Many of the people in this thread would enjoy _Knitting for Anarchists_, which is an intermediate-to-advanced exploration of what's really going on in knitting and knitting patterns. Also known as 'how to figure out what the hell the pattern really wants you to do, instead of what it's TELLING you to do, since it doesn't know you knit exactly the way you do.' I've always purled 'backwards' -- I knit Continental, and instead of wrapping the yarn around the needle the way I'm apparently supposed to (which struck me as over-difficult), I do it the other way, which means that if I follow knitting patterns exactly I end up with a lot of twisted stitches.
I was most amused, when reading Orson Scott Card's Rebekah, to find Isaac offhandedly mentioning in passing that the 'holy writings' in the posession of his father Abraham talk about a creature called a curelom, though nobody alive had any idea what such a creature was. :->
It's true: education greatly increases the number of in-jokes one gets and giggles at.
One of my high school classmates was named Malcolm DuBois Love (called DuBee for short). His father, who had the same last name as he did, was a cardiologist. No, I'm not kidding. I can only imagine the hospital intercom calls.
Huh, CHip. Usually around here (Chicago) it's the Witnesses that swarm subway entrances and try to (a) argue with and (b) shove The Watchtower at busy commuters who only want to get to work on time.
A relevant webcomic for your amusement and hairpulling.
I'm just amused that David decided to blogspam to advertise his blog about blogspam.
That said, I've gotten my first piece of LIVEJOURNAL comment spam, which means someone's really trying.
Is it just me, or was a large part of the backstory for last night's Angel a big shout-out to Superbarrio? :-> Sort of.
Kevin Andrew Murphy said, "Teresa, what, in your opinion, is the most egregious copyediting mistake in Genesis? And the Bible as a whole?"
And I'm still curious. Footnote please? :->
I've never tried getting movies out of the library, but I knew it could be done.
Apparently though their website is totally lobotomized, and does nothing more than give you a GUI interface for their electronic catalog. It lists what branch has how many copies of what, and whether they're out at that moment, but I can't seem to find any functionality at all to get them to reserve them, or to communicate with them at all. Le sigh.
Ben Newman is writing some damn good stuff lately. He's even written four songs that I adore, whose source material bores me to tears (the Metroid series of video games, A Deepness in the Sky, a A Fire Upon the Deep, Tombs of Atuan).
Alan Moore is also, it seems to me, a past master of doing comic books where the author packs the visuals chock-full of neat little references. Either he encourages the artists in it or he picks artists who do it naturally. :-> League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has many frames/pages that profusely reward extended study (spot the cat with the tiny lilliputian horse in its mouth like a mouse!). More recently, Smax is much the same sort of thing. Issue # has a Trogdor the Burninator reference, for goodness sake!
Moving your wishlist off Amazon needn't take a lot of typing, because a program could do it.
Uh huh. And how do you tell the program to change pages? Because there are over 800 items on my wishlist. Which is over 40 pages of their messed up interface. :->
I do kind of enjoy leaving out-of-print stuff on my Amazon wishlist, to be a sort of datapoint that people do still want those things.
I never thought of using the Chicago Public Library website to get books, for some reason. Probably 'cause the web presence was tiny the last time I was serious about librarying (about six years ago). You would THINK that a major metropolitan area like Chicago would have a main branch open past 5:30 on weeknights, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be wrong. Grmph. ... I take that back. Apparently they're open till 7 except on Fridays now. Hmm. I'll have to get back in the habit. Though my in-pile at home is big enough it may be hard to convince my husband that I need to borrow books I *don't* own. :->
Hrm. Well, the problem with trying to hack Movable Type to be my wishlist is (a) I don't have anywhere to run it at the moment, (b) it would require a looooooot of typing to port the data, and to input new data, and (c) I'd need someone Technical to handhold me all the way through it, as learning new 'how to make this software fold itself into origami' skills don't come nearly as easily to me as most Technical people think they would.
I'd hit the library more if there were a branch I could get to when it was open on anything but Wednesdays (taking into account that I don't leave the house on weekends, mostly, and that I get off work at 5 downtown, and travel time must needs be factored in). The branch I can get to after work on Wednesdays has, uhm, not so great of a selection, and every time I've tried 'ordering' (having them get it from another branch) a book through them, they never call me back and I never remember to go ask.
Amazon is lousy for serendipity, said Lis Carey.
