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the PODCAST
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the INTERVIEWS
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  • MSJOM Podcast
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  • the INTERVIEWS
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Defective Geeks - – blog, podcast and geeks
BOOK, INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: Jo Treggiari, author of ‘Ashes, Ashes’

Ashes, Ashes focuses on survivor, Lucy “Lucky” Holloway, a teenage girl. While an epidemic killed her entire family and most of humanity, Lucy avoided becoming sick and dying from the plague. Then when natural disaster decided to wipe out what was left of human civilization, she still found a way to live.

Despite all the loss she had suffered through Lucy is still very much a teenager, clumsy and insecure. All on her own she found the courage to keep waking up every day with just a single survival guide to tell her how to live. It is lonely and brutal. Lucy thought she would have to keep hiding and scavenging for what little food was left for the rest of her life, however long that may be.

Then one day she met another survivor, a teenage boy named Aidan. Lucy had an aversion to other people and had trouble trusting them. In the end, people need other people and faith pushes Lucy to Aidan’s direction. She joins a community of other survivors where she learns again what it was like to live and work with other people. She also faces her fears, finds deeper courage and new truths begin to unravel. Is there hope for human beings to survive?

Ashes, Ashes is a dark imagining of what could happen to our world and exposes the fragility of human beings. The author, Jo Treggiari  hones in to a world that gave you a feeling of: this could happen. Yes, I do recommend you read the book especially if you like young adult dystopian novels. It is very well written and the touch of suspense will definitely hook you. I love that the female main character is honest. Even though I am way past the age, she felt like a true teenager and someone relatable despite the extreme situation she is in.

I love Jo and I “twitter” with her constantly. I finally asked her to do an interview for the blog and was delighted that she said yes!

Continue reading

September 22, 2011by Space Pirate Queen
BOOK, GEEK REVIEWS

Book Review: Fallacy by Adam Whitaker

Fallacy Cover

Fallacy by Adam Whitaker

Fallacy follows the ups and downs in the life of Mortimer Bigsby and those around him. The title is apt in that the story deals with people’s misconceptions of each other and of their own lives and the chaos and occasional beauty that results from those fallacies. There’s a great deal of absurdity, much of it stemming from Mortimer himself, but the book also deals with some serious issues like faith, religion, and abortion.

It was actually the serious subjects that felt most out of place. As a reader I was quite ready to accept the ridiculous things that Mortimer and those around him did. What I had a harder time swallowing were the interjections of what felt directly like the Author’s opinion, not the character’s, about subjects like faith and abortion. It reminded me of War and Peace, when Tolstoy would break from the story and rant about Napoleon and history for a few pages. Unfortunately, in Fallacy, Whitaker remained in character when this happened and it felt incredibly out of sync with the rest of the story.

Where Whitaker succeeded most was in developing his characters. He is quite talented at painting a portrait of who a person is by describing the small things that make up their life. The intricacy of everyone’s relationships and how they change over time is deftly handled. Family gatherings stick out as fine points where characters we see only for a few pages become three-dimensional and you can empathise with them and maybe even pity them for the choices they made that led them to that point in their life.

Overall, I feel Fallacy is a good character study, but suffers from losing focus on that and side tracked by unrelated topics.

September 10, 2011by Pilbeam
ART, BOOK, GEEK REVIEWS

ART: Day from Marie Lu’s LEGEND + Book Review & Interviews

Marie Lu and I made a deal awhile ago. Well… after I threatened that I would break into her apartment with a hanger and steal one of her books if she didn’t give me one freely. Therefore, she was forced to give me an ARC (advanced reading copy) of her book, LEGEND. In exchanged, she requested a watercolor painting and I happily obliged!

Click for a bigger view.

On a slight more serious note, when I found out that Marie was a secret, ninja writer and her book is going to be released in November– my mind was pretty much blown. It’s kind of awesome to know someone personally who is a YA author and who is getting published through Penguin Group. Not only that but a movie deal on top of it. Whaaaaaat! Too awesome! Why do I know such amazing people?

The above painting is of Day, the main male protagonist in LEGEND. He also stars in one of her unpublished, past novel (which I also forced her to hand over to me– I’m pretty persuasive, what can I say? ;]) and I found it kind of neat that she brought him back to a new story. In my younger years, I’ve also done a lot of original character recycling in comics, stories and role playing. I can sympathize with a creator’s attachment to their characters.

But back to LEGEND. Read more for an exclusive interview with both Day and the author.

Continue reading

August 25, 2011by Space Pirate Queen
COSPLAY, EVENTS

Cosplay in America, Launch Party

Cosplay in America is a photography book by Ejen Chuang. In 2009, he went to six different anime conventions across the country, compiling photos for the book.

