23:19 22 Jul 2010
I generally don’t listen to podcasts much, but I just listened to the first ten minutes or so of “The Haunter of the Dark” on HPPodcraft.com and I’m really impressed by the quality. They’ve been going for quite some time, so there are plenty of podcasts beyond that one (although many are discussions rather than readings).
23:57 21 Jun 2010
I’m not a fan of the Harry Potter series. I’ve only read the first one, didn’t particularly like it, and it’s not my kind of fantasy series.
I’m not a fan of fan fiction, despite technically having written some. I regard it as being of dubious quality, despite knowing perfectly well that it’s not more likely to be bad than anything else.
Nevertheless, I was, and remain, captivated by a particular piece of Harry Potter fan fiction: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Its twist is that its Harry is a hyper-rationalist genius. You should go read it now.
23:21 25 May 2010
The webcomic Nobody Scores is back. Its return is accompanied by some nice anti-iPad snark, too. I’m glad it’s back, even though I don’t think the new strip itself is that great.
I used to read it, but had entirely forgotten about it until MetaFilter reminded me of its existence.
11:50 15 Feb 2010
I’ve always had a soft spot for good genre parody, regardless of genre, and The Unfeasibly Tall Greek Billionaire’s Blackmailed Martyr-Complex Secretary Mistress Bride is pretty damn hilarious. You can read the first chapter in HTML, or the whole thing at Scribd.
08:53 01 Jan 2010
Happy New Year!
Once again, my goals for the coming year.
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17:43 29 Dec 2009
I had eight goals for 2009, and all of them that I’m going to get done I’ve already completed. Time to review.
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06:42 27 Dec 2009
I read 75 books in 2008, just managing to hit my target. (This year, I won’t make my target of 80, or even get close.) Some excellent books were among those 75.
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23:53 13 Nov 2009.
Updated: 02:03 14 Nov 2009
Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book won the Nebula award in 1992 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1993. I would describe it as a time travel plague thriller academic farce, and of all the triple crown winners it is my least favorite. Some of its ideas were good, and some of its passages powerful, but overall I found it disjointed and less than gripping.
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05:52 26 Oct 2009
Speaker for the Dead is the second novel in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. It won the Nebula award in 1986 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1987. Its predecessor, Ender’s Game, is revered as a science fiction and geek cult classic that still has resonance in geek culture. I liked Ender’s Game when I first read it years ago, and when I re-read it recently (prior to Speaker for the Dead), I enjoyed it and thought it held up quite well.
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15:20 13 Oct 2009
Startide Rising is the second novel in David Brin’s Uplift Universe series, and it won the Nebula in 1983 and the Hugo and Locus in 1984. I read its predecessor Sundiver first, and it nearly stopped me from going on to Startide Rising. I didn’t like the writing style at all, and it felt unpolished. It must be said that its ideas and setting were interesting: it’s “big universe” science fiction, with a multitude of alien races. The unique concept Brin came up with was that every alien race was raised to technological advancement (or even sentience) by some other race acting as “patron”—except for humanity, which reached a high degree of advancement, and raised dolphins and chimpanzees to higher-level sentience, without a patron.
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21:02 15 Sep 2009.
Updated: 12:54 12 Oct 2009
Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake won the 1978 Nebula and the 1979 Locus and Hugo awards. I’m having trouble figuring out why. This is not to say it’s bad—it’s quite good, and I’ve definitely encountered worse award winners. But it won all three while seeming to me like a good but unremarkable novel, and my expectation is that the “triple crown” winners would be remarkable in some way.
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16:28 04 Sep 2009
Via Greg Costikyan comes The Nemean Lion, a very short text adventure. I find it interesting partly because it’s somewhat like microfiction, and because it plays with the form somewhat.
While I’m here, I should also mention Hamlet—The Text Adventure, which I’m rather fond of (and which is a signficantly larger game, although probably not huge by text adventure standards).
01:41 31 Aug 2009
2006 involved quite a lot of reading, including perhaps a higher number than average of books in series.
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01:38 30 Aug 2009
Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, the opening novel in his Heechee series, won the Nebula in 1977 and the Hugo, Locus, and John W. Campbell awards in 1978 (making it even more highly-decorated than most of the “triple crown” winners).
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01:31 28 Aug 2009.
Updated: 19:23 24 Oct 2010
In 2005 I set myself a goal of reading 60 books, partly to try to make up for the low numbers in 2004. I barely made it, reading The Phantom Tollbooth on 31 December.
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01:13 27 Aug 2009
I read only 37 books in 2004, the lowest total since I started keeping track. I’m not sure why I read so few that year, particularly since quite a few of the books on the list are books that I was completely absorbed by and went through quickly. The quality is mixed, but some of them were excellent.
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05:16 25 Aug 2009
Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is the fifth winner of the science fiction “triple crown”, winning the Nebula in 1975 and the Hugo and Locus in 1976. It is a story of future interstellar war, between humanity and a species known as “Taurans“. It focuses on the war career of its main protagonist, William Mandella. I consider it an anti-war novel, and was quite impressed with it when I first read it last year.
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15:34 24 Aug 2009
This time, I’ve managed to let just a day pass since my last roundup of books from a given year.
2003 started slowly on the reading front; apparently The Idiot took me three months to get through. The first five months of the year saw me read just four books, an extremely low rate. I returned to a normal reading pace thereafter, with some dips and a surge in December.
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15:54 23 Aug 2009
Yet again it’s taken me more than a year since the last collection of book favorites. Part of the reason for this delay is that I’ve made abortive efforts to improve the display of book information on this blog, but none of those have reached a point where I think they’re usable. So, basic text lists it is.
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