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Buffy: Does it ever get easy?
Giles: You mean life?
Buffy: Yeah. Does it get easy?
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: (looks up at him) Lie to me.
Giles: (considers a moment) Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar.
(In honor of the tenth anniversary, today.)
I'm reminded of Where have all the cowboys gone? as well.
Happy Buffiversary!
Here's a question which some of you are possibly the best people in the world to answer: my mother is tutoring a kid who reads at a fairly low level (perhaps 2nd or 3rd grade). He loves the Star Wars movies, and keeps asking for books "like that." Is there any good science fiction out there for younger kids? I remember I was reading Asimov and Herbert and Verne around that time, but I don't think he's quite ready for them yet.
Sheesh. Ten years. This passage of time thing is something of a pain in the ass. I recently subscribed to digital cable and have ever since been obsessively making dvds of movies I record on the dvr. I keep a little entry in my "dvd library" folder for each film which includes the year of production, of course, and I am *repeatedly* shocked to discover how UNrecent so many "recent" movies are. What is it with these people? I don't know why the world can't just agree to let me be as old as I see myself being in my own mind.
When I was in about 4th grade I loved just about anything by H. M. Hoover or William Sleator.
Mimi, you didn't mention the kid's actual age, which can make a huge difference in subject matter, but my first thoughts are Diana Wynne Jones, the Harry Potter books, and I suspect some Andre Norton would work for modern kids. If it's macho adventure the kid is after and he's about ten or so, try him on John Carter of Mars.
Happy Buffyversary. Anyone want cheese?
Depending on the kid's age and interest, the Bruce Coville Magic Shop books and My Teacher books are fun and not very difficult (although they're pretty earth bound--no space opera per se).
Madeleine 8: I wear the cheese. The cheese does not wear me.
I'm a lurker but I love this kind of question.
I would try Jane Yolen and Daniel Pinkwater. But most SF for that reading level will tend to be funny or involve kids as protagonists, which precludes the kind of gun & lightsaber action he would know and expect from Star Wars.
Also consider comic books. If the reading level is too difficult, the pictures will help draw him through the story. But do screen for content. Single-issue comics that say "All Ages" next to the barcode should be OK. Marvel has a whole line of these, including "Marvel Adventures: Spiderman" that are printed in collected editions about the size of manga. Ask your local comic store guy for help.
OK, does anyone know how I can tell if my computer has been auto-updated for the DST change? I've run various updates that XP has suggested, but I can't tell if the update described in this Microsoft KB article has been installed or not.
Microsoft KB articles are distinctly unhelpful, I find.
Just as a data point, Andre Norton never worked for me as a kid. Teresa's experience was the same. She remembers saying to her mother, "It doesn't make pictures in my head."
I say this fully aware that Norton's work is dear to many readers. They're not wrong. It's a value-free thing, like being able or unable to appreciate Tolkien or Dune.
mimi: Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet books are the easiest reads I can think of. They may not be quite what he has in mind, though. How old is he?
Er (she said shamefacedly)... what about the Star Wars books for kids? My seven-year-old loves 'em. Jude Watson et al., I think. And if I remember correctly, there are a couple of different series at different reading levels.
Uh, never mind. I found this page, which Explains It All. I ran the thing and I'm already updated.
Patrick 12: Andre Norton never worked for me as a kid.
I wasn't even alive when Andre Norton was a kid.
Seriously, I read all the Andre Norton I could get ...but now I can't remember a single thing about any of it. I remember finding it really dark. I remember that I liked it better than books intended for kids my age. I don't remember a single story or character. That's generally a bad sign.
My favorite Buffy quote is "That'll put marzipan in your pie-plate, bingo!"
It's probably not actually my favorite, but it is the one I say the most.
Ten years, Jesus.
If he might be receptive to fantasy, how about the Diane Duane 'So You Want To Be A Wizard' series? Simple reading, but it gets into big adventures and serious issues very fast.
Hmmm... If he enjoyed Star Wars, why not try him on some of the as-it-were literary predecessors of Star Wars: Heinlein juveniles, Leigh Brackett (arrgh, looks like all out of print), Kuttner & Moore (arrgh, ditto.)
OK, looks like you're left with the Heinlein juveniles, but there's some great stuff there: Red Planet, Starman Jones, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, The Star Beast, ...
Reading Andre Norton is very tied up with my discovery of how much I loved SF, so while I recognize not everyone feels the same about her, I can't be objective about a discussion of her merits. I still clearly remembered the settings of Galactic Derelict, or the stories of Dread Companion or Moon of Three Rings, 30 or 40 years after I read them.
mimi@4: I can't recommend any specific books off the top of my head, but it might be worthwhile to check out the Golden Duck Awards site.
The Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl books might be good. They are caper/adventure stories from the viewpoint of a criminal "mastermind." With magic.
Ooh there are the new Tom Swift books.
And I second the My Teacher books (though definitely not Starwarsish)
10 years of buffy didn't hit me as hard as, say, finding out that Fight Club [the movie, that is] was HOW many years old?
I mean, going "season four... season five... season seven" helped give me a sense of scale, at least.
The buffy moment that comes to me isn't really a verbal one. It's when the scoobies see Giles playing "Behind Blue Eyes" and they just ... stop.
First comic of season eight, next week [they say.]
Ten years?!
Lots of things have been making me feel old lately, but for some reason this is really hard to take. :}
I feel a DVD marathon coming on ...
10 years of buffy didn't hit me as hard as, say, finding out that Fight Club [the movie, that is] was HOW many years old?
I've been having moments like that a lot recently, with all kinds of things but especially with music. Just the other day in my blorg I had cause to mention The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and as I did I realized it was nine years old.
Oh, hey, speaking of ME and my blog, I have a question that arises out of my stupidity and total inability to Just Google It, Stupid.
