February 2010

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Book Log #9: Fall of Light, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

February 10, 2010 in Book Log | Permalink

I only realized partway into Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s Fall of Light that this was actually a sequel to a previous book: A Fistful of Sky. I elected to keep reading anyway, but I can’t help but wonder if I’d read the other book first, whether this one would have made more sense.

This one’s premise was promising, I thought: Opal LaZelle is a makeup artist working on a movie set, and she’s got a thing for the man who’s playing the monster of the movie. Only something awakens to possess him when Opal goes a little overboard on mixing her magical talent in with her gift for makeup artistry–and she discovers that the location where they’re shooting is no coincidence. Makeup artist is certainly something I hadn’t seen done before in a fantasy novel, and I wanted to give this one points alone for an unusual profession for the heroine.

Unfortunately I found the read disappointing, I fear. It was admittedly a bit of a relief to have most of the cast react surprisingly well to discovering that Opal is magically gifted–but on the other hand, all of them, including Opal herself, seem surprisingly casual about the fact that something else has invaded the consciousness of Corvus Weather. Also, there are several interesting concepts the plot toys with–is the invader of Corvus truly evil? Are Opal’s past flirtations with darker magics going to unleash part of her that should never have been given form? But these concepts seem thrown forward for the reader’s consideration, and none of them get any real resolution at all.

Which isn’t surprising, given that the book overall doesn’t get any real resolution, either. Without going into spoiler territory, I’ll say right out that the ending is a cliffhanger, and I’ll have to hope that Ms. Hoffman plans a followup, if nothing else just to give these characters some closure. If one isn’t coming, I have to take this book as a standalone experience, and ultimately as such, it doesn’t satisfy. Two stars.

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Heads up, LJ peeps

February 9, 2010 in The Internet | Permalink

For several days now, LJ’s feed of custom styles has been broken–which has meant that the custom style I set up to let it download a feed of my Friends list into my mail client hasn’t worked, so I’m totally behind on keeping up with all of you!

If anybody posted anything addressed specifically at me, can you link me up in a comment? Thanks! *^_^*;;

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And now, the Nook report!

February 8, 2010 in Me | 4 comments

Nookish goodness arrived at my house today! Therefore, as promised, here’s my overall initial review post.

First and foremost, y’all may have heard that the Nook comes with insanely complicated packaging. This is absolutely true. When you first get into it, there’s a little slip of paper that has–I kid you not–a seven-step procedure for freeing it from the various layers of packaging around it. This all had the advantage, I suppose, of making damn sure that it got to me intact. But when you have to have special instructions for actually unpacking the thing, I think they might have gone just a touch overboard, y’know?

My reaction on getting it out of the first layer or so though was “It’s a Microsoft Ship-It award!” Because it looked like this, you see:

I had to get userinfospazzkat‘s help to actually liberate the thing; he’d already done the same with his own nook, and his hands are stronger than mine, so he was able to do the last couple of steps to pry the thing out of its plastic support tray. Once that was done, I was able to do the fun part: powering it up, getting its updates on it, and most importantly, firing up the books.

Overall I like the design and look of it. Once I put it in its cover, it’ll be about the size of a small hardback book, and not so heavy that it’ll be onerous to carry in my backpack. I’m not much of a fan of the way the screen flashes when you turn a page, but other than that, I find the e-ink very readable, at least in direct light. It’s not as useful in low-light conditions, so this may be an issue when reading on the bus after dark. I may have to resort to the iPhone as backup reading device then. I am also amused that its default screensaver is the various pictures of authors that anybody who’s ever been in a B&N store will remember as being the artwork on the walls. I like that enough that I’ll probably keep it, for now.

It downloaded updates on its own, which was nice, and it cheerfully went and got all of the ebooks I’ve already purchased from the Barnes and Noble ebook store. This was I admit a trifle confusing UI-wise, since I’d set some of my books as “archived” because I’d already read them, and got confused because I had to tell the thing to go ahead and download those–but I didn’t have to do that with the rest of them. But it was all good in the end.

Getting all my non-B&N content onto it was super easy. You can plug it into a USB port and have it mount as a drive, which is lovely. You can then dump as many files as you like in whatever directory structure you like onto it, which is also lovely. But there are several organizational issues with how the device actually shows you the files, to wit:

  1. Whatever directory structure you use is entirely irrelevant, because the actual device will just do a flat display of all the files it finds; it doesn’t care about your folder structure.
  2. There is currently no way to organize your titles past “sort by author” or “sort by title”, in the “My Documents” section; in the “My Library” section, where the B&N content resides, it’s a little nicer and you also get “Most Recent” as a sort option. But what I would really want to see here is the ability to mark a book as Read somehow, whether that be by a tag or by moving it into a Read folder or what.
  3. After looking at the lovely lists of titles and cover thumbnails in the iPhone’s various reader apps, the black and white file list is really kind of boring to look at. But this is only a mild objection on my part since the tiny cover thumbnails would lose something on this display and not really be worth displaying.
  4. A lot of my PDF files are coming through with really weird mangled names. I don’t know why that is, if it’s a metadata problem on them or what. I may have to see if I can fix those in Calibre or something.

