Miscellaneous

Things I Remember

August Leave a Comment

I’ve been re-reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen this weekend, in anticpation of Zack Snyder’s upcoming film (warning: link re-sizes your browser). Ironically, the sense of nostalgia the work tries to elicit—for the supposedly more innocent comics (and times) of the 1940s and 1950s—is not the nostalgia I experience. I’m simply too young. I instead experience a nostalgia for the period when Watchmen takes place, 1985. The fear of nuclear annihilation was never something I felt palpably. I was thankfully too young for that as well. I could sense the fear, and sometimes the outright paranoia, in the world and some of the people around me. That paranoia dribbles and oozes through the the pages of Watchmen, coating the characters and distorting everything. There is so little hope in this book, and so much despair. How sad is it that these are my “simpler times”? In the book we… Continue Reading →

Email Problems

August Leave a Comment

Anyone who may have tried to contact me via email over the last twenty-four hours more than likely found that they could not. Due to some inbox weirdness, I was able to send but not receive email until early this afternoon. All the messages I was sent during this period were lost; you will have to send them again. The problem seems to have been resolved, so things should go back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have A Policy

August Leave a Comment

After sitting on the idea for a couple of months, discussions like this one have finally forced me to draft a book review policy. It’s kind of wordy, but I think it covers everything I wanted to say. If I find that I need to make some adjustments later on, I’ll post about it here. So: authors, publishers and publicists, if you have a book that you’d like me to review, get the skinny here. I’d love to hear from you.

It’s Not My Place to Say

August Leave a Comment

A few words for my American readers on this momentous day: I’m not an American citizen (I don’t live there, in fact I haven’t even visited for something like sixteen years), so it’s not really my place to tell you what election day is all about in your country. I would not be making this statement at all if I did not believe the outcome of the election mattered to you, or indeed to me. In a free and democratic society, voting for your leadership is not only a right, it’s a responsibility (an opinion I’ve expressed before). What you do today will have an effect on you, your loved ones, your community, and even those of us in other nations. I won’t pretend that I don’t have an opinion about who would be the best choice, both for your nation and mine (ahem), but I’ll ask only these two… Continue Reading →

MobyLives, Um, Lives!

August Leave a Comment

A couple of years ago I was big, and I mean big into podcasts. I had a job that didn’t require a lot of concentration, and we were allowed, even encouraged, to listen to iPods and CD players and so on while putting in our twelve hours a day (that’s right, twelve). I listened almost exclusively to podcasts, and MobyLives was far and away the best book oriented podcast around. And then one day it disappeared. But before it was a podcast, MobyLives was a blog. And finally, after two years or more on hiatus, it is a blog once more. I’m not sure if anything can live up to expectations I have, thanks to the amazing quality of the podcast, but I have no doubt that the new MobyLives will be a worthy addition to my daily reading, and to yours too. (Thanks to David for the heads up.)

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

August Leave a Comment

It was brought to my attention earlier today that my RSS feed has been acting up. In the sense that it hasn’t been working. It turns out that this is probably my fault; I reconfigured some things the last time I updated my MovableType installation (not recently, but I guess this has been going on for a while), and it looks like that broke the RSS feed. The old RSS feed was at https://vestige.org/index.rdf; this no longer works, and I can’t figure out how to make it work. But it turns out that if you point your feed reader to https://vestige.org/index.xml, everything will work just fine (although I haven’t done anything to the template, so it probably won’t look very pretty in your reader—if that sort of thing is even an issue; I don’t really know much about RSS, as I don’t use it myself). Sorry about the mix up.

Notice Anything Different?

August Leave a Comment

After eight consecutive hours of sweating over code, I’ve managed to not only give the old homestead a fresh coat of paint, but I’ve finally made it properly functional again. There’s a search box on the right, which I removed four years ago after it broke and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. It works again. I’ve updated my links, tweaked the about page (including the addition of my favourite photo of myself), and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you’ll find a new copyright notice and the very best renovation, pagination! You can now actually page back through previous entries (and then forward again, if you’re so inclined), a feature which was long overdue. The category archives are also paginated, so you won’t have to scroll through one single monstrous page when you check those out. I’ve also included more meta-data on each… Continue Reading →

Overheard On My Lunch Break

August Leave a Comment

I was wandering through the BMV on Bloor St. during my lunch break this evening, and in the CanLit section I overheard a young lady with an English (I think it was English) accent say the following to her blond Canadian friend: “Everybody thinks Oedipus was so weird, but it wasn’t his fault.” Things like that bring a smile to my face.

Building My Stack

August 1 Comment

In a recent blog post, first-time author and and long(ish)-time blogger Rebecca Rosenblum asked her readers (and I guess I count as one of those) to list the books they are reading and talk about the hows and whys of their reading choices. I refer to the books I own but have yet to read as “my stack,” with books I plan to read soon on the top, and books I plan to read much later at the bottom. My personal library of unread books was at one point an actual stack, but over the years it has grown large enough to render that description purely metaphorical. Anyway, I love to talk about this sort of thing, so behold! the great and mighty post about how I choose my reading material. Right now the only book I’m reading is Elyse Friedman’s Long Story Short, which I chose because it caught… Continue Reading →