Congratulations to Tim Spalding, LibraryThing creator, on the recent partnership with AbeBooks. The blog has
the announcement. I’ve been an AbeBooks fan ever since I discovered BookSleuth: a community forum where you can post whatever details you can remember from a book you’re trying to track down, and somebody will recognise it and remind you of [...]
Apparently Susanna Clarke, of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fame, is putting out a short story collection this coming October. I’ll recommend it, sight unseen. This gives you four months to read Strange & Norrell and fall in love… you could also check out the online story on the site, and the Crooked Timber seminar. [...]
Hal Duncan writes books, of which so far one has been published: Vellum, which I tried to review a while back. Recently a friend who occasionally reads this blog mentioned that he intended to give Vellum a try, and just today I came across a couple of pieces by Duncan that throw some light on [...]
Thanks to Robin, my eMu downloads for next month are already spoken for. Back when I was working on my thesis
I blogged about the throat-singing punk band Yat Kha. Since then I’ve pretty much stopped buying plastic cds, so anything that doesn’t show in eMusic gets an immediate black mark. Now they’re there. The eMu [...]
I’ve tried a few times before to start a regular book review post schedule. It never works. Now I have a new strategy: when I start reading a book, I enter it in LibraryThing, as
tikitu-reviews (a separate account to to the one for books I own). When I finish it, if all goes according to [...]
On rec.arts.int-fiction today, Brian Slesinsky posted the following snippet:
In a hole in the ground lives a hobbit. A nasty, dirty, wet hole
contains ends of worms and an oozy smell. A dry, bare, sandy hole
contains nothing to sit down on or eat. The hole in the ground [...]
Tui beer has a long-running advertising campaign (since before I left New Zealand), under the slogan “Yeah right.” (”I’ve been studying all summer.” — “Yeah right.”) A mate of mine just snapped a
wonderfully altered version of one of these storeside ads. Kudos to the originator, and hopefully Robin will keep us updated if any more [...]
Woo! It’s certainly a month for exciting releases! Don McGlashan is putting out a solo album, Warm Hand, on May 15th, just two weeks before my birthday. Coincidence? Fate!
Update: I’ve heard the single, and it’s pretty cool. Definitely on the “Andy” end of McGlashan’s spectrum, lyric and lovely rather than challenging. I’m hoping that they [...]
Inform 7, the long-awaited ground-up rewrite of the interactive fiction authoring language, is out in beta release, and it’s… extraordinary. First the bad news: they’ve tied it inextricably into an IDE currently only available for Windows and OSX. On the other hand, that IDE looks pretty damn fantastic — packed chock-full of IF-specific goodies like [...]