I went to see Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief today, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Much glee over the opening sequence with Poseidon turning up in modern day New York wearing something that looked very much like a sailor suit. I’ve never quite shared the tendency to swoon over Sean Bean that I know affects a lot of my friends’ list, but the same can’t be said of whats-his-name who plays James Bond and was Poseidon in this film. I am thinking that more men should wear miniskirts these days, if that’s what they look like in them.
Having said that I enjoyed it, I think I may have liked the beginning and end much more than the middle. I’m getting tired of the “youth discovers he’s special, gains lots of cool powers, goes through a time of testing and comes out a hero” theme. Admittedly, it’s my fault for watching so many children’s films! But I think on reflection that I was more interested in the doings of the gods than in what Percy and pals were up to. All these “gods play games with the fates of men” stories seem to concentrate on the men they use as playing pieces – just once I’d like to see the story from the gods’ point of view.
The special effects were great. I’ve never seen a better centaur in a film. He looked positively real. I also loved the lightning bolt. I really enjoyed the set-up with the explanation of who Percy was. It all began to go down hill when he got to the training camp and within minutes was taking down experienced sword-fighters by the sheer power of his bloodline. I’m kind of fed up with this meme that all you need to do is find the thing that you’re good at. No amount of practice, training, dedication or hard slog is required. There are no years and years of working at your skill and perfecting it by slow degrees. No, Harry gets on the broomstick and instantly he’s the best quidditch player ever. Percy sticks a hand in the water and heals, and instantly he can take down the best fighter in the school.
If only it worked like that. But it doesn’t, and the constant repetition of the idea that it does probably damages children’s ability to buckle down and actually practice hard enough to get genuinely good at things. Grr!
Also grr to the fact that the black guy on the team was a satyr. Is it me, or is that kind of a demeaning choice? Initially when I saw he was on crutches, I thought “ooh, he’ll really be the god Hephaestus in disguise. How cool !” But no, he doesn’t even get to be a demi-god. He gets to be a semi-bestial creature who is obsessed with sex. That’s… not a casting decision I would have made, given the choice.
I did enjoy the first of the three questy-type things. The overgrown garden centre was genuinely creepy. And I liked the lotus eaters as well. Charon was very good – he had definite grim reaper style. But I was a little disappointed with the Hades = Hell thing. They’re not the same at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a depiction of Hades. That would have been something different – so I felt that was a bit of a wasted opportunity.
I don’t know that I would watch it again, but I was only a little tiny bit bored by the over-abundance of action at the end, which is a lot more than I could say for the latest Harry Potter. And it is nice to have the Greek gods back on film. I think I missed them, over the last 10 years.
Just making it in time for Valentine’s day yesterday, I Do Two is now available in pdf here!
Other formats are in the pipeline and should be coming along very soon, and it has gone to the printers. So it should be available in print in about a fortnight.
All profits from this anthology will be donated to the Lambda Legal Defense to support their fight for marriage equality for all. So if you buy this anthology, you won’t only get a great read, you’ll also be doing a good deed 
(I should make that a tag line – “do a good deed, buy a great read!”)
It’s a good hefty volume. Nearly 100K long, containing 22 stories from authors ranging from the well known – like James Buchanan – to newly discovered rising stars – like D.C Juris. And as part of the team who chose the stories, I can vouch that every single one of them is good
My contribution is called Inner Truth, which is a glimpse at the happy ending of John and Alfie from False Colors, but told through the eyes of one Joe Malley who has his own problems:
Excerpt
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If you’ve got a gmail account and a Google profile, you may not even be aware yet that Google’s new Buzz social networking service makes all your email contacts public. As far as I understand it, that means that anyone gets to check up on who you email, and who you have ever emailed to in the past.
OK, I’m not ashamed of anyone I write to, but I don’t see why that’s anyone’s business other than my own.
There is a little button at the bottom of your gmail account which says “turn Buzz off”. However, it seems that that doesn’t actually work. Thanks to catdancerz, here is the real way to get rid of this feature that no one asked for in the first place:
gmails-turn-off-buzz-still-does-not-turn-off-buzz-heres-how-to-really-do-it/
As stolen from eroticjames
The rules:
* Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.
