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MxPx – Panic and Secret Weapon (Special Edition)
I continued to catch up with the MxPx back catalog and purchased both Panic and Secret Weapon. My initial feelings upon listening were that I liked a lot more songs on Secret Weapon. But maybe, as with Before Everything & After this would turn out to be just a first impression where when looking at…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue
Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue by Christie Yant My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is one of my favorite collections of stories and one of the best anthologies/magazines I’ve read so far in 2021. A lot of the stories in here a phenomenal. There are also a lot of…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014
Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was a GREAT issue. I don’t think there was one story that wasn’t top-notch. My favorite SF stories were Codename: Delphi and Exhalation. My favorite fantasy was The Only Death in the City. The Afterparty excerpt was great and I…
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Review: Third Daughter
Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn My rating: 4 of 5 stars I got this book as part of the Storybundle.com Extraordinary Steampunk Bundle. I had no idea what to expect when I started reading it. Based on the cover, I figured it was basically a Steampunk novel taking place in India rather than England.…
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MxPx – MxPx: You’re Never Too Old to Rock
Last October I came back to MxPx, as I detailed in this post about how the lyrics for Friday Tonight led me to finally watch Friday. Over the past half year I would return to their self-titled album on Spotify. (I don’t subscribe to Spofity, but I do use the free tier to discover new…
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MxPx – Before Everything & After: What if MxPx made a Good Charlotte album?
(the first 3 paragraphs are a slight modification of what I wrote for an Amazon review) The headline kind of gives it away, but this album definitely sounds like a cross between early/late MxPx and Good Charlotte. You can see on Wikipedia and other places that this was part of a 3ish album trend where MxPx…
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Five Iron Frenzy – Until This Shakes Apart
Over its long tenure as a band, Five Iron Frenzy has had some really silly songs. Songs like “Arnold, Willis, and Mr. Drummond”, “Oh, Canada”, “Blue Comb ‘78”, “The Untimely Death of Brad”, “Where is Micah?”, and many others. But they’ve also always been a really political band. On their first album, Upbeats and Beatdowns,…
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Review: Snow Crash
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is the second time I’ve read this book. This first time was something around 20 years ago and it was definitely a 5-star book to me at the time. I’d never read anything like it. Reading it in 2020 is very interseting. Some…
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Review: Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 142
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 142 by Neil Clarke My rating: 4 of 5 stars An almost perfect issue (in terms of my tastes) in which I loved all but one of the stories. Here are my thoughts-per-story, which may have some more text than my status updates if I came up against character limits during updates:…
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Review: Stronger Than a Bronze Dragon
Stronger Than a Bronze Dragon by Mary Fan My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is the second book I added to my to-read list after meeting Ms. Fan at Farpoint 2019. Even though both Starswept and this one are rated 4 stars, that’s more a consequence of only have 5 stars to choose from,…
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2019 in Books
While I continued to read lots of cookbooks in 2019, this was the year of Sequels, Sanderson, and Science Fiction Magazines. On the sequels front, I finished The Cosmere (except for White Sands Vol 3), continued The Expanse, The Asylum Tales, Red Rising, The Dresden Files, The Mogoliad, Wild Cards, and the Illumination Paradox. For…
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Review: Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 129
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 129 by Neil Clarke My rating: 5 of 5 stars I think the only story I wasn’t into was “Neptune’s Trident”. Otherwise, a top-notch issue. Especially liked the non-fiction essays this time around. My thoughts on each story (a slightly wordier version of my status updates where character limits kept me from…
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Review: Promise of Blood (Powder Mage, #1)
Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan My rating: 4 of 5 stars As I work through my To-read list, we come to another book I added around 2014. This one was after Mr. McClellan had been interviewed by Sword and Laser (and 4 years before I’d ever heard of Brandon Sanderson). His idea of powder…
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Reviews: The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon – The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World; Food Processor Perfection: 75 Amazing Ways to Use the Most Powerful Tool in Your Kitchen; Planet Barbecue!: 309 Recipes, 60 Countries; Prepare to Meet Thy Doom: And More True Gaming Stories; Abaddon’s Gate; Damnation Alley ; The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl; The Perfect Cookie: Your Ultimate Guide to Foolproof Cookies, Brownies, and Bars; Words of Radiance
The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon – The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World by Steven L. Kent My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a very comprehensive look at the history of video games going way, way back. I’m familiar with a lot…
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Review: Chester 5000 XYV
Chester 5000 XYV by Jess Fink My rating: 3 of 5 stars The old cliche is that no one watches porn for the story. But books and comics have always had the ability to be more cutting edge; perhaps because the budget is so much smaller, making the stakes lower. Somehow, Jess Fink elevates things…