Anybody seeing WP refusing to count unique visitors today? I’ve had 13 visitors since 7:30 am, and currently have more countries than individual visitors. I kinda doubt that.
Month: February 2014
Re-re-considering Robert Jordan and some other stuff
You may recall me posting about starting a reread of The Wheel of Time and not being as enchanted with it on the second time ’round. I was a bit less than halfway through the first book when I wrote that post; I proceeded to read the next four hundred pages of the book in something like three hours, so apparently whatever was bothering me wore off abruptly. Which is good, because otherwise the end of the book, where they search for the Eye of the World in an area called, I am not making this up, the Mountains of Dhuum, because calling it “Mount Doom” would be too obvious, would have made me throw the book across the room.
Another weird detail I didn’t remember: two chapters repeated, in their entirety, toward the end of the paperback. As a printing error, no big deal– but the page numbers continue in proper order. Normally when that happens the page numbers get screwed up too. I’m going to do some research to make sure my copy isn’t missing chapters; I doubt it, as the narrative continues smoothly and the chapters are consecutively numbered, but it’s worth looking into.
You may also recall me recommending that you pick up G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel #1, which just debuted last Wednesday and is certainly still available at comic shops nationwide. I am now adding to that recommendation her novel Alif the Unseen, which I read from cover to cover this morning and is marvelous. It’s also so completely weird and screwed up that I refuse to tell you anything about it other than that you should buy it right now and read it.
Walking Dead starts up again tonight, which keeps intermittently making me very happy, until I remember that I watch it through iTunes and so I won’t be able to actually see it until tomorrow night. This keeps happening; it’s like an incredibly specialized version of Alzheimer’s. “WOOHOO! WALKING DEAD! Oh, shit, not until tomorrow.”
…I had more, but I can’t remember what it is anymore. I’m having another sickish day today and it’s apparently messing with my ability to concentrate. So, yeah.
Snow geology
A neat thing you might not be aware of about snow, if you live somewhere where it doesn’t snow very often: under the right circumstances, it forms clear striations like rock does, if you happen to get a decent break in between storms and different kinds of snow fall in the different storms. Note here just how clearly you can see the break between Major Winter Storm 1 and Major Winter Storm 2.
No real point, I just thought it was neat.
Really crappy pictures of a really cool thing
I stopped at Subway (heh) for lunch on my way in to OtherJob. The particular Subway I stopped at has two blind turns as you circle the restaurant from the drive-thru microphone to the actual window where you pay and get your food.
I made the first turn and had to slam on my brakes, because there was an honest-to-God red-tailed hawk just chilling in the parking lot two feet in front of my car. I almost hit him. That close. Scrabbling for my phone ensued, but the beautiful bastard flew away just as I was pulling up the camera app…
…to join his mate on the roof of another nearby fast-food installation. Two of them.
I spent a good ten minutes chasing them around the parking lot trying to get either a) a crappy picture of both of them together or b) a good picture of one of them and failed. Nonetheless, enjoy crappy long-distance taken-from-inside-the-car-through-the-windshield iPhone pictures of two really cool birds:
WHAT
Okay, I can’t find a way to get the video to embed, so you’re going to have to click on a link, but I’m pretty sure that this moment should have destroyed the world. Or at least the Internet. What I can’t figure out is whether it should have destroyed the Internet from sheer awesome or sheer horror.
And at least half of these guys, despite the enthusiasm of the article, appear to be deeply uncomfortable with whatever the hell it is they’re doing.
Please. You owe it to your children to click on this.
Russian police choir sings “Get Lucky” before Sochi opening ceremony
On epic fantasy
Google Search Result of the Day: the phrase “men fucking nen” led someone here. Yes, nen, not “men,” and no, I have no idea.
Also, yes, that’s Maisie Williams. I don’t actually watch Game of Thrones— no cable, and we haven’t bothered to pay for season passes to download it– but literally every single time she does something as her and not as Arya Stark I find it hilarious. Sixteen-year-old girls shouldn’t be able to deadpan the way this kid does.
Today’s plan was pretty simple: quick blog post, do no work, sit around read books, maybe give the PS3 a workout for the first time since I finished The Last of Us. Today’s actual events: quick blog post, do no work, somehow lose three hours, abruptly realize I’m starving and eat lunch, read for an hour, fall asleep, get up just before five. I was home sick on Monday, remember, and I am officially sick to death of this quasi-ill low-grade recurring semi-mononucleosis bullshit that has plagued me off and on since this school year began. I don’t normally complain about naps but I did not want to take a nap today and so it was not the pleasurable experience that they normally are.
What I wanted to do: finish The Eye of the World, the first Wheel of Time book, which I’m only about halfway through. I’ve read the first… six? seven? books in the series, and put them down a long time ago when 1) Robert Jordan wrote an entire book without mentioning my favorite character and 2) I realized just how many books he still had to go before the series was finished– and that was before he died, leaving Brandon Sanderson to take over, and what was supposed to be one final book turned into three final books.
Here’s the thing: other than the omg long nature of the things, I don’t recall having any real complaints about the story or the writing itself– I’ve been looking forward to finally reading the series in full and was excited about picking up the first volume again a few days ago.
It’s… surprisingly hacky. (OKAY, FUCKING SERIOUSLY, HOW THE HELL DO I TURN OFF THE GODDAMN SPELL CHECKER IN THIS SOFTWARE, BECAUSE IT JUST REPLACED “HACKY,” WHICH IS A WORD, WITH “JACKY,” WHICH ISN’T, AND THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME, AND THE NAN-VS-MAN WARS IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH ALREADY PISSED ME OFF ENOUGH. I CAN FIX MY OWN DAMN TYPOS, WORDPRESS, DIE IN A FIRE.)
Ahem. I’m okay now.
It was quite a while ago when I read the series, and to be honest I remembered very little of it, but, like, the nouns are getting to me: he doesn’t have trolls or orcs, he has trollocs, and he doesn’t have ogres, but he has ogiers, and there’s a guy named Thorin in there and you can’t do that, and the bad guy actually has “Ba’al” in his name, and then there’s the scary guy in the ruins whose name is actually Mordeth, like, be a little subtler and call him Lord Evilkill or something like that. The tuatha de danaan are Irish fairies; he has a group of gypsies called tuatha’an. I know naming things in fantasy stories can be a pain in the ass, and I’m not blind to the fact that my Grond shares a name with a battering ram in The Return of the King, so maybe this is all a trifle hypocritical, but this stuff just keeps happening. That and the whole thing is very, very Tolkien in a way that didn’t annoy me the first time I read it through but on reread, much like the formerly-one-of-my-favorite-books-and-now-entirely-unreadable Sword of Shannara, it’s really getting on my nerves.
And I have, like, thirteen more of these things to go.
I may be somewhat less excited about this project than I was when I started it, is what I’m trying to say here.
In which I don’ wanna
I don’t like to get behind on my grading. But this is what happens when a) you refuse to do grading at home during the week (which I do), b) you have two out of the last three Fridays where school is cancelled, and c) on the one Friday where school isn’t cancelled, you didn’t have school on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday and it completely escapes your notice to bring your stuff home.
Thankfully, I came home yesterday assuming we’d be out today. Which we are. So I’m going to go read a book and play video games and hope that my house gnomes do my grading for me. Because it’s still Friday, dammit, and I don’t grade on Fridays. 🙂
I shoulda known this was gonna happen
What’s that line from Blade again? “Some motherfuckers are always trynna ice skate uphill”?
Forgive the possibly choppy presentation; turns out embedding Tweets is a bit more complicated than I thought it was.
