I'm going to talk about the Obernewtyn Chronicles today.

( Cut for spoilers for the Stone Key and the Gathering, I guess. Not that anybody really cares )

Also, the descriptions of the books in the Obernewtyn Chronicles are amusing in their inaccuracies, so I'm going to nitpick them. In red font!

Obernewtyn
In a post-apocalypse world,
That's grammatically incorrect. I believe you mean "post-apocalyptic world".
Elspeth is one of a new breed of mind thinkers
Mind thinkers? ...Mind thinkers? I think the person that wrote this was trying to say that she has psychic powers, but I don't know what they thought "mind thinker" was supposed to mean.
and seeks the truth of her strange powers.
No she doesn't. She has no reason to disbelieve the theory that her powers come from nuclear fallout, and searching for an alternative explanation would be kind of dangerous, considering she'd be at the risk of being burned at the stake if the wrong person found out what she could do.
A search inevitably leads her to the sinister and mysterious Obernewtyn.
Obernewtyn is indeed sinister and mysterious in this book, but saying that her search that she didn't actually embark upon inevitably lead to Obernewtyn makes it sound like there was more than search and she got to Obernewtyn every time. But it still says "a" search, as in just one. Did anyone proofread these?

The Farseekers
Their refuge, Obernewtyn, is under threat.
I guess who "they" are isn't as ambiguous as I first thought, but I'm pretty sure Obernewtyn wasn't any more threatened than normal at the time this book starts. At the end, yes. But that doesn't drive the plot.
Only Elspeth and her allies have any hope of resisting the forces of evil.
And the rebels! And the Twentyfamilies! And the Sadorians! And the beasts, up to point! I think this is kind of a weird thing to say anyway, since the "forces of darkness" are specifically attacking them, according to the first sentence. If they didn't have any hope, it'd be a pretty depressing book.
And time is running out.
Can't argue with that, though it doesn't really mean anything. Time is always running out.

Ashling
Elspeth's old enemy Ariel is back and is seeking revenge,
Define "back". He's in every book, antagonising Elspeth from behind the scenes. His presence is more important to this book than to the last one, but only slightly.
and she herself must finally confront her feelings for Rushton...
This summary is okay, I guess. That sentence is 100% accurate, at least.

The Keeping Place
Dameon is kidnapped
Rushton is kidnapped. Dameon isn't in most of the book, but not because he's kidnapped. How can you get Dameon and Rushton confused? They're both characters Elspeth is close to, and they're not even that similar.
and the Misfits are forced to offer themselves to the rebels.
I don't know if I just have a dirty mind, but that phrasing is really unfortunate. I don't think Rushton's kidnapping had anything to do with them deciding to help the rebels anyway. They'd decided to do it even before that happened.
Elspeth journeys to Sador with Dragon,
Firstly, Dragon's in a coma and isn't fit to journey anywhere. Secondly, Elspeth doesn't go anywhere near Sador in this book. I suspect that this part is talking about when Elspeth goes into Dragon's dreams while trying to wake her up, but the place in Dragon's dream isn't Sador either. How little attention would you have to be paying to not notice this? Elspeth mentions that it's a dream about a billion times!
and there she finds the fifth and last sign in her quest.
That's accurate. It's the fifth sign, but she finds it first. But I'm not sure how that works.

I haven't seen summaries that bad since the blurb for Silver Mantle, either a children's or YA fantasy novel. If I recall correctly, that set up a subplot that's resolved in like two chapters as the plot for the entire book.

...

MIND THINKERS.

Okay, the Magic School Bus Explores The Solar System computer game. I can handle a group of kids standing on the surface of Venus only protected by flimsy-looking spacesuits. I can even deal with Liz's increasingly annoying voice. But you do not tell the kids that beyond Pluto, there's nothing but space until the next star. Won't somebody please think of the Kuiper Belt? It thinks of you... naked. Wait, that's bisexuals. But still, that the first Kuiper Belt Object discovered only two years before this game was released is no excuse to act like it doesn't exist. Its existence had been speculated on since 1943! They don't have to go there, after all, they didn't go to the asteriod belt either. Just mention it. I don't see the concept being too complex for the target age group. It's just a belt.

