30 days of Night (review)

Stuck at Barrow Alaska for 30 days before the sun comes up again. Vampires come to town and take over, massacring the populace.

I liked this movie, it was well-paced and gave me a wonderful view of the carnage that was to come. The vampires were intelligent, and carefully eliminated contact between Barrow and the rest of the world, by destroying cell-phones, satellite link, and any vehicle capable of communication with the nearest town. This built the suspense for me quite nicely. It was good to see creatures written and played with some intelligence for once.

Once the vampires seal off the town, they go after the people, indulging their bloodlust and slaughtering the town. As the lead vampire said "we should have thought of this long ago." Once the initial attack is over ( and the smart townies go to ground early ), the vampires begin a systematic search of the town for the survivors they know are there, but the extreme conditions mask from them. The show loses a little of its early logic here for the sake of the story, so my criticism is more a nit than anything. The vampires go as far as to send a helpless victim they have kept alive, down the main street crying for help to lure out any good Samaritans.

The surviving townies do make a reasonable guess that the vampires hate sunlight for some reason, and test this theory by taking a big chance that lights in a hydroponic garden put out the proper light to injure the vampires. The guess proves correct and one vampire is badly fried by the exposure. The vampire-and-human chase continues for the entire 30 days, with the humans taking refuge in the attic of one home and then moving to a more defensible location.

The downside to the movie is that only the lead vampire seems capable of putting two and two together in an intelligent fashion, but his appearance always portrayed a shift in the situation, and the actor did a very good job in my mind of showing the vampire's inhuman, intelligent side. Again, a nit, but slightly bigger than the earlier one.

At the end, the vampires decide to burn the town and everything in it to preserve their anonymity. I'll leave the review off here to save the suspense.

I have been very vague with the review as the newspapers have already dissected the movie quite thoroughly, and because I wanted to leave you with a taste and not the whole plate. This review is to pique your interest, and if you do enjoy the vampire genre, this will be well worth your money in my opinion.

Sufficient to the day is the Weirdness contained therein

The title says it all in this instance. Why, oh why would anyone want to steal a full trashcan from our yard. You would think that if someone wanted the trash bin, they'd just dump the trash and take it, or if they wanted checking account numbers or credit card numbers they'd just grab a bag of trash. But, noooooo! They take the whole da** kit and kaboodle!

Lloyd has been wandering the neighborhood to see if he can spot the bin, and it shouldn't be hard to locate, being the only bright blue bin in a neighborhood of black. However, the two-day search to date has turned up nothing, and the bin wasn't grabbed by kids and taken into the woods, as though there are woods, they are too thin to hide a trash bin. We're going to chalk it up to 'the season' and let it go. But it is just da** weird.

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starts in a couple of days and I'm already clenching my teeth to keep from jumping the gun. I think I have a good layout for the next attempt at a 50,000+ word story. We'll see what happens though.

Also, to all of you who have taken the time to read this extremely erratic blog, thank you very much, I appreciate all the comments, as they do help me see things from a differenr perspective, and they do help me refine my writing. I can't tell you enough how much that means to me. Thank you.

Dead Air

In a previous post, Lloyd helped set down his ideas on how to build a character personality. Over the last few days with the City of Heroes Halloween Event going, I've had opportunity to team with some good teams. One ting I have found interesting though, is how each team, or more properly, members on the team handle long silences, or 'dead air'.

As a player I do not mind dead air at all. If I am in the middle of a fight, answering someone is not my top priority. Outside of action, there is time for conversation, which does not always happen. There are a few players that HAVE to fill that silence with a comment, a /tell, something so that the silence feels not so long and/or uncomfortable. Others, possibly because of shyness, or natural/character reticence, do nothing to fill that empty space.

You don't have to fill the 'dead air' with conversation, but you can do little things like ::looks around:: or some other small non-verbal activity. This doesn't have to happen all the time, nor should it. The idea is that if you are uncomfortable with long silences, this is a way to relieve that pressure and add to the game in some way for your teammates, that doesn't require a response from them. Odds are you might get one though. People are curious, and nothing piques curiosity like :: picks something up off the ground:: . My two cents.