I was never the type of player who could strategize well enough to take advantage of a card like this. Knowing what my opponent had never gave me enough to turn the game to my favor. Black had a lot of cards that would allow you to force your opponent to discard, which this card would synergize with quite well, but I never played black back in the day either, so I was STILL out of luck :-D
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Title:
Starfishers
Series: Starfishers #2
Author:
Glen Cook
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre:
SF
Pages: 211
Words: 72K
The
boy narrator from the previous book is now just one of two undercover
agents for Luna Command, the military machine of humanity. They have
infiltrated a Starfisher world ship to discover its secrets for all
of humanity. The Sangaree, the humanoid aliens also from the previous
book, have also sent their own undercover agent. She ends up outing
BenRabi and Mouse but they for some inexplicable reason don’t out
her. This allows her to get a Sangaree Clan fleet to attack the world
ship and then there’s some space sharks (I’m not kidding) and
there’s big battles, blah, blah, blah.
The whole time BenRabi has been having an existential crisis and he’s as whiny as a 15 year old. It gets real old real fast. I wanted to slap him across the face so many times and tell him to grow up and stop being such a baby. Why Cook chose to write him this way is beyond me.
In the end BenRabi chooses to abandon Luna Command and join in with the Starfishers. Which is what they also wanted. However, Mouse is Luna Commands long term bullyboy BenRabi going over was all part of his plan. Aye yi yi.
This wasn’t a waste of my time and I actually enjoyed this a tiny bit more than the first book, but my goodness, BenRabi made it very hard to enjoy the story. It almost seems like Cook is deliberately writing his SF to be as unpalatable as possible. Why, I have zero idea. Maybe Cook has a split personality and the side that wrote SF hated everybody, but especially the people who read his SF? OR! Cook didn’t actually write his SF. He subcontracted it out to guy named Vladimir Gonzalez from China who only wrote in Bavarian and then used a corgi to re-translate it into english. Hey, that works for me! It neatly explains everything.
 |
| The REAL Glen Cook |
★★★☆☆
From the Publisher
Starfish: Treasure troves of power. They were creatures of fusion energy, ancient, huge, intelligent, drifting in herds on the edge of the galaxy, producing their ambergris, the substance precious to man and the man-like Sangaree alike. In deep, starless space the herds were protected by the great harvestships of the Seiners, or Starfishers - the independent, non-Confederation people who dared to skirt the deadly boundaries of Stars' End and battle the Sangaree. It is with them on the harvestship Danion that Confederation agents Mouse Storm and Moyshe BenRabi have to fly and fight, probing mystery and myth. And where BenRabi, man of many names, must surrender his dreams and his mind itself to the golden dragons of space and their shepherds, the gathering... Starfishers.
I have been using ereaders since ‘08. However, in 2017 I bought a Kindle Oasis. It was everything I wanted in an ereader. It was small and light enough to hold comfortably in one hand. It had a warm front light so I didn’t need to sit directly under a lamp to see what I was reading. It worked with Calibre without a hitch. Most importantly, it had BUTTONS. I hate touching a screen when I am reading. Mainly because I half the time I am eating and my fingers might be greasy, etc. Thus, for the last 7 ½ years I have enjoyed ereading bliss. Sadly, the battery is beginning to wear out on the Oasis (it has the bulk of the battery in the cover) and I have to charge it twice a week now (when I first bought it, it would last from 7-10 days on a charge). It has also begun to show signs of software degradation as well as hardware degradation (screen might take a double tap to select something, or a button will have to be pressed several times to get it to respond). I realized it was time to get a new ereader.
The
landscape has changed dramatically since ‘17 though. Amazon no
longer makes an ereader with buttons. They have also begun seriously
locking down their kindle devices in much the same way that Apple has
screwed their Iwhatever users over. So a new kindle wasn’t an
option this time around. In fact, most ereader makers had stopped
making devices with buttons. I ended up going with the Pocketbook
Era, a device from ‘22 that still had buttons.
I
knew there would be a learning curve and I had hoped that any issues
would all fall into that category. One positive thing from the
get-go was that I didn’t need to register the device or create an
account at Pocketbook to use the Era, unlike any kindle device. I
created my various collections (series or authors) and then began
moving books onto the device from Calibre. I only moved a couple at
first, as I didn’t know how things would go and I am glad I started
small.
