This is ridiculous

It’s April 18th in Seattle, and this is what’s in my yard:

I really wanted to love it

So, the book that took forever to finish was The Difference Engine. I’d tried it way back when it first came out, and I remember I didn’t finish it then, so I vowed to finish it this time around. I loved the world, of course. The world is very well thought out and cool–isn’t this book the reason the word ’steampunk’ was invented? But I thought it was lacking in plot.

I’m an unabashed genre fan, and I need something to happen in a story, and The Difference Engine is very much a setting-focussed novel. The setting is indeed wonderful, but the whole thing with the cards, which were obviously a MacGuffin from the start just seemed forced. And the POV shifts were distracting.

Still, it’s a fantastic setting.

gainfully employed

I haven’t written much lately because I’ve been… working! Yes, a real job that is actually in my field. Also, I spend ages reading the slowest. book. ever. More on that later.

some stuff to read

Oh, man, I am the worst blog-writing-person, ever. Almost a month without updating? Very bad!

I’ve been doing some volunteering, but that’s no excuse for ignoring the internet, man. The Internet! So here’s some fun and free stuff:

All of ElfQuest online, free and legal! Not all up yet, but it will be. Words cannot express how much I loved these freaky little overly muscled, big-eyed creatures back in the early eighties. And this thread on Mefi reminded me there used to be an ElfQuest role playing game with this totally awesome traceable elf-body shapes you could trace and draw hella cool outfits on. I had that game. I wonder if it’s still around, in some box at my folks’ house…

Sometimes, just for fun, I like to read the talk and history pages on wikipedia entries. I also love time travel stories. Wikihistory is a perfect story for people who like time travel and wikipedia talk pages.

I read this story a couple of weeks ago and it made me cry: Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk.

If you liked that one, and are into the whole sentient toy thing, there’s always Brian Aldiss’s classic, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, which was the basis for the Kubrick-started, Spielberg-destroyed movie AI. You must forgive it that.

free books, e-books, cheap books

So Tor is doing this free ebook a week thing which is pretty cool and should be supported so they do more cool stuff, y’all. One of the books they’re offering (offered? I’m not sure how long each download available…) is John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which I’d read before, thanks to the library. I started re-reading it and remembered I wanted to read the sequels, so I went out and bought the second book, The Ghost Brigades.

I also bought a paper copy of OMW, because nothing (yet) beats a codex in the hand. E-books are extremely handy and I’m fully in favor of them, but when I want to read something long that I haven’t read before, I want to hold it in my hands and turn the pages, y’know?

I’d like to get an e-book reader someday, but right now there isn’t one out there that appeals to me. A paperback you can stick in your purse and read wherever. You can turn back and forward easily. You can fold down page corners and doodle in the margins. You can read one in the bathtub! A book doesn’t require batteries or charging. A book can’t be taken away from you when the publisher upgrades the operating system. Books published hundreds of years ago can still be read today.

But an e-book reader can hold hundreds of books, and that’s why I want one… eventually. Till there’s one I like that isn’t too expensive, there’s my laptop. Electronic formats are great for fun things like searching the text. (Number of times the word ‘bacon’ appears in Old Man’s War: 2.)

They’re also terrific for short stories. I love reading short stories online, and since I started doing that I’ve discovered several new-to-me authors to buy in print format.

All this is to say the idea of giving something away for free will make people pay money later absolutely works, at least in my case. (It seems like it might be working for others, too. Scalzi posted some numbers indicating his sales were up the same week the OMW download went live. I’d love to see some numbers from the other authors to see if it holds true.)

I love to read, but two things keep me from buying all the books that look pretty to me: The first is budget. I limit my new books purchases because I’d be utterly broke if I bought everything I wanted. The second is time. It takes time to read a book, and my time is limited. I want to reasonably certain I’ll enjoy a book before I commit the time to read it. (Of course, one can never be totally sure, unless you just re-read your favorite book over and over again.)

So free e-books are a great way for me to get an idea of whether I want to commit my time and later dollars to an author. Used books are also good for this. I’ve often bought the first or second books in a series from a used bookstore, and then started buying the rest new. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series is an example where I did exactly that–I even bought the last one in hardcover. I also bought Rob Thurman’s third book new this week, after reading the first one from the library and the second one used.

So in conclusion: free e-books, I like ‘em. Except when they’re horribly difficult to read, like the unfortunate situation with Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Here’s a case where it’s obvious some paranoid exec got his panties all in a twist about giving something away for free and decided to cripple the giveaway. Heaven forbid people might want to read it offline. (Tor’s free downloads, btw, are offered as PDFs, HTML, or Mobi format.) Fortunately, Neil Gaiman offers a number of free short stories on his website.

So in (really, this time I mean it!) conclusion, free e-books rock and are a great idea. Go join the Tor email list to get some, and then go support the authors you like by buying more of their books.

Now, I’ve got some reading to do…

Where I’ve been hanging out [on the web] this week:

Where I’ve been hanging out [on the web] this week:

Watching these Louis Theroux BBC shows. Always interesting and often fun. And Louis Theroux is definitely at LEAST a 9.

Make a wallet out of your favorite man-titty at Cut Out + Keep.