You know how it's possible to link to a specific part of a page? A specific line? Like how this is a link to my comment at #22 on this thread? I've been wanting to do it a lot recently on the blarg, to refer to a specific paragraph of a previous entry, and I have no idea how, or if it's even possible to do it the way I want to. Anyone? (If it matters, I use blogger, because of course I can't bear having any part of my life be untouched by Google.)
Heinlein's Between Worlds... It's got a teenage boy caught in a war against an oppressive regime. That should sound familiar to the kid. No robots, but the hero befriends a multi-limbed Venusian dragon who gets drunk on corn syrup.
Mimi: Perhaps A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, which I remember loving as a 10-year-old.
Thanks so much for all the suggestions! My mother says he's in fourth or fifth grade, so I guess around ten years old; she's taking him through How to Eat Fried Worms right now and he's really enjoying it, if that helps to give a sense of reading level. I think he has been reading the Star Wars books for kids on his own already and is looking for something new--though this is, apparently, a child so not interested in books that he hasn't heard of Harry Potter. I have trouble believing that, but mom swears it's true.
As for Buffy, it's weirder to me how long the show hasn't been around. Only three years? Really? It seems like forever.
Ethan, you need the anchor tag. I'm not sure how helpful this tutorial is but if it doesn't work for you at least it'll give the key words you need for googling ('name' and 'href', basically).
Ethan:
Assuming blogger lets you put in general HTML tags, the original and common HTML way to refer to such things is to create an HTML "anchor" with the <A NAME="foo"> tag, where "foo" is whatever name you want to give it, paired up with a </A>. You can then link to it with a regular <A HREF="..."> by adding "#foo" to the name of the page itself, or within the same page by just using <A HREF="#foo"> as the entire link (paired up with a </A>, of course.)
It looks like Movable Type won't let me put in the "name" attribute to an A tag, so I can't make this post an example.
A less well-known way to do it is with the "id" attribute to another tag, such as <P ID="mypar2">. Again, Movable Type is stripping out the example, so I can't use it here. No big loss.
ethan @23
The way I know how to do that is to use the name anchor
(a name="$name"),
replacing the paranthesis with less than/greather than signs, having the word you want the tag anchored to, for instance, the first word in a paragraph, and then closing the tag (/a), with the same replacement rules.
Then, to reference the tag, use the url of the specific entry and add #$name directly after the .html eg:
http://www.example.com/entry5.html#$name
There might be more elegant ways to do this, but I do know it works on blogger citing this example
Wow, I always wondered how to do that but never asked. I'll make use of that.
Y'all are the best, I mean seriously.
sharon, Clifton, Scott W, anyone who may have posted a response in the time it takes me to type this: thanks. It works, and it's easy!
Mimi, if he's a baseball fan John Tunis' books pleased me no end at that age. Chip Hilton and Rick Brant are high-school age boys, so he might not yet identify with them.
How about the Star Wars manga? It's never too early to get a kid into reading books back-to-front (though I think a couple of the issues we've checked out of the library recently have read plain old front-to-back).
My son suggests Mary Pope Osborne's Odyssey series and Lloyd Alexander's Time Cat as other possibilities he's enjoyed.
On the nonfiction front, in addition to the eighty-eleven DK Star Wars Encyclopedia-type books, we've recently enjoyed an awesome book called Incredible Comparisons by Russell Ash. It features side-by-side, beautifully illustrated rundowns of everything from the volume of various oceans (the Pacific Ocean could hold all other seas and oceans combined) to sundry natural and manmade disasters (the area destroyed by the Yellow River flood of 1887 was half as big again as the entire area of Ireland). Sadly, it seems to be out of print--we've renewed it twice from the library and need to bring it back, so I guess it will go on the "search at used bookstores" list in my planner. I've seldom seen a book that captivated my entire family so thoroughly; just needed to mention it.
will@7: Wow, I haven't thought of the John Carter of Mars books in years. I devoured those as a kid, but I think all my copies disappeared in the Great Book Purge of '88 or thereabouts.
I've also now reminded myself of how I plowed through the Alfred Hitchcock mystery series at that age. I wonder if those are even still in print?
Two of the three winners of the EFF Pioneer Awards are stfnal people: Cory Doctorow and Bruce Schneier! The third honoree is Yochai Benkler and I'm pretty sure he's mundane.
Mimi: At that age, I was just starting to get into SF. My trajectory into the series was via the Norby comics in Boy's Life, so I got started on the novellas by Janet and Isaac Asimov, and then some of the old Tom Swift books. I recall reading Bruce Coville, and some other juvenile series I can't remember at the moment. But it wasn't long until I got into "adult" SF - Asimov's and Niven's and Clarke's short story collections, which led me right into Ringworld and Foundation and such, and I was hooked.
I remember I saw the TV debut of Buffy when I was in LA for what must have been the spring Internet World of 1998. My team were just shipping the first residential broadband hardware at the time. That was a while ago, wasn't it.
OK, since someone else has already brought up an HTML question ... I'll take this one step further and submit a plea to the JavaScript gurus out there. I'm having a devil of a time tracking down an example of exactly what I want to do on the page I'm working on ... and my JS knowledge isn't yet to the point where I can just whip up a script on my own. (I can modify existing scripts to do what I want, though.)
What I want to do is this:
1.) image 1 loads when you first view the page.
2.) when you mouse-over image 1, it rolls over to image 2.
3.) image 2 is an imagemap containing links to the other pages on the site.
4.) when you mouse over the various hotspots in image 2's imagemap, new images showing the text of the name of each linked page appear. (these new images aren't themselves links, though -- they're just there for show.)
I've found several scripts allowing me to take care of steps 3-4 quite easily ... it's the bit about step 2 being a rollover from step 1 that is driving me round the bend.