My
first, and probably biggest, issue with the Era was that I couldn’t
go into a collection and then add multiple books to it. Everything on
the Era is built around books as individual files and how everything
is handled is based on that. That meant that I had to select each
individual book and move it into the collection I wanted. That is
totally bassackwards! It was also incredibly frustating as I had to
do this for all 80’ish books. There is a plugin for Calibre called
Pocketbook Collections that was created to take care of this problem,
but most plugins are created by people who live this kind of stuff
and so what seems easy, commonsense and “duh” to the creators are
like calculus problems for the rest of us, while blindfolded. I gave
it 10min of my time and then gave up. I was already frustrated and
trying to do something “more” while frustrated would just lead to
more frustrations. So I moved each individual book into its proper
collection, one by *&^% one. I will not do that again. Which
means I will have to conquer the plugin. I’ve conquered other
Calibre plugins, so I know I can conquer this one too. The slight
hitch is that I have recently quit Mobileread.com (where the Calibre
and plugin help forums are) because I told someone from Massachusetts
to step in front of a bus. That’s not acceptable behavior and so I
closed down my account so there wouldn’t be any repeats of it. I
can’t act like that and I won’t accept it in myself. But that
means its up to me and my pal Google (the lying piece of trash) to
figure this thing out. I will, albeit very slowly. But I work best in
first gear anyway. It’s just annoying when you know you could be
going 60mph.
So
everything was loaded up and I got the light settings how I wanted,
the text size and spacing just how I wanted and the margins how I
wanted. I was good to go! Then I experienced the second issue.
The
bleeping buttons, of all things. They were not the softpress buttons
like all of the kindles I have used to date, but were much more
“haptic” (a hard press until it literally “clicks”) like the
Barnes and Noble Simple Touch of years gone by. The reason that is a
problem is that kind of hard pressing does a number on your thumb
after a while. Considering that I will read for hours at a time,
necessitating a LOT of button pushing, I could tell my thumb would
end up hurting after an hour or so. Now, the Era also has a touch
enabled screen so I could touch the screen, but I don’t like being
forced that way.
That’s
it, my only problems. Both are surmountable and something I’ll get
use to. But for anyone thinking about the Era, they need to be aware
of those issues.
The biggest thing I like about this Era is that it is bigger than my Oasis. That means I can use the same font size and have more words on the page to read. And the Era actually weighs a little less. More words on the page means more reading between page turns, which adds up to more time reading overall. While it might only mean an extra minute or two per book, given the number of books I read per year means an extra book or two per year. That’s not a lot and for some people it would mean nothing but that they are worrying about numbers. But I LIKE to read and getting the opportunity to read even one extra book a year is a wonderful thing.
As
I begin to use the Era on a full time basis, I’m sure I’ll
stumble over other negatives and positives. But this is my reader now
and I’ll simply have to accept those for the quirks they are.
I hope Netnanny doesn't block this post from me!
The time change here in the US happened this past weekend. "Springing" forward always does a number on me, but man, this time around, it hit me harder than it ever has before. It also messed Mrs B up too. I ended up waking up Sunday morning at 9:45am (I'm usually up at 5am) and that was when Mrs B finally got to sleep. Needless to say, we didn't go to church that morning. Of course, church was having issues with their equipment so there was no livestream.
The discombobulation continued throughout the week. Several days I fell asleep before 8pm and then woke up at 2am. THAT made for some miserable work days. But to balance things out, it was mostly sunny and warm! No snow shoes, hurrrahhh! That made my mood much better. I am hoping to reset my internal clock this weekend.
I also bought a box of Twinkies. That really helped my mood :-D Sugar and fat sure do taste yummy.
My reading has been really off. Sleeping such odd hours has made it almost impossible to focus on reading for hours on end like I'm used to. The flip side of that is that I've been able to do a bit of blogging. I'm fully 3 weeks ahead with some extra random days in April already done. That makes me feel good.
Speaking of feeling good. I am in a much better place than last month but I'm still pretty fragile. Kind of like I'd gotten a wound over winter and it has finally scabbed over and begun healing under the surface. Unfortunately, I've still got a couple of situations ahead of me that might just rip the scab off and force me to start healing all over again. But I hope it goes better than my pessimistic self believes :-)
I just want to have enough energy to read again. I think that will be my goal for the next two weeks.
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Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted
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Title:
The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn
Series:
Doctor Syn #6
Author: Arthur Russell Thorndike
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages:
199
Words: 75K
Somehow
I misnumbered the series and got ahead of myself with this book. I
didn’t notice a thing though, so I suspect the episodic nature of
this series insulates it from problems like that.
