Tag: recommended

An eclectic bit of bookery

It’s been a while since I closed the various “book stuff” tabs, so let’s take a run through those, shall we? I came to this by the Lord Dunsany connection, but I don’t think you need to be on that page at all to enjoy H. E. Gowers’ HASCHISCH HALLUCINATIONS, posted over at the blog of master-designer-and-artist-of-the-eldritch John Coulthart. I’ve… Read more →

Aside

Just a quick recommendation for anyone who likes “traditional” music–while I was at the Shelter Valley Folk Festival this year (I got to see The Sojourners perform live!) I was introduced to the singing of Matthew Byrne. Byrne was performing with his group The Dardanelles, but had a couple of chances to show off his solo singing, and it was hella impressive. (I also loved bandmate Tom Power‘s introduction for Byrne, where he explained that in Newfoundland “best singer in the town” is a position much more important than mere temporal authority, like mayors or members of the legislature.) Check out some streaming tunes on Byrnes’ site, and buy some tunes if you like them as much as I did.

Keep Hitting Play

I like to think of myself as pretty musically eclectic: it’s not so much that I like one category of music or another, but rather that I like the good stuff. Which leads to lots of pockets of music that appeal to me throughout the entire space of music. There are areas I’ve kind of shied away from for one… Read more →

Link posts are easy

Links, pithy comments, you know the drill. The graphics on this one might not be astonishing, but the idea of supermassive black holes being flung from collisons at galactic cores is probably cool enough on its own to sustain interest. I love how science writers drop line like “these objects can have masses equivalent to one billion Suns” the way… Read more →

Her Eyes Alone Are A 500 Page Novel

“The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” If I am recalling correctly, that’s a Proust line. I’ve always liked that formulation–it ties into both what I think one of the main points of travel isto help you see home properly, and into that Zen-ish notion of trying to always come… Read more →

A Happy New Year present from Eric Kleptone

Yes, that’s right, a new Kleptones album was made available yesterday as a New Year’s present for us all. I’ve been a fan since A Night At The Hip-Hopera (and have mentioned The Kleptones several times here over the years) so you can imagine that this is very welcome news to me. Having listened to the new double(!!) album, Uptime/Downtime,… Read more →

Best Of Lists

Generally speaking I hate this time of year on the Internet–I am so tired of year-end wrapups, best of lists, etc. It’s even worst this year, since it’s also the end of a decade. Enough with the lists. Having said that, I did see one list that actually got my attention: Paul Witcover‘s list of his ten favourite F/SF novels… Read more →

Finder: Go Read It

No, I’m not talking about Emma Bull‘s 1994 novel Finder–although I think you should go read that too, and all the other Borderlands stuff. I’m talking about Carla Speed McNeil’s comic Finder. Why should you read it, you might ask? Well, I think it’s one of the best straight up science fiction comics out there, and I’ve been following it… Read more →

Language and the Shaping Of Thought

While I was doing my undergraduate studies, in addition to my Engineering degree, and my minor in Philosophy, I also pursed a number of “options”, notably including an option in Cognitive Studies. Both the mechanics of thinking and the philosophy of cognition and identity were (and remain) of great interest to me.I wonder if there’s anything to be noted from… Read more →

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

One of my favourite possessions is my Tilley. Yes, I know that most people who wear them are at least a generation older than I am. Yes, I know they’re hardly fashionable. I could care less–I am quite fond of my khaki/olive T5. Here’s the thing: it fits–no small thing for a man who was laughed out of a hat… Read more →

Goldstein interview and story

I’ve been a Lisa Goldstein fan since the first time I read The Dream Years. I have all her novels, including the ones she’s written under a pseudonym. Hell, in a strage bit of synchronicity my desktop wallpaper is Eric Fortune‘s artThis was a Tor.com bonus, so I’m not comfortable hosting a copy myself–but if you know how to use… Read more →

Aside

Boy, I wish I had been running WinSplit Revolution for a couple of years now–essentially since I first got the widescreen monitors. What a handy tool. Essentially it’s a little app that intercepts configurable hotkeys and uses them to map windows into specific screen coordinates–it makes the process of working with many open windows easier. It’s the first “leave it running all the time” tool I’ve added to my toolkit in quite a while. And it’s donationware. Yay.

Now I need to find an equivalent for my Ubuntu boxes.

Some Movie Recommendations

I wrote this up for another online venue, but I might as well put it (lightly edited) here. The idea was to recommend five movies that you think are “good” and that people are less likely to have seen. I chose these: From the Heist/Caper/RomCom Of The Old School pile, I’d choose O’Toole and Hepburn in How To Steal A… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.