My brain scatters farther

each passing day. I realized this morning that just because I’ve been keeping up with other LJs and even commenting regularly lately (with the exception of the weekend which is a new internets rule of mine– to Keep Out on the weekends. . . more or less) I have not actually posted to my own for a whole week.

Woops.

So, what do I have to say for myself on this sunny, but way too cold for fricking MID MAY morning? I feel randomness coming on . . .

I see from glancing at my f’list that spectralbovine posted that NBC has renewed CHUCK. Woo to the HOO! That is such a fun TV show. It gladdens my heart that it isn’t ending yet. Although I just Googled and pulled up an article that says big changes have to be made, including getting rid of a regular character. Which dampens my glee.

Speaking of spectralbovine, he recently recommended certain graphic novels to me, among them Scott Pilgrim and Y The Last Man, so I’ve been on a comics reading jag. Also, my ten year old, Andy, has become a fan of the X-Men, so I pulled out my copy of 1602 by Neil Gaiman for him and I reread it.

I’ve always had trouble reading comics* and therefore haven’t read as many as I would have if I were normal. But this time as I’ve read I noticed something new. They have a compulsive quality to them. I mean creating compulsion in the reader. It’s a curious thing, akin to hunger. As I’m reading one, I want to gobble the whole thing down, except that’s difficult for me, due to my weird problem. Many books are page-turners of course, but this feels different. Like a flavor you only get in comics as opposed to prose novels. Comics are a very particular way to tell a story and they put the reader in a very particular place, that shares a quality with all other good comics, but not with any other form of storytelling.

*I have extreme motion sickness–there are many video games that I cannot even watch people playing, much less try to play myself and I got instantly queasy at the top of Seattle’s Space Needle because you can feel it shifting slightly in the wind. Even reading comics can bring it on. It’s getting better as I age, though, at least as far as graphic novels go– I haven’t been in the Space Needle in about 10 years.

See Coraline in 3D this weekend

Because I think it’s going to be kind of meh otherwise.

::Gasp!::

I know. I’m out on a limb here, listening to it creak loudly beneath me. Maybe my viewing of the movie suffered from too-high expectations–so many reviewers have gushed about it, and Rotten Tomatoes had something like an 88% rating for it, but I didn’t find it very engaging. I enjoyed the creepy look, the eerie mood, but the story felt a bit flat. Which it didn’t at all when I read the book. It was several years ago, but I remember thinking it was a very tightly written, spooky, updated fairy tale. I was really rooting for Coraline and admired her courage. The movie made the story look like the author felt guilty for neglecting his children and wrote this tale to feel better.

But that could just be me.

And the 3D effects were AWESOME. Very sharply-intaken-breath inducing. Well worth the ticket price. So if you have any interest, go! Put on the goofy glasses and then turn around and look at the whole audience wearing them.