Books, and a woot.

First the woot:

We bought a standalone DVD recorder when the prices had dropped to something reasonable ($130, I think, at CostCo). Eliz promptly started dumping Sesame Street and the like; it turns out that when a kid raised in the TiVo era expects ANY program he desires to be available immediately. A 6 hour run of $EDUCATIONAL_PROGRAM can be very useful, especially when said kid wakes up at 3 AM and is bouncy and does not want to go back to sleep and is being a charming pain.

The DVD recorder was overheating regularly and not recognizing disks. Google says this is a known defect, so we returned it (all hail CostCo's infinite warranty on non-computers) and picked up a new one. Now for the woot: in addition to not overheating and generally working better than the old one, this DVD recorder will play DivX AVIs. So the Doctor Who S2 collection plays directly from one DVD and one CD.

Now for books. It's been a while:

Liz Williams, _Snake Agent_
Charles Stross, _The Clan Corporate_
Timothy Zahn, _Blackcollar_
Carrie Vaughn, _Kitty Goes to Washington_
Chris Howard, _Nanowhere_
Jim Butcher, _Restoration_
Rachel Caine, _Windfall_
John Ringo, _East of the Sun, West of the Moon_

_Snake Agent_ is a hardboiled detective story told in a technofantasy Singapore that is well connected to traditional Chinese Heaven and Hell. Gods, godesses and demons complicate the plot, but mostly the major deities stay out of the action. There is always the sense that one or more of the entities could simply snap their fingers and resolve everything... probably at the cost of upsetting Universal Order. So they don't. Meanwhile, Crowley and Aziraphale^w^w^whone's a detective inspector, the other one is a demon! They fight crime.

I haven't yet met any of Stross's output that I didn't like, with the exception of a few short stories. _The Clan Corporate_ continues his winning streak as book 3 (or part one of book 2, if you prefer) of the SF-in-fantasy-trappings series about a family of worldwalkers who now have access to three parallel dimensions: one very close to ours, one in which the Christians died out in the embers of the Roman Empire, and one with a tech and social milieu very similar to the mid-eighteenth century. The series revolves around Miriam Beckstein, a journalist from almost-our-timeline who gets caught up in the mess. In this installment, Things Get Piled Higher and Deeper. I'm looking forward to reading _Glasshouse_ as it arrives in the near future and _The Jennifer Morgue_ when that worthy Bond-meets-Cthulhu tome is published.

Zahn's _Blackcollar_ was apparently born out of a desire to tell exciting ninja espionage tales in the Dorsai universe. Mnyeh, not so much. Competent, but uninspiring.

Another vote for the restraint shown by Carrie Vaughn in her second Kitty book: while we now have another supernatural race to go with the werewolves and vampires, none of them have exhibited new and hitherto unsuspected superpowers. Also, Kitty has not gained in power level, at all. This being Washington, however, politics abounds.

You can tell _Nanowhere_ is a YA novel because the author tries to slip in the pronunciation of any big words that the reader might not have encountered before. Otherwise, it's a near0future dystopie with a secret underground lair full of nanotech and AIs. Provides just enough nastiness to hold the attention of your average teenage horror fan.

Butcher wrote a short story as a prequel for The Dresden Files (soon to be a series on Sci Fi, starring someone who looks almost nothing like the in-book description of Harry Dresden, and apparently involving a Karin who looks nothing like her description... sheesh, is it so hard to cast a tall man and a short blonde?) and this is it. Will not provide much satisfaction if you don't already like Harry Dresden, the only wizard in Chicago's Yellow Pages.

Also in series-land: _Windfall_ is the fourth and most recent of the stories about a weather witch and her incredible sine-wave adventures. This one seems to have provided the author with an opportunity to write off a trip to Florida as business expenses. On the other hand, the characters are individuals, the plot is non-obvious but sensible, and I zipped through it in one day and still want more. Not recommended unless you've enjoyed the previous three.

Finally, some war porn. _East...West..._ will make no sense plotwise or politically without the context provided by the previous N books in this series, especially the initiator _There Will Be Dragons_. Just remember that all the magic is supposed to be nanotech and advanced physics, sex has no consequences and anything inconvenient for the plot will either be ignored or swept under this rug, right here, marked "advanced AI protocols forbid it". Still competent words-in-a-row, but my gosh everything Ringo writes sounds the same. Compare and contrast with Stross, for instance, who can keep a consistent tone per series but is apparently immune to cross-contamination.

Books, and a woot.

First the woot:

We bought a standalone DVD recorder when the prices had dropped to something reasonable ($130, I think, at CostCo). Eliz promptly started dumping Sesame Street and the like; it turns out that when a kid raised in the TiVo era expects ANY program he desires to be available immediately. A 6 hour run of $EDUCATIONAL_PROGRAM can be very useful, especially when said kid wakes up at 3 AM and is bouncy and does not want to go back to sleep and is being a charming pain.

