Just finished reading Black Blade Blues, by J.A. PittsThe book follows Sarah, a young lesbian who's an apprentice smith. She reforges a magic sword and ends up fighting all sorts of mythical creatures in modern-day Seattle. Along the way, she fights her destiny, meets all sorts of interesting creatures, screws up her life good and proper, and ( Read more... )

Andrea and I went on a date on Thursday. We started with dinner, then went to see Monsters vs Aliens. Because of the logistics of it all, we found the easiest plan for us was for Andrea to head straight to Kanata after work, and I met her there, so we ended up going to the AMC. I gotta say, I was irritated with the AMC when it first opened ( ( Read more... )

I finished reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow last week, and it's taken me a little while to process it to decide how I feel about it ( Read more... )

Famed blogger and award winning author John Scalzi decided after writing The Last Colony to step away from his Old Man's War universe to write something different. He even put it in a special Acknowledgments section at the end of the book. Then he changed his mind and retold most of the story of The Last Colony but from the perspective of Zoe, ( Read more... )

There's a going phenomenon in computer science circles called "patterns". The idea is that a huge number of the problems programmers and designers are faced with have been solved before, in a variety of clever and not-so-clever ways. As people identify recurring problems and clever, flexible solutions for those problems, they write them down and ( Read more... )

A few different friends have suggested the Dresden Files books to me over the last couple years, so I went and picked up the first few to try them out. Then I picked up a few more. Then I picked up every one that's out right now. And now I'm trying desperately to be patient while I wait for the next book ( Read more... )

Google released a new web browser today, Google Chrome. It's still in beta, like virtually everything else Google has ever done (is gmail even out of beta yet?) but so far I'm very impressed. I've popped up a few random pages and haven't had a problem yet. It's also faster than Firefox (and IE, although that should go without saying), and ( Read more... )

Just a mini-review... I've only played it for about 8 hours total so far, nearly to the end of chapter 2, so obviously there's a lot of content in there that I haven't seen yet ( Read more... )

My bro and I got out to watch Hellboy 2 on Sunday night, and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to describe it ( Read more... )

On my dad's advice*, I went out last night and bought a Weed Hound. Later on in the evening, I pulled a good three dozen weeds out of the back yard with it... in the space of maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Without breaking a sweat. Or even bending over, for the most part ( Read more... )