If anyone knows of a page where this is done, or better yet, can point me to a script that would accomplish this, I would be most grateful... thanks much!!
re: kids/YA books
Are Asimov's Lucky Starr books still in print? Not only are they aimed at about that age, but according to the Wikipedia entry, supposedly the "Force-blace" may have inspired the Light Saber in Star Wars.
For a 10 year old, and allowed Fantasy as well as SF, I'd go for the kid's Pratchett (Truckers/Diggers/Wings and the Wee Free Men/A Hat Full of Sky/Wintersmith) although the latter triology might be a bit deep in places.
On the topic of Heinlein, I'd recommend a few of his other youth books including The Star Beast, Have Spacesuit Will Travel and especially Red Planet, which was one of my favorite books when I was in about fourth grade.
I read the hell out of E.R. Burroughs when I was a squirt. All the kids in my neighborhood did. We didn't care for Tarzan so much but the Mars books, the Venus books, Pellucidar... they were read with all the enthusiasm a bunch of pre-pubescent boys could muster, which is quite a bit in case you didn't know.
You can find some e-texts of his books here.
How about Heinlein's juveniles? Some of them are fine for kids younger than the books were ostensibly published for. Red Planet, for instance, or Between Planets might work. There's action, but the violence itself is usually offstage.
Bruce Coville: MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN, SPACE BRAT etc.
Jane
Will H @ #3: Thanks for the link! Now my life has meaning again.
Like beer!
Beer bad.
Klunk the guy who was mean to us on head with club and drag him out of danger.
Beer bad!
I loved that ep. (Thank you, Mad!)
Constance
#12 PNH: Just as a data point, Andre Norton never worked for me as a kid. Teresa's experience was the same.
I'm unreasonably fond of Norton (in the abstract, at least) because a couple of her books (Galactic Derelict, Time Traders) hit me hard when I was very young: it might have been the first genre fiction I found.
But, yeah, shortly thereafter, I discovered the Heinlein juveniles, and then I was off, alphabetically through the library stacks - and I've scarcely looked back at the Nortons....
Re children's SF, I remember enjoying Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left by Robin Klein.
I only got into Buffy recently, when my sister gave me season 1 for my birthday and season 2 for Christmas. I'm getting near the end of season 2 now (I've just been watching the one in the hospital with the monster only children can see). I think I'll have to acquire some more soon. I keep wanting to talk about it and have had to explain to certain family members the difference between being obsessed with something because it plugs into some hole in my brain (which I am not, yet, about this, and believe me I know what it feels like) and merely liking something very very much because it's good and wanting to talk about it because I have just been watching it.
Patrick @ #12: I read and loved a TON of Andre Norton in my late-elementary to early-high-school years, but it never made pictures in my head either. In fact, one of the reasons I stopped reading her stuff is I found it increasingly unpleasant to put down a finished book with the sensation that the entire story had occurred in a very dense fog.
Recommendations other than those already made: E. Nesbit, especially Five Children and It; Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead; Howard Pyle, Otto of the Silver Hand (this might be too difficult due to archaic language--I don't remember--but I remember it pushed that "hero" button for me as a kid). And of course, Treasure Island.
Also, never underestimate the value of choosing a book to read TO the child, a chapter at a time (e.g. Treasure Island or The Hobbit); eventually you will be "too busy" to read and the child will pick up the book and struggle through a chapter on his own, if he gets hooked tightly enough.
Scott H @ #45:
You're most welcome. Did you click through the cover to the first few pages? The Serenity comic gave me a feeling of photoshoped weirdness with its actor-likenesses, but the pages of Buffy 8 resemble Sarah Michelle Gellar without giving the impression that she met a grisly end in a pressed fairy book.
Constance @ #46: Foamy!
"the pages of Buffy 8 resemble Sarah Michelle Gellar without giving the impression that she met a grisly end in a pressed fairy book."
Has that started being published yet? I'll be waiting for the collected edition, but I'll certainly want to track its publication schedule.
SF for a young reading level:
Katherine Applegate's Animorphs series
Jane Yolen's been mentioned upthread, but specifically, she has an early reader series about Commander Toad that is worth looking into.
Seconding Bruce Coville and Artemis Fowl.
The Star Wars: Young Jedi Apprentice books are also right around that level. And, in "books we can't keep on the shelves at our library," there's the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne, though that's time-traveling historical fantasy and may not be science fictionny enough.
Bob Oldendorf, #47, et al.: I've also got a possibly unreasonable fondness for Andre Norton, based in part on the fact that her Ordeal in Otherwhere just happened to be the first sf novel I ran across with a female pov. (I know there were others out there, even back in the Dark Ages of my childhood, but there weren't many in those days and that one happened to be the first I found.) I'd been reading sf for a while at that point, Norton and the Heinlein juveniles and a few others, and never noticed that the pov characters were exclusively male--and then there was this book that was different.
Mind you, I don't want to overstate the case--it didn't bother me that so much of the young adult sf I was reading had been written from the male pov, and I never had any problems identifying with a male hero. However, suddenly realizing that it was POSSIBLE for "the girl" to be the hero was a Good Thing.
I agree - Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville have many good 'reluctant reader' books. He might also like the Angie Sage 'Septimus Heap' books - they're like a step down from Harry Potter, but with terrific characters.
The "Butt" books and there's always Captain Underpants, which seem to be a hit with young boys, because, yanno butts that try to take over the world and toilet humor are funny when you're a ten year old boy.
I think bigger boys find them funny too...
Not to imply that HP doesn't have terrific characters. But SH is just less intense, and still has terrific characters.
You know what I mean.
I can't believe you guys are celebrating Buffy on my birthday!
mimi, my mother always read The Borrowers to her fifth-graders.
