Altivo

Furries in the library!

Someone lent Gary the Firefly/Serenity series on DVD. I had already heard enough about it to suspect it wouldn't appeal to me, but I agreed to watch some of it with him. Unfortunately, my prior assessment seems to be correct. We watched the first disc's worth, and I was quite put off by all the violence. Some of the story elements are interesting, but it seems to me that the main thing that is used to hold the series together (and keep the interest of viewers?) is regular doses of extreme violence. This certainly is alien to my own life experience and doesn't attract me at all. I can't understand why anyone would want to watch this stuff, frankly, but I feel the same about most television and films.

I've mentioned that I was listening to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in the car when driving to and from work. That's on CD and the car has a CD player. My old Jeep had a cassette player instead, so I used to listen to audiobooks using an mp3 player and one of those tape cassette adapters. Can't do that now. Consequently, the book on the mp3 player only gets listened to while doing barn chores. At the moment, that's the audio version of Brian Jacques' Redwall. The author himself is narrator, and multiple actors perform the character voices, which is nice because there are so many different dialects of British and Scottish English involved. I've been enjoying it quite a bit, which is a contrast to my experience a couple of years ago when I tried to listen to Mossflower while driving. That edition was on cassette tapes and the sound quality wasn't as good. I found that I couldn't follow the accents over the distractions of driving and the noisier background. However, they are no problem at all while filling water buckets and scooping manure. Hmmm.

I've also been reading Why Coyotes Howl by Watts Martin (published by Sofawolf.) This is an anthology of short stories, some definitely furry, some more marginal, and a couple that, while good enough stories, leave me puzzled as to why they were included in this particular collection. The furry stories are very good though, and I recommend the book to furry readers. I especially enjoyed the one set on a college campus and told from the viewpoint of a raccoon who is jealous of the cute vixens, mostly because, as we learn, she has a massive crush on a certain dog fox. The outcome was most satisfying...