Books and Things

Dammit! I was really going to start blogging again, at least semi-regularly, but it hasn't been happening. I could blame "too much time spent on Twitter" but there are plenty of times I'm not on Twitter and I think about blogging something but I'm like, "Nah. Not in the mood. Maybe later." It's just habit I think. I used to be in the habit but now I'm out of it and it's not so easy to get back into it. Part of it too, I think, is knowing that I will spend time writing something and maybe three people will read it or maybe none and I'll never know because one has anything to say.

Okay, sorry, I'm starting to whine about how unpopular I am and nobody wants to read that. Let's get to what I'm really here for today: books!

I finished reading The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin several weeks ago and have been wanting to rave about it but I don't know quite what to say other than, "It's fantastic!"

I first found out about it on Twitter. At first I didn't think much about it but then someone said something about a "sentient planet"? So that immediately got my attention and made me want to read it. As it turns out, it's not really clear whether the planet is actually sentient or the people in the story only believe it/he is, like we believe in God but, let's be honest, there's no proof that He/She/They/It actually exists.

Okay, let's quickly leave that can of worms behind us. It's also not clear, to me at least, whether these books should be categorized as science fiction or fantasy and that's one of the things that I like about them - it doesn't matter. Magic is mentioned, not as something that is performed but more like a force that exists, like gravity or magnetism or maybe the weather. But they also mention technology - mostly the technology of dead civilizations that the characters in the story don't understand. And, I don't know, there are just things about the story that seem "science-y" to me, a non-science-y person.

This trilogy has an epic, important, feel to it. I highly recommend it but maybe not to everyone. It is dark and often violent and involves some child abuse so if you're especially sensitive you might not enjoy it. But I really don't have the words to tell you how excellent The Broken Earth Trilogy really is.

* * * * *

I'm currently reading Persepolis Rising, book 7 in The Expanse series and loving it as always. And there are a dozen or more books that I want to read absolutely right away! One of my favorite things about Twitter is Book Twitter - all the readers and especially the many authors (some of them true superstars, in my mind at least) who freely engage with readers just like ordinary people. I have discovered more Must Read! books in a month on Twitter than I did in a year before I went back to spending time on Twitter.

My final thought for this post: Twitter (and the rest of the Internet) is whatever you make it. It can be politics and ugliness or it can be friends sharing books and cat pictures. It's all up to you.

Books

Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton

I love big books. I have even read books primarily because they are famous for being long. And I enjoyed them. So don't think I'm complaining about these two books by Peter F. Hamilton being long. (988 pages and 1008 pages in mass market paperback) But some parts of the books, especially the first one, were long and tedious, hundreds of pages of politicians and VIPs schmoozing and fornicating. But the more interesting parts, with strange aliens and time shifting paths through the woods and such were very brief.

I know some people say, "Why waste time on a book you're not enjoying? Just quit and move on to something else." It makes sense but most of the time I just can't, maybe because I've been rewarded for such patience again and again. I actually decided at one point that I would not buy Judas Unchained though, but before I got to the end of Pandora's Star I was hooked in spite of the the long, tedious passages and it ended on a cliffhanger so of course I had to continue.

Judas Unchained turned out to be increasingly interesting and finally brought the story to a satisfying conclusion. I really like Hamilton's world building and characters, two elements of a story that are especially important to me. And overall the story was excellent - about the fight against a truly terrifying race of aliens determined to exterminate humanity.

Now I'm sure I will read more by this author but probably not for quite a while. I have a lot of other books on my must read list and maybe even some re-reads that I want to get to first.

Been Reading

I have been reading a lot, actually, but I'm only going to mention a couple of the more recent ones I've read.

Catherynne Valente's Space Opera is not the kind of book I'm normally into. A lot of people have compared it to Douglas Adams' novels. I can understand the comparison; there's a similar kind of irreverence and silliness but Space Opera is in no way a copycat. I first read the first chapter on Tor.com and I was charmed by the extreme wordiness and clever metaphors so I bought it. (Kindle) After the next couple of chapters I started to get impatient with it and considered quitting but it was still interesting enough that I wanted to see what happened. Would the entire Earth be destroyed all because one guy couldn't sing well enough? Well, if you care, you'll have to read it and find out for yourself. I won't spoil it.

There is going to be a movie, which surprises me a little. It wouldn't be my first choice of book to be made into a movie but I'm sure it will be entertaining if it's done well.

