The Reading Corner.

[Geo]

Food and sadism, little else.  No wonder Oerdin is such a big fan.

You know nothing, Uncle!

[Buster's Uncle]

You're illiterate, Ygritte!

[Lorizael]

...it's 75% padding (a significant portion which is about meals eaten)...

You forgot descriptions of heraldry.

Anyway, how does 75% food compare to Tolkien's 75% hills/valleys/rivers/etc.?

[Buster's Uncle]

Similar.  I've said so before, if you care to search.

[E_T]

...it's 75% padding (a significant portion which is about meals eaten)...

You forgot descriptions of heraldry.

Anyway, how does 75% food compare to Tolkien's 75% hills/valleys/rivers/etc.?

or all of his songs

[Buster's Uncle]

I began a re-read of Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper this afternoon...

...And there's one heck of a movie in that, given sufficiently good CGI and someone like Sam Elliot as Jack Holloway.  Open with grizzled prospector during opening credits, working alone, shooting a damnthing, eating alone, ect - generally looking thoroughly grizzled and tough and alone…

Gadzillions in box office, done well enough, and hella toyetic…  Geo?  Anyone else familiar?  Thoughts?

[E_T]

Nice Non-Fiction Short, this month over at Baen's main website https://www.baen.com/

“The Universe Beyond the Plasma Frequency” by Kerry Hensley
small snippet

After centuries of watching the night sky with increasingly sophisticated tools, there’s still plenty we don’t know about the universe. Part of the challenge is that we’re stuck on a planet that’s surrounded by an atmosphere that blocks certain types of radiation from reaching the ground. It’s hard to complain too much, since if X-rays could make it to Earth’s surface humans would either be dead or a very different kind of organism, but it has certainly slowed our progress. We’ve managed to launch telescopes into orbit around Earth to observe most wavelengths of light, but there’s a huge chunk of extraterrestrial radiation that we currently have no means to observe. The culprit? A layer of plasma in Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere.

Find it here https://www.baen.com/plasmafrequency

[Elok]

Re: ASoIaF (necro!), a couple of as-yet-unmentioned things stuck out to me about it:

1. If a character is reported to have died (off-camera), no matter how many people saw it or how sure they are, that is an absolute, iron-clad guarantee that the character is still alive.  There are no exceptions.
2. If a character at any point decides to be heroically altruistic, the universe will swiftly and brutally punish them for their hubris.  If a character decides to be villainous, but is grossly incompetent, their comeuppance will be delayed for several hundred pages if not an entire book.  The only competent villain to have suffered in any way thus far is Tywin Lannister.  Unimaginatively dutiful stoics like Brienne, Sansa, and Davos are their own category, and will generally endure a persistently crappy life without the dramatic downfalls of bolder heroes.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Figured out what that alphabet soup referred to before you got to names from the characterization of plot tropes - yes; exactly so.

[Buster's Uncle]

I am not currently reading, but-

I find myself thinking about reading Cheaper By the Dozen as a kid as I work through a set of pages - the sheer volume and repetition of my workflow really rewards efficiency, and Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, the parents, were pioneers in Motion Studies.  She's still cited in business texts, and she did all her publishing over 100 years ago.  I've discovered that the aggravation of dealing with Secret Project pages I renamed with the project name -which means the numbered addresses in the originals that scroll to next in line are useless- is ameliorated considerably by dealing with the scrollbar and page title stuff 10 or so at a time, THEN going back and correcting all the crosslinks and pic addresses one at a time.  I don't have to change what's in the paste buffer nearly as often, and with this many little pages, it adds up.

I'm deeply embarrassed to have given the Wayback Machine so many years to lose everything, when I didn't realize how much I hadn't saved yet, the first time around.  I keep the Wayback copy up all the time for a week now in a tab that I refer to constantly.  While I work several Secret Project pages ahead, on the scrollbar stuff -no hope of keeping track of the numbers- I could refer to the game and the order it lists in, but not having to tab out and work in narrow windows is better.

Read the book, is my point of quoting this.  It's good.

[BU Admin]

This is a test post.

[Lorizael]

If this had been a real post...

[Buster's Uncle]

All your books would have self-destructed in five seconds, leaving you nothing but Smallville* re-runs to watch...

*AKA Superboy the Vampire Slayer

[Bearu]

I have read Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
Another interesting book remains Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall.
I might also recommend the reading of Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands on the Crimean War.

[Rusty Edge]

I was reading the usual naval historical fiction, and maybe I"ll write here about those books at some point.

The last couple days I've been reading IQ by Joe Ide. It's about an unlicensed black detective in Long Beach, CA who dropped out of high school. It had a lot of NYT acclaim, and I was in the mood for a detective story, so I tried it. It felt fresh and original to me, or at least the main characters. He doesn't carry a gun. He has a shrewd sense of smell, so he can recognize a cologne, or which people just got off of the hydraulic elevator. Uses observation and reasoning mostly. He has no friends within the police department, is too skinny to go around physically threatening people, doesn't have the cash to pay informants, and doesn't run con games against the suspects and witnesses the way some fictional private detectives do to get a break in a case.

He has his own demons, so he winds up trying to serve and better the community to appease them, even if that means he gets paid with a chicken or something. He's selective about which cases he takes, but he has a good track record, and word of mouth advertising.

I bought the next book, "Righteous". We'll see how it goes. I once enjoyed a series about black police detectives in Harlem in the 1930s ( or was it the 1950s?), but everybody carried knives ( I assume that was realistic) and I'm squeamish about fresh blood, and had to give it up. So far, I'm impressed with Joe Ide and his character Isaiah Quintabe.