Nader Warns Bloomberg Not To Run

Ha... I had to check for a second to be sure I wasn't reading the Onion. As someone that's still a bit sore about Nader siphoning away crucial Democratic votes in the last election, I found this simply priceless. Read more on the Huffington Post. Fun quote:

If both Mr. Nader and Mr. Bloomberg were to enter the race, they would be competing head to head for the vote of egomaniacs, who make up three percent of the electorate nationwide but closer to fifty percent in California and New York.

Speaking to that egomaniac constituency, Mr. Nader called Mr. Bloomberg a "novice spoiler," adding, "When it comes to screwing up elections, experience matters."

Quantum Slacks

Thanks go to Jen for sending me this little gem, courtesy of the Onion:

Haggar Physicists Develop 'Quantum Slacks'

Fun quote:

"Scientific law holds that any given piece of clothing becomes less fashionable over time," Kohl said. "However, at the quantum level, we have found that certain styles of Haggar slacks actually grow more fashionable, suggesting the existence of 'slachyons,' theoretical pants that travel backward in time."

New Bond film: Noooooooo!!!

Just saw this over on the Huffington Post's entertainment section:

New Bond Film: Quantum of Solace

Direct quote from the article:

Craig's second Bond adventure continues in the gritty vein of "Casino Royale," in which a rough-edged 007, newly granted his "license to kill," bled, sweat and felt real emotion. But Wilson promised it also has "twice as much action" as its predecessor.

"It's pretty jam-packed," he said.

Man, pardon my French, but the people that make Bond films just don't fucking get it, do they? I really liked the last film, Casino Royalle, for the simple reason that there was NOT a huge car chase/gun fight/wench conquest/whatever every 5 minutes.

Anyone that's read the Bond books will tell you: he's not a very nice guy. He simply can't afford to be. His womanizing, nihilism and OCD in regards to everything he eats, drinks and drives comes from the very real knowledge that he is, at any given time, moments from death in service to his country. Things aren't exploding every 5 minutes - Bond always fought a very, very cold war, and fought it well. This is what makes the novels so exciting and fascinating, but for some reason the producers of the Bond films just never seemed to understand that (and still, it seems, don't).

Personally, I hope that the tone of the article is completely wrong, and that they'll keep a leash on their urge to make every new Bond flick bigger and bolder than the last. Remember: even car chases featuring tanks and trains, and motorcycle jumps over spinning helicopter rotors couldn't stop some of the later Bond films from sucking, and sucking hard.

To the Bond producers: please guys.... more grittiness. More "Bond as a character" not "Bond as an excuse to use gadgets". More "tortured Bond" and "uncertain Bond" and, yes, "despicable bastard Bond". Please? The world's ready for a hero that's not a caricature of a man (our President's example to the contrary)... Honest.

New reviews and a comment on sales...

Whew! Survived another holiday season. Sorry for the delay in posting, but I’m still slaving away at the conclusion of Nights of Sin, and I figured that was the most important thing. I've had some personal/family challenges recently that have really done a number on my head, but I've still got my chin up (barely) and am still working, and that's all that matters.

REVIEW UPDATE:

Kara did a search and found a few reviews that I have not yet seen – I’ve listed them below.

• Jia’s review over on DearAuthor.com
• Mervi Hamalainen’s review over on Curled Up With A Good Book (5 stars!)
• Jandy’s (short) review at Jandy’s Reading Room:
• Daniel Robichaud’s review on HorrorReader.com:
• Katie McNeill’s review on BolgCritics.com:
• Jerry Seeger’s review on his blog, Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas.

Thank you everyone! There are some great insights in those reviews, and all of the criticisms are, I think, more than fair. Hopefully you'll all like Book 2, and I welcome your reviews when it's released!

This last find was really very special for me. It comes from the Live Journal of Bright Lilim, who was asked about their favorite books of 2007. Blood Magic was on the list. From the blog entry:

It’s an old question, but a good one . . . What were your favorite books this year?

List as many as you like … fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, science-fiction, business, travel, cookbooks … whatever the category. But, really, we’re all dying to know. What books were the highlight of your reading year in 2007?

That a tough question because books can be satisfying in very different ways. How can I compare a fun romp like Logston’s Shadow to Simmons’ thoughtful Hyperion which was good in totally different ways? So I just looked at the list of books I read this year and picked out the ones that I had best memories from:

Matthew Cook: Blood Magic
Jeff VanderMeer: City of Saints and Madmen t
Samuel Delaney: Tales of Nevèrÿon
Anne Logston: Shadow, Shadow Dance, Shadow Hunt, and Waterdance
Dave Duncan: Mother of Lies
Dan Simmons: Hyperion, t
Ursula LeGuin: the Disposessed t
Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light
Kat Jaske: For Honor. An adventure of what might have been
t=translated into Finnish

I read quite a few mystery and detective books but none of them made it to this list. Clearly, it’s time to find better mystery books.

