For professional and expert users, however, there are some things that could be improved. First, afaik Google Book’s metadata is a total mess. Doesn’t it WorldCat have an api? Since my main goal was to alphabetize my books and keep track of them, super-detailed metadata was not that important, but I have a feeling that this app could easily be improved if the developers found cleaner catalogs to consult. Or maybe its not.

Secondly, and more importantly, is exporting your data. The app features a super-convenient option to export your data in SQL or CSV formats, but few of these formats are supported by standard bibliography software. As a result, getting your data out of the app and into Sente, Papers, Zotero, Mendeley, BibDesk, or even EndNote can be a pain. Even more important than getting clean metadata, then, is producing an ability to export records in bibtex format, which iirc is more or less the defacto standard these days.

Overall, this is a great app by a great developer that is undoubtedly one of the best (if not the best) of its kind. I very highly recommend it — and with just a few more tweaks it will have all of the ridiculously specialized features that niche users like me clamor for!

The goal and format The Sake Handbook is a good idea — this is no coffee table book of beautiful pictures of sake bottles. Instead it introduces the reader to sake through the brewing process, explaining a welter of names and methods slowly and logically as it takes you through the production process. Subsequent chapters take you through Japanese tasting terms, different kinds of sake, drinking vessels, and so forth. These chapters successfully keep the reader from entering Overwhelm Mode by repeatedly defining Japanese terms when used (a glossary is also included, which is good). The prose is clear, although it also seems repetitive and padded — I’m not sure if the author was trying to lengthen this already-short book, or simply an attempt to make the volume welcoming to readers. Often, however, it just makes it hard to find information. The chapter on Ginjoshu, for instance, doesn’t actually explain what Ginjoshu is until you are a page and seven paragraphs in to it. Sometimes authors write forgetting how little their readers know compared to them — it seems like this might be the case here, where long digressions and reflections get in the way of serious information. If anything, much of the text could be reduced to helpful tables and charts which would orient the reader to topics like brewing method, taste terms, and so forth.

It get worse. Some of the chapters of this book are downright unhelpful. The section on ‘collecting sake labels’ is not actually about collecting sake labels but a discussion of the most common kanji characters that appear on sake labels. Readers searching for tips on getting labels off bottles, descriptions of how collectors organize their collections, etc. will have to look elsewhere. The chapter on sake bars in Japan and wholesalers in the US — 37 pages — will not be of use to most readers. Perhaps the intended audience is anglophone expats in Japan? At any rate for those of us in the rest of the world this section is of little use — the list of wholesalers in my state is already out of date. Honestly: who needs a phonebook when you have Google?

The most egregious problem with the book is the main section: the 100 pages of recommended sake to try. This section consists of pictures of sake labels and one paragraph reviews of the sake in question. This is the expert, value-added core of the book — it could be used as a guide for first-timers looking to try different sakes, or to read about sakes they have tried at a restaurant or bar. Unfortunately, the sakes are organized by the geographical region of their brewery, from north to south. It’s ridiculous. This essentially means it is impossible to browse the list on the basis of any of the criteria a reader would actually use: alphabetical listings of brands, types of sake, flavors, suggested lists of sakes for tastings, and so forth. The index does list brands, so the book is not a total waste, but it is certainly a disappointment.

Let’s face it: compared to the relatively well-written Wikipedia page on sake and the many brewery website out there, Gauntner’s book falls short. If you are not good at using the Internet and want to learn more about sake, it will do the job. But at base the book’s value proposition falls short: despite assertions to the contrary, you can beat free — but in order to do so you need to curate information better than this. A useful book, but I have to admit I’m a little disappointed that I bought it.

The Dungeon Saga has been compared to a lot of other games, but is best conceived as a cross between Puzzle Quest and Dungeon Raid. You character advances across a very basic map and fights individual monsters like Puzzle Quest, but the battles are done using a match-3 mechanic like Dungeon Raid’s. Leveling, climbing up skill trees, and buying equipment all follow the Dungeon Raid mechanic. Derivative? Yes. But a lot of fun to play.

The game is attractive and gameplay requires thinking a step ahead. Anyone will enjoy the game, but it also has the depth necessary to keep the attention of ‘serious casual’ players. There are some missteps — after a while the music gets annoying, but you cannot turn it off without also turning off the sound effects. It would be nice to know how much gold you have when battling monsters, but this data isn’t available in the game display. You cannot read the description of skill higher up the skills tree unless you are ready to unlock them, which makes it hard to plan your progress. Not this this matters, since customization choices are pretty limited.

