Firstly, there was The World Is Not Enough, which had a few neat things (rent-a-sub! now you, too, can rent a part of the Russian navy for a weekend of fun and smuggling!) and a few questionable things (the terrorist wasn't THAT bad-ass, so why were people so boggled by him that they'd kill themselves rather than surrender? I mean, c'mon, Bond has kicked the butts of people like this guy without hardly breaking a sweat before). Oh. I guess I should have put spoiler warnings. But, really, it's not like the movies are going to be in theatres all THAT much longer. The Next Big Thing will probably knock them out shortly.
Also, there was Toy Story 2, which seems to have escaped the evil of creeping sequelitis by being surprisingly good. If only Pixar produced more than a movie every two years (although, when you think about it, that's probably WHY their movies are good). Zurrrrrg! Not much to say about this one. Although they could probably produce a whole movie just of Buzz Lightyear, given the opening sequence of Toy Story 2, and, if the toys sell well, they probably will. And it would probably be good, too.
In the book realm, I read The Empire Of The Ants which... it... well. Um. For most of the book, there are two subplots that fail to intersect. In one of them, it's anthropomorphicizing ants (ie, giving them small, bug personalities) and giving them socio-political goals (in the ant world, that is, which involves things like discovering the Eastern Edge Of The World, which is, of course, a road. I'm sure there was some deep and meaningful metaphysical stuff about how we would relate to a species so much more bad-ass than we were that they'd crush us by accident without even noticing, which is to say, not at all, mostly. Secondly, there was a sub-plot involving a cellar which eats people. It was built by a mad scientist, you see, so it's full of pretentious metaphysical statements scrawled on the walls, which gives the author an excuse, nay, a calling, to be pretentious and metaphysical. Since my tolerance for pretentious metaphysical crap was used up years and years ago, I'm sorry to say I actually flipped through those parts to get to more stuff with ants being squished. The cellar, anyway, involves several wacky traps to deter the foolish, but after you've gotten to a certain point, you can't get out again. Various groups of people go down this thing, despite steadily increasing levels of police annoyance and signs saying "No, really, don't go down into the damn cellar any more!" Eventually, nearly twenty people vanish down the silly thing. However, at the end, they always reach the mad scientist's secret lab, which is outfitted with the latest in mad scientist gear (nuclear power plant... ?!) and apparatus a-plenty. And all for the purpose of communicating with the ant mound above the secret lab, in perfect secrecy, free from the distractions of the outside world. Having desciphered the ants pheremone 'language', the mad scientist devised a method for communicating with them involving a tiny robotic ant that emitted and detected things. So, they cheerfully conversed with the queen of the ant empire above them, until the ant mound was unexpectedly burned out by a bunch of surly kids, and the queen replaced by someone surly and contentious and human-disliking, who promptly severed communication. And there the book ended. Which left me laughing out loud, because here these people are having gone to all this trouble to seal themselves away, and now they've got nothing to do and no way to get out. Way to go, guys! Bet you wish you hadn't put so much effort into those death-traps NOW, hunh! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!
In game news, there's Final Fantasy VII (motto: "This one really is the FINAL fantasy. No, wait, maybe the next one.") which I've finally gotten around to playing on my iMac, thanks to the wonders of the Connectix Virtual Game Station. It is, indeed, a game of glory, in that it's taken me nearly eight hours just to play through to a point where I'm out of the initial city. Now, granted, that's not eight consecutive hours, and it did count the time even when I wasn't playing but had been distracted by web browsing on my other computer. In FF7, you play Cloud (except when you don't) and his surly and contentious party of maniac rebels against the evil of the Shinra Corporation. Yes, Cloud, the guy with the largest sword we've ever seen, whose manliness is tempered only by the fact that at one point, he's forced to dress up as a woman. Poor Cloud. It's hard to be an anime hero these days. Also featured is the now-traditional Squaresoft Love Triangle, which in this case is Cloud (the guy), Tifa (the childhood friend) and Aeris (the other girl). In Chrono Trigger, the last game where we saw the S.L.T., the hero ended up with the Other Girl (we're not sure what Lucca, the Childhood Friend(tm) ended up doing, and, quite possibly, we don't want to know). Perhaps in this one the Childhood Friend will win over the Other Girl. Who knows?
Also, there was anime, as I got some fan-subs in. Namely, Starship Troopers, the anime, which was inspired by Starship Troopers, the novel. And not to be confused by the movie of the same name, which was inspired by the novel in that the novel's pages were used by the scriptwriters to roll their hallucinogen-laced joints. The anime is 'based on' the novel in the same way that the anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water is based on the novel 20,000 leagues under the sea in that they both have a submarine in the story captained by someone named Nemo. Still, it does come closer than the movie did, in that the powered armor is, well, powered armor, and the rest of it seems to at least be in the same idea as the book. So it's at worst merely bad, as opposed to the full-scale abomination that was the Starship Troopers movie.
Next episode: Muffin Troopers
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