Grinches, Gamers, and Urban Wizards

[shannon_a]

So it turns out the Occupy event that Kimberly & I ran into in San Francisco on Friday night was them trying to stop the lighting of the Christmas tree at Union square. I kid you not. They were also trying to stop people from Christmas shopping by screeching about materialism. Later in the evening, one of the demonstrators apparently got into fisticuffs with Santa, pummeling his red-capped head into the ground, shouting, "The elves are the 99%" while children squalled, "Mommy, is Santa dead!?"

OK, maybe I made up that bit about the Santa fight, but generally I am astounded by how tone-deaf the Occupy movement has become. I mean, stopping people from Christmas shopping, that's the type of shit you talk about in a coffee house in Berkeley when you're passing your third joint of the evening around, just before you start talking about how the troops should hug it out with the Afghanis. I generally agree with the complaints about how the Christmas holidays centers on giving people stuff they don't necessarily want, but, dude, OCCUPY HAS BECOME THE GRINCH!!

Yeah, that's going to look good in the headlines.

(Actually, the headlines were even more pathetic, because the occupiers didn't even get near the Christmas Tree because there were like 17 of them and hundreds of seasonally-spirited shoppers and arboreal admirers.)

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The rest of the weekend was relatively quiet. I decided to go down to EndGame for board gaming on Saturday and played Carson City, which was an excellent choice as it's a little longer than I usually manage on Wednesday night. I played horribly, but still had fun.

Overall, after four days of a fair amount of relaxation, I'll say: whew.

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Back to work today and back to groceries (we still continue with Thanksgiving leftovers, but I wanted some avocado, some roma tomatoes, and some chips to go with my remaining turkey sandwiches).

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This evening, I finished reading Game of Cages, the second Twenty Palaces novel by Harry Connolly. Chris H. at Endgame suggested the series a few months ago, and it quickly became one of the group of urban fantasies that I like and consider successful. I read a lot of different urban fantasy series several years ago, but nowadays there's only 3.5 that I actively like.

The first was Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, but her writing went to crap several books in, so she's the .5. I stopped reading the series after it had already been embarrassing for several books.

The second is, of course, Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden. Wizard & Detective. Best urban fantasy EV-ARR, and still going strong 13 books in.

The third is Mike Carey's Felix Castor series. Exorcist. Totally creepy unlike any of the others, but it took me a couple of books to really love it. By book #3 or 4 I was sold however.

And Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces was my most recent find. It's about active monster hunters and is pretty totally unique. The second book wasn't as strong as the first, because it lost some of the investigative elements, but it was still a real page-turner. And now I've just learned the series has been cancelled. Dammit. I have one more book to read, but hear it ends on a cliffhanger. Sigh. I'll probably read it anyway ...

So I guess that'll drop me back to only two urban fantasy series I consider worth reading ...

I should probably try Kim Harrison and Kelley Armstrong again sometime. I got four books into each of those series, but neither was spectacular enough for me to read more (though I hear the fifth Armstrong is the best to that date). On the other hand they weren't as bad as some of the others (like Sookie Stackhouse; sorry True Blood fans) ...

Comments

[webmacher.livejournal.com]

"I generally agree with the complaints about how the Christmas holidays centers on giving people stuff they don't necessarily want, but, dude, OCCUPY HAS BECOME THE GRINCH!!"

Quote of the day!