Oh! I almost forgot. There's what you might call a catchphrase in Space Opera which is one of the most true and profound bits of wisdom I have ever read: "Life is beautiful and life is stupid." Isn't it though!

Another, more exciting, book I finished recently was Gareth Powell's Embers of War. This is so my kind of book. Pure space opera like I thought no one was writing anymore - starships, weird planets, aliens, action, politics, drama. I finished it in what was for me record time. Unfortunately the sequel won't be out until next year.

One of my favorite things about Twitter is all the authors I'm discovering. At first I was following only two authors, then authors started following me. Obviously just to get my attention so I would buy their books and it is working. That's how I discovered both of these books and there are a lot more that I want to read soon.

Spoiled, Privileged Person First World Problem

It's funny how we so quickly become dependent on little conveniences that we were perfectly fine living without for most of our lives. Take, for example, package tracking. I hate when I order something and there's no or only minimal tracking info, such as only the date shipped and an estimated delivery date. But sometimes knowing can be as bad or worse than not knowing.

I ordered a t-shirt from an Etsy shop. (It's going to be a gift.) It shipped from Seattle via DHL. From there it went to Raleigh, NC. My package spent several days in Raleigh then finally shipped to Grand Prairie, TX, where it apparently spent several more days. I say "apparently" because on the day it finally arrived here Tracking showed that it was still in Grand Prairie.

I have the t-shirt and I didn't especially need it in a hurry but I would just like to know why. I'm pretty good at map reading but you really don't have to be to know that North Carolina is way far the other side of Oklahoma from Seattle, WA. And then there was the extra stopover in Texas. I admit that I really don't know a lot about how shipping works but that route seems terribly inefficient and wasteful.

And while we're on the topic of shipping, how long do you think it should take for a package to get here from the other side of the planet? I have only ordered internationally a couple of times but from my limited experience and reading the experiences of others three to four weeks seems to be typical. I just don't know. If you, personally, traveled around the world by plane how long would that take? According to this page it's possible to do in three to four days. That's a complete circumnavigation. Since we're talking about packages though, I'm talking about, at most, halfway around the world. And I know there's a lot of handling of packages that adds time but still, it seems to me that it should be possible to get a package from Europe to the middle of the U.S. in about two weeks.

But what do I know? As I said, I'm not a shipping expert, just a spoiled, impatient consumer. You know, if someone could finally invent the transporter we could get packages in just an hour or two. Sometimes Star Trek makes the real world look so lame.

Books Books Books

It has been way too long since I wrote anything about the books I've been reading and, to be honest, there are some that I barely even remember so I'm going to go through these briefly, starting with the most recent one I finished.

Generally, I do not much like post apocalypse novels but for some reason Amazon keeps recommending them to me and darn it some of them are actually pretty good. Excellent, in fact - like The Silent Earth Trilogy by Mark R. Healy. It begins sometime after a Nuclear Winter. All life on Earth has been wiped out and all that's left are "synthetics," what most of us think of as androids. Strangely though, these synthetics are exactly like humans. They have emotions and feel pain, both physical and emotional, just like humans. The only difference is that if they get damaged they don't heal, they have to be repaired but on post apocalyptic Earth there are no repair facilities. (And of course they don't eat or drink which is the main reason I would never want to be an android. Ice cream is too important to me.)

The synthetics have formed various factions. One faction hunts down other synthetics and kills them for spare parts. Another is trying to form a new civilization. The main character is one of two synthetics who are trying to restore life using frozen embryos and seeds. This is, as I have already said, an excellent book - compelling story and great characterization. I can't really consider a book "good" unless it has characters I care about and other characters to fear and/or hate. This has both as well as a great story with plenty of action. I highly recommend this book to all science fiction fans.

I suppose you could call Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time post apocalyptic also but the whole story takes place on a ship and an alien planet so I think of it as more of a space opera. A few thousand humans have left a dying Earth and headed for a previously terraformed planet. When they get there they find the planet is already home to a rapidly evolving civilization. The story takes place over a period of hundreds of years as the characters wake up from cold-sleep, go back into cold-sleep, and wake up again several times. This is another excellent story and as unique as anything I've read. If you're arachnophobic you might want to skip this one though.

