Recent content on jverkamp.com
The Lost Hero followed newcomer Jason Grace as he shows up at Camp Half-Blood, lacking in memories and with a touch of … Rome about him. So of course, now in The Sons of Neptune we get the other side of the story. Percy Jackson, also with memories missing, finds his way to Camp Jupiter instead. What if Camp Half-Blood, but Roman. And based on legion, with a much more militaristic point of…
Yeah, I know. Something of a tortured title. It’s fun looking at train tracks though. I had no idea that they were as irregular as they are. Variations in spacing and alignment all over the place. View on Flickr
I think that’s probably about enough Mad Men. I’m still not entirely sure what people see in this show. Perhaps it’s coming from my (strong) preference for sci-fi and fantasy–worlds that really make me stretch, things that aren’t quite so real . Perhaps it’s the fact that no one in the show is really a particularly good person. On a more positive note, I feel…
♬ ♬ ♬ Way down Hadestown Way down under the ground ♬ ♬ ♬ Hadestown is such a great show. I first discovered the music a few years ago and listened to it almost non-stop. Then last year, I had a last minute chance to travel to New York and happened into last minute (excellent) tickets to see it on Broadway. Barely any of the original cast 1 , but it’s still an awesome show.
You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do… A Wizard of Earthsea is a relatively simple coming of age story about Ged. He starts out as a…
Ocean’s Eleven was great. A straight forward heist (at least in what their goal was) with enough twists about how they got it done that really drug you through the movie. All held up by an excellent (and stacked) cast and a ton of banter. Ocean’s Twelve has pretty much the same cast, which I loved. But the heist makes so much less sense this time around. They do try to justify it (Benedict…
Well, it’s not quite Frozen , but you know? I’m glad they really went for something ambitious! It’s the same world. One kingdom (really one city on the coast). Sisters, one with powers and a queenship and the other with … an impressively positive attitude? Also, reindeer, a living snowmen, and now… elemental powers, mystical fog shrouded woods, and a voice calling…
Matilda: Daddy, you’re a crook. Harry Wormwood: What? Matilda: This is illegal. Harry Wormwood: [hands the car drill to Mikey, then walks to Matilda] You make money? Do you have a job? Matilda: No, but don’t people need good cars? Can’t you sell good cars, Dad? Harry Wormwood: Listen, you little wiseacre: I’m smart, you’re dumb; I’m big, you’re little;…
Twenty years later, another trip to Alaska. We met my parents (who were on a two month trip of their own) for one week. And oh, what a place for taking pictures Alaska is. View 212 more... View on Flickr
Another long flight back? The perfect time to rewatch the Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps just one of them–with the Extended Edition. Man those are long movies (especially in that version). And man, I forgot just how awe inspiring those movies are. It all began with the forging of the Great Rings. It’s the tale of a little man (literally in this case) on a mission oh so very much larger…
Our last full day. A bit quieter. We went to a museum and a store with a chocolate fountain. Such a great trip. I’m ready to head home. View on Flickr
Back through Portage to hike again on our way to Anchorage. We made it to Blue Ice Trail and Byron Glacier Trail. Very cool. Literally. View 5 more... View on Flickr
Our one full day in Homer. We went out to the tidal flats. It wasn’t quite like I expected, but still neat. Also out to the Spit in the evening. View 23 more... View on Flickr
We went to the Sealife Center in Seward before the (long) drive to Homer. Along the way, we stopped in Soldotna, which happened to be having a festival. That was a fun surprise. View 12 more... View on Flickr
Out into the ocean. We saw a decent amount of sea life, including three humpbacks (1 calf!), puffins, and seals. The part out on the more open ocean was so rough. Just about everyone got sick to various extents. View 29 more... View on Flickr
A hike at Exit Glacier and pictures at the marina. View 10 more... View on Flickr
Another day, another hero. This time around, we open with Jason. Another obvious (to the reader) demigod, hidden in plain sight. Battle reflexes, special powers, purple T-shift… ability to speak Latin… Jason scratched his head. “You named him Festus? You know that in Latin, ‘festus’ means ‘happy’? You want us to ride off to save the world on Happy the Dragon? Wait. What? Oh…
Our first day in Alaska, at a house just outside of Seward. Man. The forests and mountains and rivers and life just everywhere. It’s very pretty. View 21 more... View on Flickr
It’s been a while since I watched these movies. But hey, when you’re on a plane for five hours and they have a screen full of movies? Worth! In a nutshell–it’s a quintessential heist movie. Gather the crew, plan the heist, deal with what goes wrong, and walk away in the end victorious. And then show the audience how in the world you actually pulled it off. Building the…
Made it back to Holliday Park for probably the last time until classes begin again this fall. View 6 more... View on Flickr
The 3rd to the 5th. Good fun! View on Flickr
Miyagi: Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off. Oh this movie. It’s a classic, but somehow I’ve never actually seen it. Right now is the second best time though, so here we go! In a nutshell, it’s a pretty straight forward coming-of-age / underdog sports movie from the 80s. Really. Daniel moves to a new town, gets beat up, meets the girl, gets beat up some more, meets the mysterious…
It took a while (relatively speaking) to get to this one. And, while this one has a lot of great individual scenes, I think it’s the weakest of the series. This time around, we’re in the 70s, with the introduction of Beyoncé’s Foxxy Cleopatra. I enjoyed her role, especially her introduction, talking (so obviously) through a third party. She seems like she’s having fun and…
Onward in Harry Potter. And still without making it back to the first. Plotwise, this is one of my favorites. It’s an action packed story with a lot of mystery going on and a twist to the plot that (long ago) I did not see coming–and which actually pulls the last part of the story together very well. Even if, in the broader world Harry Potter lives in doesn’t make any sense .
