Tag: fantasy

Bookses

Finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday on Friday.

Went to see Stardust again. It holds up quite well to a second viewing. Ever since seeing it last week I’ve been desperate to reread the novel, but maldis still has my copy. Since we were near a bookstore, I decided to pick up the paperback version, though, since it’s actually a different format than the one I’ve got already. The downside is that it doesn’t have Charles Vess’ illustrations. The upside is that it’s more portable.

I ended up rereading the whole thing last night. short comparison.

We’ve been trying to be out during the hottest part of the day, since our air conditioner isn’t terribly effective. It’s not really the AC’s fault, it’s the airflow in the apartment (or lack thereof). I’m out on the balcony right now, which is really nice. Step through the giant open screen door into the living room, and it jumps up considerably. Further back, into the room with the computers? Forget it!

So I’m sitting outside, occasionally glancing out at the trees, or up at the not-quite first-quarter moon, typing on the laptop.

Current Music: You Better Leave the Stars Alone, Ego Likeness
Current Location: home

Random

Got out to Santa Monica last week to meet up with my brother and his coworkers as they returned from a conference in Taiwan via LAX. Must remember to post pictures of dinosaur topiary and sundry oddness. (Edit: I finally got around to it.)

Speaking of photos, alenxa and I managed to get some really interesting cloud & sunset pictures yesterday.

Saw Stardust w/ andrea_wot and zehntaur. It was good. Disappointed to find how few people went to see it, though. Seriously, Rush Hour 3? At least it didn’t lose to Daddy Day Camp. Anyway, Stardust is highly recommended. If you haven’t seen it, try to catch it this weekend while it’s still in theaters.

Apartments are resurfacing the parking lots this week. Tomorrow through Saturday we’ll have to park on the street. This place doesn’t have enough street parking normally, never mind when 1/4 of the spaces are unavailable.

The Question of the Day

It seems that the question of the day is, “What page are you on?”

No spoilers.

I’d pretty much figured on not picking up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until after Comic-Con. I had some things I wanted to make sure I got finished first, in particular some website updates. But then alenxa finished the book on Saturday, and I decided that the updates I had left weren’t quite so important as the ones I’d done Saturday afternoon. So I picked up the book Sunday afternoon, and put it down around 11:00 at night, a little over halfway through.

This morning I took the car in for some fairly major maintenance. They’d offered a complementary rental, which I happily accepted, and arranged for Enterprise to send someone over. (I would have been quite willing to walk, since it was hardly even sprinkling, but figured if they’d made the arrangements, I might as well. As it is, I think it would have been faster to walk.)

Naturally I pulled the book out in the waiting room. After a few minutes, the 50-ish man a few chairs over asked,

“What page are you on?”

“428.”

“432.”

I found it funny that we were not only both reading it, but within a few pages of each other.

After picking up the rental, I drove over to my allergist. Afterward, as I was making my next appointment with the new receptionist, I noticed the book on her desk (open and upside-down, but it was recognizable by size, color, and a name which jumped out at me before I looked away). Before I had a chance to mention it, the doctor walked up, noticed my copy sitting on the counter, and said, “Oh, you’re reading it too?” She then explained that her son and daughter (the latter turned out to be the unfamiliar receptionist) had each gotten their own copy so they could both read it immediately. At this point the daughter asked me,

“What page are you on?”

I opened the book. “448.”

“Oh, I’m on page 530” (or something around there). “I’ll close it so you don’t see anything.”

Wicked

Finished reading Wicked. Very good. Also very different from the musical. And I don’t mean in a Les Mis or Phantom condensed-the-heck-out-of-it way. I mean in a took a few high points from the book, then connected the dots with its own story way.

At least it wasn’t on the level of, say, Starship Troopers.

Collection of interesting links

Roads Gone Wild: a traffic engineer discovers that, in some circumstances, if you design the road right, you can actually make it safer by removing signs, lane lines, curbs and the like. The comments at Photomatt.netare interesting as well.

The History of Mathematical Symbols. Some of them are more recent than you might think.

Top 10 cheesiest movie lines—though they should probably be renamed the top 10 high profile cheesy movie lines. I think “I’m just the cook” in Under Siege (or was it the sequel?) is at least the equal of “No, I’m a postman” in cheese level. And once you get into the realm of B movies, there’s a wealth of cheese to be found.

Ursula Le Guin doesn’t like what Skiffy did to the Earthsea books. She really doesn’t like it She really, really doesn’t like it. She really, really, really doesn’t like it. And she’s not alone.

Daniel Handler, however, seems okay with the screen adaptation of his books.