If it's the adventure aspect of Stars Wars that he enjoys, he might like the Tintin books. In the last few months, they've been a big incentive for our kids to learn to read more proficiently, because they want to be able to read the adventures on their own. And the pictures make a good supplement to the text for newer readers.
Some of the books have SF elements too, like _The Calculus Affair_, involving a new invention coveted by the bad guys as a possible superweapon. There's also a pair of books involving them going to the moon (written before the Apollo program), though we have yet to read those two.
(I will note that there's some degree of ethnic stereotyping in the series, particularly the earlier titles, so you may want to review particular titles before buying. The early _Tintin in the Congo_ for instance was considered un-reprintable for a long time, and I've heard Tintin fans recommend it only for completists, though I haven't yet read it myself. On the other hand, the late title _Tintin in Tibet_ was specially commended by the Dalai Lama.)
The books are a lot of fun for us and our kids. And we're quietly amused that the "colorful metaphors" that kids pick up as they get older are turning out in our family to be from Captain Haddock's repertoire. (We nearly lost it the first time our younger daughter broke out with a loud "billions of blistering barnacles!")
Mary Frances #54: I felt the same way the first time I read The Blue Sword. Not only is the main character a girl, but she's carefully described as not pretty and she stays not pretty throughout the book. I first read it when I was a pudgy twelve year old. Twenty-ish years later, it's still as comforting as a hot chocolate with marshmallows.
Also, it has horses and big cats, always a plus.
Happy birthday, Marilee!
Rob Hansen, #52: I've heard conflicting reports about when the Season 8 comic will ship, but it'll either be this week or next.
John Mark Ockerbloom, #59: I can't believe it didn't occur to me to mention the Tintin books. I grew up with them and, as many people here know, I'm a total fan. I have a copy of Destination Moon in my office as a talisman of my seven-year-old proto-SF-fan sensibility.
The piece of Tintin pelf I truly covet is the matched pair of angel-Snowy and devil-Snowy cloisonné lapel pins I've been reliably told were made at one point.
I'm so very disappointed that the proposed Ripper miniseries looks like it's never going to happen.
What strikes me, watching the show again after all this time, is how very, very tired Buffy is by the end of season 5. There are episodes I can't watch now; they cut too close.
I notice, too, how much of an asshole Buffy is sometimes. And these days I more admire Xander's quiet, ordinary heroism. He's a mensch.
Aconite @ 64
Ripper just can't happen as long as Tony Head is happy doing what he's doing, and I suspect he's happier doing it in England. Which, I agree, is bad for all of us who would like to see more of Rupert, especially the angst that he always kept so carefully hidden, except when some high-powered nasty had him by the short-hairs.
You know, I really liked that Buffy was an asshole every now and then. People that focused on an extremely demanding and important job often are; nothing personal, mate. It made her a lot more believable than your average superhero.
That was what really made the series for me: Joss Whedon's absolute insistence on making the tone and themes of the show as wide-ranging as possible. Humor, horror, drama, and really bad puns, all in one episode, with the mix constantly changing from one ep to another.
The one that really got to me was the ep where Buffy's mother died. It was like ripping the backdrop away and revealing real people trying to deal with situations that fictional heroes always manage to shrug off after they've chewed the scenery long enough to register their distress with the audience.
Oh, by the bye, does anyone out there remember seeing Tony Head in "VR5"? For that matter, did anyone see "VR5"? Yeah, that's what I was afraid of, I guess that's why it only lasted 8 episodes.
Bruce: I was very fond of VR5, although I preferred the earlier half of the series with the stand alone episodes.
Mimi: What about the John Bellairs books such as The House with a Clock in its Walls.
The only Andre Norton juvenile I ever read as a kid was Outside, which I remember really liking. She doesn't do much for me now that i'm an adult. Don't dislike her stuff, don't love it. Of course, when I was seven I loved the Ruthven Todd Space Cat books, so what do I know.
My 10 year old son adores the Pendragon books - and there's quite a few, so they'll keep any reader going for quite some time...
Cathy @ 67: Jeezly-crow, I forgot all about the John Bellairs books. I read holes in every copy the Stockton Public Library had, I think. Some of his images still stick in my mind (every time I wear corduroy pants, I think of his line about "the kind of pants that go 'whip-whip' when you walk"). Wonderful, spooky and infinitely memorable. Thanks for the mind-jog.
Am I the only person on the InnerTubes who has never seen an episode of Buffy or any of the spin-offs?
Anyway.
Where is the conversation about knitting? Is that in the other open thread? I think I have discovered a temporary cure for Second Sock Syndrome.
Dark Horse has a preview up of Whedon's new Buffy comic. Cover and first five pages, and the publication date is this coming Wednesday, 14 March. (I'll probably wait for the trade.)
Another item in the "things to make you feel old":
After 36 years, the Gentle Strength Co-op in Tempe, AZ has closed for good.
Buffy is my best beloved. Don't usually go all googly that way, not ever. But compared to whatever else has come along since -- aiee.
Vaquero (a.k.a. the Spouse) does not comprehend any of this in any way -- he's never ever watched a single episode, and will never watch a single episode, and why, really should he, since there isn't a hole in his creative, inner, sensory world that needs Buffy to fill it? He is entirely sympathetic to my admiration for Buffy though. Just as I am to his always-opened heart for something that I don't comprehend.
The night of Buffy and Angel in the cemetery after Joyce's burial -- I have wept every time. And so perfect. A perfect night of love and support for Buffy. In a cemetery.