I have NO idea why this is called “The Courageous Exploits…”. There’s nothing courageous about a smuggler of liquor out to avoid taxes. We also find out that when one of the Dymchurch gang disagrees with the Scarecrow, if they aren’t killed, they and their family are exiled to an island off the coast of France where one of the Scarecrow’s suppliers lives in luxury. They have a decent life too, but that is where their life is going to stay. It’s always good to be reminded that Doctor Syn was the pirate captain Clegg and he’s as hard and unrelenting now as the Scarecrow as he ever was as Clegg.
Syn has his usual adventures with traitors and new authority figures. Thankfully, there seems to be no new romance on the horizon. That is good because we all know it wouldn’t turn out well and the poor woman would just die or be killed or kidnapped and killed or something that would end with “She’s daid Jim”.
★★★☆☆
From Wikipedia
In 1781, Doctor Syn continues his adventures as the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, foiling all attempts to catch him and to break up the Dymchurch smugglers.
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without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at
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Will Murray wrote Cthulhu short stories for various magazines and collections and they all had the overarching element of being connected by an organization that was trying to prevent the intrusion of the elder gods into our dimension. Each story was standalone, not necessarily dependent on previous stories OR future stories and if one story contradicted how our world ended, it didn’t matter, because what did matter was that the elder gods WOULD break through, period.
I had only read one of these stories before, so the novelty of them all was pretty good. My usual complaint occurred, which didn’t surprise me. One of the top men of the top secret organization (CEES? I can’t remember what ridiculous thing it was called. It made sense when reading but as soon as I stopped I simply forgot because it had no real world application) was a devout Christian and when the elder gods broke into our world and were eradicating humanity, said leader went insane, spouted some specific blasphemies about God and Jesus and then blew his head off with his service pistol. What concerned me about it was that it didn’t concern me.
I am thinking that I have gotten too used to such things, and that isn’t good. So I’ve got one more Cthulhu anthology on my ereader and once I’ve read that, I’m going to take a break from the cosmic horror for the rest of the year. Let my standards reset to what they should be. Repeated exposure to blasphemy is doing what it always does, it dulls and I refuse to accept that in my life.
★★★☆☆
Table of Contents
Introduction
To Clear the Earth
The Eldridge Collection
Rude Awakening
A Trillion Young
Static
The Sothis Radiant
Dark Redeemer
What Brings the Void
The Hour of Our Triumph
Black Fire
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Title:
The Lost and the Lurking
Series: Silver John
#3
Author: Manly Wade Wellman
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Folk Fantasy
Pages:
178
Words: 56K
Silver
John is tasked by the gubbamint to investigate a town. Turns out the
entire town is in thrall to a witch woman and she has BIG plans.
John does his usual self-effacing thing, calls on demonic powers (but supposedly benign) and ends up letting a black preacher save the souls of Wolver when the witch woman accidentally kills herself.
Yeah, this story was about evil devouring itself. John does very little, just a nudge here and there. Exactly as in the previous two novels.
The only difference here is that Wellman lets his politics peek through for just a couple of sentences. I was disappointed in him for doing so because he hadn’t done so before. It felt very whiny.
I gave this the same rating as the previous Silver John stories because it was a template and just like the previous ones. As long as you can deal with that aspect of these stories, then you’ve nothing to fear from diving into this series.
I usually like to include the covers for these, but I simply couldn’t find one that was even halfway decent. The big ones were just smaller versions stretched out and pixelated OR they were pictures of an old paperback with all the attendant damage an old book cover has. That’s actually what I’m using here but with it being smaller it isn’t so noticeable.
★★★☆☆
From the Publisher and Bookstooge
Country
folk, especially backcountry folk, are like to be a mite suspicious
of strangers. But a plain man with a civil manner and no highfalutin
airs can count on a neighborly reception from simple, decent people,
so when the natives of Wolver looked to be fixing to whale on Silver
John, he reckoned maybe it wasn't the sleepy little hamlet it seemed.
But then, if it was, he had no business there anyhow.
The man
who picked the guitar with the silver strings had seen some doings in
this mountain country, and had a reputation with some almighty
powerful souls, not all of them flesh and blood. So when the
government got curious about the goings-on in Wolver, it wasn't so
strange that they should have asked Silver John to see what he could
see, nor at all peculiar that the wanderer had shouldered his pack
and his guitar and hiked up the trace of a road to take a
gander.
Wolver had a desolated look, from the smoking trash
piles outside the town to the tumbledown ruined church. The children
in the grimy yards stared at him dully, while their elders ignored
him or watched him with undisguised hostility. John had no quarrel
with them, but it sure looked like they were set on picking one with
him.
With Tiphaine the witchwoman in talks with foreign agents to bring down the United States, John must call on all his arcane knowledge to not only save the deceived people of Wolver and his own life, but the American Way of Life itself.
