Book Review: Girl Waits With Gun

Well, I wasn't sure I would get this review up on time but I did it, I'm calling that my victory for the week and will get back to working on my spring round-up post I suppose.

Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart

TV Series Review: Elementary (season two)

As readers of this blog already know, back when I started working full time in the spring my watching took a hit and once Agents of SHIELD really picked up I ended up having to put Elementary to the side for a while, even though I had really really enjoyed the first season and this season was just as good. It certainly doesn't help that the only (legal) way I can watch the series online is to do it through CBS's website which only has the last five aired-on-tv episodes and my god the most annoying ads ever. I know some people complain about hulu's ads but here they have four or five commercial breaks and five to seven ads each, all 15-30 seconds long. "So, it's basically just like cable tv then?" Pretty much and it is terrible, please put this show on Netflix streaming so I can recommend it more easily!

Elementary (season two)

Webcomic Review: Phandomland

Phantomland by Maarie

Santa Lusion is a rather ordinary series but ever since she came there Chie's life has been strange. Brought there not by choice she wakes up one morning to say that she suffered from a terrible diease that left her with no memories of her previous life and was declared dead by official records. And now she's in the employ of Cypress, an organization that trains these "ghosts" to fight crime and she's been given the meanest, toughest ghost to train her, crap. 

Cops, "light" superpowers, people with unreliable memories about their pasts, none of these ideas are new and I'm sure I've come across at least one story before with all three of these tropes in it, there's a lot of fiction out there guys. However there is something to the rawness of these tropes which makes me think that they won't play out the usual way. M isn't just the usual "bad cop to the rookies good cop," he's an antihero for sure and I expect getting him to change will be one of the ongoing conflicts. Likewise, Chie doesn't seem like she'll just settle into being the new girl, I can also see her fight to figure out her past being not only a driving force but an even bigger conflict than m's attitude problem. And there I've just explained why this series, despite it's rather ordinary summary, there's a spark, a fight to it which I think will help develop it very nicely. 

Besides how the story is structured, I like how spunky Chie is. She's a likable newbie whose curious and ignorant but not dumb, although I expect she'll be the "audience stand in" character for a while in order to get all the exposition across. I do wonder where the story will go though, there's a short blub on the comic's front page that the story has been printed before yet I've gotten the impression that the current updates are all new. In the end that part won't matter although the art does actually feel a little dated as well. I don't mean that in a bad way, rather that it seemed like four or five years ago, perhaps a bit longer, it was "in style" to go aping manga by drawing a comic in just black and white with some tones, in some ways a very stark style that contrasted a lot with the character designs and setting details, and I just don't see that style used quite as much (heck, I think webcomics are actually leaning more towards being in color these days which is rather cool). Regardless, I hope that isn't a sign that something behind the scenes isn't going well for the comic and that it develops into being as interesting as I think it will be!

TV Series Review: Sherlock (season three)

Goodness it's been a long time since this show started, as the opening credits rolled by I was thinking that way back when this show first aired I had just started dabbling in video but by now I could do a fair recreation of the opening on my own if I put my mind to it (and put in quite a few hours of work that is). Back then barely anyone had heard of this show too and now it's everywhere. Before the first episode aired I was chatting with my mom and she said that they were taping it, my aunt's sister said that they would be watching it when I got home that evening if I wanted to join them, I started watching it while babysitting since my charge was already in bed, and when the parents came back, before the episode ended, they said that they were taping it too! Really, now everyone and their cat is watching the show (no seriously apparently my cat loves it when my mom watches Sherlock since it means he can sit in her lap for a full hour and a half without being moved).

Sherlock (season three)

Documentary Review: How Sherlock Changed the World

Someone on twitter pointed out this little documentary to me and, since I'm waiting for the PBS broadcast of Sherlock which won't start for another few weeks, it seemed like a fun little diversion in the meantime. And I was curious, considering that the science Sherlock Holmes used, based on what I remembered from reading the books, seemed so similar to modern day forensics there's no way Arthur Conan Doyle made up all of that, right?


How Sherlock Changed the World