Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Finding a new apartment takes a long time.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ Non-mutually gratifying phone sex.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May everyone you know doing everything interesting you want to write about... read your site.

One short book mention.  In addition to the Steven King novel that I reviewed/discussed a couple of days ago, I got another book from the library. It's listed on the "Books Lying Open" thing on the bottom of the nav bar on the left.  To save you scrolling down, it's called The Thousand Orcs, by R. A. Salvatore.  I've never read anything by him before, and from the looks of the first 30 pages of this novel, I probably never will again.  It's very bad.  Like bad fan fiction.  Not poorly-written fan fiction, which there is a ton of around the Internet, but bad fan fic, in terms of writing like a "my first fantasy novel", following a very evident formula.

• Short intro to set the tone and introduce some minor characters who are just there to fall victim, with exposition galore as they conveniently think about where they are, what the state of the world is, etc.
• Short action scene introducing the bad guys and what will be the central conflict of the novel and killing off some extras.
• Several very short scenes from the PoV of the other main chars, establishing where they are to begin with.

That's as far as I've gotten, which is about page 28, and I've found myself skimming paragraphs several times already.  Very boring prose; workmanlike, completely lacking in inspiration or quirkiness or an original voice.  It's also such a derivative world, sort of a Tolkien-light crossed with Warcraft and it doesn't "feel" at all real. It reminds me of the very mediocre Blizzard novels, and I'm not just saying that since I didn't get to write them.

If I make it through any more I might write about it again, but I've closed it and put it back in the living room, since I didn't want it staring at me from beside my bed.  I assume there are interesting battle scenes eventually, the way the book is opening up, so maybe I'll skip ahead a bit and check some of those.

Looking at the Amazon.com review page for it, the guy obviously has his fans, for the crappy book has a 4.5 rating, despite being like the 20th in his video game-esque series. Fans do like sequels. The world in his books is the same as in some video game series, but I'm not sure if he invented it, or if he's writing something of an adaptation or fictional version of it, ALA the Diablo/Starcraft/Warcraft Novels.  And just to throw doubt on the judgment of slashy fantasy fans, I'm looking at the reviews for the utterly mediocre (if that good) Legacy of Blood, the first of the Diablo novels (the only one I've read all of) and even it has a 4/5 rating.  And it was just awful.  Really, the whole thing is about a possessed suit of armor with a bunch of pointlessly gory scenes thrown in, and it's got virtually nothing to do with Diablo at any point.

This sort of thing (the Orcs book, the Diablo novel rating, everything) really makes me want to not write Fantasy, since such utterly mediocre crap can be a big seller and appreciated by the non-discerning fans.  Bleh.

The aforementioned short topic (mentioned before I got off on that crappy book sidetract) is about this website.  (Click that, or the rest of this won't make any sense.) Malaya sent me the URL a couple of days ago, after she saw it while idly surfing the results of a "blackchampagne" search on Google. (Isn't it cute that she's looking at that? ;)

As I think a glance would inform you, it's the exact same as this site, down the navigation format, the Quote of the Day, and the bottom "next" and "previous" links. Just the background wallpapers have been changed, and a few other tiny things.

Before you leap to the conclusion that I've been most heinously ripped off, check out this mail from the January 2003 Mailbag. It's from January 25th, the second to last one on the page, so scroll down.  Or read every word; it's fine with me, I mean that's what I wrote it for. Anyway, I'll quote it here:

Date: January 25, 2003
From: Mike
Subject: BlackChampagne.com Layout

Hello. This may seem like an odd question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I will be redesigning my website shortly, and have become quite fond of the layout you use on BlackChampagne.com. Since you would obviously be the inspiration for it, would you mind if I used a similar layout? It would not be identical, but would most likely be close enough to notice the derivation. Thanks for your time. 

I told him that I didn't think this was such a great layout, but he could go ahead and use it as inspiration if he wanted to, as long as he gave me some sort of "inspired by" credit.

And that was the last I thought I gave it.  Until Malaya brought it up.

I did give the guy credit, but looking at Halycon Sanctuary now, it's a bit creepy. I mean I thought he'd use the basic page layout, with the dark background and then the lighter BG inside the text area, but it didn't occur to me that he would be basically a duplicate.  Down to the QotD and way the navigation is presented.  However I did say he could copy this look, so what was I expecting anyway?  I'm not going to ask him to change it now.

I showed it to a couple of friends who read this page, and they were less understanding:

I think he ripped you off. I was rather annoyed, actually, credit or not. And I was just messing around on Google.

It's disturbing. I don't like it, personally.

It's a cheap imitation and it feels...wrong.

I just get a bad vibe; like he's trying to sound like you...speak on similar topics...copy your tone...

Also:

ARE YOU SERIOUS??!! That is freakin ridiculous, he COPIED your site. I would tell him to change it Eric!!

That pisses me off....I am very protective of you you know. I am going to bed now.

It is identical though. That would be enough to sue someone had he done it to another corporation.

Well, as long as you don't mind...........I do though, you can tell him to put that into his pipe...

I'm choosing to take it as a compliment though, and after all, I did say he could use the design.  I ought to be careful what I give permission for, if I'm going to be unhappy when it's taken, eh? If anyone else has a thought on this feel free to let me know, since the two people I've asked thus far obviously disagree with my position.

Anyway, they have their yearly Best and Worst movies listing, based on the reviews.  The formula they use is a bit suspect in my opinion.

Instead of just going by the Tomatometer, we calculate the score by taking the Tomatometer and adding the sum of Fresh minus Rotten reviews. Why? Because a movie with 100 reviews should be weighted above the one with only 25.

This works out so that a poorly-reviewed movie that had a lot of reviews gets a worse rating than one with even worse reviews, but that wasn't as widely-reviewed.  So in theory a movie that was reviewed by 1000 critics and was 50/50 on the good/bad rating would come in as the best and the worst movie of the year, by their metric.  This doesn't happen since the biggest movies all are reviewed by about the same number of critics, but I think it shows their formula to be pretty suspect, mixing percent with addition. Somehow I don't think the RT.com people are real big on math, or they would have worked out something a bit more complicated and representative.

For example, Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, in addition to having possibly the worst title ever, has 89 reviews on their site, and not one of them is positive.  Not one.  Every single critic, large or small, though it was a piece of shit.  Yet it's only #3 on their worst list, since it got fewer total reviews than either Rollerball and Bad Company, which are the #1 and #2 worst reviewed movies of the year.  Rollerball has 109 reviews of which 106 are bad, while Bad Company has 139 reviews and 122 of them are bad.  What are the odds that after 89 Ballistic whiffs, at least four of the next twenty critics to bother with it would have liked it? 

Here are the top 25 worst of the year. To their credit, Rotten Tomatoes lists the percent good/bad as well as their calculation of the overall score, which is the good/bad % with the total reviews factored in. And while Pinocchio had 0% good reviews, it only had 49 total. I guess, in theory, you could imagine that if another 70 critics had seen it, 10 or 15 might have liked it, putting it about where Bad Company came out.  Though it seems unlikely.

Oh, and they did a top 25 of the year also, but good movie reviews aren't fun to read, so I paid it little attention.  LotR:TTT came in #1 this year, after LotR:FotR came in #1 last year, both because they were reviewed by every critic on earth, most of whom liked them. TTT was 97% positive.  The iffy rankings are Spider-Man coming in #4, with 88% positive, while Spirited Away comes in #8 with 98% positive reviews.

I think they weight too heavily by number of reviews, but scoring quibbles aside, it's an interesting list to see.

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