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Intense dreams last night.  Most of them seemed to be about The Hunger Games in some way, or at least about totalitarian dystopias in which the actress playing Katniss Everdeen lived.  In one of them, she was angling for a government career to get inside information on a series of bombings and also an influx of larger-than-natural predatory animals in the area.

In another, more surreal iteration of the dream, the world and everything in it proved to be figments in the imagination of five or six people, and saying the right words at the right time would collapse parts of the world back into their minds, leaving a blank, white glowing space where the world used to be, and several confused and irate duplicates of the same person wandering around in place of  whatever random passerby had been there.  It was necessary, although deeply distressing, to destroy the world and reduce it to its component authors, although I don't know why.  The implication was, there was no real world, and when this process was finished it would just be this group of people chilling in an empty universe until they starved.

Anyway.  Headache making it difficult to think.

Weird.

I feel great.  Haven't taken any meds today, just water and caffeine.  Of course, I also haven't had the windows open or gone outside.

Anyway, feeling much better for the moment.

Time to Get Shit Done, I guess.  Make hay while the sun shines!

Lightning Age 3: LARP summary, part 3.

Somewhat belatedly, I know...

Now for the rest of the cast – the crew and passengers of the flagship of the Prussian submersible fleet, the U-19 Nautisch:

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Reading books by recently dead guys.

Read Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton, and finished The Girl Who Played With Fire.

Pirate Latitudes was pulp drivel, all the grunge of Pirates of the Caribbean and none of the charm.  A few interesting characters, who were promptly ignored in favor of the grim, stoic, industrious Antihero With A Plan.  Possibly it could have been made much better if Michael had still been alive to conspire with an editor; the world will never know.


The Girl Who Played With Fire was exactly the book Dragon Tattoo prepared me to expect.  The first hundred pages were totally irrelevant; later on a whole page was spent on an IKEA shopping trip where a sentence would have sufficed (and two pages later came another shopping trip -- this one a lean and admirable example of how to handle indirect characterization.  Everything Lisbeth bought said something about her state of mind.  Maybe if I knew every IKEA product by name the same would be true of the first trip; I doubt it.)  So the pacing is still a botch, the exposition still infodumpy, the prose still leaden in a way that may be a translation issue... but the pacing and exposition can't be, and the prose is consistent with them. 

That said.  More strong women with more agency, although their sex lives are still either centered around the author-insert male protagonist or used for audience titillation.  To me, a slightly better emphasis on systemic violence against women -- it didn't feel as much like it was being exploited for fetish fuel at the same time it was being decried, though obviously Your Mileage May Vary.  The action sequences and the suspense of the third act were superb, with a few hiccups.  All in all, the last third of the book was The Empire Strikes Back, Kill Bill, and that weird bit of The Fellowship of the Ring where a fox narrates a scene all rolled into one.

I intend to read the third book as well, and I am enjoying the series, but all in all it's uneven enough that I don't really recommend it to anyone who didn't already intend to read it for their own reasons.  I wish Stieg Larsson had been around longer to master his craft (and probably benefit from some therapy); I think he had interesting stories to tell and I would have been interested to see 'em.