The biggest issue with the game is balance: like Puzzle Quest, you play against monsters, but like Dungeon Raid you earn gold and experience by matching them off the board. This fact, combined with how incredibly easy the first six levels are, mean that you spend most of the early game grinding gold and experience.

The Dungeon Saga lacks the depth and polish of a classic like Swords and Poker, but the mechanics feel less tacked-on than those in the latest version of Dungeon Raid, and the interface is iOS native, unlike Puzzle Quest. If you’re looking for an entrée into the genre, or just a light experience, this would be a good title to pick up on sale.

I’m still never going to give Facebook more data than I absolutely need to in order to communicate with my friends. But I recently reread the Amazon and iTunes TOS and I see that both now give themselves a nonexclusive license to your work, rather than just taking your copyright (as it use to iirc). I can live with that.

So In My Copious Free Time I might be able to squeeze out a recommendation or two… maybe… that’s the plan anyway…

There are lots of good things about the show. The supporting cast is strong: Guy of Gisbourne scowls darkly, and he is just the start of it. Keith Allen’s vaugely-swish Sherrif (“would you chose a woman over all this… this… POWER?!?”) is a great baddie. It is Lucy Shelton Griffiths, however, who steals the show. Refreshingly Rubenesque, agentive, and non-blond, Shelton’s Griffith’s Marion is a marvelously strong — and, frankly, extremely beautiful — woman. In fact the best pasts of the show are the scene work between her and Jonas Armstrong, which shows off how complex and torn their relationship is: he trying to win her heart by protecting her, even as she searches for a lover who realizes that she does not need protecting, but seeks to protect others. In fact, the show has a lot of scenes like this which are far better than they have any right to be. The plot centers around the destruction of happy families by oppressive forces, and a surprising amount of their plight is genuinely touching, walking a fine line between melodrama on the one hand and emotionally empty move-the-plot-alongism on the other. This, along with the fact that the first season has an actual arc, raises Robin Hood above your average Hollywood fare.

Which is good, because these days LA sets high standards for action which Robin Hood does not meet. This is one of the weaknesses of the show: despite their attempts, the British simply lack the sensibility — so exemplified in Xena, for instance — requires to take a warehouse full of costumes and a bunch of stuntmen-turned-actors and produce genuine Cheap Action. The fight scenes are only so-so, and not enough is done with the conceit of Robin as the master archer. Even the opening theme-song was preformed with full brass fanfare played by trained musicians and not turned out by a guy with a synthesizer living in Santa Monica who uses his bedroom for his office, which is the way cheap actions shows should have their fanfares made.

Ultimately, however, the greatest weakness of the show is Robin Hood himself. Is he a rollicking adventurer whose effortless competence means he has never lost and never learned to grieve? Is his pure good-heartedness untouched by a sense of moral complexity? Or is he, as the show suggests, a deeply religious patriot, a nobleman accustomed to leading and being obeyed whose benevolent paternalism is challenged by Marion’s feminist demands for parity? Is he driven by vanity, or by a desperate need for affirmation fulfilled only by the adulation of the crowd? Is he the scarred war vet whose experiences of combat have given him hidden emotional depth or a man of integrity who emerged from the Crusades unscarred only by clinging to his values? Armstrong’s Robin Hood promises to be a complex mix of all of these things, but ultimately comes across as incoherent rather than nuanced: haunted one minute, happy the next, but never realizing that tantalizing goal of becoming a truly compelling and multifaceted character. Its hard to tell whether it is the writers’ fault or Armstrong’s or both, but it is a failure that turns a potentially great show into a merely good one.

Before Spartacus began a little message popped up on the screen reassuring us that what we are about to see seems so shocking only because “that’s how things really were back then”. This was an excuse that I bought in HBO’s “Rome”, which did a wonderful job portraying the period it took place in, even if at times you did wonder whether some scenes absolutely had to be set in the middle of an orgy, and whether the Mad Men-esque ethnograhic detailing would appeal to anyone other than Classicists and randy teenagers. I didn’t care for 300 too much, but I admit that it’s well done, and I get why people like it — and of course they threw realism out the door immediately: if they hadn’t they would have had to call it “300 and their 9000 slaves”.