He’s stuck out there. He thinks he’s totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man’s psychology?” He turned back to Venkat. “I wonder what he’s thinking right now.” LOG ENTRY : SOL 61 How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense. With the recent release of the Project Hail Mary movie, I decided to reread the Project Hail Mary…
This is it! The Last Battle 1 . Kronos and his army of titans, monsters, gods, and demigods is about to reach New York City and Mount Olympus. And, because of a rampaging Titan coming across the country, the city is almost entirely undefended. So it’s up to Percy and the demigods of Camp Half-Blood to save the day! Oh, did I mention that Percy is about ot turn 16 in this book? And that…
I watched (and reviewed) Despicable Me 2 years ago, in theaters. We watched those movies over and over again for so long when my children were younger. But now, it’s back in favor, so it’s a good time to review it! Gru, criminal mastermind, has a glorious plan. Gru: …we are going to steal… pause for effect… THE MOON! To do that, he needs cookie robots and three…
With my new lens, birds are so much easier to take pictures of. And they’re so dynamic. And sometimes weird looking. View 54 more... View on Flickr
I probably should have skipped this one. I do like the three short stories well enough. We get The Bronze Dragon–a game of capture the flag and a new guardian for the camp. Plus we get more of Silena (child of Aphrodite) and Beckendorf (Hephaestus) who are a fun couple. Then the Sword of Hades–I do enjoy stories with Nico in them. He’s a nicely complicated character. Plus more…
A rewatch for me, but that’s just a fun movie. More than a bit 80s feeling, but it works. I love the characters, especially Andrew the Giant’s Fezzik and Wallace Shawn’s Vizzini. They’re just fun throughout the movie. And man is this movie quotable. Even if you haven’t seen, it I’m sure you’ll have heard some of these. Inigo Montoya: Hello. My name is…
The Labyrinth . Daedalus . Return of the Minotaur . Oh, this book has a lot going for it. I love the setting. It’s interesting seeing more of the ways demigods can go–and have gone in the past. Not all demigods are heroes–which we’ve already seen–but they’re not always villains either. And the same with monsters; we’ve already met Tyson. And for that…
Annabeth is missing and a goddess is in chains! It’s time for a quest! Only this time, it’s not Percy’s quest. Oh, and apparently not everyone is fated to survive. Percy is growing up–ever nearer to that fated 16th birthday. So of course, he’s got more than just demigod problems. “Love conquers all," Aphrodite promised. “Look at Helen and Paris. Did they let…
Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we’re related for better or for worse…and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum. After the events of The Lightning Thief , Percy Jackson is starting to settle into his world of gods and monsters. So of course, things have to get complicated. This time around,…
The Harry Potter films have some problems 1 , but they came out just at the right time to be a large part of my growing up. I’ve seen them all and, while I think the books are better in a lot of ways, the movies have a lot of charm. Especially the first few. They’re just done in such a magical way, really capturing the fantastic feel of the world. It makes you wish you could just hop…
El Principito. En español. ¿Por qué? ¡Por qué no! En serio, porque estoy aprendiendo español. Un libro fácil es bueno para aprender. Pero El Principito es un libro raro . Es un libro sobre serpientes. Y planetas. Y flores. Y volcanes. Y baobabs. Como dije. Un libro raro. Pero lo disfruté. [[TODO:El Ojo del Mundo||La próxima vez]], debería leer un libro en inglés y luego en español. Voy!