Constance
I'm a longtime reader, but not a con-attending fan. Books that grabbed me as a kid:
Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)@65: You know, I really liked that Buffy was an asshole every now and then. People that focused on an extremely demanding and important job often are; nothing personal, mate. It made her a lot more believable than your average superhero,
Uh huh. Nobody gets to be spotless in Joss' worlds. One of the things I liked best about Spike is that even when he was good, he wasn't nice. One of the ironies I particularly loved is that even before that thing that happened in Season 6 (trying not to post a spoiler for those still working through the show for the first time), he--the souless monster of the group--was the most emotionally honest one of the bunch.
Ten years ago, my sister and I consulted and decided that we would try out that new show that was coming on TV.
Half an hour in, we consulted again and decided that it was boring.
What on earth were we thinking? I don't know--perhaps the same general squeamishness that kept me from watching Star Wars for so long (because it was about war). It's only thanks to the musical episode* and file-sharing and Netflix that I've started to catch up now.
And I listen to the Spanish dub to improve my Spanish (with the subtitles turned on so I don't miss the puns and one-liners). If any hispanic vampires frequent the library where I work, I'm golden.
*I love musical theatre on odd subjects. In my YA novel-in-progress, the characters are putting on a musical called Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad.
Mimi.
When I was 10 I started on Roald Dahl and the like, next year it was Narnia and it's peers, then straight into Bradbury then next year P.K.Dick, then I got a crush on Carl Sagan and became a PBS addict. I was an odd monkey child.
#64: In fact it's very important to BtVS that Buffy herself is often, as you put it, an asshole.
Of course she's an asshole. She's been put in an impossible situation. She's never had even a fighting chance to be a reasonable grownup human being. Instead she's a horribly self-absorbed narcissist. She's grossly unfair and horrible to the people who love her the most. Spike in particular, but Willow too. Xander too. On a regular basis.
BtVS is in so many ways a tragedy. That's one of the many things that's great about it.
Mind you, I'm one of that crazy minority of people whose favorite season is #6.
I'm overwhelmed by the number of wonderful suggestions--thank you all so much! I can tell I'm going to have a lot of fun winnowing these down to pass along to my mom. This kid will become a reader yet!
One of the things that I really like about the later seasons of Buffy is how they explore just what it means to be The Slayer for so long. After all, until Buffy came along, Slayers seldom reached their 18th birthday. Heck, Buffy got killed her second year in and only got to keep going on through a Plot Device.
Slayers aren't supposed to stick around that long. They aren't supposed to last for years, to gather friends and obligations, they aren't supposed to survive long enough to deal with all the trials of getting through highschool, collage, and into the adult world while still dusting vampires and battling demons.
Slayers are the hand-grenade in the arsenal of the Forces of Good. Small, compact, and they do a whole lot of damage when they go off, but they're a one shot. Until Buffy.
And they way they explored that in the final seasons worked for me in a weird twisted way.
Thena, if you've discovered a cure for Second Sock Syndrome, out with it! Tell us how you did it.
Mimi and all, I'll apologize in advance for recommending one of my own titles, but once he's gotten through all the Tintin books, you might want to try him on Tim Eldred's Grease Monkey.
In re Buffy: I staved it off for years. Then Anna Genoese got tired of waiting and tossed all of Season One on to Patrick's desk, with orders to watch it. And then, Buffy ate my brain.
My head is still full of Buffy. There's a map in my head of the automobile-oriented suburban ring around the older Sunnydale town grid. I can't discuss the universality of law, and the corruption that invariably grows up when the protection of the law is not universal, without thinking about the treatment of Spike. I have elaborate theories about the history and bad practices of the Council of Watchers, and how their social roles dovetail with Wolfram & Hart's. Strange things bloom in my imagination, like the localized Linux distribution used in the vicinity of the Hellmouth, the sneeze reflexes of Fyarls, and the universal role of proximate redundancy in prophecies. I wonder about the strange confluences of privileged information that would occur if Drusilla entranced Files & Records. For some time now, a part of my brain has been chewing on the question of why magical tomes are so scarce and expensive.
Nobody warned me before I uploaded it that the Matter of Buffy isn't inert.
Not to break the Buffy theme going here, but I saw "300" tonight. Not great, but... decent. Probably give it a matinee rating, because you'll probably want to see it on the big screen if you're going to see it at all.
I staved it off for years.
I'm still staving it off, I guess. I'd watch an episode here or there, but maybe the lack of continuity kept me from really getting into it. There were lines like "fire bad, trees pretty" that stick with me to this day, though.
then, Buffy ate my brain. ... For some time now, a part of my brain has been chewing on the question of why magical tomes are so scarce and expensive.
Hm. I still haven't caught up on BSG, and now I have this feeling I may need to add another series to the DVD stack.
Tom Swift is a good idea -- the text isn't challenging. Good for intro material. Tintin -- jeez, they're going to try another movie. Give me strength. Who would we cast? I'll just say Daniel Radcliffe in a wig. It's hard to know what to say for the purposes of someone who reads at a low level.
But what did I love? Ah... Half Magic and Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager (I only read his other five books in recent years). It broke my heart to pick up the latter title for a quarter at my library here. They discarded it! To make shelf space for more ghost-and-booger series fiction, no doubt. Grumble, grumble.
Freddy the Pig. The Mad Scientist's Club! Homer Price! The Mrs. Coverlet books. Alice in Wonderland, repeatedly. I'd say Marvel comics, but they've changed beyond recognition. I have a hard enough time just scanning recent comics. Lord help me, I'm o-o-o-o-old!
Also, I find I can't go wrong with anything by Beverly Cleary. She wrote adaptations of "Leave it to Beaver" stories that take us right into Beaver's head. Dunno how they go over with the younger set, though -- you know, people 40 and under.
PNH #80: You're certainly far from alone - Season 6 is my wife's favorite too. (Me, I'm in that rare made tribe of Season 7 supporters, though my personal all-around favorite is 4.)