I finally read Oliver Twist. Around the time I was ten years old the movie, Oliver, was a really big deal and everyone thought Mark Lester was the most adorable kid ever but I never got to see it so the book was completely unspoiled for me. I'm a huge Dickens fan so of course I enjoyed it. I did get a bit impatient with Oliver always being in some kind of danger but mostly it was a fun ride.

Sadly, I do not have a perfect memory or even an especially good one. Good enough - average, I guess you could say, but there's only so much disc space available so inevitably some things are going to get lost. I remember very little about Gemini by Ray Jay Perrault. I do recall that I thought it was interesting and different, though I can't say excellent. I may read it again sometime.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is sort of an odd book and really hard for me to explain. I've been thinking, well, really for weeks, about how to describe it, what to say. I'll just say I liked it and I plan to read the other two books in the trilogy. If you want to know more you can go read about it on Amazon

I am afraid that there is nothing I can say about Babylon's Ashes, the sixth novel in James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, that wouldn't spoil the earlier books so I'll just say it's good - really good. Some things happened in it that were kind of disappointing to me and overall I didn't like it as well as some of the earlier books but still, it was very good and of course I will continue reading this series.

Ursula LeGuin

It was all over Twitter last night - Ursula LeGuin has died at age 88. I have only read three of her books: The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest and The Left Hand of Darkness. I liked them all well enough but was never especially motivated to read more so I guess I'm not a huge fan. What's sad about it for me is that I have reached the age when all the people who have been icons for my whole life are dying. Of course they are because they're all older than me but it's not that easy to be logical about it.

Anyway, maybe I will finally get around to reading the Earthsea Trilogy.

Reading List

As if I really need more books to read, here are 95 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in 2018. I haven't finished reading the list yet but already I have found a few that interest me.

Stars Uncharted, S.K.Dunstall
QUIETUS, by Tristan Palmgren
Free Chocolate, by Amber Royer
Outpost, by W. Michael Gear

Well, that's certainly a good start. Now, to read the rest of the list.

Brains Are Weird...

... but sometimes mine is awesome. Last night (or this morning) I dreamed an entire Star Trek series that never existed. I wish I could remember more of the details. There was an android character named Data but it wasn't Data and that confused us (I was watching with my son) so I grabbed the remote and looked at the "info" and the first aired date on it was 1965 and that confused us even more because the technology and decor was more Next Generation era but I noticed that the uniforms were original series style uniforms except they were all blue. I think the captain was female, which would be wrong for 1965. So, because of all that, at some point I realized I was dreaming.

Like I said, I can't remember many details. There was something going on on a beautiful planet, something involving a river. There was also a spectacular view of an ocean. Wherever it is I kind of want to go there for real. In the dream it was like I was there. Even though I knew I was just watching it on TV I was also in it somehow? You know how dreams are. Anyway... that's what my weird brain came up with last night. I'm really disappointed that I probably won't get to see any more episodes.

Silly Sci-Fi

Science fiction TV shows are sort of like cookies. Even if you know they're not going to be good they're still irresistible. At least that's the way it is with me. As they say, your mileage may vary. It's like, someone leaves an opened package of store brand sandwich cookies on the counter. I know those things are usually kind of awful but I will grab a couple and eat them anyway and, if they're not too terrible, later a couple more.

So that's why I watched The Orville. It is definitely "store brand" sci-fi and the name of the store is Fox. That said, I have to confess, a bit sheepishly, I did sort of enjoy it. If you've seen the commercials you already know that visually it's very much like Star Trek:TNG. The ship's exterior is sleek and white; the interior bright, clean, minimalist, and full of wasted space and the crew is a mix of humans and aliens but otherwise it is pure Seth McFarlane - casual, irreverent, and lowbrow.

I was expecting that it might be nothing but gags but it did actually have a plot and some action. The style of humor is not really to my taste but at the same time nothing offended me enough that I immediately wanted to stop watching it. There were a number of familiar faces. I was pleasantly surprised to see Penny Johnson Gerald as the ship's doctor and Brian George (of Big Bang Theory fame) in a guest starring role.

So I'll keep watching for a few more episodes, at least, to see how it develops.

Random Linkage

Precontinent - Jacques Cousteau's underwater habitat. I don't remember if I've ever heard of this before. I used to watch the Jacques Cousteau TV specials when I was a kid so I probably saw something about it once and just forgot.

