It's been a few months, but we've finally got a new piece in the Spectare section -- a standard review of Stephen King's Sleepwalkers. It's fucking awful.

Also, I received reports that the link to the Miscellaneous section on the main and content pages (and now at the bottom of articles) wasn't working properly for users of IE 6, so I've attempted to fix that (apparently the problem stems from the fact that IE can't count, though oddly enough the display was fine on my IE 5.5). It should be deactivated on the Misc. page, but everywhere else it should behave like the others. Anyway, I think I've resolved that issue, but let me know if you encounter any problems with that (or anything else), mmkay?

And that's all for now. Ja!

Nothing new tonight, but since Tina commented on the "Angel" finale entry and wanted to know the extent of my grievances with the "Buffy" series finale, I popped over to a Buffy board on which I've been posting for some time and looked up my old comments on it. In case it doesn't come out as well in these older reviews (though I think it does), I'll preface these remarks by noting that my dislike of the series finale was the logical end of my immense disappointment with the final season as a whole. And, of course, I'd been upset with the series since the beginning of Season 6, since I felt then and still feel to this day that Buffy should've ended with Season 5. In addition to Buffy's ultimate sacrifice and the rather triumphant ending despite her death, it was pretty much driven home that while there might have been fun from time to time, the life of the Slayer must ultimately be an unpleasant one, fraught with conflict... and that the Slayer's fight never really ends until she's dead. (more...)

It's been a while since we had a quiz, so let's go!

Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"

San Francisco -- Liberal and proud, you'll live your lifestyle however you choose in the face of all that would supress you.

Interesting. And there's more: (more...)

So I'm finally getting around to blogging about the series finale of "Angel" that aired on the 19th. (Wow, only a week ago? Guess I'm not as behind as I thought.) We've already heard a few words about it from Tina and Anon -- "What the hell was UP with that ending?!" and, "I loved the ending of Angel. Angel has always been about the shades of grey areas between good and evil. The point was that the battle against evil never ends, something they were saying in the episodes near the end of the series," respectively -- so I suppose I'll attempt to address some of their points and go from there... and I guess I'll start with Anon, since Tina's comment refers to the end, which I guess I'll talk about at the end. 🙂 (more...)

So Tina over at fidlet.com has recently written a blog entry addressing the depiction of vampires in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel". She writes:

It is repeatedly said in the show that vampires (and other demons) do NOT possess free will. Why is that? Well, it seems to be due to thier intrinsically evil natures. That is, humans have free will because they have a soul, which gives them a conscience: so they have something within them that pulls them towards the good; there is some motivation in them, intrinsically, to do the right thing. Vampires do not have this: there is nothing in them that motivates them to do what is right...

Yet, while the characters recognize that vampires don't have free will, they nonetheless seem to hold them morally responsible for their actions. Buffy has no problem killing creatures that simply cannot help doing what they do. But she will never kill a human being, on the grounds that they do have a soul (i.e., free will). This seems rather mysterious to me: so you willingly kill those that had no freedom to anything but evil, but will not kill those that freely do evil.

So being something of a Buffy "expert", I wrote up a comment to post over there. And then it ended up being so lengthy that I figured I'd just post it as a blog entry. Be warned, I'm kinda exhausted (it's past 5 AM...), so it's probably not the best example of my work, but it should make sense. So Tina, this one's for you. 🙂 (more...)