We were also late converts (I actually, ahem, brought the first season home after it started coming regularly into the conversation around here). I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades.
Just got back from a sneak preview of The Last Mimsey, which is loosely based on the Lewis Padgett short story, "Mimsey were the Borogroves," about kids who find a sliding-bead toy from the future that teaches them how to think in four dimensions. That story has a tragic ending (at least from the point of view of the parents); I was really curious how the film makers would let things play out.
I was kind of worried at first; the theater was packed with parents and little kids. What little I saw of the publicity suggested that it was more of a thriller. I imagined hordes of scared kids, or me bored by what turned out to be a kiddie movie.
Anyway . . . . this was a hoot! Maybe a hoot and a half. It takes the central notion of the Padgett story (toy from the future found by kids, who learn to Think Differently) and embeds it in a movie very much like E.T. in feel. The toys the kids find are really freaky and futuristic in a mineralo-organic way. The "Mimzey" of the title is a stuffed rabbit / supercomputer teaching tool.
Rainn Wilson, who plays the arrogant dweeb assistant manager on "The Office," is great as a space cadet science teacher.
There's some borderline new-agey stuff, but you can forgive it as technology indistinguishable from magic.
As I bonus, I got two miniature Mimzey dolls. I'm not sure whether I'll give these to my nieces or save them for ten years and then sell them on eBay.
Stefan's mention of The Last Mimzy reminds me that we also went to a preview showing of a movie this week, Starter For Ten. As the title implies, University Challenge is a central part of the movie.
My short description: it's a British version of the 1980s John Hughes movies, with a protagonist who'd be right at home in Making Light comment threads. Recommended.
Thena @70, Fragano @78, me neither. Not out of snobbery; just never heard of it when it began and I don't watch much episodic television anyway. I'm beginning to regret getting into "Lost" since I have other things I'd (almost) rather do for the last hour before the late local news on Wednesdays.
#70: No, I've also never seen any of it. Enjoyed the original Buffy movie with Kristy Swansen, and enjoyed Firefly (another tv series by the same guy who made Buffy), though. Don't want to give up n days of my life to watch all of Buffy, though; maybe irrational.
Also, the only cure I know for Second Sock Syndrome is just to knit two in tandem. Have two sets of needles of the base size; two skeins of yarn. Cast on and knit cuff #1, then set it aside and cast on and knit cuff #2. Knit down to heel turning #1, knit down to hell turning #2; and so on.
(notice how I snuck in that "hell turning"? I thought you might like that.)
Seriously, though -- parallel sock knitting is the only way. I do all my socks this way. Learned the lesson on my first sock, which was a pain, and I finished it, and have never even managed to cast on for the mate. The only way for me to finish a pair is for #2 to never be more than one section behind. That way when I finish #1, there's only a couple of hours of work left.
I avoided Buffy at first because it sounded silly. The movie was good, but where could they go from there?
But then, when I heard it was a smart and rich show, I avoided it because it sounded like too much of a monkey puzzle. Too much brain-share required to follow it. This is why I avoid Lost and why I feel bad, sometimes, about following the new BSG.
meredith #38: You had to upstage me, didn't you? Though I see no one's answered you yet...
Emily H #77: I love musical theatre on odd subjects.
Have you seen Jeanne and the Perfect Guy? French musical about AIDS; one of the very best movies I've ever seen.
PNH #80: Mind you, I'm one of that crazy minority of people whose favorite season is #6.
Oooh! Oooh! Me too! Although my favorite villain is the Mayor, I'm still season 6 all the way.
Actually, ooh ooh me too to just about everything everyone's been saying about Buffy. Especially the stuff about her being an asshole. She doesn't get to not deal with things just because she's the main character of a TV show. One of my favorite things about that show is that it seemed like every season (and, on a miniature level, almost every episode) stripped away another layer of comfortable illusion about the universe it took place in. You think vampires are all bad? Nope. You think watchers are all good? Nope. You think slayers are all good? Nope. You think the system of slayerdom is good? HELL no. Genius show.
Now I'm all pissed off, again, that Whedon's no longer on the Wonder Woman movie.
I can remember being in fifth grade or so and wandering through the stacks of my public library looking for a particular kind of book. Title and author didn't matter. It had to have a rocket ship on the sticker on the spine and the jacket had to be obviously old: sketchy cover art in two or three colors at most, dust jacket scratched and dulled by years of handling, pages thick and speckled with bits of fiber. The ones that had a blank cover, usually some color seen only on institutional furniture, with the title and author stamped on the spine were also worth a look.
I had no idea that I was immersing myself in the heroic age of science fiction. I just knew the stuff was good. A similar hunt in your public library might yield some gems as well.
Can't add anything to the recommendations except Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle books, and to enthusiastically second Edward Eager and John Bellairs. And Narnia, especially "Prince Caspian," which a 10-year-old boy ought to appreciate, what with all the kids camping out on their own in the woods and the big swordfight between Peter and the evil King Miraz. As for Andre Norton, I've always felt that some of her books were wonderful and the rest terrible -- no in-betweens. I loved "Star Gate" and read it dozens of times when I was about 12 -- read it again recently, in fact -- but the Witch World books left me absolutely cold.
JamesK, it's only in the last couple of centuries that a teenager would have been considered non-adult for so long. OK, there's a lot of cultural variations, and being a woman complicates things enormously.
But it occurs to me that the death rate is a partial answer to the problem of how just one Slayer can cover the whole world. The Watchers are still a problem--how can they organise--but maybe if the Slayer isn't within reach of the most threatening place, she has to die.
And, until Buffy, nobody has ever been able to finally finish off a Hellmouth because, sooner or later, another becomes more threatening.
