Fireworks are still very pretty and excessively loud. Either they've gotten brighter or my eyes have gotten more sensitive: some of the bursts, especially one type of green, hurt my eyes. I think I'd've happily skipped the loudspeakers and perhaps brought a radio. Mostly, it was a fine excuse to hang out with people outside ( Read more... )

I quite liked James Blish's A Case of Conscience, another book of farwing's that leapt off the shelf at me. I was particularly surprised to notice this, perhaps a third of the way through, when I realized that the plot was going to turn on delicate points of Catholic theology. It's quite dated -- written in 1958, set in 2049-2050 -- with some ( Read more... )

It's summer. The sourdough culture is really hyper (even a couple of days ago when it was only ~70F), or perhaps it just likes curry. After adding curry powder and coriander and ginger to the sponge, and letting it sit probably too long, I added the rest of the flour (getting what seemed like a very soft dough -- not nearly so much resistance to ( Read more... )

We had some time to kill on Saturday, and so I was dragged (kicking and screaming, or at least protesting faintly ("My shelves are all full and I don't need more stuff!")) into a bookstore. There, on the big display table in front, with a generous discount, was the 2004 revised edition of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. I've been hearing ( Read more... )

Primer I'd call a must-see movie for anyone who likes social science fiction (by which I mean stories exploring what people might do given access to some interesting bit of technology -- where the people are plausible, and what the tech does is eventually clearly defined, whether or not it's plausible). A set of garage engineers accidentally ( Read more... )

"In the Forests of Serre" leapt off the shelf at me in the wee hours this morning. I spent several hours wrestling with it before I managed to get it back onto the shelf. It was tasty. Or perhaps my brain was ( Read more... )

... must be a baby.

I read a chapter and a half of Jhereg to vorpalkitten. (She slept through most of it, but reading it aloud amused me anyway.) I expect I won't really appreciate how bad an idea this is until, a few books into the series, she's old enough to start asking me questions about them.

Not mine, but ratatosk's rabbit hole tale, which I expect will greatly amuse anyone who likes cooking or modern fairy stories, and a great many other people besides.

Start at the beginning and then read the continuation.

Around 8am (why, yes, I am a nightshifted goof ... but I wasn't that nightshifted) I finished "Alien Influences" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It wasn't bad, but I was disappointed; I felt like the pieces could've come together into a much more compelling tale. It had lots of good moments and promising plot twists, but it never came together for me ( Read more... )

I finished Connie Willis's "Bellwether". (I blame ironrat and jencallisto.) I think it's not as good a book as "Doomsday Book", but I enjoyed reading it more: it was quite lighthearted, where Doomsday Book was dreadfully depressing. I wasn't as willing to buy into the bellwether/chaos theory as the time traveling historical scholars and an influenza epidemic, ( Read more... )