Book Review: Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is utterly present in Doorways in the Sand.

Now, I've given Zelazny a small amount of shit in the past, at least in the limited context of this blog, but only in the interest of being an honest reviewer.  I now feel obligated to give the old boy some love, publicly and on the Internet, at the cost of my nil critiquing cred, but fortunately that won't be necessary; I actually read Doorways, and enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed any other book ever.

Several Thoughts

A couple of things have occurred to me, none of which is large enough to make a full post out of.  I guess this is what Twitter's for, but I can only manage so many Web-2.0 life outlets at once.

The Good

The extent to which the alignment system of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons influenced my philosophy of the world is very nearly embarrassing, although the writings of Michael Moorcock helped too.  Good and Evil is a fine spectrum for some stories and some religions, but Law and Chaos are so much more interesting.

The Story of Brother Giles

It seems that there was a Gaelic monk named Giles who was a brother of the priory at Lindisfarne.  Giles took his final vows in the year 745, and soon afterward, in a fit of holy inspiration, took up residence in a small wooden box.  An ascetic among ascetics, Giles spent his days in silent, cramped meditation, leaving his box only for the Palm Sunday precession.

Brother Giles continued his life as an enclosed anchorite until June 8, 793, the day of the famous Viking raid on Lindisfarne.  When the Northern raiders found Brother Giles in his box, they demanded that he come out of his box to be killed.  When he refused, two of the stoutest warriors carried the box to the top of the bell tower and cast it to the green.  The Vikings descended to inspect the ruins of the box, but Brother Giles' body was nowhere to be found.

Because of his controversial lifestyle, Brother Giles was never canonized, but the sad story of the miraculous monk soon spread through the flock of the faithful.  An idiom grew among the merchants of Europe: boxes containing precious cargo were to be treated "as it were Brother Giles' own box".  As greater literacy arose in the 15th century, traders began marking such cargo with the now-shortened form of the idiom, simply "Brother Giles", or in Latin: "Fra Gile".

Semster-end Work Spike: Update

Just released an amount of tension via my second presentation of the week.  Some of the work for this was going on ten minutes before class, so very high stress.  I need to try really hard not to relax though -- there's plenty of more work ahead.  My portfolio will definitely get beefed up by the end of the month.

After taking 5 classes this semester and promising myself, "Never Again", my very favorite professor ever ever announced an independent-study class involving work on the gigantic Sakai Project.  I have never been so excited about anything.  Also, this is the first class I've ever had to apply for.  News on that will be forthcoming.

Book Review: Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber, today best known as the author of the excellent sword-and-sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, died in 1992, at the age of 81, of "organic brain disease".  I have no idea what that means.  He was the son of the Shakespearean actor Fritz Leiber, Sr., who is actually in the picture; I found this a lot more compelling than most photos of Fritz Jr.

Conjure Wife is the first of Leiber's stories that I've read which is set in the then-modern world.  That it was published in 1953 (according to the copyright information), or 1943 even (when it was serialized), goes a long way toward explaining some of the book's more... politically awkward moments.

Misery, Death, and Slime Molds: My Love Affair with Roguelikes

One of my favorite pastimes in this modern world of 3D movies (who ever thought those would come back around again?), beautiful multiplayer online games, and graphics cards more powerful than my entire first computer, is to play in the humble genre of roguelike games.  But what exactly is a roguelike?  It is a game that is, in most respects, a lot like 1980's Rogue, the first graphical computer game.  Given that they are classified by their similarity to a particular game, roguelikes for the most part share a set of common features:

Book Review: Wizard World, by Roger Zelazny

Who couldn't love that face?

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is totally absent from Wizard World.

Now I am a huge fan of Roger Zelazny.  The Great Book of Amber is the best 1258 pages I ever spent, twice.  Lord Demon, Donnerjack, and Creatures of Light and Darkness are among the most imaginative, atypical works of fantasy I've read.  Zelazny's main characters are typically demigods, in one way or another, dealing with their demigod problems, but with some kind of connection to something like the modern world (e.g., the main character of the second half of Amber has a CS degree from Berkeley, and is also a sorcerer).  Something about this is strangely compelling to me.  As another e.g., Amber starts with the main character waking up in a hospital with amnesia, and is very much in a noir style; the true nature of things is revealed only slowly.  Great stuff.

For these reasons and more, I really, really wanted to like Wizard World.

So About The Name...

So about the name of this blog:

At some point in the mists of the past (I'd say 2006-2007) I got on a roll of making fun of romance novels.  I could swear that I wrote two or three several-paragraph things about the ridiculously manly Count Dangerham, only I cannot find them for the life of me.  Maybe I can try to work myself up to writing some more, but I doubt it.  It's kinda been "done", you know?

Blasting Off to a New Latitude

I spent this very extended weekend in Florida, celebrating my stepdad's 70th birthday / hip replacement.  (I guess that should be "(70th birthday) / (hip replacement)".  /s have always made me uncomfortable that way.  I know for sure that he only had his hip replaced, not his birthday, and I'm reasonably certain that it was his first procedure of that sort.)  He lives in the extraordinarily rich community of Aventura: