Reading Mary Roach's Stiff reminded me of having a really great party conversation with someone who happens to have a small volume of esoteric knowledge. It's witty, a pleasure to absorb, chocked full of anecdotes, peppered with wonderfully weird trivia, and isn't something you're likely to get anywhere else. But, like any party conversation, it isn't meant to go on for too much longer than the duration of the party, which is the only flaw in this otherwise thoroughly entertaining and creepy look at how we treat ourselves after we aren't ourselves anymore.

There are plenty of animated films with superb drawing, and plenty with stunning computer animation, but I haven't seen many that blend them with the effortless success of Blood: The Last Vampire, which I bought today.

The premise is well worn: there are vampires, we need to kill them. How do we do that? Well, how about an ambiguously vampirish-but-human assassin? The plot itself is fairly basic, but the execution is completely solid and visually stunning in a completely unassuming way. The simplest or most innocuous scenes often grab your eye the most. A bus turning, a plane taxiing on the runway, or the motion of the camera amongst the army base setting often cause a bigger 'wow' moment than the dramatic fight scenes. The more obviously dimensional computer graphics are truly integrated into the style of the production and fit seamlessly into the over production design. I don't know that I've ever seen any film do it that well yet (Blood was released in 2000). It's worth watching it just for these beautiful moments.

Prima Games’ making-of book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar is a good read and a worthwhile purchase, if you really enjoy the Half-Life series, the story of the universe Valve has created, and are interested in game design.

Unfortunately, the most interesting part of the book is also the least prevelant: the writing. While the sketches, early character, vehicle and monster models, level designs, and other visuals are gorgeous and fascinating, and provide the subject matter for the text, they are just a large collection of pretty pictures without the narrative. And, frankly, the text that is there is great.

I'm sitting in a community coffee shop with my book, my laptop, Alisa, and lots of other people's children. Watching the people around me, I've determined that cocktail parties, and really any adult social gathering, would be infinitely cooler and more fun if they ran the way small children interact when meeting each other for the first time.

Imagine, instead of sitting at the intersection of two couches in someone's living room, trying to balance your crappy box wine in one hand and 85 cheese cubes on a dish the size of a silver dollar in the other, you were piled onto an arm chair with 3 other people. Two of you are upside down, dress/bulky sweater over your faces, another one is wandering away clutching a cup the size of their torso (possibly singing), and the last one is kind of bopping to an internal rhythm, bumping into the person next to them, who is totally cool with it.