And what was with the Io level? I remember Saturn's rings and Neptune being hard, though they were really easy when I played them today, but I couldn't get to the coin on Io at all. If you hid a weight behind that lava flow that no longer hurt me because I was lugging around a snowman, very funny. Venus was harder than I remember, too. Stupid lava flows and poisonous clouds.

Shut up, Liz!

(Actually, I had fun, even if it doesn't look like it from this post. I just like criticising stuff)

I'd almost finished the first part of the screencap adventure thingy I was going to do for The Neverhood when I did an extremely intelligent thing and Googled something from the tab I was using. When I went back, I would've been okay if I hadn't been prompted to restore from the saved draft. For some strange reason, I'd assumed that the draft it spoke of had been saved sometime today, so I clicked okay. In fact it had been saved sometime yesterday. I had a backup text file, which was slightly more out of date.

I spent half the evening on this. Now I'll have to redo it. Crap. At least I can remember some of the things I said.

Why do I keep having dreams that unsettle me? I'm scared of ants, and I keep dreaming about them, and last night I had a dream that I got dropped off on Black Mountain, only I didn't realise it was Black Mountain until I saw the Telstra Tower. Seeing the Telstra Tower close up freaks me out even when I'm prepared for it, so that was a big shock. Also, I don't think the back of Black Mountain is covered in dry grass, but it was a dream, so whatever.

Anyway. I was thinking about fanfiction premises and whether any could be inherently OOC and impossible to do well. And I decided that they could.

( I also decided to post about it. I'm really only talking about one fic here )

( I've been rereading a lot of Homestar Runner fanfiction lately, and one thing that really irks me is how Strong Sad is usually portrayed. )

I feel better now. I'd post this to fanficrants but all I'd get would be "there's a fandom for Homestar Runner? Seriously?" replies, so I don't really see the point. I hate those. But that is another rant. For another time.

I've noticed that when explaining things, especially on the net, some writers try to be familiar with you by beginning a sentence with "remember when." I think it's an attempt to put a difficult explanation in a familiar context, but the writers generally seem to assume that the reader is the same as they are. Which seems to be invariably an white, middle class, American man in his mid twenties. It gets annoying.

It's even more annoying when the writer refers to "mom and dad." Is this some sort of American thing? Shouldn't he at least say "your mom and dad?" I'd prefer "your parents," just because it's a bit more concise.

It would be okay without the pop culture references as well. No, I did not grow up on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or Thundercats. Those shows were from the 80's. I was born in 1989. I remember Blinky Bill, Super Ted, and Babar. And most of the shows on Australian network television in the 90's are not the same shows on American network television in the 90's.

My first memory of anything that even slightly "made history" was Sydney getting the 2000 Olympic Games. And that may have been a documentary.

So... Yeah. Twenty-something American males do not make up the entirety of the Internet.

Next week: My rant on the word folks, because it being an American slang word for "people" makes it OMGEVIL!!1!1! (Shot)

Disney's just beginning to really annoy me. Why are they only playing Dave the Barbarian during the school holidays? I like that show. I'm in the minority, I know, but I'm told that Kim Possible started out in much the same way. Which gives me hope. What was my point again? Ah yes, being annoyed that they took Dave the Barbarian off. Why not push Recess back, or get rid of one of the episodes of Lizzie Macguire they insist on showing from noon? I don't think that it'd be missed much. Beisdes, it's their own advertising that killed DtB anyway. Whoever makes the ads is really good at making the shows look stupid... I want Dave the Barbarian! *Annoyed* How can people who haven't watched it say that it's stupid? It's very random, yes, and a tad predictable, but not stupid. How can you call the line "I know! Let's have... a really bad chase scene!" and the Scooby Doo parody that followed "stupid"? And as for "Steve the egg"....