NASA's Retro Space Travel Posters - I'm sure you've seen some of these before. They've been around for a little while and they seem to be popular but I wanted to put a link here mainly so I can find them again myself.

Retro sci-fi covers featuring impractical female attire

Hairy Selfie Nails - OMG! I can't even!

Yann Souetre - Science fiction art. Fascinating images.

Fungus Arrangements - Photography. Colorful arrangements of mushrooms.

Star Wars Galaxy Necklace - The planets and spaceships from Star Wars, including the Death Star, on a necklace

Quarter Trick - Useful tip

Pink Floyd Household Object Project - I haven't listened to these videos yet.

Woodland GIFs - These make me feel peaceful.

Great Space Opera

Oh! Wow! Space opera fans, you have to read this: Kit by Val Kubera. It's part crime drama, part political drama, part horror story, part romance, and 100% space opera.

The title character is a Tentari, who are hermaphrodite humanoids. Kit and a younger sibling are the only survivors from a starship that was destroyed under suspicious circumstances. They survive as best they can on a large space station inhabited by all manner of unsavory characters. He (I'll address the matter of pronouns in a minute.) has some memory chips given to him by his parent that contain information that everybody wants. He is taken in by a merchant ship captain who was close friends with his parent and thus the wild ride begins.

The author uses male pronouns when referring to the Tentari which is grammatically correct, I suppose, but it feels wrong in a number of ways. One, it reinforces our human tendency of binary thinking - every creature must be either male or female. I found it nearly impossible to think of Kit and other Tentari characters as anything but male. It also at times felt awkward and ridiculous since the author remained consistent in using the male pronoun even when referring to a character nursing an infant. I think it would have been preferable to use made up pronouns, such as Mary Gentle did in The Golden Witchbreed with the neuter pronoun ke.

Anyway, very minor quibble. Overall it was a fantastic, exciting, edge-of-your-seat, unputdownable book. A few scenes are not for the squeamish and there are a couple of fairly explicit sex scenes but nothing that a reasonable person could call "gratuitous," in my opinion.

That Moment When...

Have you ever been reading a book and come across a line or a passage that suddenly changes your perspective on the author? Maybe it sends the author up a notch or maybe it's like, "Oh! I thought he was that kind of author but he's actually that kind of author." Am I making sense?

The first three books in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series were discounted during Amazon's Prime Day. I had always been kind of interested in these but also kind of not or maybe I should say less interested than I was in some other books but the Prime Day discount seemed like a good opportunity. Not only were they discounted but they are standard size paperbacks which seem to be increasingly rare these days, at least in the books I most want to read, which annoys me no end.

So anyway I got them and started reading the first book and it's good. I'm not a big fan of military sci-fi but this is fleshed out enough with personalities and interesting dialog, and of course, interesting technology, to make it seem like not just military sci-fi.

So I finished Old Man's War and immediately moved on to The Ghost Brigades. It's been a fun read. Then about three-quarters of the way through the book, maybe a little more, I come across this line:

And as for thinking, what about thinking requires you to observe yourself doing it?

This begins a couple of pages long discussion about consciousness. I'm not sure I'm buying it, or maybe I'm just not completely able to wrap my head around the concept of a being that thinks but is not aware. That's kind of beside the point though. What I am charged up about is discovering an author who explores tricky subjects such as consciousness. So, now I'm suddenly a Scalzi fan and I have added several more books to my Must Read list.

BTW, Scalzi is really entertaining on Twitter. I have liked so many of his tweets I'm starting to feel like a creepy celebrity stalker.

Books Books Books!

So I have been putting off blogging about my reading for months! It's not an obligation, of course. Nobody is obligated to blog daily, but see, I want to share this. I just haven't. So anyway, I've mostly forgotten what I wanted to say about all but the most recently read of these so I'm just going to put them all in one post and just to do something different I'm going to stick some completely unrelated photos in here as dividers. (These are not all of the books I've read this year, just some highlights.)

Earlier this year, thanks to Amazon's recommendations for me, I read two books with similar subject matter. Both are set during the Civil War era, including the pre- and post- Civil War years. Yellow Crocus by Laila Ibrahim is about a young plantation owner's daughter's warm, loving relationship with her nurse, a slave woman named Mattie who is separated from her own son in order to nurse the white infant.

