At last, the final part of of “Henry VI”, a moment I have been waiting for. Is this anticipation the result of a great and amazing story? I wish, but unfortunately I just want to get it over with since the 1st part was only decent, and the second was awful. I have little faith in this part being any better, so just getting it over and done with and move on is the best I can really hope for at this point.
The big problem is that English history is full of infighting and hideous politics that just doesn’t translate to an interesting story. It’s hard to get in to a story when the characters not only fail to interest you, but when you find yourself wishing they’d all just throw themselves on their own swords and be done with it. The 2nd part yielded no real protagonist, but rather a bunch of antagonists fighting and scheming against one another. Since the cast of characters remains much the same, I can’t say I have much hope that this third part will redeem the first two. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Barnes and Noble, Historical Fiction, Shakespeare, The Yale Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
Okay, as I mentioned in last weeks Shakespeare post, I was out of town on vacation this past week. As a bit of a background; my family goes on vacation for a week every year at my parents cabin in northern Minnesota. It’s my parents, my brother and his wife and son, and my sister and then me. It has always been something I’ve looked forward too every year, primarily because I don’t care for the city and I love the north woods and lake country.
Unfortunately the annual trip has never been perfect, and this year represented one of the less enjoyable vacations in recent memory. A nice part of it was that my brother was sick for a few days which I can’t blame him for, but there was also a lot that could have been improved on a great deal which I simply have to get off my chest. Now most of this happens every year, but it’s getting worse and worse every year and I’m running out of tolerance. I know some of it is ragging on others for how they spend their vacation, but it’s a family vacation and it effects us all, and I get a bit tired of wasting the bulk of my vacation days every year for a family vacation that is simply lacking. Read the rest of this entry »
First off I’m just going to say that next weeks Shakespeare post will be delayed. I will be out of town starting this weekend through to the following weekend, so I will not have time to read the play and make the post. I was hoping to actually read it this week along with part 2, but the added length with these histories has made that too difficult. I probably could have done it, but it may well have burnt me out, particularly since I’m not enjoying these plays as much as I did the comedies.
So after a decent first part, I’ve now moved on to the second part of this play. I found the first part to be okay, but it seemed to focus less on the actual plot than it did on the wars in France and the people involved in that. Since there was so little focus on what seemed to be the overall storyline this play focuses on in the first part, I honestly wasn’t sure how I would perceive the following two parts. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Shakespeare, The Histories, The Yale Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
Alright, so I was lazy for a week, but now it’s time to move forward and take a leap in to my next foray in Shakespeare. Now I have all the comedies under my belt, which only leaves the histories and the tragedies. I certainly enjoyed the comedies overall, but I knew I would likely enjoy them more, so I’m a bit nervous to see how I perceive his work now that I’m moving on to the more serious and dramatic works. Now I’m a big fan of depth and drama, but not really a big fan of stories that are told just to see how sad they can be, which is how I perceive tragedies.
Before the tragedies we have the histories though, which is probably the segment of Shakespeare’s work that I’m least familiar with. The tragedies are discussed often in school, even though we rarely read any of them, and only watched film versions of others. The comedies aren’t quite as well known in school, but have a lot of famous lines and stories and sayings, so most people are at least familiar with them. The histories are oddly unknown to me, and we never discussed them in school, even though some seem to say it’s some of his better work. I have to wonder if this will be a bore, or just tragedies based on reality, or what I should really expect from these. I suppose now we’ll find out. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Barnes and Noble, Shakespeare, The Histories, The Yale Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
I’ve always been a fan of “Diablo” and “Diablo 2″, and late last year a game was released called “Torchlight” that had a large number of the development team from the first two Diablo games working on it, as well as the creator of another popular action RPG in the same vein called “Fate”. Earlier this year Torchlight was on sale, and being the Diablo fan I am, I just had to pick it up. With “Diablo 3″ not coming out anytime soon, this seemed like a great opportunity to get back in to one of the funner genres out there.
Now first I want to say to the people that just put the game down as “ripping off” “Diablo”, you guys should really grow up and get over it. This game is very similar to the “Diablo” series, certainly, but I find it hard to say someone is ripping off something that they themselves designed. The same people that made this game made those games, so I can’t really accuse them for using game mechanics that were their creation in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, the people responsible for the game are more relevant than the company that they worked for. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Runic Games, Torchlight, Video Games
So I will be too busy this week to get my weekly Shakespeare read in. I could probably find the time to do it, but with how much of my spare time will be eaten up by other things, I really don’t want to spend another 2 to 3 hours for the weekly read. But, at least I’m remembering my monday musing about competition in sports. This week I’ll be talking about Soccer, which is well timed due to the FIFA World Cup that has started this week.
