Which books do you find your friends are most likely to steal?
The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which has to be my favorite fantasy book ever, but which I can't recommend to Randall because it's so much better if you've read other fantasy first and because I'm afraid he'll not give my copy back and because I've already recommended something.
On the Best SF/F Thread, I've got to offer up The Book Of Ash. Now, I won't actually go so far as to call it the best, but it's among the best not-yet-mentioned-here fantasy which doesn't require one to have read other fantasy first which I've read recently.
Which is to say that I finished last night and really, really, like it.
First, I like the gritty medieval warfare stuff. Mary Gentle can describe what wearing armor is like, because she has actually worn armor. I recognize the descriptions as accurate because I made myself a chainmail shirt.
Second, I like the Philip Dickian ontological riffs.
Third, I was amazed that Gentle managed to pull it off at all. Not because I don't respect her as an author -- because I didn't think it would be possible to provide a satisfying ending to the book, given the constraints she had set. She proved me wrong.
Fourth, I fell in love with the main character, Ash.
There are a few flaws: the prose was unspectacular and somewhat repetitive -- take a drink every time something smells pleasantly of horse, or a character defecates upon him or herself, or some random piece of armor is described. Also, the third and fourth books (the series is publised in the UK as one volume, and in the US as four), are rather slow, and probably could have been combined. Finally, despite the length, the characterization was rather weak.
But these flaws don't ruin the book(s), and I recommend it (them) highly.
Don't knock Coppertunity! Coppertunity has Joementum!
I name all my computers after authors. A couple of years ago, I built a computer with 1 terabyte (for non-techies, 1 metric buttload in home computer terms) of hard drive space. I named it after the author of #4.
I normally am not a fan of Indymedia, but these are some great photos of a protestor from about a block from my office in Boston. He's protesting the Abu Ghraib torture, of course.
Jill Smith, I do that too. It works fine in chat rooms, I find, but I'm not sure how it translates to non-live mediums. I'm almost sure I was inspired by its use in the earlier Final Fantasy series of games (of which I've only played three or so) to indicate a pause.
Here are a few examples of this from my IRC log:
"This discussion is very... interesting"
(indicating that he thought it was crazy, which it was)
"*UserName ponders again exactly why he's subscribed to this list..." (the * indicates an "emote", which allows someone to talk about themselves in the 3rd person. It's useful for instance when roleplaying to indicate actions).
"It's frustrating when i have to look up some of the vocabulary he uses.... jerk." (the last bit there is in her next line)
"It's Sunday and I should be doing homework for class tomorrow..." (she then proceeds to have a long conversation)
(these are from four different people)
I think it can be used at the end of an utterance like "um", indicating that one wants to hold the floor while one composes one's next sentence. This doesn't have much relevance on IRC, because people can interrupt without actually causing any harm. But it does let one add qualifiers:
"I think we should kill everyone..."
"... who tries to kill us"
(made-up example)
I ran "Liar, liar, pants on fire" through the Paper Game last night, and got out: "The man lied until his chest exploded."
On an unrelated subject, I use unique addresses for various forums, to track address harvesting. Recently, I've gotten more spam for the address I post here than for most of my other addresses (not counting work-related addresses). I know there's nothing anyone can do about this, but I thought I would warn people.
(forgive the l33t spelling of p00p -- I'm circumventing Making Light's filters. You'll also have to change some URLs due to this -- just tr/0/o/)
David Goldfarb, I first learned that game under the name "Eat P00p You Cat", but it's locally (that is, at the Harvard scifi club) called "The Paper Game" (a terribly undescriptive name). I've also heard "Picture Oracle" from some Columbia U scifi types.
Good art skills help, but you would be surprised at how well stick figures, boxes, and arrows do (and how poorly elaborately rendered scenes sometimes do). I got an excellent picture of a river, a dome with nude people in it, a sea, and a crossed out sun, but while I could identify most individual elements, and knew the reference, I didn't put them together.
On the other hand, even with not-very-good art, after two iterations of "E-mail causes conifers to turn into deciduous trees", "PINE stands for Pine Is Not Elm" was restored almost exactly to the original -- the only alteration having to do with a friend's desire to be a smartass.
I keep meaning to set up a high-tech system for online play, but I'm not sure I would have the tuits to do my pieces in a timely fashion, so I doubt anyone else would.
I also notice that play styles differ dramatically. I am quite likely to draw a short comic strip, using conventions from comics (thought vs. speech bubbles) and mathematics (implication arrows, slashed equals signs), but I don't use words or numbers. If it came up, and it the next person were a programmer, I would use ?: ("x = a ? b : c" means "if a, x is assigned the value of b else x is assigned the value of c" from the C programming language. I also use magnifying glasses to denote a "zoom in" on a particular part of a scene. On the other hand, most of the games I see online involve only single pictures with no explicit progression of time, and do use words but not as many arrows.
And here92s the basic deal: Say you open an envelope and find weird powder in it.
First, check if it's from your dealer. You don't want to alert your officemates when your new shipment comes in, or they'll all want some.
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|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 8 |
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