(no subject)
2. Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook
New author for me, and definitely a fun read. Wiz, a computer programmer and very stereotypical solitary geek guy, gets summoned by a powerful wizard into a fantasy world. No one's real sure why, and the League (the bad guys of the story) kill the wizard before anyone can find out. They just assume that he's powerful and important and somehow useful to the wizards of the north, who are fighting to keep the League from taking over everything.
The antagonists are a little cliched (I keep thinking "Evil Leauge of Evil" when they're referred to as just "the League"), but genuinely creepy.
And the concept of the story is pretty cool actually. Wiz figures out that magic is basically programming reality--in machine language. Which means that wizards who make mistakes tend to die spectacularly. So, he decides that what the world needs is a programming language for magic and goes to work creating one.
3. Shaping Information by Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett
A book I read for school, but one I enjoyed a lot more than I expected to. The authors look at visual communication--basically everything from symbols to font size to color to shapes of road signs--in terms of conventions. How the ways of organizing info visually develop, gain recognition within particular discourse communities, change, and eventually get replaced.
So, there were bits comparing a cutaway drawing showing how a mill worked from 14 or 15 something, one from 17 something, and one from 19 something, showing the shift from picture illustration with grass and people and background to more abstract representations.
Oh, and their writing style rocks. Clear and fluid, not pretentious, with a ton of visual metaphors. Enough that it might have gotten annoying if they weren't all spot-on.
What I'm reading now for school is, sadly, much less engaging.
New author for me, and definitely a fun read. Wiz, a computer programmer and very stereotypical solitary geek guy, gets summoned by a powerful wizard into a fantasy world. No one's real sure why, and the League (the bad guys of the story) kill the wizard before anyone can find out. They just assume that he's powerful and important and somehow useful to the wizards of the north, who are fighting to keep the League from taking over everything.
The antagonists are a little cliched (I keep thinking "Evil Leauge of Evil" when they're referred to as just "the League"), but genuinely creepy.
And the concept of the story is pretty cool actually. Wiz figures out that magic is basically programming reality--in machine language. Which means that wizards who make mistakes tend to die spectacularly. So, he decides that what the world needs is a programming language for magic and goes to work creating one.
3. Shaping Information by Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett
A book I read for school, but one I enjoyed a lot more than I expected to. The authors look at visual communication--basically everything from symbols to font size to color to shapes of road signs--in terms of conventions. How the ways of organizing info visually develop, gain recognition within particular discourse communities, change, and eventually get replaced.
So, there were bits comparing a cutaway drawing showing how a mill worked from 14 or 15 something, one from 17 something, and one from 19 something, showing the shift from picture illustration with grass and people and background to more abstract representations.
Oh, and their writing style rocks. Clear and fluid, not pretentious, with a ton of visual metaphors. Enough that it might have gotten annoying if they weren't all spot-on.
What I'm reading now for school is, sadly, much less engaging.