The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by David DeLaney:

However, for future Tor/Baen/etc. reference? I can't special-order books until I've actually heard they're there, and have added them to my list, and taken the list into the store. This is inferior, as a marketing technique, to encountering a new book that I hadn't heard of, or didn't know was out yet, already in the bookstore, that I can buy on the spot. The Internet allows a lot of savings on various parts of the process, but can't replace "oh look, I was looking down the shelves and here's THIS", as far as I can tell.

--Dave

Hmm. Certainly a possibility.

(It's not as though there aren't other books in my books.to.buy textfile that I'll never actually see there.)

--Dave

So ... when will it be available as a paperback, like the others in the series, so that I'm able to buy it at Waldenbooks?

(Cuz if the answer is "never", then I'll never be able to read it, or pay money to Tor for it. Sorry.)

--Dave

For the pokemon-as-shaman above, I'll contribute ... lemme find it again ... The Bridge,

http://imago.hitherby.com/?p=213

... from a site which is chock-full of Rebecca/R. Sean Borgstrom-y goodness. (Read from the archives, because the next/previous links leave out the letters columns and jump around oddly in places.)

Recommended, among everything else: Aslan Shrugged, and The Abbey,_After the Rain.

--Dave

Diverging just a hair, I'm nearly finished with John C. Wright's recent cross-author sequel, Null-A Continuum... and while it's most definitely space opera, I can't decide whether it Ought To Be Filed Under hard or soft. Or, for that matter, crunchy or squishy. It does have a good bit of far-future in it... but Mr. Wright does appear to be quite American.

(I liked it, by the way. Yes, it's pulp, but I think it's fairly GOOD pulp.)

--Dave

Serge @8 - A tigrinoid, of course.

Dave "oh, panth" DeLaney

Adding to Jules @14 - my first reaction was along the lines of "how did they manage to convince the clerk they were from your car?". I guess I'm used to US gas stations that have the cashier in sight of all the pumps, keeping track in their head of who's at which pump, where they would have -seen- the guy pumping gas into the other car from the other pump. (I guess I'm also thinking of digital pumps, each with a number taped on it, so the clerk gets a notice inside when pump #4 has stopped pumping, for example.)

Perhaps these are 80-year-old gasoline pumps or some such?

Dave

And for body image issues, gender dysphoria, and generalized feelings of powerlessness? Almost anything by Jack Chalker, of course!

Dave, ducking uglily

Two other more-recent webcomics that will almost certainly appeal to Girl Genius readers:

Dresden Codak, at www.dresdencodak.com - first strip is at http://dresdencodak.com/2005/06/08/the-tomorrow-man/ , but it may make more sense to start with the Hob sequence, http://dresdencodak.com/2007/02/08/pom/ .

And 2D Goggles, starring Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. (They fight crime.)
Start at http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/ .

Both update slowly. (I may actually have found either or both as a sidelight particle here, but if so, they've since scrolled down off the bottom...)

--Dave

David @ 121 -
And now I'm wondering which pagan gods, exactly, accept sacrifices of mayonnaise.

Dave "French. They've got to be French." DeLaney

Don't have a cellphone, and my home phone has an answering machine on it with the message "Hi! This is Dave's answering machine, at . Please leave me a message, if you're not a recording!". Despite that, I do still occasionally get wrong-number messages, though rarely; even more rarely there's a series of them over a week or so obviously all from the same person. I'm not using this as a work phone (and at work I'm not supposed to be _using_ the phone for intracompany calls at all), so it's less of a problem for me than it could be...

Sounds like Patrick may first want to try appending, to his current voicemail message, "If I can't understand part of the voice message you leave, I'm quite likely to be unable to call you back.", or the like.

Stephan@11 - ... ... your soapmaking efforts SCARE me sometimes.

