Category: Reviews

Gossamer Commons

Later today, I’ll be posting PLotW1 but before that happens here’s a different link that you should really check out. Gossamer Commons is a relatively recent webcomic, started back in March 2005 by Eric Burns and Greg Holkan. Eric writes, Greg draws. The premise is something like so; the main character, Keith, has saved the life of a fairy child. Since he did this while knowing that seeing the fairy would mark him for death2; the Fairies owe him 1 boon of Keith’s choosing. As Keith has longed to be a published author; he requests, as his boon, that the Fairies give him a muse so he can great the great American novel. A novel that will inspire generations to come and will be read by annoyed college freshmen four hundred years from now. 🙂 Mr. Holkan uses a variety of methods in his artwork on the strip and so far it’s working really well, but the thing that keeps me coming back and reading the new strip is the writing (done by Mr. Burns.). Since I’m not much of a writer myself; I charge you with looking at today’s strip for an example how good this strip can be.

Keep up the good work fellas, we’ll be watching you!

1 Pukka’s Links of the Week
2 Apparently in the GC world just seeing one of the Fairies will automagically mark you for death.

Product Image: TiBR Pro

My rating: 5 out of 5

I recently finished reading the last of my unread stack of books, took a look at my bank account and realized that continuing to buy more at the current time would be… unwise. So I started looking around the apartment for something else to read, but nothing really sparked my interest.

It probably wasn’t helping that a good friend of mine kept writing in her journal about how much she was enjoying rereading The Count of Monte Cristo. Then it occured to me that story is most likely in the public domain, so a quick jaunt over to Project Gutenberg and I’d confirmed that it was in fact in the public domain. Then I started downloading a copy of this and a few other stories when I realized that I didn’t have a book reader on my PDA any more. So I looked around at some review sites and ran across TiBR Pro by inDev Software. Niiiiiiiiice.

TiBR Pro supports reading eBooks off my PDA’s memory stick and even cooler; it allows me to rotate the screen sideways for a much more natural viewing area. They also had a free version, but the description didn’t mention reading from a memory stick and I’ve got enough stuff on my PDA that I really wanted that feature. So I coughed up the measly $9.951 and I’m most pleased with my purchase. So far I’ve worked my way through ~50% of The Count of Monte Cristo and I’ve already downloaded several other books that I look forward to reading using this great new tool!

As a side note while I was searching for eBook readers to load on my PDA; I ran across the ManyBooks website. ManyBooks takes etexts from places like Project Gutenberg and converts them into popular eBook formats. This makes it easier for lazy people like myself to quickly get the stories onto our PDAs for reading whenever we have a spare moment (e.g. during boring meetings).

1 I’ve seen other readers for my PDA costing twice that, which would definitly be out of my budget for the moment.

The Wheel of Time is a series of books by Robert Jordan. The series started out very promisingl, interesting characters, good descriptions, better dialog than I could ever come up with but the last couple of books, Crossroads of Twilight in particular, have failed to deliver on that early promise. The description has been focused more on how worried everybody in the story is without really giving a good sense for why they’re so worried. For all that Jordan has tried to make his villans, the Forsaken, seem to be horrendously powerful; the heros never seem to be truly overwhelmed by them. Rather the heros seem to simply lack the necessary self-confidence to deal with them. The other problem that the series is suffering from is “feature-creep”. First we had the Dark friends, then Padan Fain, then the Whitecloacks, then the Forsaken, then the Seachan. Is there going to be any end to the villians that are going to be thrown at the heros? Will we ever see a resolution to all the diverent plot threads that make up this series? From the way that last book read, I think Jordan has lost or forgotten whatever it was that he originally intended to do with the series and these days is more interested in turning just another book to continue the series because like George Lucas; he knows people might hate it but they’ll buy it anyway.

I also happened to catch tonight’s CSI and while I enjoyed it; I did feel somewhat cheated. See, Wil Wheaton was one of tonight’s guest stars and since I regular read Mr. Wheaton’s blog I’d been rather looking forward to this episode. Unfortunately, Mr. Wheaton really only seemed to get a very few minutes in front of the camera and while I did enjoy the performance… I guess I was expecting more. More what exactly, I’m not entirely sure but I suppose I was hoping to see Mr. Wheaton have a chance to really get into his role on the screen. *shrug* Ah well, nice work Mr. Wheaton and here’s hoping that this leads to more jobs for you!

On the advice of a friend (Pukka), a while back I began to read Wil Wheaton‘s blog. Though I’d seen Stand By Me and Toy Soldiers, my firmest memories of Mr. Wheaton were of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was one of the few sci-fi shows that my parents were willing to watch and I have to admit while I enjoyed parts of that show (Picard rocks!); I hated Wesley. He always struck me as this smart ass; who’d lucked out his way into working on a starship. Of course, probably what really irked me about it was that it was him and not ME! Even so, that initially made me reluctant to visit the blog, but Pukka has a habit of sending me interesting links. Since he’s rarely wrong (unless I’ve already seen what he’s sent); I checked out Mr. Wheaton’s site and have been faithful reader ever since. Then back when I ordered my copy of Ghosts in the Snow from Amazon.com; I had one of my oddly, cheap moments.
(more…)