Patrick's initial quote recalls an earlier cinematic moment that may have inspired Buffy's and Giles's exchange, or that anyway hits a similar note. Though more compressed.
In Luc Besson's 1994 cult thriller/comedy THE PROFESSIONAL, Jean Reno portrays Leon, a reclusive, somewhat childlike European hit man living in NYC. Down the hall lives a tough kid named Mathilda, played by the 12-year-old Natalie Portman. Leon zealously ignores his neighbors, but he's seen Mathilda around.
One day he encounters her in the hall, smoking and gazing darkly into the stairwell. She sits so as to conceal her eye, blackened for no good reason by her worthless drug dealer dad.
After a pause, Mathilda asks, "Is life always this hard, or is it just when you're a kid?"
Leon considers a moment, then decides to tell her the truth. "Always. Always like dis."
Like Whedon and his writers, Besson expertly interweaves light notes and dark, tragedy and pathos and asskicking all shot through with humor ...
You know. It all definitely helps with the delightenment.
Season 6 of Buffy is not by any means my favorite, but I didn't dislike it the way so many other fans of the series did. (S4 was my least favorite, hands down.) I just think they could've expressed the same storyline in, say, half the episodes they chose to use, and been far less heavy-handed with the 'magic as a drug' thing. But it also contains a couple of my favorite episodes (the musical and Tabula Rasa come to mind), and while it may have not done it in the smoothest way possible, it was inevitable that they'd have to do at least one good arc on the downside of non-Slayer power.
Though frankly, I've yet to forget ME for the way they chose to set off that final storyline, as obvious a choice as it was.
I avoided Buffy for two seasons because I generally greatly dislike series spun off from movies. However, I was talked into watching it, and the first episodes I saw were the closing episodes of S2 and the first episode, then new, of S3. That hooked me, in a way I honestly think S1 would not have -- S1 is not by any means bad, but it suffered the usual growing pains of a new show and that probably would've lost me, at least for a while.
Dan Layman-Kennedy:
PNH #80: You're certainly far from alone - Season 6 is my wife's favorite too. (Me, I'm in that rare made tribe of Season 7 supporters, though my personal all-around favorite is 4.)
At the moment, my ranking is 3,2,1,5,4,7,6 but we're currently rewatching and this may change.
We were also late converts (I actually, ahem, brought the first season home after it started coming regularly into the conversation around here). I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades.
I suspect that's certainly true of 7. Fortunately, the first time I saw it was as bundles of bootlegs, months ahead of UK transmission. I gather it was shown in the US just a couple of new eps at a time, interspersed with gaps and repeats, which given the nature of that episode in particular would have just killed it as a viewing experience. We're also interleaving the Buffy episodes with contemporary Angel episodes and so picking up continuity we missed first time around since the two shows were shown months out of phase and not even on the same TV channels over here. Great, great TV.
which given the nature of that episode in particular
Season, damnit, given the nature of that season.
Out of the books I read as a kid, I remember the Asimov robot books especially well: they were one of the few things I read as a kid that didn't seem radically different when I reread them as an adult.
I'm fond of Garth Nix, especially his Sabriel series, though it is a bit dark. Shade's Children, a stand-alone novel, is amazing. He also has a new series targeted even younger, which is nonetheless shockingly readable for adults.
(It's worth mentioning again that Dianna Wynne Jones can do no wrong.)
Biggles, if you can get it. Perfect for boys who are not sure if they like to read. Biff! Zoom! Watch out for ejaculating natives!
Seriously, a couple of the early wartime short story Biggles books might be perfect. Biplanes on the Western Front would no doubt seem alternate universe to him, rather than historical fiction.
#70: Am I the only person on the InnerTubes who has never seen an episode of Buffy or any of the spin-offs?
[sticks up an embarrassed hand]
Owing to general hearing difficulties I somehow lost the habit of TV. 2006 was an unusually indulgent year, when I watched subtitled DVDs of both Howl's Moving Castle and The Incredibles. I'm still recovering from this excess....
#87 Dan Layman-Kennedy: "I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades."
Well, I watched all of Buffy on DVD, in less than a year, and I love the hell out of seasons six and seven*. The friends of mine from whom I borrowed the DVDs, who had seen Buffy as it was aired, didn't like the later seasons at all.
#94 ethan: "Now I'm all pissed off, again, that Whedon's no longer on the Wonder Woman movie."
Joss Whedon was on the--*sigh* I hate it when I hear good news in the context of "Hey, did you hear about awesome thing X? Yeah, it's not happening anymore."
*Excepting the part where Joss Whedon KILLED MY FAVORITE CHARACTER, THAT JERK.
This thread confirms my suspicion that some of you are too intelligent for your own good. Mimi asked for recs for a kid who reads at a fairly low level, and people are suggesting Andre Norton and CS Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle and E Nesbit. Seriously, people! I can believe that no-one here ever struggled with reading, but have you never come into contact with anyone who doesn't devour highly complicated intellectual books effortlessly and with glee?
For a kid who is vastly intelligent but has a specific problem with reading, such as dyslexia, a sophisticated book can work for reading aloud or reading with a lot of support. But there's more to reading than just deciphering the words.
Apropos of practically nothing else in this thread, the "50 States in 10 Minutes" test (linked in Particles) is made much easier when one was made to memorize the song "Fifty Nifty United States" in grade school. I clocked in at 8:05 to spare without trying particularly hard, which almost made it feel like using the song was cheating. (Incidentally, Google informs me that the song was actually a Ray Charles song! I had no idea my teachers played me Ray Charles songs in school.)
Silly tests of memory recall.