Hey look at that, the Foglio's can draw something that isn't all cartoony and jiggly! Color me surprised. I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. Of course, back in the day I never paid attention to who the artists are anyway. That's changing as I'm doing these posts though.
It is time to once again celebrate that Authorial Recluse, Mr Zip. Mr Zip is turning 40 this month and that is something worth celebrating. Heck, he's older than my little sister for goodness sake!
This is as far into "The Jungle" as Mr Zip ever wants to explore. Give him concrete and pavement any day! Plus, all the accoutrements of civilization.
Point in case. You will NEVER find a Mr Mac's in the deepest darkest jungles of Africa or the Amazon. Mr Zip has never looked, but he's pretty sure it is the case. He's also never looked on the Moon OR Mars, but he's pretty sure there aren't any Mr Macs there either. Mr Zip is one smart monkey!
Besides, all Mr Zip has to do is traipse the couple of feet over to the oven and voila, there is a Deluxe Hamburger mac-n-cheese. It's almost like magic. And it tastes better than magic too, guaranteed!
Once he's stuffed himself and is about to enter a food coma, Mr Zip likes to go to his favorite haunt and just chill. Bookshelves are the place to be for Mr Zip and it's about all he's actually up for these days anyway. Mr Zip is feeling his age and wants some warm food, a comfortable place to sit and an uninterrupted snooze, preferably 2-3 days at a time.
Mr Zip wasn't always such a sedate, comfortable bachelor. Back in his hey-day, he was tearing up the carpets like you wouldn't believe. He also got hitched. Yes, you read that right, Mr Zip was married.
She was a blonde haired temptress from the Cabbage Patch clan. While both she and Mr Zip were just reaching their majority (they were both a couple of months old by that time), it was obvious that this Romance was Meant To Be. A lavish wedding was thrown by the entire First Grade class at school and unending bliss was just ahead, or so they thought. But forces beyond their control tore them apart and they were destined to never see each other again. After that, Mr Zip swore that his heart was a stone and he would never love another. It is a vow he has kept to this day.
Thankfully, Mr Zip has made friends over the years. Of course, when he first met Jimbo the Desperado, nobody was sure if it was going to be friendship or a bloodbath. It could have easily gone either way.
Thankfully, they bonded over their shared love of the book Grumpy Monkey. Now they're best buds as they occupy their own favorite niches on the bookshelves.
Of course, once Mr Zip wakes up from his 3day long nap, he needs a little pick-me-up. Thankfully, he's as fond of energy drinks as I am. Down the hatch! He hasn't exploded yet from that much caffeine.
Then it is time for some light reading. This decade it is the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Mr Zip ain't no rube from the turnip farm after all!
Mr Zip has enjoyed his time with you all, but now he says "Shove off". You heard the monkey!
I know the pictures make this look a good bit purple’ish, but in real life, it’s a much more dark blue. This was one of Paperblanks “Old Leather” collections, where they had various colors and tried to simulate that look of scuffed leather. If you look at the big picture versions, you’ll see all those “scuff” marks and recognize “old leather”. Of course, it’s not actually scuffed and it’s not old leather, but it sure does look like it. I had some old leather book marks once that had those same kind of scorings and beatings just from getting moved around and pressed. That’s what leather does after all, takes a beating and keeps on enduring. From the name you can tell they were trying to be clever. I’ll give them points for trying anyway.
The Old Leather Collection had several beautiful options, but sadly, Paperblanks only carried three that had the flap on the front, all the rest were open edged and were closed by an elastic band. That’s just not acceptable to me. It’s not aesthetically acceptable (as they would not match all the rest of my paperblank journals that DO have a flap closure) and it’s not privacy acceptable to me. Should my journal fall out of my bag in a public place, I know that flap will keep it closed and if someone picks it up, they won’t be able to see anything of what I wrote. It’s not so much that I’m concerned as I just value my privacy, even in such little things.
In one of the previous journal posts, Lashaan (from Roars and Echoes) asked if I would ever consider buying a boatload of just one style of journal and using that for years and years. I had never thought of things in that light and I had to sit back and give it a think. I wouldn’t want one of the Embellished Manuscripts, where they are highlighting an author and a particular work, because after 2-5 years I’d get tired of that. It would have to be a design oriented journal that I could just look at and enjoy. Or something plain that didn’t challenge me on an artistic level at all. A journal like this one is very close that ideal of plainness. But not quite. After two of these in a row, I’d go quietly insane and like Abdul Alhazred the Mad Arab, I’d probably end up writing the Bookstoogenomicom, that most evil, alluring and world ending book. And ain’t NOBODY got time for that any more.
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