The result? The first and most extensive documentation of last year’s generation of cosplayers in America.

All characters, all races, all genders are featured in this book– and if you’re familiar with the convention scene, you would probably recognize quite a few people. The book is straightforward but its design is quite sleek and cool– Cheung took great care with all the pictures. All his photos reflect how much he admires the hobby and the people who love it.

The launch party book was hosted in Royal-T’s backroom. Quite a good crowd of photographers, onlookers and cosplayers showed up. Yes, I did decide to cosplay for the event just to get into the spirit of things, of course! Though it isn’t easy to take pictures while other people are taking yours! It is definitely a strange feeling every time I put on a costume again, but I can’t always deny my love for dressing up.

CLICK HERE for those morbidly curious about my old cosplay years!

Cosplay in America//Launch PartyCosplay in America//Launch PartyCosplay in America//Launch Party

Nonetheless, I believe the party was a success and everyone was enthusiastic about the book. Others were excited to see cosplayers featured in the book show up and I spotted a lot of autograph signing.

Tune in Tokyo (currently featured in LA Weekly’s Best of LA People 2009!)  kept the Japanese music pumping in the room. Cosplayers jumped on the dance floor to show off their para para moves (my videos of those will be uploaded soon, by the way!) and eager voices sang along with the Pokemon theme song.

Cosplay in America//Launch Party

Cosplay-lovers should definitely add this book to their collection. It is a good representation of– well, cosplay in America!

The book sold out at the party, but Chuang is taking more pre-orders at his website and you can find him at conventions selling copies.

Cosplay in America Website

Cosplay in America Twitter

Don’t forget to check out his website for more information.

Watch the slideshow of the photos I took at the event:

CLICK HERE to view the flickr gallery.

May 24, 2010by Space Pirate Queen
GEEK REVIEWS

The Golden Compass: Or how to get lost in religious debate


I read the Golden Compass and accompanying books when I was in high school. I found the first one interesting, the second one a bit odd, and the third one terrible. I went away from the trilogy wondering why everyone thought it was amazing.

Fast forward six years. I work in a games company and hang out with people who actually read. One night we got to discussing why I love ‘kids’ books and they assumed I must love the His Dark Materials trilogy. I revealed that I didn’t like it. In actual fact, I was apathetic at that point. I didn’t remember much about it except that it left a bad taste in my mouth when I finished it. They were shocked. They all felt it was a fabulous trilogy, ground breaking etc etc etc.

I began to wonder, had my teenage self miss-judged the series? Was I too self-involved, or uneducated in religious symbolism and history to understand these so-called amazing books? I wasn’t sure. I hardly ever change my opinion on a book, I know what I like and what I don’t like, sometimes I can even articulate why.

So, I decided that with the movie coming out shortly, it was time to reread the trilogy and see if I was incorrect in my first impression. Well…I wasn’t. I still can’t stand them.

The first book starts out well enough, the story is interesting, the characters somewhat compelling. I got annoyed at his bizarre choice to rename common things from our world in Lyra’s just to make it more fantastical. Like he says to himself, “Hmmmmm, how do I create a believable fantasy world with the least amount of effort? I know, I’ll take random words and find different root words for them. It’ll make me look really clever and like I put a lot of effort into it.” This concept irritated me because it threw me out of the story. I would try and imagine the scene in my head only to get stuck on a word and go, “Wait, what the hell is anbaric? Is it gas, electric, candle?” and then have to reread the passage because I’d lost the flow.

But the first book isn’t that bad, all things considered. It holds together pretty well as long as he doesn’t talk about Dust. It’s almost as if even he can’t decide what the hell Dust is.

-Nancy

The second book just isn’t really that memorable. You get through it quickly because you know you need to. Will is so flat as a character and I really just didn’t care about him. It’s also in this book where everyone starts acting more like super heroes than people. The characters are presented as normal in the first book, but suddenly some of them (namely Mrs Coulter) can now do whatever they want, without proper explanation.

The third book is the worst by far. It’s long and blustery and mostly pointless. More and more the characters have these insane abilities and knowledge of what they have to do, and considering this is mostly a war to get rid of God, they sure seemed blessed with powers to do so. But more on that later. My real gripe with the third one is the terrible editing. There’s a good three chapters about a stupid bomb that has nothing WHAT SO EVER to do with the main plot. You could rip those pages out and nothing would be lost. Nothing. What kind of editor did this man have? Next gripe is those weird mulefas. I mean, come on. It’s the same problem Star Wars books have, they create these absolutely mind blowing creatures that I can’t even begin to imagine so I’m stuck with this ugly horse/elephant/on roller skates in my head.