The idea that Sparticus’s violence is somehow not ‘over the top’ but ‘period’ is ridiculous — unless you think that iron-age Thrace is the kind of place where time suddenly slowed down and people threw buckets of blood in slow motion across people watching pitched battles. Equally, most of the sex was Spartacus-as-dildo: close up shots of his hot wife Liking It ending with an incredibly uninteresting All American heterosexual simultaneous orgasm, missionary position and all. There are certain moments in the show when I wonder “what is the director thinking?” except I already know the answer, which is “I know, let’s end this scene with… cunnilingus!”

Ultimately this is the real problem with Spartacus: its not the amounts of sex and violence, it’s how poorly its done. The balletic ultraviolence of 300 has been replaced with gory, by-the-numbers action scenes. Rome’s scene of James Purefoy au naturel getting dried off with a strigil — carefully designed to show off James Purefoy, make a point about Roman perceptions of rank and nudity, and, especially, demonstrate the use of a strigil — has been replaced by the usual large amount of totally naked chicks and just a couple of guys not wearing shirts. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for weird, derivative movies — Brotherhood of the Wolf anyone? — but Spartacus isn’t one of them.

Back in the immediate post-9/11 world people spent a lot of time comparing the US to Rome: imperial ambitious, shared trajectories of decadence, hubris, and decline. Spartacus has some interesting touches (the transitions between scenes through morphing backgrounds and zooming in on maps), but when watching it I can’t help feeling like one of the bloodthirsty, sybaritic bystanders in the show itself. How far we have come from Laurence Olivier hitting on Tony Curtis by talking about seafood. If we keep going at this rate, I shudder to think what is going to go down in the Ben Hur remake.

There were moments of sparkling dialogue — mostly of the DeWitt Vs. Guys In Suits variety — but I for one miss the days when in the course of 90 seconds Joss could simultaneously give David Boreanaz a cameo on the last episode of Buffy, explain why he wasn’t going to be on for longer than that, and tie up stuff with Buffy in a realistic way but non-subplot starting way. The scene where Bamber is convinced Dushka is spy and she explains away her attempting to break into his desk as a sign of her enthusiasm to find out where their honeymoon will be was very nicely written but man did the Topher/Saunders scene not do the work it was supposed to dramatically, although it did give me a very good sense of what the writers were striving for.

Meanwhile, we did get to see Apollo and Wesley again which is welcome and I look forward to seeing how they get incorporated into the show as Joss moves towards sukkot, and I’m hoping we’ll get to see Alan Tudyk before simchah torah. We’ll see — overall I’m guardedly optimistic that Joss will make good on the ‘do-over’ that Fox has handed him.

I imagine that Dollhouse is going to be canceled after the season finale, since it has gotten so good. It is a pity — Joss is really warming up to using the chair. We’ve seen dead people, children meeting different versions of themselves, attic’d employees put back in the bodies of dolls, and now we know Tudyk has been on a steady diet of egg whites, toast, and exercise in order to fit snugly into his probably-organic-cotton doll jammies.

Maybe it’s Joss’s fault for making shows that don’t get really going until people have already given up on them, or maybe people who like to watch good TV just do it over the Internet now. Even if they do cancel Dollhouse, at least the Tudyk-reveal last night gave me a ‘wtfbbqsauce’ moment the likes of which I haven’t had in _years_. Literally.

On the one hand, the show burrows down through multiple layers of reality anchored below the dollhouse — the various fantasy worlds the show uses to undress and imperil Dushku in each episode. This is a fantasy situation for the writers — the story arc of the Dollhouse reality can be interrupted in any episode by a one-off episode that can literally be about anything: its a situation drama without a situation. Or rather one which is a metasituation which can accommodate any number of stories inside itself.

Its also interesting to think about the character development that occurs between the Dollhouse reality and stata beneath it. The dolls and their support staff develop relationships in and through interactions in the lower reality. The friendship between Sierra and Echo thus develop half consciously (or not) (or consciously to a degree that the audience is not yet privy to) while they are other people.

On the other hand, you can’t give Joss a chair that erases your personality and not expect to see the technology ramify upwards. Honestly: Do you think Olivia Williams knows who she actually is? As the show looks for dramatic wallop it will surely give it to us by building narratives above the Dollhouse reality in which staff supposedly secure in their identities are revealed to be programmed pawns of bigger actors with darkly shrouded identities.

So despite the gross sexualization of Dushku the show has potential — there is always the possibility of the gross sexualization of Tahmoh Penikett and Dichen Lachman to look forward to, for instance. But seriously, despite my mixed feelings for the first couple of episodes, its clear that the world of Dollhouse is a big playground, and I look forward to seeing how Joss plays with it.