Let me see... I have (this is going to sound like a Borgesian list by the time I'm done, I fear, and the motivation behind much of this is that I cannot possibly fit enough shelves in this apartment any longer to hold all these):

paperbacks I've read more than a few years ago, in alphabetical order by author, in stacked cardboard boxes that are themselves in order but their piles jump here and there inside the apartment

paperbacks I've read fewer than a few years ago, in alphabetical order by author, in alphabetized floor piles (plus a small segment of A that got misfiled when I got to one end of the boxes, oops), waiting to be sorted into the boxes correctly - currently on N going towards the end of the alphabet, reading the 18 Andre Norton / Norton+someone paperbacks that had accumulated. This sorting is never-ending, as they accumulate behind the sorting point in either direction.

some small stacks of new paperbacks on and around my computer area, waiting to be read and sorted into the above piles

not-very-new paperbacks I haven't read yet, in alphabetical floor piles

hardbacks in alphabetical order by author, in piles in the walk-in closet from A through N, and on shelves from O through Z, plus a pile or two of as-yet-unread ones

oversized hardbacks in alphabetical order by author, in two tall floor piles

role-playing game books on a set of shelves in my bedroom and piled in three very tall piles at the foot of my bed

books containing cartoons of various sorts - newspaper comic strips, editorial, etc. - in alphabetical floor piles, divided into paperback size, oversized, and that in-between size that Garfield collections used to be

(This doesn't count newspapers, or magazines of any sort, or the collected NEA/UFC copyright books for a couple decades, or etc.)

If I ever buy a house (which seems unlikely) it'll have to have enough room to unpack and shelve them all. It'd have to be a fairly large house. Windowless rooms would be a plus.

--Dave

As I read down the lists of memories here of a more dangerous world, I'm happy to have been born in 1964 - after polio, though from very vague memories (I don't have access to my childhood medical records, alas) I had rubella and chicken pox and something else, a couple of them before I can remember at all. But survived them all. I don't THINK I ever had mumps, and am not sure about measles. The something else may have been whooping cough.

And I am also irresistibly and repeatedly reminded of the Gashlycrumb Tinies, as a window onto a world where children _did_ die of many and various things (though not necessarily in alphabetical order).

Thus endeth the digression.

--Dave

Picallili kumquat, picalilli kumquat, pedunkle pedunkle eek!

Dave "for abbie" DeLaney

Joel @187 - a hit, a most palpable hit.

Dave @189 - For a moment, I was actually thinking Nepbg, Jnqr, naq Zberl ...

--Dave

183 is N Sver Hcba gur Qrrc, of course.

If only she had been reading a picture book, I should never have met the Queen. Or have had to recite any of that poetry... At least she didn't laugh when I told her about it.

A couple days ago I was on the phone with a customer, and we had been discussing shipping coats, and she came out with the following line:

"Well, I used to work in a dress shop, and we ALWAYS steamed before we put out!"

It's _difficult_ to hold in that level of immediate-reaction laughter (so as not to get puzzled looks from the rest of the call center)...

So these do happen in real life, yes.

--Dave

James @2 - Can we start calling them the "wrong-wingers" now? Since they're so desperate to prove that they were right after all, and that we're DQQMED now...

--Dave

Bruce @ 100:

Those were by Michael Moorcock, and appear in (among other places) Blood, Fabulous Harbors, and The War Amongst the Angels (says Wikipedia, since I never saw the last one...). They contain several of his heroes from other sequences, in thin, no, or medium-thick disguise. I liked them.

--Dave

Robert @ 30:

As someone who plays entirely too much WoW, I'll note that a) the zombie invasion is over today (which is good, because infection duration was down to a minute yesterday), and b) they're basically re-using the plotline from when Naxxramas, the Necropolis instance, first showed up a couple years ago. So I know to look for Marks of the Dawn being given away free, for example.

But yeah, it was annoying in a minor way, and the relative concentration of young jerks in any MMORPG ratcheted it up to "majorly annoying" at times.

I'll decompress once Hallow's End is entirely over.

--Dave

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