And can we stop being all “Oooooooh be one with the earth” crap? Yes, we get it, their world is perfectly fucking balanced. It’s so simplistically balanced they can explain it with elephant trunks! Not like our world where we can only begin to understand the causes and effects of the environment on larger scales and can’t comprehend it on small scale at all. Yeah, that’s a great piece of writing; let’s point out the flaws of humanity by making a metaphor that doesn’t work.

Finally, the ending of the third book just sucks. But, that’s not really a gripe with his writing so much as it made me regret reading the whole series because it’s such a downer. I’m not even one that has to have happy endings, but after all that bullshit you read through to get to the end and that’s it? Shit, I’d rather watch Old Yeller.

Now, about this whole religious controversy, everyone keeps saying it’s promoting atheism. Well, the definition of atheism is “the doctrine or belief that there is no God.” It seems to me that if they’re going to war with “The Authority” then in the terms that we have defined Atheism, the book isn’t promoting atheism because it states there is a God. The important point is Pullman is saying the God we’ve come to believe isn’t the creator, but that doesn’t mean he’s saying there isn’t one. So, get off his back and stop giving the Atheists a bad name.

As for whether or not Pullman is having a go at the Catholic church, well, considering he’s having a war on the one true God (which involves several religions, let’s not get self-obsessed here) then he’s really writing a book against all organized religions. So, everybody should be pissed off, not just the Catholics.

Personally, I don’t see why the church is paying any attention. Whatever his book is saying, it’s badly written and confusing so why pay it any heed? They’re just drawing more attention to it. I think their time is much better spent banning Harry Potter which is at least teaching children morals and that doing what is right isn’t easy. God wouldn’t want that now would he/she?

December 7, 2007by Pilbeam
EVENTS

West Hollywood Book Fair

Yesterday, a friend and I went to the West Hollywood Book Fair– which I found out about mostly because David Mack was there for a panel. The fair was a little disappointing. The variety of books for sale was lacking– at least, I didn’t see anything besides New Age and sex books. Which are fine… but not what I wanted to shop for, really! We ended up hanging out at the comic books and sci-fi pavilion; and wasting money on some crappy crepes some guys were cooking at a food booth. Bad food is always so disappointing….

We mostly littered about the Golden Apple and Tokyopop booth. Pawing at comic books and bothering people… the usual!

The first thing we did was Mack’s panel which we were a little late on. Here are some photos and a video clip from the panel.

And just because she’s a doll, here’s my friend Anna. I don’t know what she was laughing at… I think it was me she was laughing at. Yeah. That makes sense.

I did actually buy one book under Anna’s recommendation. I might do a review of it here in the future– I think it’s going to be a rather interesting book. Anna said the words “cannibalism” and “gay sex” and I was easily won over…. till next time!

October 2, 2007by Space Pirate Queen
GEEK REVIEWS

There and Back Again

Sorry for all that crazy downtime. Um. I really have no excuse for it except for my own stupidity. That is… I somehow misplaced the files for the site and accidentally overwrote it while working on another website.

Yeah. Homer Simpson ‘Do’h!’ moment.

But now we are back, and hopefully… we’ll stay awhile, with a change here and there on the site. Keep on watching and reading!

I dare say the new Hairy Pooner Harry Potter book came out, did it not? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. I missed all the Potter hootie-nannies last night. Instead, I went dancing at the Queen Marys with some friends. I’m a nerd who likes to dance, I can’t help it. Plus, standing around in line with a bunch of Potterheads wasn’t appealing enough.

Now, if the Weasley Twins were to be my date, then that’s a whole different story! But that’s pure fantasy in my head!

No, I haven’t bought my copy. In fact, I never bought a Harry Potter book in my life– my mommy buys them. She read them before I did and beat me on the head with them until I finally broke down. Great books, don’t get me wrong, but the hype still boggles my mind.

I heard of a story of a certain webstore that “accidentally” shipped the books a few days before it released. Scholastic is throwing a tantrum over it, which has me all dumbfounded. If this has happened to any other books, no one would give a flying pooper over it. Fandom and hype does strange things to the world, I swear.

Ah well. I still look forward to this so-called last book anyways. Though I’m sure there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to avoid spoilers at this point. I’m not one of those who feels the need to read the entire book within a 24-hour period. First off all, I like to read leisurely. Second of all, I’m not crazy. Third of all, I like to actually sleep. Last of all… I’m not crazy.

To each their own though– happy Potter time to all I hope!

July 21, 2007by Space Pirate Queen
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