1. D fed me Order of the Stick (which I'm still in the process of reading), and as a result I've been playing a lot of NetHack. (I'm really bad at it -- the sort of careful thinking-through of potential options when that leocrotta shows up isn't my forte, and I die a lot.) NetHack... can be a sort of interesting laboratory for studying probability ( Read more... )

At the end of National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month, it is traditional for me to post an unattributed list of quotations referenced by our household during the month of February for people to guess. So here you are! I'll add the attributions to this post on Monday. (I think that, for whatever reason, this year's are easier than those of other ( Read more... )

With apologies to Heather for using the same source (but hey, great minds think alike): Happy Valentine's Day ( Read more... )

Salieri: Mozart, it was good of you to come!
Mozart: How could I not?
Salieri: How... Did my work please you?
Mozart: [hesitantly] I never knew that music like that was possible!
Salieri: [uncertainly] You flatter me.
Mozart: [getting into it] No, no! One hears such sounds, and what can one say but... "Salieri."

-Amadeus (Shaffer)

Cheer up, Hamlet; chin up, Hamlet; buck up, you melancholy Dane ( Read more... )

Had we but world enough, and time ( Read more... )

There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl--faith, hope, and love--and the cruelest of these is love.3+/5 (subject to sequel revision). I finished my first Valente! So this is a book that I would never have read except on iPod. I read this in dribbles and drabbles while getting my hair cut, in airports, while getting gas ( Read more... )

First come I. My name is J-W-TT.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this college:
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

-attributed to Henry Charles Beeching

I am pleased to participate in the fourth (whoa, already?) National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month (henceforth NPQiYBM), even though every year I intend to save up quotations for ( Read more... )

It's getting near the end of February, so I thought I'd do another overheard-in-our-household quiz thingie -- some version of all of these quotes were spoken in our household during the month of February. Books and movies both are fair game, with one from a musical. Frighteningly enough, more of the quotations are not from books than are, which is ( Read more... )

"Rewarding the good," Delia said, "and punishing the wicked."

Dev gave her a dry look. "Would that everything was so binary," he said.This is a Duane-tries-to-channel-Vinge book about a big Google-esque MMORPG company. I always enjoy reading Duane -- I got to her from her Star Trek novels and have been happily reading all the Wizard books since ( Read more... )