Tomorrow I’ll give it a good test run with actual reading, and report back on that. So far at least I’m favorably inclined to it, but man, I hope they improve the organization of files on the device in future firmware releases.

And oh yes, I also had to take a picture of this, because Kendis says hi:

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Assorted bits of housekeeping

February 7, 2010 in Site Updates | Permalink

Did some work this afternoon and evening during the Super Bowl to clean up various bits of annathepiper.org as well as the journals it mirrors out to. This included:

  • Deleting my InsaneJournal account; don’t really need it since I’m on both JournalFen and Dreamwidth, and nobody ever answers my posts on IJ
  • Un-mirroring a lot of older posts from annathepiper.org off of LJ, DW, and JF
  • Changed my theme on LJ just because I was tired of looking at the old one
  • Finally bought a paid account on Dreamwidth, just because of their general awesomeness
  • Updated my sidebar links a bit on JF just to link off to the other sections of my little web of journals
  • And, on annathepiper.org, fixed some broken links by instituting a WordPress plugin contact form on my re-instated Contact page; also, re-instated my long-missing Nethack page, which is mostly there to commemorate my still one and only Ascension

Slowly re-instating a bunch of old missing content on annathepiper.org as well, just for giggles and because I can. The GBS, TOFOG, Filk, and Sonnets sections are on the way back eventually.

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Conflikt was fun

February 3, 2010 in Me, Music | Permalink

Several of you who read my journal in whatever iteration already know this since you were actually there, but hey, Conflikt! That was fun.

This was the first year that userinfosolarbird and I got to attend the whole convention, which was nice. We still pulled a commuter con, which was not quite so ideal; next year, I think we’ll be getting a hotel room, just because driving all the way back to Kenmore at 2am or later is crazytalk. Especially when things like the Jury panels happen around 10:30 in the morning!

Dara did of course do more active music playing than I did since she has a CD in progress; me, I mostly hung out and beat on one of the novels in progress. And a nice lady I hadn’t met before even told me she quite liked Faerie Blood, to which I double-taked hugely, and was all ‘wait, a complete stranger actually read my novel? Whoa!’ (Nice Lady Who Read My Novel, if you’re reading this, I have forgotten your name and LJ, but if you drop a comment I shall make sure to note it again properly for the future!)

I did periodically also whip out Rags and do impromptu jamming near the registration table, which was also good fun. Special shout-outs on that are due to userinfodoragoon and Jeri Lynn who was managing the registration table, and whose LJ, if she has one, I do not know! We managed to play a not too bad little pass through “Si Bheag Si Mhor”, a song to which I am partial of course from its connection to Mr. Crowe and the Grunts. (Mmm, “Judas Cart”, I should listen to that again.)

Also participated in the Band Scramble, which let me meet a few nice folks and play music with them; we did “Elf Glade”, which is a standard at the Murkjams, and it was an interesting musical exercise to try to follow somebody else’s version of the guitar line. Also fun to try to invent piccolo twiddles on the fly since I never play flute on this thing at home.

The main attraction of the whole shebang was userinfofilkertom, though! Since my original exposure to filk was in the Midwest and my and Dara’s housemate at the time, userinfoamethyst_dancer, was an old college buddy of Tom’s, I’m real familiar with Tom and fond of his music quite a bit. He’s a superb musician, and I was very pleased to see that he hasn’t missed a step in live performance since I saw him last. His voice and guitar playing are both very strong, still! It was with great glee that I plunked down money for three, count ‘em, three of his albums at the con–and furthermore picked up two more off of iTunes when I got home. Tom’s just that awesome.

Secondary highlight: seeing Alexander James Adams perform. I really want Alec to start writing more new stuff, just because as a long-standing Heather Alexander fan I have the original versions of a lot of his songs stuck in my brain and they don’t really want to be budged out by newer versions. He’s got a quite nice new vampire song though as well as a new one called “The Dance of Hoof and Horn”, and of course his fiddle playing is still sublime. Extra bonus points for Dara and I getting to sit near him in the big Sunday afternoon Jam, too. And I got to remind him of the incident in 1997 when he looked me in the eye at a room party and said “Play something!” and I squeaked and almost melted into the floor. Now? Now I can actually whip out a guitar and do something with it. He told me he was pleased to have inspired via terror. ;)

(Another shoutout to userinfodoragoon as well for whipping out that fiddle of hers and duo’ing with Alec on “Si Bheag Si Mhor”. Lovely and very well done!)

