(no subject)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Baen Free Library. This may not be news, but it's new to me. The link sends you to an explanation of it, but it boils down to lots of Baen's classic books available to read for free online. (I don't have a reader so didn't investigate whether they were downloadable.) It includes a number of books I've been meaning to read, including some that were just recced to me.

And my work ethic goes pbththththth.

Barbarians at the Gate

Last week I watched Barbarians at the Gate, a made-for-tv movie from 1993 based on the book of the same name. I loved the book, so figured what the hell.

It was bad. Really bad.

The problems:
- The 90 minute movie kept pretty much all the events of the book. But the book is 600 pages long, a lot of that being background that explains why those events were significant. The movie just removed all the context, rendering everything meaningless.
- The movie retained the ninety billion characters with similar names. Having faces to go with the names didn't really help clarify things.
- It's a business history, so all the action is people talking to each other. Specifically in conference rooms. There's one bit where some people run down the sidewalk, but that's about it. And you can make a dramatic movie with people just talking to each other, but you need titanic actors. This didn't have any.

What it did have was Jonathan Pryce playing Henry Kravis like a half-asleep Bond villain.

I learned one thing from it--that the last name Greeniaus, which I'd been thinking of as "Green-ee-ouse," is actually pronounced "Greh-nus." Assuming the movie got that right.