Video Game Review: LEGO The Lord of the Rings

After getting to play awesome LEGO versions of Star Wars [1], Pirates of the Caribbean [2], and Harry Potter [3], I (and probably many, many others) began to fantasize about what other movie franchises would make great LEGO video games. Among my favorites were Alien, The Chronicles of Narnia, Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, The Mummy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Terminator, and X-Men.[4] But the one that absolutely just had to happen was LEGO The Lord of the Rings. I mean there's a character named Legolas, for crying out loud! On top of that, Warner Borthers owned the licensing rights and they'd already licensed several other properties to Traveller's Tales (Batman and Harry Potter) for LEGO games. But even though I was sure it was going to happen I was still pleasantly surprised when the announcement finally came out. Leann gave it to me for my birthday last year.

Movie Review: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

I hated the 2002 Spider-Man movie almost from the instant it began. The voice-over narration at the beginning was cheesy and having Tobey Maguire be the actor to read it only made it worse. What a terrible case of poor casting. To make matters worse, the power went out halfway through the movie so we had to come back another day to re-watch it.[1] However, Spider-Man 2 was good enough that it redeemed the first movie enough that I now own them both. We do not speak of Spider-Man 3. The Amazing Spider-Man is a reboot of the series. Unfortunately that means that we have to rewatch a lot of Spider-Man's origins (the fateful spider bite, Uncle Ben's demise, etc.) as well as rewatch him discovering his new powers and learning to use them.

Movie Review: John Carter

I first saw a trailer for John Carter when I went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 3D.[1] I thought it looked pretty awesome and I was eager to see it. Leann and I don't make it to the movie theater that often, anymore, so it's taken me a while to actually watch this film. But in the meantime I read several of the books in the 'Barsoom' series. This one is actually based mostly on A Princess of Mars.[2] but also incorporates a few elements from The Gods of Mars.[3]

Book Review: The Master Mind of Mars

The Master Mind of Mars retreads the "super brain at the expense of everything else" vs. "average at everything (but really super brawn)" theme from The Chessmen of Mars.[1] In that book there are creatures, called kaldanes, which are little more than large-brained heads that can switch bodies (which they call rykors) at will. The kaldanes didn't care what gender of rykor they assumed; it just had to be humanoid. In this book, a mad scientist has been experimenting with swapping brains between the bodies of different creatures, but he has no reservations whatsoever—a woman's brain into a man's body, a man's brain into an ape's body, two halves of different brains into the body of a third, and so on. An Earthman (not John Carter, this time [2]) discovers this scientist and helps him with his gruesome work for a while until he falls in love with one of the female subjects. He inevitably defies the mad scientist and the rest of the novel ensues.

Book Review: The Chessmen of Mars

Despite the title of the book, the Earthly game of chess is never played by any of the characters. Instead, Edgar Rice Burroughs invented a new chess-like game for the Martians to play, with its own unique pieces and rules: jetan. But that left Burroughs with a conundrum: to entitle the book The Jetan-Men of Mars might be confusing or even offputting to potential readers but to entitle the book The Chessmen of Mars would be inaccurate. He finally went with the latter. Jetan is supposedly a representation of the ancient animosity between the Yellow Martians and the Black Martians. However, the reason it appears in the title is because at one point a giant jetanboard is introduced and live players are forced to take the place of pieces and fight to the death to capture a given square. As far as I can tell, Burroughs was the first to write such a scene.[1]

Book Review: Thuvia, Maid of Mars

After three books about John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs finally decided to try writing about another character in his Barsoom series.[1] This time we're reading about Carthoris, John Carter's son (though the apple doesn't fall far from the tree). Burroughs also switched from the first person narrative he used while telling about John Carter to third person with an omniscient narrator. So in a few instances we actually get to see some scenes from the point of view of the titular character, Thuvia, who first appeared in the second book, The Gods of Mars.[2]

Sulfur-containing Amino Acids

I was recently working on a submission for a pass-along story [1][2] I've been writing with some of my friends for a few years now, which we call Blood Faith.[3] It concerns a secret world of vampires (no relation to the creatures found in the Twilight books and movies [4]). It is written in epistolary fashion, much like the famous vampire novel Dracula or C. S. Lewis' novel The Screwtape Letters. The first several letters are pedagogic, explaining many aspects of the vampires' secret society, while the later letters transition into a narrative about several vampires who discover additional secrets that the rank-and-file vampires are unaware of. Even though we're far into the narrative at this point, I decided to go back and write another pedagogic letter about the effects of garlic on vampires. While researching various chemical compounds found in garlic, I discovered that the chemical structures for several of these compounds weren't available on Wikimedia Commons. So I made them myself.