March 31, 2008
Joy! Behold the new Readings section, visible in the navigation bar! I put all books, short stories, and essays into databases, making maintainance super easy. You can sort them by author, title, or publication year, and adding new methods of sorting is a breeze. I kept my rather arbitrary categorization into science fiction, other fiction, and non-fiction (I culled manga since I don't read it any more). It's convenient, but I might change it in the future. Who knows, maybe my reading habits will eventually cover more branches of literature?
The books I've read since last time are Halo: The Flood, Asimov Laughs Again, The Life & Fables of Aesop, The Truth About Chuck Norris, The Portable Atheist, and Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales. That last book is a compilation of SF short-short stories and I transcribed the ones I thought were awesome and put them on the shiny new Short Stories page. I have a few more I want to transcribe, so if you like the ones that are there, watch the page. I also added three new essays, "SF Words and Prototype Worlds" by Eric S. Raymond, "Thoughts of God" by Mark Twain, "Gaps in the Mind" by Richard Dawkins, and "Why We Need Academic Freedom to Question Newtonism" by PZ Myers. Speaking of Myers, he is funny, thoughtful, and hilariously entertaining, so I linked to his Pharyngula.
I've sunk a lot of my free time lately into playing the various Ninja Gaiden games. The payoff? Not much: Ninja Gaiden Miscellanea, which should only be interesting to you if you're as obsessed with Ninja Gaiden as I am (Ninja Gaiden II can't get here fast enough).