Last week I finally finished the last round of paper editing on Father’s Books. This was supposed to be just to find and fix typos, but turned into yet another round of “let’s move this sentence over there” and “I can cut this paragraph” sorts of edits. Which is not to say there weren’t typos too. Most times there’s nothing much interesting about typos, but every once in a while they’re cute.
So this week I’m continuing my recent spree of reading translated works* with The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin, depending). As you may be able to guess by the author’s name, this is a Chinese science fiction novel.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/11/2019: “The Three-Body Problem””
So this week I’m still reading The Night Watch Collection, by Sergie Lukyanenko. At this point I’m well into the last book of the trilogy, Twilight Watch, which so far is my favorite of the three.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 6/4/2019: “The Night Watch Collection””
So this week I reached into the giant stack of old schoolwork and other papers that my parents sent me several years ago. This time I pulled out a contribution to that great American literary genre, the epistolary road trip memoir:
Over the past several years, after Dennis the Vizsla Dog became a little old man dog, he got in the habit of being noisy in the evenings, loudly complaining via barks and whines that he wanted everyone to stop watching television and go to bed at, oh, 8pm* or so. To an extent, this could be managed with things like the Treat & Train or simply by the occasional tossing of treats (which Hipster Chaplin thought was wonderful, because he was faster than Dennis at that point, with a better nose). Another way this was managed: Putting on subtitles for everything we watched. Because if you can’t listen, you can always read.
So this week I’m reading the Night Watch collection, the international best-selling dark fantasy series by Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. The collection gathers the first three books in the series — Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch — into a single volume. Being that this volume is around 2,000 pages long, I’ll probably be reading it for roughly as long as it takes to resolve a land war in Asia.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 5/14/19: The “Night Watch” Collection”
Those who have been following this blog for a while (i.e., my parents — hi Mom & Dad!) may remember how, a few years back, my wife and I spent about six months getting caught up on HBO’s Game of Thrones series. Because we didn’t have HBO, we did this by getting the discs from Netflix, and because, the seasons were spread across a lot of discs, we temporarily upped our plan to the “two discs at a time” level. (Otherwise it would have taken us like a year.) Around when we were finishing up Season 7, HBO announced that there would be no Game of Thrones in 2018, and so once the last disc went back to Netflix, we had to wait. And wait. And wait.
Now, of course, the wait is over.
Continue reading “Not A Review Of “Game of Thrones” S8 E3: “The Long Night””
So this weekend we finally got around to watching Aquaman (in 3D!) — no, not that Aquaman. Not that one either. This one:
So over the past several years I’ve posted various scenarios I created for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, featuring such neglected villains as Angel, Dracula, the Gentlemen, Ethan Rayne, and Glorificus (that last scenario having been created by Jeff Dee, with small modifications by myself). But now, like the show itself, we must come to the end of our run of Buffy episodes. Never having written a scenario for the final Big Bad, the First Evil, I’m wrapping things up one season before the show did, with Dark Willow, the Final Boss of Season Six. And what a bad boss she was.
Continue reading ““Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Board Game Scenario: Dark Willow”
So this week I’m reading Railsea, by China Miéville, author of several of my favorite books, including Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Kraken.
Viscosity 