I knew that Tesco had pulled out of their American adventure, but I'd become lulled by the fact that the stores themselves continued unchanged. Except that they no longer had the ginger lemon creme sandwich cookies, which, though not my favorite cookie overall, I find myself craving more as time goes by ( Read more... )

Read Snuff, by Terry Pratchett. (And you can kind of tell I moved near a used bookstore. . . and the local public library is quite excellent. . . and moving also was an opportunity to get all the books out of boxes in my garage and onto actual bookshelves. Some of them are even lightly sorted. I've been reading a lot, is what I'm saying ( Read more... )

Picked up a copy of Mishima's 『命売ります』, which the Wikipedia is pleased to translate as Life for Sale. It's strange -- I bought it mostly because it's a Mishima work I'd never heard of, and once upon a time that would have been important to me. But at that time it hadn't occurred to me that so much of his work might remain untranslated, and in fact ( Read more... )

Been sewing a fair amount lately. Darned my M-65 field coat. Sewed up the lining of my favorite jacket. Hemmed some jeans. Replaced some buttons. "Mending" might be a better term, since I'm pretty firm about sewing only for practical reasons ( Read more... )

Having moved to within spitting distance of Google's headquarters, I'm seeing a lot of the self-driving cars on the road. They're pretty neat -- I, of course, am all for making driving an obsolete skill -- but it does make me wonder: how aggressive are they ( Read more... )

Finally ended my contract at the day job. It's a source of remarkable ambivalence for me -- on the one hand I enjoy recieving monies and buying nutrients, on the other I was pretty tired of that job, and especially of the particular species of gross corporate dysfunction that afflicted that company ( Read more... )

Read Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. Surprisingly good! In general, I think hard SF is pretty boring, but this really shows a lot of the strong points of the genre -- what you might call the romance of physical reality. There are a bunch of scenes where he just describes how grand it all is, and how wonderfully we've come to terms with the sheer ( Read more... )

Sometimes I read my 419 spam. (Terrible habit, I know.) But this one's amazing in its metacity.

I am Mr Ibrahim Lamedo the chairman of ECONOMIC & FINANCIAL CRIME COMMISSION (EFCC).EFCC in alliance with economic community of West African states (ECOWAS)with the head office here in Nigeria.we have been working towards the eradication of ( Read more... )

Went under the fence at an abandoned elementary school. I don't know, it's all a little too preciously gothy for me, but there's a definite power in that desolation. I went to a school that looked a lot like that, and those memories, such as they are, remain irresistible.


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Been (re)reading some of Murakami's minor works. (I'm just making this category up, but I'm pretty sure it's a reasonable division to make.) One of them was After Dark, which I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that I thought he was just phoning in. It's got his usual character types behaving as you'd expect. Dual world, evocation of Tokyo, ( Read more... )