I don’t have a recording of this one, so you’ll just have to read it as verse. It’s a story song, really, so in that sense a lot less like the more imagistic poems I have tended to put out there lately.
Shannon
Takes a lot of elbow grease to get the stains from the counter
Residue of hamburgers and quickie lunches
Shannon’s Diner charges a dollar for a hamburger
And chances are Shannon herself makes it
At fifty-four she flips her burgers and hates it
“Braid won’t be at Slamdance because of SCMRPG getting dropped,” is the short form. Read on for the details…
As many of you probably know, there’s this game called Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, an oldschool-style RPG about taking the roles of Klebold and Harris, killing kids in school, then dying, going to hell, and coming to some awareness of what they’ve done. The game is pretty divisive — the creator seems serious in his intent to create an artistic response and commentary about the Columbine shootings, but of course many simply find it to be in poor taste.
John Cage’s 4’33” as a ringtone.
(Yes, it’s a little tongue in cheek. The ringtone does exist, you can download it, but I think the performance art is partly the press release!)
I am so happy to see this animated map of the history of the Middle East, because for many years I’ve dreamed about seeing a map like this for the history of the world. This only covers the major empires and other large developments, not each small country or tribe (hmm, how hard would the four-color problem be with a time axis? Automatic switching of colors?), but it’s still a wonderful and illuminating 90 second history lesson.
So I finished reading these books ages ago. Kristen was kind enough to do all the legwork of getting the links and pics in place here, and get the post ready for me to fill in the actual review content. And then I didn’t do it. I mean, these books were part of the same pile as the last book review set I did! So I read them all well over a month ago.
Better late than never, right? So here we go.
The first book in this set was Ellen Kushner‘s excellent Swordspoint. It was a wonderful tale of a world where bravoes lived by the sword and fought for the amusement of petty nobles, and a single duelist, the astounding St. Vier, was the pinnacle of the art of the sword. Then came the somewhat less good The Fall of The Kings, set in the same world but much earlier, laying the groundwork for the world of the first book. Somehow more muddled and less satisfying, less full of panache really, it didn’t work as well. Now comes a third book, The Privilege of the Sword, and it’s a return to form in many ways — the tale of a young girl who is brought to the capital not as a debutante, but by her mad uncle (a returning character from Swordspoint) to learn to handle the sword. It still has the flavor of decadence and the surprising sweetness of the other books, but the young and ornery protagonist helps quite a lot to make it a lighter and less involved tale than the last book. If you liked Swordspoint (and really, most fantasy fans should have at least read it) I suspect you’ll like this one too.
Read More “Amazing Stupendous Superlate Stories of Scientifictive Fantasy!”
