After reading The Moon Pool, I decided to read Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, which served as partial inspiration for The Moon Pool. Narrator travels underground, finds an advanced society. The book is half the length of The Moon Pool, but took a lot longer to read; it's tough slogging, perhaps because of the legendary Bulwer-Lytton writing style ( Read more... )

I just finished reading The Moon Pool (1919) by A. Merritt. People say that this influence Lovecraft and the TV series "Lost", and they are right. I found out also that it influenced The Mole People (1956). I'll explain more in a somewhat spoilery fashion behind a cut.

( The Secrets of the Moon Pool )

For those who missed it:
I’m so EXCITED!! I said I was going to do it, and here it is! It’s for all the girls and guys who want a lot more FANTASY in their lives… and some fierceness and magic, romance and mystery, crazy and wild adventures, and yeah, some danger too. It’s my novel called Modelland (pronounced “Model Land”) that takes you to a ( Read more... )

Linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum is planning an anti-Strunk and White Elements of Style rally at Brown, although he's been told he's not allowed to include a book-burning. Still, it might be interesting. It's at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, April 13th. If anyone goes, it might be an interesting LJ post.

I'm curious about how well he'll do.

I was watching a Twilight Zone episode ("The Brain Center at Whipple's",) about the fears of modern people becoming obsolete, when I started to wonder: what was the first "fear of being made obsolete by a machine" story? The earliest I can think of is the story of John Henry, which would be from about the 1880s.

When I was investigating how to implement The Plan So Crazy It Just Might Work, I saw that there were a couple commercial apps designed to convert PDFs for you, into JPEG and in one case AVI. However, I avoided them because I figured "why pay someone else to basically wrap a GUI around tools I already have ( Read more... )

So, I've had this plan I've hinted at, but kept secret while I researched it. First, the set-up: because of my impermanent residence, I can pretty much use the computer every day, but only for short bursts, and there's no guarantees of any kind. That makes it pretty much impossible to work on projects. I can in theory write, but only the old- ( Read more... )

I didn't do rabbitholeday this year, despite the fact that I had plenty of warning. I had a couple ideas, but nothing I felt was really intriguing and inspiring. Plenty of other people had rabbithole entries today, though, so I'll have a lot to read.

Last night I started listening to an audiobook version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Although it's ( Read more... )

I've been commenting in other people's journals lately, but not posting much. I'd better do something to remedy that.

I've been on an odd kick lately, reading a lot of crime stuff. It all started with seeing No Country For Old Men, which was great and deep, without being obnoxiously deep. This lead to reading up on various killers, like Zodiac and ( Read more... )

Here are the answers for the rest of the Improbable Phrases meme from a few days ago, plus some discussion.

1. subjunctive instant replay, crab canon, strange loops
   (Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Guessed by doctroid)
   I figured this one would be easy for anyone who's read it, because of "strange loops". But damn, had to ( Read more... )