Went to see The Golden Compass last night and I have to say, the one things that irks me about fantasy stories is the need to romanticize war.

There is always this clear division between good and evil in such movies and I find it frustrating. Yes. It is just a movie. A kids movie. But war is the central theme to most any science fiction or fantasy story. Not only that, but the story glorifies and romanticizes the fight against the impending evil. Why is this? Are we teaching kids, in order for good to triumph, to get what one wants, is to seek out evil and destroy it. I enjoy the idea of seeking out what may be hindering us and fighting it, but the source is rarely evil or purposely out to destroy us.

What would fantasy books and movies look like without war?

I’ve been playing with Hulu.com for the past week and I honestly have to say that I love it! I almost never watch network television so I don’t even know when what few shows I like are even on. I’ve gone through all the Office episodes they have as well as some of the Kitchen Nightmares and 30 Days (Morgan Spulocks show) episodes.

The quality of the video playback is quite nice and the “commercials”, while annoying, are generally pretty quick. One annoyance with the commercials is that you are actually forced to watch them. So if I have a video playing and I open a new tab, say to check my gmail, and the video progresses to a commercial, it will stop playing all together. I have to switch back to the Hulu tab for the ad to play through. Obviously this half makes sense and can help act as a timed-pause feature – why would I be surfing another site while watching a video, right? One huge plus is that once you watch a commercial within a single video, that’s it. You do not have to watch it again, unless of course you refresh the page.

A couple cool features are the Lower Lights and the Trim Embed Clip features. The Lower Lights feature does just that, it dims the page around the video, similar to Lightbox. The Trim Embed Clip lets you trim a video so you can embed just the chunk of the video you’d like to.

The Office: Local Ad