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#DS91sttime: Season 4, Episode 10, “Our Man Bashir”

December 6, 2013 in #DS91sttime, General Topics

Season Four, Ep 10, "Our Man Bashir"

Season Four, Ep 10, “Our Man Bashir”

Several years ago I was at Dragon*Con waiting for the start of an event in one of the grand ballrooms. Said event was running behind schedule, so the organizers had several people playing “You Don’t Know Jack”, live, while everyone else waited for the real deal to start. I’m pretty sure the demo of the game (which was all it really was) wasn’t supposed to run nearly an hour, but it did.

I knew the main event was delayed, and no announcement had been made as to why, as the organizers apparently thought “…Jack” would keep us sufficiently distracted. I had a lot of laughs, true, but I kept thinking to myself “man, this is taking a while”.

That’s what this season has felt like. We know the Dominion is circling ever closer, but the showrunners don’t seem to be interested in going to the show’s core plot just yet. So we keep getting distractions.

We’ve had an homage to old alien invasion flicks, a send-off to Indiana Jones, and now it seems we’re going to be delving into James Bond territory. “Our Man Bashir” is very much like “Little Green Men”, in that the plot is outlandish, and it makes few apologies for it. Read the rest of this entry →

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Review: Critical Failures, by Robert Bevan

November 20, 2013 in General Topics

Minor profanity blurred on this image of the cover.

Minor profanity blurred on this image of the cover.

If the other books I’ve reviewed are polite visitors, then Robert Bevan’s “Critical Failures” is the guy in the GWAR T-shirt that cussed out a neighbor, drank all the vodka, and passed out in the bathroom.

This book spends a lot of time in said bathroom. Bevan answers the truly burning questions in the fantasy genre, such as “How badly does an orc’s feculence stink?” and “What god does a Dwarven cleric pray to when he forgot to designate one?” As you might guess, this one’s not for kids by any stretch of the imagination–the profanity comes early and often.

Tim, Julian, Dave and Cooper are four friends that seek to assuage their day of boredom working at a local chicken restaurant with a game of “Caverns and Creatures”, the book’s stand-in for the pen-and-paper RPG we all know and love. Said game will be run by a “Cavern Master” named Mordred, who has a fragile ego, only a loose connection to reality, and a bag of magical dice. Having him meet the exceedingly-caustic Cooper creates a situation as stable as a Soviet nuclear reactor. Read the rest of this entry →

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Beacon – Part V is LIVE!

November 18, 2013 in General Topics, Slideshow Topic

Beacon - Part VFinally! Here’s Beacon – Part V, weighing in at eighteen thousand words of awesome. That’s the longest installment yet.

Excited? Then don’t let me keep you. Head to the installment’s page to find links to it on your choice of ereader platforms.

I realize that there are some of you out there that haven’t even read Part I yet. Well, I’ve good news: you can still grab Part I absolutely free (where available).

Here’s the blurb:

A family struggles to reunite in the wake of a surprise attack. Part V of the Beacon Saga.

Peace slips away as mankind and its allied aliens mobilize their navies. Separated and questioned, Mally confronts the growing power of a militant shiplord, while Thrat and Rurek endure interrogation. Luckily, there are other forces at work in the fleet, and the scouts are not alone. Help will come from the least expected of places. But a different revelation will change Beacon forever.

A serial installment of eighteen thousand words.

Read the rest of this entry →

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Review: A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin

November 6, 2013 in General Topics

A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin

A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin

I’ve always been leery of the time investment asked by epic fantasy series authors. There is just something about being propositioned to sign on for, say, fifteen books, that asks more of my gut than any wandering knight or misbegotten king ever could. “Here there be a dragons,” they say. “Come with us on our epic quest.” My heroic response: “Here there be Bo. She is on the go!”

I have kids. Expecting to complete an epic fantasy series requiring such so much free time–to put it mildly–requires more than a little hopeful optimism.

So A Game of Thrones had me skeptical from the first crack of its pages, and I fully thought I might not make it through. This first book in George R.R. Martin’s series isn’t much smaller than that most-mammoth example of fiction I’ve read, Stephen King’s unabridged version of The Stand. And there are four other books in line behind this one, with a slated two more to still be written. Egad.

But I’d been gifted my copy, and if there is one thing I love in my fiction, it’s intrigue (which the series has a reputation for), so I thought: why not? And we were off to the joust. Read the rest of this entry →

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#DS91sttime: Season 4, Episode 9, “The Sword of Kahless”

November 1, 2013 in #DS91sttime, General Topics

Kor: a great character if there ever was one.

Kor: a great character if there ever was one.

“The Sword of Kahless” is almost a love letter to the treasure-hunting adventure genre. There are so many borrowed tropes in this episode that one wouldn’t be surprised to see Indiana Jones himself show up, perhaps with a phaser in the place of his trusty revolver, cracking away with a Ferengi energy whip.

As I’ve said so many times, no one owns tropes, and I can think of worse things than such an homage within the Star Trek universe. But the affection might have gone a little too far, because this adventure’s similar ending to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade undermines the plot development up to that point. As in, we’re left wondering if there was a point. Read the rest of this entry →

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