“The Dispatcher” by John Scalzi
Took me a while to get around to it, but I finally picked up John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher yesterday morning and polished it off before bed. Some mild spoilers (depending on your definition of “spoiler”) below....
A little Calibre trick: Set series order in metadata
Many book series do not make it abundantly clear what order the series is in by book title. If you are reading, say, Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, it’s not clear from book titles what order the series is in. So you finish Ringworld and then you are ready to...
Happy Public Domain Day! Or is it?
Today isn’t just the start of a new year, it’s Public Domain Day in the United States. Works from 1927 enter the public domain today, making them free to copy, share and remix....
Disappointed in the Kobo Forma: Two years is too short for an e-reader to last
The Kobo Forma is the first e-reader I’ve ever owned that I’ll be replacing because the hardware died, rather than replacing it with better technology. This is rather disappointing since the Forma had everything I wanted and wasn’t even two years old....
Recent books: The Obelisk Gate, Kaiju Preservation Society, All Systems Red
I’ve done a terrible job keeping up with my reading over the past few years, but have been trying to remedy that recently with some success. In the past few weeks I’ve been getting back into science fiction and fantasy, with The Obelisk Gate, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and...
A cardinal sin of content marketing: Writing what you want the audience to have read
No matter who your audience1 may be – admins, developers, decision makers, or anyone else – they’re not obligated to read your content. It’s all about “what’s in it for me?” If you need to communicate something to an audience, you have to write what they want to read...
Shakespeare, yea or nay?
Is Shakespeare mandatory for a well-rounded secondary education? After more than 400 years, it’s reasonable to ask whether the canon is due for an overhaul, or to be chucked out of the window entirely....
Amyl and the Sniffers, Fraidycat web follower, Mogwai
Let’s shake some of my browser tabs and see what falls out. Fraidycat web follower / feed reader RSS has been on the decline since Google snuffed Google Reader. Many sites, these days, don’t even support RSS. It’s a problem. One solution that might fit the bill for many...
Not with a bang, but a whimper: The Stand collapses
Stephen King, and all of us, keep coming back to The Stand trying to get it right. First published in 1978, The Stand has been re-issued with an additional 500 or so pages in 1990, adapted as a miniseries in the early 90s, a comic series by Marvel from...
[Review] Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching that Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism
More than 100 years ago in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a black man named Ed Johnson was dragged from his jail cell and taken to the Walnut Street Bridge and lynched. That Johnson was almost certainly innocent, and that he was already condemned to die by hanging, mattered not at all...