* No captions. It must be like we’re speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.
* They must ALREADY be on your hard drive – no Googling or Flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you’ve saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.
* You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don’t want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.
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Am reading Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling – book one of the Nightrunner series – at the moment. (Well, I started it today.) So far I’m not overly impressed. It’s very generic AD&D sort of fantasy with taverns and bards and guilds and elves who so far don’t appear to be very elvish, and wizards and evil gods. Not that I’m saying that I could do better – just that I expected better, given all the enthusiasm for it. I feel I’ve seen it all before, and often done with more flair and originality. Katherine Kerr’s Deverry books, for example, seem to have covered much of the same territory with more style. So far Alec seems to be effortlessly good at everything, and Seregil is trying to be mysterious, but it’s not really working because I honestly don’t care about his past and I don’t see why I should. And all the characters keep explaining the geography and history and politics to me, and I can’t say I really care about that either.
Is it only popular because the heroes are gay? I’m on page 108 and not terribly interested any more. Does it get better?
Well, the good news is that through the wonders of Vitamin D, Potassium, Iron and Borage oil, I am now no more depressed than the average person who can’t sleep because their shoulders are too sore. The bad news is that I have got such a stinking cold that I can’t think straight. Also toothache.
Also, yesterday my computer got a massive attack of malware, and although the anti-virus stuff caught it all before it infected anything, I seem to have deleted two useful programmes as well in the deleting rush. So now some process is no longer running that ought to run (or is running when it ought not to–my eyes glazed over when Andrew tried to explain.) So the computer is running v e r y s l o w l y. And drag and drop doesn’t work.
On the plus side, however, I have just finished designing a new website for the Ely and Littleport Riot morris dancing side:
http://elriot.co.uk/elriothome.shtml
which I’m quite proud of.
And I’m half way through the second lot of edits on Shining in the Sun. These are going very slowly because (a) the computer is broken and (b) my brain is broken. Normally I would have breezed through it in a day but at the moment it’s looking like a whole week thing. Other things are piling up around me – unanswered emails, housework, plans for Ailith’s birthday party – but I’m afraid I may be a little slow getting to them.
Still, all of that is an improvement on depression. On balance this week is definitely better than last.
I’ve been seeing lots of posts about Imbolc/Candlemass saying that it’s celebrating the turn of the year into spring. In this as in most things, I’m slower than everyone else. For me, February is the dark hour before the dawn, the moment when even the memory of light seems furthest away. February is 3am, the suicide hour, writ large. It’s only when March comes along that I start feeling that I’m not going to die after all.
Every year, I reach that stirring of spring with more surprise, as it seems more and more unlikely that I will ever get out of the clutch of winter depression – I’m worthless, what I write is worthless, what I think is worthless, what I say has all been said before. The world would be better off without me.
I don’t like feeling like this; avoiding everything because I don’t have the energy to deal with anything. I wish spring would hurry up, but I don’t believe in the snowdrop in my garden. I’ll only start to believe it’s all over when I see daffodils.
On a more positive note, at least the sun is out today – which helps immensely. When the sun shone on Monday, I spent the day in the conservatory with a fan heater on, so that I could soak in the light. Today, when the sun shone, I walked along the footpath half way to Haddenham, and it was lovely. An icy mist hung over the fields and the ground was mud topped with a crackling layer of ice. I was completely alone. The sky was white and so was the sun. And the horses in the fields looked like shadows, with their breath smoking. I walked for an hour and didn’t want to come back. Now I have glowing ears and a cup of coffee, so I hope today is going to be better than yesterday. Tomorrow can look after itself.
Coolness! I got my edits today for Shining in the Sun, which has brought it home to me that it’s coming out on the 8th of June, and that’s not really all that far away!
The consensus seems to be that I use far too many semicolons and exclamation marks; how can she say that! 
Nah, it’s true. I have a great fondness for semicolons, even though I don’t have any idea of the grammatical rules for using them. Or, at least, I didn’t. I do now!
Argh!!! Those exclamation marks just keep sneaking up on me. Still, I don’t comma-splice half as much as I used to, so that’s a consolation. We live and learn. Though in my case I mostly just live.