Huh. I've been slogging through AlexLit out of a sense of duty, rating a bunch of stuff, but let me tell you, I've gotten far more useful recommendations out of Amazon (with less pain in the rating system, though I like Alexlit's system's greater flexibility, and the adjectives chosen for the levels are priceless). Amazon also knows about more than 1600 books I've rated as to my opinion thereunto appertaining (gaaah! I'm stuck in a maze of twisty little passive phrases, all alike), which gives them a better depth-of-field for helping me find stuff I want. Easily half of what I've read in the last two years was recommended by Amazon, and quite well, too.
Amazon also has cover art, and in many cases now the back of the book, for the proper browsing experience. And they're touting a brand new 'search complete text in every book we carry!' feature, but I'm not sure how useful it'll be.
If you give the character/player seemingly impossible challenges, and they honestly feel that they can't do them, they stop playing the game.
At a concom meeting recently, my conchair commiserated about his early experiences playing Zork (I think it was Zork. I feel sure someone here will remind me if it's not). It took him three real-life months to get past the 'show the bird to the dragon, bird eats dragon' puzzle. In the very next room is ANOTHER dragon. Punch-drunk and more than a little despairing, he types 'attack dragon'. It asks if he just wants to use his hands. He did. The game tells him brightly that he valiantly attacks the dragon with his bare hands and kills it, wham bam all done.
He performed what I like to think is a variant of Dorothy Parker's 'flinging the book into a wall with great force' - he punched his Commodore 64 so hard it left a permanent dent in the metal case. And didn't play Zork again for several weeks (or until he could think about it without getting pissed off).
If you want to save money on a book, buy used. The discounts are deeper than Amazon, and it helps break the cycle of "Shiny. New. Must buy now" which drives the consumer culture.
Dear God, I wish I could. The closest there is to a viable internet-interface used bookstore is bookfinder.com, though, and it has neither communal billing, communal shipping, nor anything like proper wishlist or shopping cart implementation. I still use it sometimes, for things I can't get new, but when I end up paying over $6 for a $1 used book, I've saved myself nothing (esp. if the reason for the price-upping is that I ordered six books and they came from SIX SEPARATE STORES who all charged me shipping).
Powell's is kind of nice, but (a) their selection sucks, compared to Amazon and some other places, and (b) their used selection really sucks. I stopped shopping at my local physical Powell's when the SF section consisted entirely of three categories: books I already own, books I don't want to read, and books I sold them.
Honestly, I whore Amazon for their wishlist functionality, using it to take notes to myself about just about everything I've heard of that's interesting, but the ease-of-use and utter low prices are seductive as all hell. I know I *ought* to support locals, buy used, etc, etc, but DAMN it's expensive and inconvenient. :-/
I like Sawyer OK (what I've read), but he strikes me as lightweight, not only because he makes scientific mistakes even when he's swearing he's not, but because the latter bits of the ones I've read boil down to 'and this happens because I say it happens, and I'm writing the book.' Which isn't to say I don't like it! :-> *What* I like, though, is that he's good at writing 'ordinary people encountering fucked-up circumstances.' I adore the mystery and courtroom-drama bits of Illegal Alien, for example, for the same reasons I liked Forever Knight: it's not an alien novel, or at least not lots of it. It's a murder novel about an alien. In the same way, ForKni was a cop show that happened to have a vampire protagonist, not a vampire show (primarily).
I just like that sort of trope. And almost anything anthropological, or with genuinely DIFFERENT aliens/societies, will get me to read it at least once.
Tom: I have yet to find an independent bookseller that can anything like match Amazon's prices (aside from SFBC, which is its own kettle of wax). I also have yet to find an independent bookstore with the convenience and full-featuredness of Amazon's website. The closest I can come is sending long emails with title, author, and ISBN to Alice Bentley and having her mail it to me in maybe a month or so, if she doesn't forget and everything comes in fine. Which is moral, but incredibly inconvenient, and I usually forget to do it.
As far as in-person bookstores go, (a) I never manage to get anywhere to go to them, mostly, and (b) they rarely have anything on the shelf that I want to buy, and if I'm just having them order it, it's more convenient to have them mail it to me, as (a) means it'll probably be over a month before I get back to pick it up, if I ever remember. Amazon has HUGE selection, buy-it--right-now instant gratification, usually free shipping, decent to great prices, and an interface that doesn't piss me off.
I would be glad to be proven wrong; please provide URLs of independent sellers that might fit my needs as well as Amazon does.
Though sometimes I deliberately order obscure stuff through Amazon just to convince them someone DOES buy it.
I love 1066 and All That, though I get the feeling I'm missing at least a third of the jokes.
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