One Lovely Blog Interlude

gifguide2codereadinglist

In the spirit of CodeInFig’s recent post, I’m taking a coding break this Valentine’s Day and instead writing up an About the Blogger. The only problem is, as you may have noticed from my picture, I am a cartoon character. There’s not much to know. So instead of writing specifically about me, I’m listing 7 of my favorite books. In no particular order:

#1:  Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Best Dystopian with a Truly Impressive Number of 80’s References

A treasure hunt in virtual reality. Super nerdy characters—the kind that can recite scenes from War Games word for word. For anyone who grew up prior to the turn of the millennium, it’s bound to trigger some nostalgia. Steven Spielburg is directing the movie being released in 2018.

ready-player-one-book-cover


#2:  John Dies at the End by David Wong
Best Horror Story with Equal Parts Crude Comedy and Graphic Violence

The bizarre tale of a Wally’s video store clerk, his friend John, and a designer drug called Soy Sauce. It opens with a gruesome riddle that honestly seems beside the point until you get to the end and realize that the ax is actually the sort of-deceased protagonist.

john-dies-at-the-end

 

#3:  The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Best Sci-Fi Guaranteed to Rip Your Heart Out and Run It Through a Meat Grinder

Written as a long letter to an archenemy from a man who loops through his life fifteen times, always starting in 1919. Quick disclaimer: the language can be a bit tedious, but let’s face it, if you were centuries old, you’d probably write like that too. Also, don’t read the ending in public. You will be sobbing by the end. And that’s no way to look on the train home.

harry-august


#4:  The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Best Space Opera Not Involving Graphic Descriptions of Interspecies Relations

Imagine Firefly if several of the main characters were members of different alien species and the ship was being incorporeally possessed by an AI instead of River—that’s this book.  Bit of a hodgepodge of everything. It’ll make you think, if you want it to, but it’s also just really entertaining if you’re looking for a quick escape.

longway


#5:  This Book is Full of Spiders by David Wong
Best Sequel with a Truly Disturbing Revelation about the Star Trek Universe

I feel like the title says it all on this one. If you liked John Dies at the End, you’ll blaze right through it.

spiders


#6:  The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Best Fantasy/Horror Featuring Mostly Dead People

Originally, this list had five Neil Gaiman books and that episode of Doctor Who where the TARDIS becomes Suranne Jones, but I figured I should branch out.

The Graveyard Book is about a boy named Nobody Owens who is adopted by ghosts in a cemetery after his family is murdered. It’s arguably the best set-up for a fantasy story in history.

the-graveyard-book
#7:  Zero Hour by Ray Bradbury
Best Short Story to Help Talk Your Significant Other Out of Having Kids

Alright, this is not a book—it’s a short story in The Illustrated Man. But I read this as a teenager, and years later, it’s still vivid as hell in my memory. So I’m including it. All the horror of Children of the Corn in a science fiction shell.

zero-hour

 

A Personal Note: It’s been a year since I started taking out my technological frustrations on WordPress. Believe it or not, I think it has actually helped me hold onto my sanity. Same damn laptop. Still a tongue-eating parasite, but it’s my damn parasite. More coding tutorials to tame the bastard to come.

Also, I tried—REALLY, I TRIED—to put together a list of my 15 favorite blogs, but I follow too many of all different kinds. Programmers, gamers, web designers, data junkies, comics, 3D artists, traditional artists, photographers, book reviewers, even some archaeologists and one insanely cool GIS analyst. They’re all the best in their own ways and enumerating those ways would take me another year.

Until next time. And if you know of more books like the ones above, please post.

 

 

Tagged , , , , ,

4 thoughts on “One Lovely Blog Interlude

  1. codeinfig says:

    you know its “up to 15” right? i only did 7, and its harder than it looks. cool post!

    Liked by 1 person

    • It’s SO much harder than it looks! And it’s a bit of an odd exercise going back to old blogs you know you liked and realizing they don’t post anymore. I find myself doing a lot of speculating, like, did they get into a car accident? Were they mauled by a stray pack of wolves? Are they okay? Maybe they just met someone in a coffee shop and now they don’t blog because they found a girlfriend? I don’t know why my brain immediately jumps to mauled-by-wolves. I’m hoping the reality is closer to the coffee shop scenario.

      Liked by 1 person

      • codeinfig says:

        its not easy to keep blogging. i almost lost interest in posting a few months in.

        “It’s SO much harder than it looks! And it’s a bit of an odd exercise going back to old blogs you know you liked and realizing they don’t post anymore.”

        i know! happily jet (who i mentioned in my own post on the subject, though i didnt nominate because i thought she might never post again) posted shortly after i wrote it.

        youre noticing the exact same challenges i did with this thing– its funny that more people dont talk about those.

        Liked by 1 person

  2. Yeah, I keep thinking I’ll stop once I get my computer under control. I’m beginning to understand that day is NEVER going to come. If I ever stop posting, just assume my laptop finally went all HAL from Space Odyssey on me.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://gifguide2code.com/2017/02/14/one-lovely-blog-interlude/
gifguide2code.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-13
64477
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VA6XFHFGXWWHUMWM3WROBFOAX4BEEVLY
<urn:uuid:40aadc9f-6b79-4e72-9874-72cbd20a7d0d>
2018-03-23T03:39:41Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:V4W5N3TFM3UQPFRSGUFQS4V7MEYISWQV
<urn:uuid:6f93bbe3-c31d-4219-8926-db7339a63018>
https://gifguide2code.com/2017/02/14/one-lovely-blog-interlude/
length
response
<urn:uuid:7f6ce1e6-2f6e-4c94-9458-3ed4bbed4824>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-184-170-133.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-13
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf