Obsolete Your Idols

Not blogged, not read novels, not taken pictures, not slept, not baked.

But I did convert two teams from subversion to mercurial.

Oh, and we’re buying a house.

inboxzero

Originally uploaded by Binder Of Daemons

BEHOLD MY GLORY.

I made some tiny updates to bring my resume up to date since it’d been awhile and put it online again. It’s linked from the top of the manjusri.org domain.

Then I played around a little bit with the Powell’s Partner Bookshelf thing and have a shelf of some of my favorite books.

Also added to the Socialize Me page if you want it again later.

Did you like Brimstone? Did you like Unknown Armies? The novel Godwalker? The comic book Lucifer? Immortal the RPG?  Delta Green?

If you didn’t say yes to at least one of those, you’re excused.  Go skip ahead to something else in your flist or your feed reader.

Still here? Then you’ll like Sandman Slim.  It’s a novel which could have been told as a story in any of those settings but wasn’t, because it was told by Richard Kadrey.  It’s a revenge story, it’s a modern era magic story, it’s a buddy story, it’s a story about a lucky loser who more or less emerges triumphant from his character arc.  It’s really good.  But I don’t know how much appeal it’ll have to someone who isn’t already into that gritty street magic paranormal anti-romance groove when this book hits their eyes.

For those of you would like this, go read it.  It’s a fast moving story with very few aggravations.  If you’re not one of the people who would like this, you suck.  What are you doing still reading this, anyway?  I told you to beat it!

Remember when I read Revelation Space and wrote a brief review? Between then and now, probably while in Denver at a reading with Vylar, I picked up Redemption Ark, the sequel. Seems to be the middle book in a trilogy. It does a solid job of being the middle child, not wasting too many pages recapitulating the plot of the first book, sheds a new light on what’s gone before and foreshadows, hopefully, a resolution to The Big Problem forthcoming in the third book. Well, forthcoming to me. It’s been in print for some time now, I suppose.

It’s more space opera, with some striking relativistic scale combats, some tough people solving thorny problems, some unlucky people failing, compromises made with the best of intentions and blowing up in everyone’s faces.

Who might like this

• Fans of space opera
• People who read the first book and wonder what happens next
• Fans of tough women and wily old men

Who might not like this

• Fans of dragons, unicorns, wizards, magicians, chicken pablum for the soul
• Readers who find middle books in trilogies disappointing in general
• People looking for a fast breezy read

I’m testing something minor and not very sexy but if you read this post, please make a brief comment telling me where you read it.  I’m anticipating answers like ‘on Livejournal’, ‘in Google Reader’, ‘in Google Reader shared by <someone>’, ‘on your planet’, etc.  Surprise me if it’s something I didn’t anticipate or reassure me of my powers of interpretation, if you would.

ETA: if you are seeing this in livejournal and have no idea how to comment click on the link ‘Obsolete Your Idols’ after Mirrored from. That will bring you to the blog itself where you can comment. Sorry for the hassle.

Yeah, so, my friend died.

On purpose.

I’ve tried to think of something intelligent or even intelligible to say about it but I’m past the clarity of anger into the morass of despair about it.  He was a good guy and he did his best and I don’t have any idea why he did himself in.

I miss him.

I was feeling restless so I looked at what Google Webmaster Tools had to say about this blog. Mostly it thought my title tags weren’t interesting enough, which was true. So I took the tip from Perishable Press on making title tags without Yet Another Plugin.

Humans shouldn’t notice anything exciting but perhaps the Googlebot will be thrilled.

If you go to Playfirst and throw some games in your cart and use the coupon code APRILFRIENDS you’ll get them for half price, at least until April 12th.  Share and enjoy.

This is kind of important. http://www.bidder70.org/ is the story of a guy who took a stand against corporations running over land.