In the other book, Sister of Mine by Sabra Waldfogel, Adelaide is given a slave girl named Rachel to be her personal maid when they are both still children. The two get along well and soon discover that they are actually half-sisters. The story follows them through adolescence to young adulthood.

I highly recommend both of these books. The stories are interesting and the characters are fully developed and realistic. Both books manage to illustrate the tragedy and injustice of slavery without beating the reader over the head with brutality at the expense of the story. I don't want to give away the endings but I will say that both are satisfying though the ending of Yellow Crocus seems the more plausible of the two.

Of course one of the highlights of my reading year was Amongst the Stars, the third book in Kelly Sedinger's Song of Forgotten Stars series. This is the kind of fun and exciting adventure story that got me hooked on reading science fiction in the first place. While I now love a great variety of science fiction it's great that someone is still writing this kind of purely fun story.

I am a huge fan of fantasy writer China Mieville. His novella This Census-Taker is quite different from the other books of his that I have read. In it a young boy witnesses his father killing his mother. The authorities (and most other adults) choose to believe his father's version of events, that his mother abandoned them, but there are other hints that Dad is "not right." There are elements of fantasy in the story but they are so subtle they almost don't matter. This Census-Taker reads almost like a mainstream novella.

I have started reading Three Moments of an Explosion, a book of short stories by Mieville. They are also very different from the Mieville that I'm used to and I like some better than others. I have taken a break from it to read some other books though. The nice thing about a book of short stories is that you can spread them out, reading them one at a time between other books.

For some reason a lot of authors follow me on Twitter. I figure they're just trying to get attention, which is fine, but mostly I haven't paid much attention to them. I'm not sure what was different about S.E. Smith. Maybe the titles, maybe the cover art. Whatever it was, I followed her and followed her links to her books on Amazon and discovered A FREE KINDLE BOOK! A Warrior's Heart. Free. So I didn't even bother to read any reviews; I just downloaded it.

I am so glad it was free. Oh! My! Gawd! As I have already said on Twitter, it's pornographic. But dammit it's still science fiction and there was actually a bit of a story and I really hate to not finish a book; I mean like a Sheldon level have to finish so, quickly skipping over certain scenes, I kept reading. Turns out there were really only a couple of explicit (very explicit) scenes near the beginning and a couple more near the end.

Aside from that there was a lot in the book that just seemed silly to me. Two brothers who were kidnapped from Earth and enslaved as children grow up and fall madly in lust with two sisters from an alien warrior race. (Think Klingon but even meaner and cuter and purple) Anyway, in spite of the fact that these sisters are perfectly capable of kicking anyone's butt and feeding it to them, and the brothers really are not, the brothers constantly feel the need to "protect" their alien girlfriends.

Overall the story is pretty simplistic. The only real action (other than the aforementioned [ahem] "action") is a pretty standard escape. That's really unfortunate because the races and civilizations mentioned in the story seem like they could be interesting if the author would concentrate more on those and less on the "romance" and interpersonal [ahem] activities. But, you know, I guess some people are into that sort of thing. I won't judge. Or at least I'm trying not to judge.

Photos taken by me over 10 years ago.

Gotham

We can't all like the same things. Different strokes, no accounting for taste, and all that. I get it; I really do and I'm fine with it. But still, once in a while something comes along that is so awesome I just can't fully grasp the fact that not everyone loves it as much as I do. My brain has always known that there must be people out there who do not love Gotham but my heart and soul do not believe it's possible. So it was a bit of a shock to learn that there are at least two people who do not like Gotham.

In case anyone reading this has missed out, Gotham (Fox) is a Batman prequel. Bruce Wayne is a teenager - quiet, serious, and often surprisingly innocent. All the familiar characters are there, though some of the villains have not yet acquired their villain persona. Edward Nygma, for example, in the early seasons is just a shy young guy with issues that probably wouldn't seem all that bad if you didn't know what was coming and it is great fun watching him become The Riddler.

Gotham is incredibly fun to watch. The casting is outstanding. The actors all play their characters brilliantly. My favorite is Robin Lord Taylor as Penguin. I can hardly keep from giggling every time he appears on screen. I could list each actor and gush about how brilliant each of them is but you really just have to see for yourself.

