On the dubious pleasures of rereading
Posted 18 Jan, 2009 at 20:30 by matt in /Books | Permanent link
Every now and then I'll pick up a series that I really liked when I was in high school. I should remember to stop doing that, because I'm almost always happier with the memories than the experience.
Right now I'm going through Jack Chalker's Quintara Marathon trilogy. There's a lot of things that I recall liking about Chalker when I was reading his stuff as a teenager: his use of diverse cultural and mythological elements, his ways of talking about technology, his depictions of different worlds. Neat ideas, neat plots, neat settings; these things make for decent space opera.
But the writing! His characters in this particular series have backgrounds that shift as the books go on, often flatly contradicting facts established at the very beginning. There's a lot of telling not showing as far as character traits go, and the way the story is set up means that there's a lot of decisions and discoveries that are repeated multiple times among multiple groups of characters... and it's not that interesting to read the third description of a tesseract in fifty pages, really.
What this probably means is that I need new, better fiction in my life; my recent spate of library borrowings have been almost entirely non-fiction, the lone exception being Patricia McKillip's lovely The Bell at Seeley Head. Suggestions, oh possibly imaginary readers?
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A modest contention
Posted 16 Jan, 2009 at 20:31 by matt in /Music | Permanent link
Procol Harum's Conquistador, especially as performed with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, is perhaps the finest flowering of progressive rock.
That is all.
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U3 vs. Portable Apps
Posted 07 Jan, 2009 at 22:19 by kael in /Technical | Permanent link
Odds are you've got a USB memory key AKA thumb drive AKA memory stick. Odds are you only use it to shuffle around data. Fortunately, there are portable apps available now, designed to actually be run off of memory sticks, rather than being installed on a computer. In fact, there are two different formats avalable: PortableApps and U3.
Both of these platforms are Windows-centric, but the former does offer WINE compatiblity for those who are allergic to products from Redmond. The former seems to be limited to Open Source Software, though. The latter requires a specially formatted memory stick to be usable as such.
I'll let you know more after I try them both out.
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Brett Spiel Welt
Posted 07 Jan, 2009 at 22:18 by kael in /Games | Permanent link
Brent and I were catching up over the holidays, and one thing that came up was how we used to like playing board games. No, not Monopoly--games like Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan. Turns out games in that vein are actually available for play at a German website: BrettSpielWelt.de. It's a web interface, but there's also a java client available which can cash content for you, so that you don't have to repeatedly reload images for games that you tend to play over and over again.
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Old School Strat + Open Source = Wesnoth
Posted 05 Jan, 2009 at 13:48 by kael in /Games | Permanent link
Battle for Wesnoth is a pretty sweet old school single player strategy game, in the vein of games like Battle Isle, or the combat system for Civ, but with a fantasy motif, and plenty of campaigns for a single player to play it with.The "official" campaigns range in difficulty, and many have selectable difficulties, which can be good, because it gives the campaigns some decent replay value.
The game scenarios are written in Wesnoth Markup Language, which makes the game very customizable.
All in all, excellent replay value, nice scalability, and excellent production values for open source.