Where Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was a delightful, raunchy, vulgar parody of spy flicks and the 90s, The Spy Who Shagged Me turns everything up a notch–for better and for worse. It all starts out where the previous movie ended. Austin and Vanessa married and on their honeymoon. Except, surprise! Fembot. Which makes absolutely no sense. But I do appreciate that we get Heather…
Austin Powers: Allow myself to introduce… myself. Austin Powers. A riff on 60’s culture and especially the genre of spy movies (James Bond especially) absolutely loaded with a particularly rauncy, vulgar sort of humor. Vanessa Kensington: Mr. Powers, my job is to acclimatize you to the nineties. You know, a lot’s changed since 1967. Austin Powers: No doubt, love, but as long as…
What if the Greek gods (and the rest of that mythology) were not only real… but still around? “Is it? What’s the most common thing gods did in the old stories? They ran around falling in love with humans and having kids with them. Do you think they’ve changed their habits in the last few millennia?” Oh. And what if they all 1 had a bunch of half-human children.…
Man. I forgot how good this season is. Eleven with Rory and Amy. The Silence. It opens with the Doctor dying–and just gets so much crazier from there. It’s one of the best season-long plots (in my opinion) with a lot of solid episodes along the way. A Christmas Carol - Skipping through time, with a cloudy sky full of flying fish. Delightful. The Doctor: [Pointing to frozen Abigail…
Information is like water—without it you won’t live long, too much and you’ll drown. And there’s a difference between truth and information. Even correct information is not the same as truth—truth does not mislead—correct information bereft of context can be more dangerous than a lie. Another book that I feel like I reviewed but somehow seem to have lost it. Overall, I really liked how this series…
“They’re turning on us!” cried one of the sailors, voicing a panic that threatened to sweep through all the humans on board. “Jesus fucking wept, you cowards,” said Berenice. “Try not to splash the rest of us when you piss your pants, you dickless shitbags.” The finale. I feel like I reviewed this book already, but seem to have lost it (or never wrote it in the first place). Still. It’s…
Well, I’m just about to Alien vs. Predator, so… I guess I should catch the Predator movies, along with Alien ! Much like Alien, this is a movie that came out a bit before my time, so I’ve never actually seen it. And just like Alien ( Aliens even more so), I was kind of amazed at how many lines I’ve quoted any number of times came from this movie… Dutch: If it…
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was a crazy, solid introduction to the world: we have a giant timeless library built into a mountain range, cities built up and around it throughout time and by more than just humanity, and you have a sort of timey whimey mess of a conflict running through everything. The Book That Broke the World sort of turns that up to 11. I already told you: we choose sides with our…
Ripley: You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else. At the end of Aliens , Ripley, Newt, and Hicks managed to survive a second Alien attack–this time with a lot more violence and space marines–only for Newt and Hicks to die off screen, replaced by body doubles in Alien³. Not even kidding. Other than, I actually did enjoy this movie. It messes a bit with…
Take a world where ghosts are very much real and, along with mediums and spiritualists, can have an impact on the world around them. Run that forward to World War I, where British soldiers have been compelled to, after they die, report back in one last time: “The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died.” Quite a first sentence that. So when our main character gets report from a ghost…
Part 3! Wherein we learn about rockets, recursion, and ricocheting items (oh my). And make it to … the end? Here are all of the commits from part 1 up through part 3. And here are all of the parts in this series so far: Posts in Solving Gentoo Rescue : Rescuing Gentoos with a Rust Solver (Part 1) Rescuing Gentoos with a Rust Solver (Part 2) Rescuing Gentoos with a Rust Solver (Part 3)
The Bear and the Nightingale . The Girl in the Tower . The Winter of the Witch . Quite a trilogy . From a dark Russian fairytale world, full of the spirits of the woods, old gods, and the incoming church up through a more political fantasy, deep into the cities of Russia where spirits hold least sway. And now, it all comes to a climax, with ever more battles between summer and winter, between the…
And here we have Part 2! It’s not been that long for you, but since the first part took six months for me to actually get around to writing it… well, this is much better! Things get a bit more complicated this time, with buttons that can open/close doors and even holes in the floor and BOMBS. But what’s really crazy is how we actually get around to solving how to get to new…
I really loved Project Hail Mary (the book) and I’d heard good things so far about Project Hail Mary (the movie), so I figured… let’s give it a chance and actually go see it while it’s still in theaters! Rocky: Amaze. Amaze. Amaze. I’m so glad I did. As a movie, you do lose out on some of the real depth of ‘SCIENCE!’ that this story really had as a novel.…
Months ago now 1 , I started playing Gentoo Rescue (after seeing the Aliensrock video ). At the core, it’s a Sokoban style puzzle game where you have to guide cute little sliding penguins to their color coded nests… but oh man does it start getting more complicated quickly. On top of that, it has a really interesting nesting level concept–the level select screens are levels…