Could it be though, that I am having so much fun watching the characters that I never noticed that there's no plot? Typically, shows that have a long season to season story arc tend to eventually lose focus and go off on weird tangents. I have to admit I'm starting to get a little bored with the Court of Owls, and if Penguin is "killed" and brought back to life one more time it might make me roll my eyes a little, but overall I don't think that's happening with Gotham. It does seem like they skip around a lot. Often the story will refer back to events of a season or two ago. I started watching during season two and I caught on fairly quickly but I don't think it would be possible to pick it up much later than that. This skipping around really doesn't bother me though. To me, it just makes it seem more real. In real life events do not always happen in a smooth, logical progression.

So anyway... I suppose I'm just defending one of my favorite shows and if it's not your cup of tea, it's not your cup of tea but if you haven't watched it yet try it. Start at the beginning and give it some time. And don't worry about the plot or lack thereof. Just sit back and enjoy it moment to moment.

Random Linkage

Starfleet Academy - It's a real place and you can take a tour! But you might be disappointed when you find out what it really is.

Artist Rick Stevens - I love this. Abstract and not quite abstract?

Language Links - A long list

Scardy Dog - Lots of pictures of dogs being afraid of things. Vacuum cleaners are a common fear and far from the silliest.

Tender Wings of Desire - OMG! Someone please tell me this is not real.

Digital Pin-Ups - I suppose that, as a woman, I'm supposed to be outraged about stuff like this but I like pin art. I can't help but appreciate the silliness and ridiculousness. These have a bit of a retro feel but at the same time modern and twisted. NSFW?

Sarah Forbes Bonetta - Interesting, little known history

The Orville - A Star Trek parody series. I'll decide later whether I love it or hate it. Of course you know if it's good Fox will cancel it after only 14 episodes.

Beautiful Tables

Train and Rail Yard Art

Book Quote

From Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds:

And though he did eventually return, his doubters had in a sense been right, because a large portion of his sanity had not come back with him.

Thanks to my son for sharing that with me. I have read the book but it was several years ago. ("Several" being something like 10 maybe)

New Old TV Episodes

In 1995 we moved from Virginia to Oklahoma. (This is closer to where we were originally from) The first season of Star Trek: Voyager had just finished. And, if I remember correctly, we were in the middle of the second season of Babylon 5. We found, to our intense disappointment, that in the Tulsa area both of these shows were on a weak channel that you can't get with an antenna unless you live practically next door to the broadcast station. It would be several more years before we got cable and then later, DirectTV.

So there are six entire seasons of ST:V that we have not seen. (Not to mention several seasons of B5*) Until now. BBC America recently started showing reruns of it on Monday night and I'm enjoying catching up. So far they have been showing episodes from the later seasons, mostly 1998, 1999 or around that. When the show first premiered I found it a bit disappointing. It was okay but just not... I don't know... not Star Trek enough. But I'm liking these later episodes a lot more. I am missing one of my favorite characters from the first season, Kes. I even named a cat after her.

Seven of Nine is annoying but I think I'm starting to hate her a bit less. I don't think I'll ever name a cat after her though. I can see why most guys like her so much. (You know, I really don't mind the token eye candy but it would be nice if we gals could see some too. At least in the original we occasionally got to see Captain Kirk without a shirt.)

But what I really wanted to talk about is the theme music. This is my favorite of all the Star Trek openings, both the music and the visuals.

There is also an extended version.

And then there's this:

(* No we can't stream it on Netflix or Hulu. Real high speed Internet is not available out here in the boonies.)

Random Linkage

Clouds - This guy says we should spend more time talking about clouds. It does seem like a better topic for conversation than most I have been hearing lately.

Spiritual Perception - A beautiful surreal art Tumblr. Beautiful! I am so in love with this site!

Kawaii Monster Cafe - Not very monstrous. A colorful and fun Japanese cafe.

Ambiguous Abbreviations - Or perhaps one could say, unfortunate.

Food Carving - Artist plays with food

Ted Wilson Reviews the World - A hilarious review of butter.

Russian Fairy Tale Portraits - Beautiful portrait photography.

Real photographs that look like paintings

Village of Flowers - A Polish village with flowers painted on everything. Wonderful!

The Turban Trick - an interesting bit of history

Ambient Geek Sleep Aids - Background noise from science fiction movies and TV shows

Miniature Environments by Song Kang - Fascinating sculptures

Book Quote

From Helliconia Summer by Brian W. Aldiss:

Hate cheers you up, makes you forget guilt.

Make it Sew

I saw this on Facebook this morning.