Links, fiction
OK, I’m clearly the last to notice this but: Benny, diminutive of Ben, i.e., Dean’s surrogate child: right now, seeming like a better family member than Sam. Ben doesn’t remember him, but maybe there’s a second chance with Benny.
Programmer outsources own job to China, receives glowing performance reviews.
Reading trolly comments can be harmful to your own balance and deliberation. In other news, water is wet. I wonder if concern trolls produce the same results?
I didn’t know Aaron Swartz, but I have a number of friends who did; he did a lot of good for open online culture, and the law prosecutors were hounding him with needs to be changed so that it can’t be used to threaten anyone who does something without permission. If you’re in the US, please consider signing this petition to the White House.
Mark Waid & Peter Krause, Irredeemable, vol. 8: Okay, I think I’m done-I really liked the initial concept, in which a once-saintly superhero goes utterly off the rails and kills millions, and his team has to figure out what to do next. But instead of really confronting good and evil and their relationship to power, the story just seems to keep introducing new characters who can punch harder than the Plutonian: your hammer turns on you, but fortunately there is a bigger hammer out there. I don’t find that as interesting as the start of the story.
J. Michael Straczynski & Shane Davis, Superman: Earth One vol. 2: Accidentally or not, this has essentially the same cover as Irredeemable vol. 8: Hands fisted by his side, Superman/the Plutonian floats in front of a world on fire, his eyes glowing. Here, however, Clark is struggling with the implications of his power, and the moral use thereof, in a world where dictators promise to slaughter everyone they can if he crosses their borders even to help deal with natural disasters. Also there’s a power-sucking monster, and Lois Lane snooping to find out more about Clark’s mysterious rise to public prominence with his career-making interview with Superman. Satisfying, though I didn’t have a burning need to find out what was next.
Wild Justice, ed. Ellen Datlow: Older collection of fantasy/horror revenge stories. Michael Marshall Smith’s “Foreign Bodies” was probably the reason I bought it, and delivered his usual dose of human inhumanity with the story of a man who fears and distrusts women, and whose best friend starts dating a woman who seems stalkery but also oddly familiar. One of the stories, Pat Murphy’s A Flock of Lawn Flamingos, was a property lawyer’s delight: a story of revenge taken by careful manipulation of homeowners’ association rules.
Jacqueline Carey, Agent of Hel: Dark Currents: Daisy works as a file clerk for the police in her small Midwestern town. Also, she is the half-human spawn of a demon who raped her mother; Daisy could destroy the world if she so chose, and when she gets angry the veils between the spheres thin and her father tempts her. And she’s the local liaison between the supernatural world and the human world, with Hel’s authority (Hel being the local goddess). When the son of some local, politically connected anti-magic zealots dies in a suspicious accident, she’s forced to work with the hot werewolf on the force (her longtime crush) and with a mysterious, attractive new ghoul in town, ghouls here feeding on human emotions rather than flesh. There are also vampires, psychics, and a variety of other beasties. Given the hot guys circling around Daisy (there’s a third human one I didn’t even mention), this feels like Carey’s foray into a popular market niche because it will sell, but Carey’s good so I didn’t mind. Still, I can’t help but hope for something like her Oathbreaker books again.
Kristin Cashore, Fire: Set in the same fantasy universe as Graceling, this book tells the story of Fire, a monster whose beauty ensnares or enrages every human and every nonhuman monster she encounters-even bugs and birds want to tear her apart. Raised by her monster father, who was cruel to others but not to her, she’s spent most of her life being afraid of her own powers. But her king and country want-arguably need-those powers for the protection of the realm. Fire is more about feeling the ethics of nonconsensual mindwarping than discussing them. While her passions and grief (for various decisions she makes and events that occur) made sense for an eighteen-year-old girl who’d had to make terrible choices, I didn’t find the story as compelling as that in Graceling.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Programmer outsources own job to China, receives glowing performance reviews.
Reading trolly comments can be harmful to your own balance and deliberation. In other news, water is wet. I wonder if concern trolls produce the same results?
I didn’t know Aaron Swartz, but I have a number of friends who did; he did a lot of good for open online culture, and the law prosecutors were hounding him with needs to be changed so that it can’t be used to threaten anyone who does something without permission. If you’re in the US, please consider signing this petition to the White House.
Mark Waid & Peter Krause, Irredeemable, vol. 8: Okay, I think I’m done-I really liked the initial concept, in which a once-saintly superhero goes utterly off the rails and kills millions, and his team has to figure out what to do next. But instead of really confronting good and evil and their relationship to power, the story just seems to keep introducing new characters who can punch harder than the Plutonian: your hammer turns on you, but fortunately there is a bigger hammer out there. I don’t find that as interesting as the start of the story.
J. Michael Straczynski & Shane Davis, Superman: Earth One vol. 2: Accidentally or not, this has essentially the same cover as Irredeemable vol. 8: Hands fisted by his side, Superman/the Plutonian floats in front of a world on fire, his eyes glowing. Here, however, Clark is struggling with the implications of his power, and the moral use thereof, in a world where dictators promise to slaughter everyone they can if he crosses their borders even to help deal with natural disasters. Also there’s a power-sucking monster, and Lois Lane snooping to find out more about Clark’s mysterious rise to public prominence with his career-making interview with Superman. Satisfying, though I didn’t have a burning need to find out what was next.
Wild Justice, ed. Ellen Datlow: Older collection of fantasy/horror revenge stories. Michael Marshall Smith’s “Foreign Bodies” was probably the reason I bought it, and delivered his usual dose of human inhumanity with the story of a man who fears and distrusts women, and whose best friend starts dating a woman who seems stalkery but also oddly familiar. One of the stories, Pat Murphy’s A Flock of Lawn Flamingos, was a property lawyer’s delight: a story of revenge taken by careful manipulation of homeowners’ association rules.
Jacqueline Carey, Agent of Hel: Dark Currents: Daisy works as a file clerk for the police in her small Midwestern town. Also, she is the half-human spawn of a demon who raped her mother; Daisy could destroy the world if she so chose, and when she gets angry the veils between the spheres thin and her father tempts her. And she’s the local liaison between the supernatural world and the human world, with Hel’s authority (Hel being the local goddess). When the son of some local, politically connected anti-magic zealots dies in a suspicious accident, she’s forced to work with the hot werewolf on the force (her longtime crush) and with a mysterious, attractive new ghoul in town, ghouls here feeding on human emotions rather than flesh. There are also vampires, psychics, and a variety of other beasties. Given the hot guys circling around Daisy (there’s a third human one I didn’t even mention), this feels like Carey’s foray into a popular market niche because it will sell, but Carey’s good so I didn’t mind. Still, I can’t help but hope for something like her Oathbreaker books again.
Kristin Cashore, Fire: Set in the same fantasy universe as Graceling, this book tells the story of Fire, a monster whose beauty ensnares or enrages every human and every nonhuman monster she encounters-even bugs and birds want to tear her apart. Raised by her monster father, who was cruel to others but not to her, she’s spent most of her life being afraid of her own powers. But her king and country want-arguably need-those powers for the protection of the realm. Fire is more about feeling the ethics of nonconsensual mindwarping than discussing them. While her passions and grief (for various decisions she makes and events that occur) made sense for an eighteen-year-old girl who’d had to make terrible choices, I didn’t find the story as compelling as that in Graceling.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.