Next week it’s Brendan Adkins’ birthday, and he’s giving us a present. Ommatidia, the first Anacrusis book, already exists. Wow. And in a week or so we’ll be able to order it. That gives you about a week to trawl through the archives and discover that that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Update: It’s [...]
Hot on the heels of my last bit of Small Beer lovin’ comes their announcement: they’re also releasing Maureen F. McHugh’s Mothers and Other Monsters for free download. And I should have remembered that Kelly Link (who runs Small Beer, along with Gavin Grant) did the same with her own collection Stranger Things Happen way [...]
I was looking for an octopus (it’s a long story) when I stumbled upon the complete plates of Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 Kunstformen der Natur. They’re beautiful. (The octopus I was looking for is featured in the BibliOdyssey book, and turns out not to be by Haeckel at all. It’s here, along with an enormous number [...]
I got an out-of-the-ordinary eMusic newsletter this month. It looks perfectly professional (although slightly different to the usual ones), but it’s from an address at emusic.chtah.com (the usual newsletters come from edmailbox.emusic.com). I’m quite sure the company eMusic owns the domain emusic.com, but anyone at all could register chtah.com and add a subdomain called emusic. [...]
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The supercool Small Beer Press are publishing a collection of short stories by John Kessel, and alongside the print release they’re offering non-DRM, free downloads (pdf/html/rtf/txt) released under Creative Commons license. There’s a Kessel story in The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (“The Red Phone”) and it’s very short, very odd and very funny. [...]
They’re made out of meat (via). Also, “They’re made out of meat”.
Geoff Pullum asks if “and/or” means “and AND or” or “and OR or”, and decides for the latter. Well, duh. Clearly it means “and AND/OR or”. (He does have a point though: if you think like a logician, it’s clearly an unnecessary connective. “And AND or” is logically equivalent to “and”, while “and OR or” [...]
LibraryThing might not be “all the wonderful”, but it’s a lot of the wonderful. Still, it’s pretty scary when it knows more about the state of my relationship than I do. Sifting through my recommendations I found Changing Babies by Deborah Moggach. You can bet I clicked that button labelled “Why” in double-quick time, and [...]
Over at my LibraryThing reviews account I just posted my review of Shaun Tan’s beautiful story-in-pictures The Arrival. I can’t recommend it highly enough. You can see some images on the artist’s website (I’ve linked a few from the review also). After posting the review I started wandering through other people’s reviews (the perils and [...]
This isn’t my news, but my sister is kindly letting me tell it anyway. She’s got a job for six months, as the office manager at a gold mine in Mongolia. I’ll give that a moment to let it sink in. What’s that? Damn straight I’m going to try to visit her!