1995: The Zanzibar Cat

I’m not a fan of short story collections, but I’m a fan of a number of authors who write one short story collection after another, so I read them anyway.

But that explains why this book went unread.  I really like Joanna Russ.  She’s very funny and she’s quite angry, which makes for an enjoyable reading experience.

This collection has lots of funny bits, and lots of very sf-ey bits, and I enjoyed it immensely. I read it (as I do most short story collections) while travelling, and the mixture of storytelling approaches fits that situation perfectly.

As with any other book that I like, after finishing it, I went online to buy other books by the same author that I hadn’t read yet.  (This is why the backlog grows.) 

Not only have I read all her books, but she died last year.

Sigh.

Anyway, I bought this paperback used.  I like used books with marks from previous owners.  Like this:

I don’t leave any marks in my book myself, though.

Rating: Terrifilicious.

Tumblr is on Acid

I was reading this story on Hacker News about how awesome Tumblr is. 

It’s kinda fascinating.  It seems like lots of people on Tumblr is extremely rah rah about Tumblr itself.  You don’t really see people on Blogger or WordPress yattering on about the platform.

But I created a tumblr myself a while back to post even randomer pictures and stuff.

And the sign-up process is a complete mess that I still don’t remember how I got through in the end, involving emails that contained links to nowhere.

And the user interface is a total clusterfuck.  As illustrated in the picture above, if I want to post a picture to my tumblr, I have about one pixel where I’m able to click to upload a picture.  (Granted, this is from a pretty weird laptop with a 1600×768 screen, but still…)

And after I’ve uploaded it, there’s no easy way to get a direct link to the post itself.

So it’s all very confusing.  Are the rah rah tumbler people on acid?

Either I’m missing something, or the entire UX is totally eww.

Perhaps I’ll give hipstagram a try…

1995: The Mark of Merlin

I bought this book at an SF auction thing at the University.  I remember a bidding war broke out between me and some woman over this book.

I’m not sure why.  I was just caught up in the excitement.

And then it sat on the bookshelf until now.

I used to read a lot of the Anne McCaffrey sf/fantasy stuff.  She’s not a good writer or anything, but her books are…  relaxing.  They’re just there.  Things happen.  Dragons fly by.  A spaceship rebels. 

This isn’t a fantasy book, though.  “Merlin” (he of the title) is a dog.

I mean, literally.  He’s a dog.

So is this book.  This books is literally a dog.

It’s an uneasy mash-up between a gothic romance book and a spy adventure book, and it fails pretty much completely in every conceivable manner.  The plot is moronic and the romance is icky.

Rating: Twaddlelific!

Papp László Budapest Sportarénában

Who knew that Dead Can Dance had so many fans in Hungary that they had to play a sports arena?

I thought the sound was gonna be pretty iffy, but it was the last place in Europe that had tickets available.

The sound wasn’t iffy — it was horrible.

As Concert Goer Guy would say: Worst.  Echo.  Ever.

It was still ridiculously beautiful.  It’s Dead Can fucking Dance, innit?

1995: Tourists

I do remember why I haven’t read this one.  I thought it was a short story collection.

I hate short story collections.

No, that’s not quite true.  I love short stories.  It’s just that they take more energy than novels.  They’re so compressed.  You have to start caring about these characters in a couple of pages, and then ten pages later, they’re gone.  And then you start on the next one.

It’s less than relaxing.

So I thought this was a short story collection for some reason or other, but it isn’t.  Instead it’s an sf/magic realism mash-up.  Sort of.

It’s quite original and fun, but it didn’t really make me want to run out and buy ten more books by Lisa Goldstein.  It’s quite good.  Quite.  Kinda.  Yes.

Rating: Ambivalific!