(Flickr set slideshow; 23 photos.)
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	Ocotillo
	Claret Cup

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Mild spoilers and slight snark may exist behind the cuts.


Steven Brust, Iorich. ( Read more... )

C J Cherryh, Intruder ( Read more... )
C J Cherryh, Conspirator (r)
C J Cherryh Deceiver (r)
C J Cherryh Betrayer (r)

Iain M Banks, Surface Detail ( Read more... )

M K Hobson, Native Star (e)( Read more... )

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, The Tomorrow Log (e) ( Read more... )

Jane Lindskold, Five Odd Honors ( Read more... )


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I stumbled across something useful this morning: a fix for ljarchive that works properly for downloading comments again.


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Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey. Surreal future dystopia run along the lines of a 1950s English boarding school, where social status is determined by colour vision. I kept muttering to myself about colour theory not working that way. Also, limescale in the Welsh reservoirs that serve Birmingham? The whole point about the Welsh water in Brum is that it's dead soft.

Gene Wolfe, The Sorcerer's House. A man released from prison squats in a mysterious house outside a small American town, which turns out to have been left to him, and also not to be entirely in this world. I kept hoping it was just the unreliable and not very admirable narrator, but there seemed to be some rather nasty attitudes in this; also there seem to be some major dropped threads, but that might just be me missing things.

Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night (e) More shenanigans among the faerie and part-faerie denizens of San Francisco; mostly inoffensive and engaging, and the protagonist does experience some personal growth.

Also the first half of Surface Detail by Iain M Banks, but I'll deal with that when I finish it.


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From the latest post in news:

2012: A Look Ahead
Expect to see big changes in the coming months. Over the last year we've decreased advertising across the site. We're excited to announce that by mid-2012, advertising will be phased out completely for virtually all of the LiveJournal service pages, journals, and communities that we know and love. Advertising will only be shown in select communities that opt in to displaying it (which you'll hear more about on February 15).

Tad Williams, Shadowrise

Kage Baker, Mendoza in Hollywood (e)
Kage Baker, The Graveyard Game (e)
Kage Baker, The Life of the World to Come
Kage Baker, The Children of the Company
Kage Baker, The Machine's Child
Kage Baker, The Sons of Heaven

Barbara Hambly, Homeland

I now feel the need of something very light and fluffy to read next. The Williams was incredibly tedious for about the first third, as the characters kept stopping dead in their meanderings about the landscape to tell each other myth-stories, which seems an odd choice for the third volume of a quadrology. After that it picked up a bit. The Company novels, on the other hand, were compulsively readable but extremely grim in parts. Then I read the Hambly for a bit of something-completely-different; it's an extremely well done epistolary novel about two young women corresponding across the lines of the American Civil War, weaving together the harsh realities of their lives with the comforts of reading Dickens and Austen, but not exactly cheerful.


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Happy New Year!


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36 new books, 11 rereads. Apparently not having a job (and hence not having a commute or a lunch break away from the computer) means that I read less rather than more. I'm mostly only reading at night, and if the book isn't very compelling, or I'm tired, that might only be a few pages. Kraken took me a whole month to get through, and I'm currently slogging through the third instalment of Tad Williams' latest series; on the other hand I got through All Clear in not much more than a (travel) day. This tends to mean that I reach for smaller books; the last two volumes of the Malazan series, and a few other large tomes on the to-read pile, just look too intimidating. I need to figure out a way to fit more reading into my day next year, and more non-fiction, too.

Another observation is that once I got my physical books back, the e-reader didn't get much use. Again, I might have used it more if I'd been travelling/commuting more.

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If your custom comment pages suddenly disappeared, you can get them back by going to Journal Style, Customize your Theme, scroll down to Basic Options under Display, and set the 'Disable customized comment pages for your journal' option to No.

Mind you, the rate things are being fiddled with behind the scenes, I wouldn't be surprised if it changed again before bedtime.

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Two more days. 7752 words, or about seven and a half scenes, to go.

And then -- what next? If I get to the end of this, it's going to need to sit a while before I plunge into editing. I'm not any less stuck on the old projects than I was a month ago, so no more wild first-drafting for a bit. Probably I'll try dumping one of the stalled projects into yWriter, pulling it apart, distilling an outline from the remains, and trying to come up with an ending that way.

In other news, LJ has been in and out all day. I suppose we should get used to that happening any time Russian politics hit the headlines.


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They had a Steam Gathering at the Industrial Hamlet this weekend, as a grand finale before closing down for the winter, and I spent a couple of happy hours there yesterday morning, taking photos of shiny traction engines and steamrollers, watching a blacksmith forge a chain, and poking into the corners and workshops again.


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The warm weather is bringing out butterflies -- and wasps -- that probably should be dormant by now.


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Asteroid conspiracy theorists may be even worse than solar activity conspiracy theorists.

Five+ hours in the slow cooker was probably too long for a mix of red lentils and dried vegetables previously boiled for ten minutes, plus a coarsely chopped^H^H^H cut up onion. Tasty enough (if rather the reverse of appetizing in appearance) but pretty close to mush in texture.

The indicator light on my coffee maker seems to have died. Fortunately the coffee-making function hasn't.

The derelict car dealership just up the road is going to be a car dealership again. I don't know whether the extensive gutter-cleaning exercise holding up traffic along their frontage for the last couple of days is at all connected. And that can't be the only reason why buses that are supposed to be running at ten-minute intervals between here and the far side of the city have been turning up in pairs more often than not for the last fortnight.

I was just starting to work on re-convincing my system that 65 F is a perfectly comfortable indoor temperature, and we get a heatwave.


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So the final word on that falling satellite seems to be that it came down overnight. Somewhere, most likely at sea. If it had fallen on anything important we'd presumably have heard about it by now.

Meanwhile, the Sun has been flaring away at a brisk pace -- one X-class flare today, and so many M-class that they're kind of merging together and the X-ray flux has barely been below the "M" level since noon today.

Facebook is utterly messed up and full of cranky people. Near as I can figure, they've rolled out way too many changes at once (but not consistently to everyone), and given people too many useless new buttons to twiddle while quietly taking away some useful privacy controls. By anecdotal evidence they may have managed to badly break privacy in the process, at least for some people some of the time by accident and probably by design for a lot more who don't realize the implications of tagging someone, for example. It all makes me even more wary of saying anything over there that isn't utterly innocuous, let along posting photos with actual people in them. (Not that I take a lot of those anyway.)


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Here's the Sun in 171 Angstroms today:



and here's how it looked a year ago:



That's the solar cycle (finally!) in action.

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at data from very early in the life of SDO, when sunspots were few and far between, and it's startling to look at the current Sun -- now sporting the most sunspots so far this cycle -- and see how much things have changed.


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Two views of my local "lake" -- actually the dam for an eighteenth-century water-powered factory, whose buildings can be seen in the background. One was taken on Monday, when it was sunny but quite windy (not nearly as bad as it was higher up, I gather) and there was a good chop on the dam; the other was taken yesterday when the water was as smooth as I've ever seen it.







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I finished the last piece of a very long-running (since 1999) crochet project tonight -- not that I've been working on it very steadily; the last two of six pieces took about ten days of odd moments. Now I just have to weave in all the ends and join the pieces together, and that's another five pounds or so of Red Heart Super Saver yarn no longer taking up space in my bedroom.


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who's having trouble seeing images on the Cheezburger network sites the last couple of days?


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