Joyful Is The Dark

A while ago, we bought some Fuji film for our camera. It's nothing special, just your standard built-for-photography-morons kind of pre-digital camera. Anyway, after much trying, we were unable to get the Fuji film to load in our camera. I swear, we'd pulled out several inches of the film, and still whenever we closed the camera, it would whirr for a while, then says "E", which meant that it hadn't found the film. Eventually we gave up, got some Kodak film, and tried it--it worked fine. So we figured there was some weird incompatibility with our camera's loading mechanism and Fuji film. A while back we got some Black's film(from "Black's is Photography"), and it wouldn't load either. We got them to confess that it was supplied by Fuji, and we returned it.

A few weeks ago, I was getting some CD-R's at "The Source At Circuit City"(formerly Radio Shack). They used to have all their CD-R's on a shelf beside the till, so I could pick out which ones I wanted, but they'd moved it behind the till instead. So I just asked the cashier guy for some CD-R's, and he grabbed me a box of Fujifilm CDs. Okay, what the heck. I've mostly stuck to Verbatim since getting my burner, and they've worked just fine for me, but I like some variety in my collection.

Last week I burned some MP3s I downloaded from eMusic onto one of the CDs, and tried to play it in my CD player. This one is getting a bit old and creaky--it's about nine years old, and it was a floor model when my wife bought it for me. It frequently skips on CDs that play fine in other players, but it works fine most of the time, and it's also got the double tape decks that I like. Anyway, the Fujifilm CD started breaking up in the middle of the second track, and wouldn't scan forward to any later track on the disc. I tried some of the others I'd burned on those CDs, to the same result. Had my CD player finally died? Had that copy-protected Tea Party CD from the library screwed it up somehow? But no, I played through the Beatles "1" CD with nary a skip.

So, I am once again forced to conclude that Fuji has made a product that doesn't work my particular idiosyncratic hardware. I'm inclined to regard this as a fatal design flaw, though in other circumstances I wouldn't even have noticed it. Still, all sorts of aphorisms come to mind, about getting fooled twice, and "enemy action", and that sort of things. I think I'll steer clear of Fuji from now on.

By the way, I was looking for some blank cassette tapes last weekend, and it turned out that the only place I could find them was the dollar store, where they're a dollar each--the same as the CD-R's. But it means I can buy a lot of different brands at once, instead of the big packs of Sony or Maxell tapes I've been known to buy. As I said, I like a little variety to spice up my collection.

Face Down Like The Jack of Hearts

I'll try to squeeze out another books update while I'm actually feeling kind of inspired to post... Let's see, the last one I mentioned was A Feast For Crows, right? That was over a month ago. So, moving on:

Dean Koontz: Mr. Murder. Another present-day marginally SFnal thriller from Mr. Koontz. Sometimes they're a little bit samey, and the main character being an author felt a bit too much like laziness. I might've liked it better if I'd read it before Shadowfires and Dark Rivers of The Heart and Watchers. Oh, well, Koontz has churned out a lot of books, and they can't all be winners. (His next one on my list is apparently a M*A*S*H-style humorous military book from his early writing career called Hanging On, which should at least be different.)

Gene Wolfe: Nightside The Long Sun. It took me a while to get into the "Book of the New Sun" series, but by the end of that series, and The Urth of The New Sun, I was really into it. It took me a while to find the entire Long Sun tetralogy, and then longer to get around to reading it. Any connections between the two series are by no means evident right now, especially from this book, which starts out as a fairly innocuous story of a priest trying to save his church from being taken over by a rich criminal and turned into a brothel. Not as good a beginning as Shadow of The Torturer, perhaps, but this priest turns out to be quite capable, and the plot moves itself along well. I seem to recall from the other series that many things from the first book turned out to be Not What They Seemed in the later books, so I'm hoping that the rest of the series will twist the paradigm a few times.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Paladin of Souls. The sequel to The Curse of Chalion, taking one of the minor characters and turning her into the protagonist of this one. I confess I don't really know who or what the title refers to, but Bujold has hit another one out of the park here, with her heroine being dragged very reluctantly into solving the problems of the gods. (Apparently there are supposed to be five books in the series, one for each good--this is for the Bastard.) Lots of juicy twists and turns.

Stanislaw Lem: The Star Diaries. I've been putting off this one for a while, since I wasn't really in the mood for it, but it turned out okay. It's more like The Cyberiad than like Solaris or The Invincible, a fairly light work of satire, humour and occasional philosophy. It's really a collection of stories, written as voyages of I. Tichy, not in chronological order and not starting at the first voyage, either. It's somewhere between The Cyberiad and Gulliver's Travels, and some of the bits go on a bit long, but all in all it's entertaining, if plotless. The first story, about Tichy going through a series of gravitational anomalies that would daunt Voyager, resulting in timelooping galore, while trying to organize one of his other selves to help with the two-man repair job, is hilarious.

Terry Pratchett: Only You Can Save Mankind. Young Johnny Maxwell is playing the titular computer game when the alien ships that are supposed to be shooting at him decide to surrender instead. A humorous and thoughtful(of course--this is Pratchett, isn't it?)look at trying to stop a war when most of one side wants to keep fighting. Perhaps a little jab at shoot-'em-up video games, but not a really serious one...I think. Well worth reading, despite its ostensibly young-adult length and reading level.

S.M. Stirling: The Protector's War. The sequel to his Dies The Fire, taking up nine years after technology stopped working on Earth. The Protector was the bad guy looming over the end of the last book, and we knew that there would be a confrontation between him and our two major heroes from the first book. I just wish it had actually happened this book, but, despite the title, it really didn't. The Protector's Skirmish might have been a better title. We get some British characters introduced, who make their way to join up with the rest of our Oregonian crew, and a glimpse at the rest of the world, but not much. We get a bit too much scenery, description of flora and fauna, and Wiccan ritual, and way too much flashback in the second half of the book, as our plot-threads meet up before two of them have reached the meeting point. An unfortunate stumble for Stirling, but hopefully he'll recover his footing with the next book.

Janette Oke: Love's Long Journey. Third book in Oke's "Love" series, which is sort of like a more cloyingly Christian version of Laura Ingalls Wilder. At least they're quick reads, though, so I keep picking them up in my continuing attempt to try to understand religious people. Franky, I enjoyed her "Seasons" series better, despite finding the anti-evolution plot thread laughable.

Now I'm reading The One Kingdom by Sean Russell. I've been meaning to start this one for month, but I kept putting off starting yet another fantasy series. This one is finished, at least--a trilogy, as opposed to Russell's usual duologies. It's set in a more straight fantasy setting than his other series--the first of those was in a Chinese/Japanese blend, and the other two linked duologies were in a more Enlightenment-era fantasy Europe. It's already quite intriguing, though, and I'm looking forward to reading more. (I also want to make more progress in the Michelle West and Steven Erikson series, though, and there's that second R. Scott Bakker book...)

I'm trying to alternate quick reads with longer books(one reason I picked the Oke), and so far it's doing well. But while I do tend keep a shelf of a couple of dozen books I want to read soon, I try not to stick to any one method of picking them. I'm doing better--I used to read everything in strict order of when I bought it, until I started to fall months and years behind...