Now don’t get upset at me for calling it Soccer first of all. Remember, I am from the US, and we call it Soccer here. To me Football is a completely unrelated sport, so show a little tolerance to differences between cultures, it’s just the way terminology works here in North America. Soccer is huge in the rest of the world, but here Soccer is pretty much a lesser sport. It’s no less of a game, it just doesn’t have much of a following. Now interest has been increasing over the past decade or so, but it is still far from reaching the level of the big four. Heck, I’d say professional Lacrosse is more popular still. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Monday Musings, Sports
What a slacker I am for having missed last weeks read. It was a busy week though, so unfortunately I really felt that taking a short break from a few minor obligations would be for the best. I hated skipping the read for the week though, since it would have seen me at the end of the comedies. So my conclusion of this part of the book was postponed for a week, but here I am and the play is read, and next week I’ll be moving on to the histories.
This play, like the previous two, is another of Shakespeares “problem plays”. The first of these problem plays is definitely the worst play I’d read from this book so far, but luckily the second one at least proved to be an improvement. So with the record being 1 and 1, this play presents something of a 50/50 shot at being good or bad. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Barnes and Noble, Comedy, Shakespeare, The Yale Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
Alright, I’ll admit first off that I missed this weeks Shakespeare read. I had a busy round of days off, which involved waking up early and lacking sleep for two days straight. When the time came to sit down and read the next play, I knew I wouldn’t really be able to take it in and stay awake if I tried. I decided simply to put that off until next week when I won’t be quite as busy and tired. Sadly working third shift means that if there’s anything I need to do during the day on my days off, then I have to throw off my sleep schedule in order to be up and do it. Becomes a problem when that happens two days straight.
Anyways, I’ve been taking the time this weekend to do some digging for possible new themes and plugins, and have not been having the best of luck in this process. I set up this blog some time ago, and the current theme and its variants were set up not long after. Unfortunately I’ve found this theme is very recognizable and not very customizable, and there are a lot of other blogs out there using it. On top of that, it’s no longer being actively worked on or supported, and with WordPress 3 coming out soon that might be a problem. So I decided to look around and see if I can find some new alternates that are more up to date. I also have a number of plugins that are also no longer being worked on, so I’m also looking for newer equivalents. Read the rest of this entry »
Now we’re getting in to the more obscure sports that get much less attention from the media and the fans, but are no less deserving of it. Unfortunately it’s just a reality that 4 major sports is about all the audience can support, and so it’s really an uphill battle for the rest. Many of them reach niche audiences, such as racing and boxing (wrestling as it exists professionally in the US is NOT a sport).
Lacrosse is something of a newcomer on the professional scene with the NLL still a fairly young organization. While the sport itself isn’t exactly new, its rise in popularity most certainly is. Lacrosse has had something of a renaissance this past decade or decade and a half. It’s still far from being as popular as the other major sports, but it is certainly one that you could consider an up and comer. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Monday Musings, Sports
Well, after last weeks amazingly disappointing read I definitely have high hopes for this weeks. It wasn’t even that last weeks was a tragedy in the comedy section, but also that it was just such an awful tragedy with two extremely crappy and independent storylines in an equally crappy setting. If the tragedy had flowed more effectively and focused on one piece or the other to develop them and the character properly, I might have at least enjoyed it more, although I think the story itself was inherently flawed to the point it would have been hard to save it, at least to the point I’d have enjoyed it. The excessive length didn’t help, particularly when all those extra pages really amounted to nothing, and the story felt poorly developed in spite of all that extra text.
What I’ve learned since last week is that the three final plays in the comedies segment of my book (including last weeks) are what are called his problem plays. They are given this name because they aren’t full comedies, but are hard to categorize as comedies or tragedies. So unfortunately that means that this weeks play, and next weeks play will both be similar to “Troilus and Cressida” in this respect. It is my hope that at least the stories will be better to the point they don’t suffer the same response. This weeks play is “All’s Well that Ends Well”, which is another play I’m familiar with only by the commonality of the saying that its title is derived from, and not as a result of its content. Hopefully this does end well, which I guess we’ll now see. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Barnes and Noble, Comedy, Shakespeare, The Yale Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
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