David’s Ramblings

I just thought I’d let my infrequent readers (both of them) that I have not died. I’ve just not been posting because I tend to be extremely lazy. I’ll try to stop doing that. Now go read the posts I just put added. All three of them, even if they suck. Go go go.

Dumbledore dies, Snape killed him. If you’ve not read the book yet, you should probably not read that last sentence because it’s what’s known as a spoiler; however if you just want to forgo the book and wait for the seventh one, you can read that sentence and have the entire plot.

I read this book in two days, depriving myself of sleep. I obviously enjoyed this book. It was a very good book, even if was a Harry Potter book. Yet, no matter how much I liked it, I find I cannot deny the simple fact that the only thing resembling a climax was killing Dumbledore. The book had no other end goal it seems, making us feel cheated when we finish and find that Harry had accomplished absolutely nothing.

It set us up a bit for finishing off the last book, but almost all of that setting up could have been contained in a prologue to the actual seventh book.

Allow me to rewrite the entire book in a form that doesn’t require us to lose sleep or kill an entire tree in making it:

Harry once again doesn’t enjoy staying at the Dursley’s, and then spends the rest of the summer at the Weasley’s. They then go to school, where Harry continues to believe everyone is staring at him, displaying the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Hermione and Ron play a game where continuously pretend that they don’t have crushes on each other, and then get together for a small emotional payoff that makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Harry has to have a crush too, so he feels like part of the ‘in’ crowd. He decides to have one on his best friend’s little sister, who’s like 6, making him a pedophile. Harry’s crush actually turns into an rare form of Wizarding heartburn that is described by the author to act like an animal in his chest or something stupid like that. In the original book, it bursts out and starts killing everything, like in the movie “Alien”, but JK Rowling decided at the last minute to cut this part out because it was so cool it made the rest of the book seem dull.

They find out that Voldemort has seven part-souls and they have to kill them all. They don’t find any of them, because that would accomplish something. They do, however, all decide to agree that Voldemort is not a very nice guy and will have to start allowing the other wizards to inspect his country for weapons of mass destruction.

Dumbledore then dies a pointless death at the hand of the obviously evil Severus Snape (after Draco Malfoy shows himself to be a nancy who’d much rather fiddle around with his wand then use magic for its real purpose of killing). Dumbledore’s dying thought is recorded as “Damn, with a head as big as I constantly claim mine to be, I should have realized that the evil-acting guy is, for all intents and purposes, actually evil, though I continuously refused to deny it.”

This is then the point where we realize that the book is over and we want to know what happened to the real ending. Harry waves his wand and then drinks his lucky potion to try to find it. He then trips over a drunken Dumbledore sitting in the grass, and they find that it was just a bum off the streets they had buried. Everyone’s happy and then Harry wakes up sad to find he was dreaming again. A horrible ending to resort to the “wake up” cliché, of course, but no worse than the one we were handed in the real book.

In the end, I rate it 4.5π. It was a good book, just one I had to rant about because I liked it so much. The ending wasn’t so horrible. Go read it, even if you’ve never read a Harry Potter book before. It’s good.

Review for “Fantastic Four”
Score: 3.9π out of 900º

Yesterday I went and saw the movie “Fantastic Four”. The story revolves around a group of 5 people who went up into space to conduct an experiment and ended up getting freakishly mutated.

Obviously, the not-quite-so-fantastic five should have realized the chances of something going horribly wrong and them being mutated into super-heroes, as it happens to so many scientists on a day to day basis. Spiderman, the Hulk… Why can’t the scientists just figure out that if you do a science experiment you’re bound to be stuck serving the cause of justice?

Anyway, all-in-all, this was a decent movie. The movie was able to pass off the mutations in a believable (for movie standards) way. It wasn’t like we were just supposed to accept that this thing just happened in space and that changed them, but they tried to make us feel like there were scientific principles at work or something like that. I respect movies that try to make up science to explain themselves rather than just saying to me “ignore the hows and whys — this person can just do this, okay!?!”

I recommend you go and see this one, if you’ve liked any of the Marvel movies to come out so far. If not, this may not be your cup of tea.

Well, while I’m at it, I’d also like to review the kid sitting behind me in the theater. He gets a solid 0π score. The kid just wouldn’t shut up.

Example:
Man goes to kiss lady, lady turns invisible…
Kid behind me: “Ha! She went invisible, he can’t see her face because she’s invisible.”
Me (muttering): Thank you, Captain Obvious!

Example 2:
Fire Guy: “Flame on!”
Kid behind me: “Look! He said flame on and burst into flames!”

Example 3:
Evil Dude in Movie: “You know what happens when rubber is super-cooled, don’t you?”
Kid behind me: “What does happen when you super-cool rubber?”
Evil Dude in Movie, snapping Rubber Dude’s finger in two
Kid behind me (oblivious to the answers onscreen): “What happens mom?”
The Mom: “Shut the hell up! *Slap!*”
The Mom not in my imagination: “I don’t know honey…”

[All of these were actually said. He had like thirty to forty comments - I'm not exaggerating.]

It was awful. He had to commentate every little thing, ask a billion questions that the movie was promising to answer in two seconds anyway, and just generally remind me how much I hate children.

I’ve worked the last couple of weeks at Engineering Services, helping survey different things, the most time-consuming being a canal in the mountains nearby. It’s not bad work, but rather redundant. You sit there and hold a rod (thus the title rodman) and the surveyor takes down the data.

It’s been quite easy, and it’s not at all a bad job, even when you have four-wheelers jumping on top of you (it just adds excitement to the day to have a large object pinning you to the ground).

Well, I don’t really have much more to say about it. It’s work.

End.

Review for ‘War of the Worlds’
Score: 4.6π out of 900º

War of the Worlds is a classic tale of aliens coming down and kicking some human butt yet still being beaten in the end. Just once I’d like to see the more realistic occurrence in which all the humans end up losing and dying to technology millions of years more advanced… but that’s beside the point.

I thoroughly enjoyed this show. I never read the book so I didn’t have to stress over whether it followed along well or not. The graphics were pretty dang good. The aliens and their machines were very well done.

As far as the acting goes, everyone played their parts well enough. I didn’t suspect the father to be so uncaring at the beginning, but Tom Cruise played the part very well. None of the battle scenes felt a little strange or scripted as some movies do.

All in all, a great movie. I highly recommend it.