James Schellenberg

It's been busy lately, and I will be away for two weeks as of Saturday (which is the big day!). So it's been pretty much radio silence here, although I do check in with Google Reader pretty regularly and I'm still sharing items there (my Google Reader shared item page or feed).

One link worth pushing here: Sorting out when those Avatar episodes will air - that clears up a mystery for me. And the fact that Avatar is wrapping is very sad for me, although I have always been a bit worried that they didn't have what it takes to sustain the show and provide a satisfying ending across four seasons. Three seasons... from what I've seen so far, seems doable. The storyline of Prince Zuko (for those in the know :) in particular seems at a good spot to wrap things up.

I added an entry to BiblioTravel:

Ender's Shadow

Ah, good old search engine optimization. I can't tell whether Google is just not stemming from all the variations of "gauge" and "gage" properly or what. But I had to make a few changes to this page to try and get "infeed gaging" a little higher in the search results - as opposed to the proper spelling!

Echo Hill Automation Inc. - Grinder Automation, Infeed Gaging

I wrote an article for The Cultural Gutter:

An Engineer and a Dreamer

So my piece about Y: The Last Man is posted over at Strange Horizons, and I just did a quick little BiblioTravel entry about Runaways. I'm officially feeling a little overdosed on Vaughan! Not really, since his writing is so good, but I'm still not sure how to handle such a large amount of episodic content, as is now available, when such items are designed to be as addictive as possible. You won't see me catching up on 70 years of comic books, but a few seasons of Lost are starting to look like no big deal! As long as I have my exercise bike all warmed up in the mean time of course :)

I added an entry to BiblioTravel:

Runaways

My latest column at Strange Horizons:

Final Issue

In a recent Moveable Type upgrade, one of my Cultural Gutter articles fell into the cracks. Thanks to Library and Archives Canada, a preserved copy is right here: "This Book is Too Long!"

I spent some time clicking around on my old Gutter articles, and it seems like there are a batch that are still attracting comments. What are they? My diss of His Dark Materials (His Dark Ending), my defence of the conclusion of The Dark Tower (Not So Happy Ending), and a pre-Serenity defence of Firefly (Kicking Ass, Literary Style). I'm pretty happy with all three pieces.

A few weeks ago I posted about my frustration with Xenocide, book 3 in Card's Ender series. The ending was worse than I remembered! Of course, I had also forgotten that this was essentially a longer story cut in half, but that makes the situation for the fourth book, Children of the Mind, much less promising. I've been struggling to get through the book, since it's boring and predictable.

It makes me rethink some of my notions about sequels. I've always held up Speaker for the Dead as an interesting sequel, but I'm starting to see the point of some of the Ender's Game fans. The two books are related - Speaker for the Dead is a "sequel" - but they feel totally different; they may as well be different universes. I'm starting to think now that the Amber series (the first five books anyways) are the perfect sequels. Each book was full of surprises and interesting action, but it was all wrapped up in the package of a thoroughly "Amber" book (my previous thoughts about the series here).

My attempt at an artsy picture: Orchid or Legume?

full size

I wrote an article for The Cultural Gutter:

Young Man's Burden

The main page now has a bit more information on it, with a bunch of links pointing to a new page about the centerless grinding line.

I've been listening to the Ender series as I've been walking to work lately. Ender's Game was not only every bit as good as I remembered, but far better - the characterization fed smoothly into the plot and the ideas behind the book, all wrapped up into a beautifully paced coming-of-age story. Speaker for the Dead, which has some personal stuff attached to it from the past for me, turned out to have a shorter artistic half-life. Ender Wiggin is the hero who knows too much, does too much, annoys me too much. Still an interesting book, but not the towering achievement that I remembered.

Xenocide, book three in the series, has been a real drag - it's wordy in the extreme, the characters are continually arguing about arcane bits of made-up metaphysics, and... frankly, it's all boring. The fact that I'm listening to it in audiobook format makes it more of a slog, since I could have burned through the regular book in an evening, but listening to it takes about 3 weeks. Worst of all, I can see all of Card's writing powers turned to the task of putting together one of the most annoying endings I've seen in a book - the magic pulling-out-of-a-hat of a few characters (and scientific developments) at the end. That's my memory of how the books ends anyways; I turned off my iPod this morning just as the FTL ship was about to leave, so I'll have a follow-up post soon. But everything about the book has been an immaculately-constructed path to that moment - in fact everything makes perfect sense as the story goes along - without much of a sense that the destination is deeply silly and frustrating. More soon.

First, because green is local (I guess?):
Green Living Ottawa

And an item of interest to me, with a few too many computers already in my possession:
The Impacts of a New PC

I added an entry to BiblioTravel:

Halting State