not actually an ideal one to run via Patreon, but there are definitely problems that go beyond that. Kickstarter is easy. Kickstarter you give $X and you get #Y in return. One shot and it’s done. Patreon sets a price-per-creation and then asks for many small donations to achieve that price-per-creation. It’s intended to cater to a totally different…

Continue Reading

what i did :)

As several people have asked, I confess that the weather was utterly miserable last night and so I stayed home and watched two more episodes of s3 Continuum, which continues to be a show that makes me happy. (It has a female lead in a role that 10 years ago almost certainly would have been a guy. She’s a ‘strong’ character in that yes, she’s kick-ass, but she’s also fragile and scared and determined and angry and loses her temper and makes mistakes and-you know, basically acts like a human…

Continue Reading