Wow. VanderMeer, Simmons, Zelazny, LeGuin… that’s some heady company. This sort of thing means so much to me, because not only did someone read the book and like it, but they remembered it after the fact, enough so that they listed it as a favorite. This is the reason that I write. More than money or anything else. Thank you so much for the honor you do me.

This brings up an interesting phenomenon I’ve been noticing. More and more, people have been coming up to me and asking: “So, how’s the book selling?”

I always reply the same way: “I have no idea.”

Almost always, the response to these words is confusion, bordering on horror. I can see them thinking: “How can he not know? Doesn’t he care?”

Of course I do. My family will be able to use whatever royalty money that comes from this. I know that I can find out within moments what the current sales figures are.

But that’s not why I wrote the book, and it’s not why I’m writing a sequel. I did it because I had to. Because, as I’ve said before, there comes a time when the pain of not writing exceeds the pain of writing every day for a year or two (or three… or more…) and when that point is reached, the author has no choice but to write. Maybe it’s different for other authors, but it was definitely that way for me.

So, once again, thank you so much if you’ve read Blood Magic and have written or blogged about it. If I haven’t linked to your review (good or bad but hopefully not indifferent) please mail me so I can put up a post. If you’ve read the book and told a friend about it, please accept a second heartfelt thank you - you have no idea how much that means to me.

The Nerd Handbook

Lots of posts for me today... It's slow at work since nobody is here (I have one of those jobs where I'm either daydreaming about product enhancements with my headphones on, or I'm calling programmers and people that can actually code things, and with Xmas approaching nobodty's around). Erm... where was I? Oh, yeah.

Saw this article called The Geek Handbook over on The Rabbit Cave, and liked it so much that I thought it needed... NEEDED... to be reposted. I see more than a little bit of myself in his descriptions of the archetypal nerd, even though I'm certainly not a programmer, coder or web designer. I found this particularly true, and the moment I stopped laughing I started looking for the tiny cameras the author had obviously planted in my house to observe me:

How does a nerd watch TV? Probably one of two ways. First, there’s watching TV with you where the two of you sit and watch one show. Then there’s how he watches by himself when he watches three shows at once. It looks insane. You walk into the room and you’re watching your nerd jump between channels every five minutes.

“How can you keep track of anything?”

He keeps track of everything. See, he’s already seen all three of these movies… multiple times. He knows the compelling parts of the arcs and is mentally editing his own versions while watching all three. The basic mental move here is the context switch, and your nerd is the king of the context switch.

The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerd’s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. It’s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where he’s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.

Seeing as how I'm typing this post in Firefox, where I currently have 44 separate web sites open, each on its own tab, I think he hit the nail square on the head here. Not bragging... just sayin'.

Anyway...enjoy, and, once again, Happy Holidays!

Jackson will produce "Hobbit" films!

From Reuters, via Wil Wheton's awesome blog - Peter Jackon will produce not one, but TWO films based on Tolkein's The Hobbit. Read the whole story HERE.

One word. Effing YEAH baby! Wait... that's more then one. Whatever. Go jump up and down, screaming like a little girl already. Or is that just, you know, me?

Anyway... this is great news. I'm not sure about the idea of a sequel film that they're proposing will cover the period between the Hobbit and the beginning of the Lord of the Rings (has a bit of a weird Rogue Squadron feel to me, for you Star Wars geeks out there), but if anyone can spin up new content set in Tolkein's world and make it palatable, it's Jackson.

The power of games

I don't know why, but I found this entire article deeply fulfilling. Easily the best gaming-related article I've read all year.

GREAT quote:

At the main entrance, a much larger setup is dedicated to Rock Band. Tellingly, the guitars are both Guitar Hero 2 era wired Explorers, the workhorse standard in the guitar game universe. The drum kit features duct tape in several places. As I walk by, 4 teenage boys are playing "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a choice not only unlikely due to the song's laconic and decidedly non-hardcore tone, but also due to the fact that one of the boys is actually singing, amplified, and doing it quite well. That Rock Band has brought baggy-trousered boys out of their basements to actually sing in public is a testament to the game's power. That my four year old son Jake is also singing every word with perfect diction and not-half-bad tone is a testament to how many hours I've played it, not any expression of talent on his part.