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Going Back to Comics
note: this was written on 1 June then put into my blog queue I don’t remember exactly what made me decide to check out some new comics, but I think it was a mix of inventorying my comics and clicking over to the Whiskey Media site, Comic Vine. In the reviews for May’s comics, two…
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Nanowrimo 2010
So, I started working on my Nanowrimo partway through November. I quit partway through because I fell too far behind. So I reworked the story to have a better ending than the rambling mess it had become and tried to get some people to edit it for me. They’ve been busy and I’m sick of…
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Review: Dracula
Dracula by Bram Stoker My rating: 4 of 5 stars this review originally appeared on Good Reads Dracula is, like Frankenstein, a book that has influenced so much of our pop culture that we don’t even question that we know the facts of the book without having even read it. Before having read Dracula, I’d…
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Review: The Map of Time
The Map of Time: A Novel by Félix J. Palma My rating: 3 of 5 stars disclaimer: I won this book from Good Reads First Reads contest This review originally appeared on the Good Reads website Unsurprising for a novel about time travel, the contents of the book are not strictly chronological. Do not despair,…
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Review: Scott Pilgrim vs The World
It took a bit of convincing from Dan, but eventually I read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. I knew right away that this was a book written for people like me. Just like Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, people older or younger than me would never get the full appreciation of all the references. I thoroughly hated the…
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Participating in the 2010 NanoWrimo
Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start. I’d heard about it on NPR and on…
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Doctorow Review: Eastern Standard Tribe & A Place So Foreign and Eight More
On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil. We also quickly learn he believes himself…
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Review: Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Today I just finished Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s the first epub book I’ve ever read and the first ebook I’ve read that I hadn’t previously read as a physical book. I’d been wanting to read the book for a long time, but the idea of sitting at my desk…
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Rethinking Ebooks
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 – 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it…
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Stephenson Post CyberPunk
I read somewhere, maybe even Wikipedia, that the reason Bud dies so early in the The Diamond Age is that his character represents a stereotypical cyber-punk character and Stephenson is signaling that cyber-punk is over – this work of fiction is going beyond that. Stephenson then does a 90 degree turn genre-wise and does a…
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Another Crack at the Same Idea
Last weekend Danielle and I went to Borders so Danielle could check out the Buffy graphic novels and I could pick up Watchmen. While in the graphic novel section I started looking around to see what new books were out in this space and I came across Beyond Wonderland and Return to Wonderland, two comics…
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New Revenue Models
While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing. I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes. The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in…
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Review: The Discworld Series
Last week I finished the Discworld Series. I started with a few books early in 2008. From the first book, The Color of Magic, I fell in love with the series. Although I have found British television and movies to be hit or miss, I have loved all of the geek genre British books. So…
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Trudging through Lord of the Rings Part 4
I am now done with the entire story of the hobbits. Overall, I have enjoyed the books more than the movie. Here’s what I have to say about The Return of the King: I found the characters in the book seem a lot more hopeless than in the movie. I mean, the movie does a…