The DVD recorder was overheating regularly and not recognizing disks. Google says this is a known defect, so we returned it (all hail CostCo's infinite warranty on non-computers) and picked up a new one. Now for the woot: in addition to not overheating and generally working better than the old one, this DVD recorder will play DivX AVIs. So the Doctor Who S2 collection plays directly from one DVD and one CD.

Now for books. It's been a while:

Liz Williams, _Snake Agent_
Charles Stross, _The Clan Corporate_
Timothy Zahn, _Blackcollar_
Carrie Vaughn, _Kitty Goes to Washington_
Chris Howard, _Nanowhere_
Jim Butcher, _Restoration_
Rachel Caine, _Windfall_
John Ringo, _East of the Sun, West of the Moon_

_Snake Agent_ is a hardboiled detective story told in a technofantasy Singapore that is well connected to traditional Chinese Heaven and Hell. Gods, godesses and demons complicate the plot, but mostly the major deities stay out of the action. There is always the sense that one or more of the entities could simply snap their fingers and resolve everything... probably at the cost of upsetting Universal Order. So they don't. Meanwhile, Crowley and Aziraphale^w^w^whone's a detective inspector, the other one is a demon! They fight crime.

I haven't yet met any of Stross's output that I didn't like, with the exception of a few short stories. _The Clan Corporate_ continues his winning streak as book 3 (or part one of book 2, if you prefer) of the SF-in-fantasy-trappings series about a family of worldwalkers who now have access to three parallel dimensions: one very close to ours, one in which the Christians died out in the embers of the Roman Empire, and one with a tech and social milieu very similar to the mid-eighteenth century. The series revolves around Miriam Beckstein, a journalist from almost-our-timeline who gets caught up in the mess. In this installment, Things Get Piled Higher and Deeper. I'm looking forward to reading _Glasshouse_ as it arrives in the near future and _The Jennifer Morgue_ when that worthy Bond-meets-Cthulhu tome is published.

Zahn's _Blackcollar_ was apparently born out of a desire to tell exciting ninja espionage tales in the Dorsai universe. Mnyeh, not so much. Competent, but uninspiring.

Another vote for the restraint shown by Carrie Vaughn in her second Kitty book: while we now have another supernatural race to go with the werewolves and vampires, none of them have exhibited new and hitherto unsuspected superpowers. Also, Kitty has not gained in power level, at all. This being Washington, however, politics abounds.

You can tell _Nanowhere_ is a YA novel because the author tries to slip in the pronunciation of any big words that the reader might not have encountered before. Otherwise, it's a near0future dystopie with a secret underground lair full of nanotech and AIs. Provides just enough nastiness to hold the attention of your average teenage horror fan.

Butcher wrote a short story as a prequel for The Dresden Files (soon to be a series on Sci Fi, starring someone who looks almost nothing like the in-book description of Harry Dresden, and apparently involving a Karin who looks nothing like her description... sheesh, is it so hard to cast a tall man and a short blonde?) and this is it. Will not provide much satisfaction if you don't already like Harry Dresden, the only wizard in Chicago's Yellow Pages.

Also in series-land: _Windfall_ is the fourth and most recent of the stories about a weather witch and her incredible sine-wave adventures. This one seems to have provided the author with an opportunity to write off a trip to Florida as business expenses. On the other hand, the characters are individuals, the plot is non-obvious but sensible, and I zipped through it in one day and still want more. Not recommended unless you've enjoyed the previous three.

Finally, some war porn. _East...West..._ will make no sense plotwise or politically without the context provided by the previous N books in this series, especially the initiator _There Will Be Dragons_. Just remember that all the magic is supposed to be nanotech and advanced physics, sex has no consequences and anything inconvenient for the plot will either be ignored or swept under this rug, right here, marked "advanced AI protocols forbid it". Still competent words-in-a-row, but my gosh everything Ringo writes sounds the same. Compare and contrast with Stross, for instance, who can keep a consistent tone per series but is apparently immune to cross-contamination.

Book

Jerry Spinelli, _Stargirl_. Amusingly, this looks like it could be SF, but it isn't. Consider dropping a Daniel Pinkwater character into a Daniel Pinkwater mundane high school, but make the iewpoint character [almost] irretrievably antiweird. Unsettling. Hopeful, but not optimistic.

Book

Jerry Spinelli, _Stargirl_. Amusingly, this looks like it could be SF, but it isn't. Consider dropping a Daniel Pinkwater character into a Daniel Pinkwater mundane high school, but make the iewpoint character [almost] irretrievably antiweird. Unsettling. Hopeful, but not optimistic.