JamesK wrote:
Slayers are the hand-grenade in the arsenal of the Forces of Good. Small, compact, and they do a whole lot of damage when they go off, but they're a one shot. Until Buffy. And they way they explored that in the final seasons worked for me in a weird twisted way
Okay, comment coming up with major spoiler for those who haven't yet seen season 7, which is why I've hidden it behind ROT-13:
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Just to satisfy my inner Trickster, I'll point out to all the people out there who have to yet to get serious about Buffy that after you've finished watching that show (or better yet, in parallel with it), you should really see Angel.
The themes aren't quite the same: Buffy is, at least partly, about growing up Slayer, and Angel is a bit older than Buffy (maybe a couple of centuries), although he's still not really comfortable with his true nature. But there's that same mix of comedy, tragedy, drama, and general geekiness that makes up anything that Whedon does.
Oh, and I just looked at the timestamps on the last few posts; I'm not the only one who's up talking about old TV shows at 4 in the morning. That helps a little when I get into arguments with the little voice in my head that tells me respectable people don't do things like that, you know, the voice that was implanted in early childhood by the Ministry of Social Conformance. It's nice to have something to say other than, "I've known for decades I wasn't respectable."
Teresa @83
For some time now, a part of my brain has been chewing on the question of why magical tomes are so scarce and expensive.
Because some things can't be printed on paper with moveable type and perfect bound. Magical tomes have to be hand-written on vellum*, hand sewn and bound.
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* Or parchment. Or whatever you call it when it's made, not of sheep or cow, but of some other beastie (human vellum for the black-covered tomes on the left-hand side of the shop, demon** vellum for the white-covered tomes to the right.)
** The vampire vellum books, written in fluorescent ink, are in the windowless back room. If you buy one of them, do it at night, or we can wrap it in blackout cloth for you.
I knew a severely dyslexic* kid in school who got very deeply into reading with graphic novels. He was big into ElfQuest, but there's a lot out there to choose from.
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* he never noticed when I decorated a birthday cake in mirror-writing.
#111: no, grimoires are expensive for the same reason that university textbooks and scientific journals are. They're produced for a small and highly fragmented market - there aren't that many wizards around, after all, and with the exception of some of the most basic compendia (Huskbinder & Matterstraw, for example, or Kipvern & Tercell), each grimoire will only appeal to a small fraction of them. Also, wizardry is a fast-moving discipline; a grimoire rarely goes into a second printing before it becomes obsolete. So publishers have to break even on a small number of hardback sales. And then there's the hassle of peer review...
Rob Hanson @ 101
I wonder if coming to Buffy on DVD has any impact on being able to appreciate the later seasons that were unpopular when they aired, the same way some comics only really hold together once they're collected into trades.
Probably so. My wife and I started watching Buffy somewhere into season 3, and Angel in the middle of season 1. We caught up with Buffy because the local schlock TV station was showing it as 3 different series: one in season 1, one in season 2, and one in season 3. Juggling who knew what and when was a job worthy of a Presidential assistant. But we picked up the thread of Angel on DVD much later, and the two experiences were very different.
I think I prefer to do it in massive loads if I can afford the time. In the case of Buffy I was recovering simultaneously from surgery and the dotbomb implosion and had a lot of time on my hands. And that's also how I read Sandman: after all the collections had come out, one huge, mind-boogying (stet) lump of Mythos every few weeks. I think I may have fried a few neurons in the process, but it was well worth it.
It also makes a difference if you see or read a series in the expected order or not. With Sandman, I started with "A Game Of You" which is somewhere in the middle of the 10 collections, but I think it burned out all my evaluation circuits, and I was hooked immediately.
ajay and abi
All true for your mass market grimoires and such (holy crap, I'm seeing recently published books in some of the scientific fields I track at over $180!), but there's another consideration for the books of great power. Any book containing power beyond your basic spells for sex, drugs, and violence requires infusion from a distilled source of the power. This usually means putting a human sacrifice in the juicer (sorry, that image popped into my head and it won't go away). As you can imagine, just paying protection to the local witchfinder ups the cost of production considerably, and sacrifice has a lot of other costs (the soprano chorus runs over $400 an hour at scale).
Now in the words of the bard (no, the other bard): "And now I hie me off to bed, to sleep off all the nonsense that I've said."
mimi @#4: For what it's worth, the first book that popped into my head when I read your question was Martyn Godfrey's The Vandarian Incident.
From the comments we have perused we do not judge the largely ignorant audience from this site to be our customers. Our clients are mostly high net worth magicians or magical firms that are well-versed with grimoire production. They recognize quality materials and workmanship and are knowledgeable about costs. This is wholly unlike many readers here who are bent on propagating sweat-scriptorium facilities, especially in less developed dimensions.
If you're willing to settle for machinery-sewn poor quality spellbooks or inferior grade typography passed off as Mystic Runes, etc, I suppose that's your choice. But that is book publication, not provision of magical tomes. You pay top grimoire publishers for accuracy, illumination, spells that don't require you to turn a page at the wrong moment, pronunciation guides in the International Phonetic Alphabet*, and quality materials meant to last no matter how much candle wax you drop on it. That's what differentiates our works from the rest.
Our customers are not just high net-worth magicians with a degree of refinement but also, more importantly, well- and broadly-educated. From long habit, they buy good quality and are not averse to paying fairly for it.
This may seem high-handed, but it is necessary to be so when dealing with riff raff. You may "have magical talent" - anyone can claim that nowadays - but you obviously don't know how to use it wisely.
Regards, CEO, Tome Home Enterprises
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* so that your Southern accent doesn't summon a demon when all you wanted was a nice cup of Earl Grey, black, no sugar
My big problem with season 6 of Buffy is that it wasn't any fun. I watched the show for witty banter and cool magic and character interaction, not to see people working in fast food restaurants. Maybe that's escapism; if so, I'll make the most of it.
My season ranking is 2135764, although the first three are quite close an
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