Alec has a work print of his next new album, so although it’s mostly reworked versions of Heather-era songs, I put down for that too since hey, again, awesomeness. And it may amuse userinfodamara as well that I bought a Heather Dale album–one of the CD vendors in the tiny dealer’s room had a whole bunch of her albums, so I got The Hidden Path and in fact listened to it tonight on the way home from work.

All in all a pleasant and relaxing way to spend the weekend. I may have been “hanging out on the periphery” girl for the most part, but it was a lovely periphery to be at. And “surrounded by musicians” is strangely conducive to getting actual writing done, not to mention guitar playing. <3 Looking forward to next year!

And maybe next year, I’ll actually have a proper chord line to “How Many Hugos?”, one of the few filk songs I’ve actually written. Not to mention, maybe I’ll finish that Doctor Who filk still haunting my brain, and also have that shiny green guitar!

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Book roundup post

February 2, 2010 in Book Log | Permalink

I may have shiny nookity goodness on the immediate horizon, but this ain’t stopping me from buying print books when the occasion calls for it. And the new release of Alcestis by Katharine Beutner warranted it.

This is a new retelling of the Greek myth about Alcestis–only in this version, when she winds up in Hades, she falls in love with Persephone. And since I do love me some Persephone, I felt it was vital to check this out. Plus, Ms. Beutner is a fellow Outer Alliance author, so there ya go!

Also picked up recently in print form:

Picked up in ebook form:

  • Murder on the Cliffs: A Daphne du Maurier Mystery, by Joanna Challis. Mystery.
  • Children of Amarid, by David B. Coe. Fantasy.
  • Ariadne’s Web, Gods of Fire and Thunder, and Empire of the East, all by Fred Saberhagen. Fantasy.
  • The Medusa Project, by Cindy Dees. Romance.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series #42: Memory Prime, by Garfield Reese-Stevens and Judith Reese-Stevens. Self-explanatory. ;)
  • Benighted, by Kit Whitfield. Urban fantasy.
  • Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, by userinfomizkit. Urban fantasy.

Note please that Murder on the Cliffs, Children of Amarid, the Saberhagens, and the Durgin release are all Macmillan authors. Note also that Children of Amarid is as per earlier recommendation, as are the Saberhagens–though it is vexing to me that Saberhagen’s Book of the Gods series does not appear to be consistently available in ebook form!

I grabbed the Trek novel just because it’s one of the ones I read when I went through my obligatory Trek novel phase, and it’s one of the ones I remember fondly, so I wanted an ebook copy of it! And of course, Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight is userinfomizkit‘s new novella. Which y’all should go buy from her.

Total books acquired in 2010: 45. My quest to own every book in the universe: proceeding nicely.

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And now, a gratuitous icon post!

February 2, 2010 in GBS, Me | Permalink

It occurred to me that if I was going to go around calling my LJ “Ordinary Day”, I should damn well have a default icon that reflects that. So for the benefit of those of you looking at this on my various LJ-flavored sites, check out the Alan and Sean loverliness. That shot is of course from the video for the song. The icon is by userinfoturple_purtle, who was the provider of just about all of the GBS icons I use.

And if you’re looking at this on annathepiper.org, here!

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I was going to do this anyway

February 1, 2010 in Me | Permalink

But the Amazon vs. Macmillan brouhaha over the weekend has pretty much bumped up the priority on this: I just dropped my first round of shiny royalties on a Nook. The actual device and a pretty cover to put it in pretty much comes to roughly the amount of royalties I got, and that’s quite fine with me. Barnes and Noble thinks it’ll ship probably around the 12th, so it’ll be a couple of weeks before Nookish goodness actually reaches my house; this too is fine, since it ain’t like I’m lacking for things to read.

(Technically, I am not going to spend those exact moneys on the device, I think–just because it’ll be nice to keep them in the account they’re sitting in, quietly gathering interest. I’m actually paying for the thing out of my primary account. But I figure that as long as I have the money, I don’t really give a flying damn what account it comes out of. The important thing is, shiny candy-like buttons! And ebooks!)

I’m also feeling the need to show Macmillan authors some solidarity, so I think my next round of ebook buying is going to be all Macmillan authors! I need to round out my John Scalzi collection anyway.

Since the cover I wanted isn’t actually available yet (a nice leather green one with an embossed quote about how a good book is the best of friends), I have instead selected the punctuation-themed one with a big ampersand on the front and a question mark on the back. This has the added bonus of being nethack-y, and will likely make me do a double-take the first few times I read something on the thing, thinking “AIGH THERE’S A DEMON ON MY NOOK”. Or, if I look at it from the back, wondering if I’ve actually identified this scroll yet.

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