Obsolete Your Idols

Well now! This is an interesting animation of how the site has changed. Fun to watch things flip around from old to new.

This is the third Matt Ruff book I’ve read, Set This House in Order.  The subtitle of it is A Romance of Souls and that’s accurate.  The heroic protagonist is dealing with Multiple Personality Disorder so it’s a very little bit like some other such books you might have read, where the hero is sometimes at odds with themself.

The early and middle parts of the story mostly take place in the Pacific North West, in and around Seattle, which I enjoyed very much.  I’ve even been to some of the places mentioned by name.  The only real letdown for me in this story was that I was expecting much more of an explicitly fantastical or beyond reality element.  There wasn’t anything in here which I couldn’t hand-wave away as subject point of view, which is perhaps welcome news for people who hate genre fiction but love to read about people suffering.

There are some fun story twists as the story unfolds and some great thumbnail sketches of characters.  It also leaves a satisfying number of questions unanswered but resolves the major ones I was plagued by, so it’s very nearly ideal for my tastes in that way.

Who might like this book:

• People with alters living in their head
• People who love reading about Seattle
• Fans of cold case mysteries

Who might not like this book:

• People with alters living in their head
• People looking for a more clearly futuristic or fantastic story
• People who hate tricksy stories

I’ve started using friendfeed as a waystation for aggregation before my feeds hit Planet Binder.  So you don’t need to be pulling from both.  Or, either, really.  Note that the tumblr and gReader feeds often contain pr0n so you may prefer to exclude those from your pull.  Or perhaps prefer and highlight them. Get down with your bad elf.

I did what I’ve been threatening to do and deployed OpenID someplace. Here. This blog. I used an existing plugin to do it because I’ve got less time than ambition right now. Enjoy.

Sometimes the internet is great for wasting time.  This is one of them.

What do you so wish?