What I’m lusting after at the mo: A Viking 7 quart stand mixer. Yeah, it’s $500, but it won’t ever have the problems the plastic-geared KitchenAid has had… though I must say, I’ve had my KitchenAid mixer for 10 years with no problems beyond a slight, kind of wacky bumpiness when mixing stiff dough. But when my baby goes, I’m getting a Viking to replace her.

Spend hours looking at these great old book covers (maybe find wallet-making material!).

baby’s first scherenschnitte attempt

Scherenschnitte is a style of papercutting. It’s usually marked by a very intricate, lacy, often symmetrical design (possibly surrounding a silhouette of some sort) cut into black paper and displayed with a white background (sometimes the colors are reversed).

It looks very cool, but also very time-consuming and difficult. I’ve been too intimidated to try my hand at it in the past, especially since even a plain valentine heart has been known to turn out misshapen and lumpy in my hands! But there’s no better way to learn how to do something than by doing it, so last night I picked up the scissors.

First, I sketched out a basic Cthulhu-esque idea in pencil, then I just cut around the lines. This is a symmetrical design, so I folded the paper and only had to cut the tentacles once.

Things I learned: it’s very hard to cut curves around little points! I used an x-acto knife for the ends of the tentacles, but then it was hard to cut in a curvy line. I think I used too much pressure with the knife, but I was worried about not cutting through both layers of paper.

Since this was just a practice run, I cut him out of printer paper. But then I wanted to see what he’d look like in the traditional black-against-white, so I spray painted him. This is very, VERY low-rent scherenschnitte! Ha. I kind of liked how the stencil effect on the backing paper looked, so I put it in the photo.

As for the design… well, he doesn’t have a body. So maybe he’s more like a really menacing ten-armed octopus (decopus?) than Great Cthulhu. I’ll have to work on that…

Possibly relevant, inspiring, and/or helpful links:

• Scherenschnitte–basic tutorial with examples.
• A papercutting tutorial (incredible!)
• A little squirrel valentine you can cut.
• What a cool valentine over here!
• A blog about papercutting. Look, her valentine has tentacles! Oh, how I yearn for cutting control like that.

Caucus!

So I caucused today for the first time, and, man, it was crazy. They (apparently) had planned for everything to happen in the cafeteria of the school, but turnout was expected to be so high, they split it so even numbered precincts were in the theater (with NO TABLES and everyone twisting around to see each other) and odd numbered in the cafeteria. Guess which one I was in?

So I get there early, and am, like, the fourth person to sign in from my precinct. There were signs everywhere touting Obama or Clinton, with Obama’s signs WAY outnumbering Clinton’s. By the time things got started, the theater was packed.

We started with a Pledge of Allegiance, even though there was no flag in the theater. We all turned to the right and sort of imagined a flag.

Now, I have to say something here: I was home schooled for my entire elementary and middle school years. This afternoon was the VERY FIRST time I have ever said the Pledge, hand on heart and everything. It felt like that scene in The Stand when all the plague survivors say the Pledge before they get down to voting on what to do about the evil rising in Las Vegas.

We break out into precinct groups as much as we could in the theater seats, and start the process of Democracy, baby! Now, I’d noticed out in the hall before, looking at the North Seattle precinct map, that my precinct was very, very tiny. Not just geographically, either. There are no apartment buildings AT ALL in my precinct–the line cuts off just before the one right down the road. It’s all single family houses (maybe one or two duplexes). So our group was one of the smallest, and we had fifty people.

Our group was mostly older and mostly white. We were split about 60/40 Obama/Clinton, with a few Undecideds. After the initial tally, someone from each group spoke briefly on why they’re for one or the other, or why they’re undecided. Then an Undecided switched to Obama, and a Clinton switched to Undecided. Then we tallied again, and then we split into groups and elected delegates to the next level, which consisted of someone saying, “Who wants to do it?” followed by a lot of shuffling and looking around, till someone spoke up and said they’d do it. Repeat until all delegates and alternates were selected. Then we were done. Democracy accomplished!

Night Rising by Chris Marie Green

Dawn Madison is a tough stuntwoman and the daughter of a famously beautiful (and famously dead) movie star mother. She comes back to LA from a location shoot when her estranged father disappears. She hooks up with his P.I. associates on the case: a psychic-slash-actor little person; a former telenovela starlet/’tech geek’ (it’s a rule–every series must have a ‘tech geek’); and their boss, a mysterious, disembodied Charlie’s Angels-style Voice. Together, they fight crime vampires!

The plot is weak at points–it involves a dead child star suddenly appearing on a few frames of film (à la the Three Men and a Baby ghost) and a secret underground world of vampires–and it feels derivative in a few places. There’s also some random erotica-esque stuff that seemed to come out of nowhere. But honestly? I found myself having so much fun I didn’t care.

Youth-obsessed Hollywood and eternally young vampires? Two great tastes that taste great together! There’s young, beautiful humans who desperately want to stay that way, and a decrepit old master vampire who loves the movies and likes to watch Alias reruns. And sometimes, if there’s a chance for an audition, well, hunting vampires will just have to wait.

Night Rising is the first in a proposed trilogy. The second, Midnight Reign, came out last week.

a couple of things to read

A Colder War by Charles Stross. A story of the Cold War, eighties-style (complete with Oliver North and Fawn Hall). Only this Cold War features a “shoggoth gap”.

Steven Brust wrote a Firefly novel. I haven’t read it yet, but, man, I liked Firefly.