Golden Anvil

So, time for an EVE Online update. I promise that this one will be shorter.

Before I get into what I've been up to, I thought I'd mention something in case I inspire anyone to try the game. First of all, they have both a Windows client and a Mac client (system requirements). Secondly, if you want to try it out, let me know. I can give you a 3 week free trial. It's better for you because you get an extra week over the normal trial, and better for me because if you end up buying the game, I get a free month added to my account!

Phera by Gary Springer

This is a book self published via Amazon written by a friend of Adviga. She was nice enough to give me one of the two copies she had, and I read it yesterday.

First of all, the book itself. It's a little hard to say exactly what the book is about. It has a strong component of telling about social changes in an alien society (although one that may as well be human). It is also talking about the spiritual journey of a small group of people. The book is really more about a journey than about any specific obstacle or goal.

Whoops! Looks like I missed a posting. What can I say... it's been busy around here lately.

In Episode 2, the group made their way out to the comet where the loot was stashed. There was a little trouble along the way with the sensors, which wasn't noticed until they reached the comet. This forced a bit of a delay while repairs were made. The young man who hired them to retrieve the goods revealed that they could broadcast a certain signal that would cause a transmitter to send out a response allowing them to pinpoint its location. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite remember the numbers needed to send the correct signal.

Last monday was the first game of our GURPS firefly campaign. I promised to fill you all in on the characters in the group. I also need to fill you in on the story so far before we get another session in and I find myself falling behind.

Let me start with Mia, played by MrsKheldar. I'll start with her, because MrsKheldar already filled everyone in. See the last comment in my prior post about this game in case you missed it.

Since I last posted a book review, I've read three books. I've felt too busy to post lately, so I'll just list them and give a short review here. Besides, I've still got to blog about last Monday's RPG session before next Monday rolls around.

Ringworld Engineers - I'm afraid I can't much recommend this one. It was ok, but not worth keeping in my library (since I was able to get it for free).

Singularity Sky - Sci-fi by an author I've never read before. Has the feel of a first novel, but still pretty good. I'll definitely be reading more by him.

Magician: Master - Second in a series I'm doing a nostalgia re-reading of. I liked the first, and liked this one even better. Well done.

I'm not sure what's next on the list. Maybe another Gemmell book. I always enjoy those.

Welcome back everyone. Sorry about the server down time. I forgot to post a warning ahead of time until what was likely way too late for most of you, so this all probably came as a surprise. Oh well, it's over with now. It would have been back up sooner, but I forgot to change one setting, and that delayed things by a day.

On the plus side, my server will now dump data to you at a 10 Mbit rate. That probably won't be particularly noticeable here on the blogs and forums, will should definitely be noticeable on the photo gallery. It should also help in cases where a bunch of people are on the ventrillo server at the same time. Anyway, so hopefully that'll be nice.

Part of this change was that we dropped our regular phone line (now that we're on fiber optic), and switched to cell phones. So, send me an email if you didn't get an email with the new numbers (and actually want to know my new phone number).

Monday night our roleplaying group finally got together to start working on characters for our upcoming GURPS Firefly game. Everyone has had tricky schedules lately, or there's been bad weather, or something has just come up for like the past month since we played Og, so it was good to finally get moving again.

We spent a good chunk of the evening just talking about what kind of character everyone was going to play without even pulling out character sheets and thinking about attributes and skills and such. This was really useful, because everyone was able to get help with fleshing out their characters and adding interesting details.

I don't have a lot of time tonight to go over everyone's characters, so expect a dump on that next week. For now I'll just say that we've got a very interesting group of characters put together, and it should be a lot of fun to play.

Ringworld by Larry Niven

This is not actually the first time I've read this book. I think I first read it back in high school. Larry Niven is a very prolific author who has been writing since 1964. Ringworld was first published in 1970, and actually stands up quite well to the test of time.

The story is about a small team of people who go to explore a ringworld, and constructed artifact which completely encircles a star. But, that's only the general backdrop of the story. It's really more about species manipulation, advanced races, secrets, clever thinking, and wild-crazy-good luck. The book is very easy reading, and simple to get into. The plot is pretty straight forward, but not necessarily predictable.

Reality Disfunction by Peter F. Hamilton

I really wanted to like this book. It had a feel that was pretty simliar to Stephen Baxter, who is one of my favorite sci-fi authors, but generally a little less "far out" and without Baxter's strong, common theme. Unfortunately, I didn't end up reading the entire book, but gave it back to the borrow/take library at work.

There has been some mention around here about a website called Fantastic Fiction, and I wanted to put in my own plug for a book related website. So, I figured I'd post comparison links, using the recently mentioned Salamandastron book so that you could see what each site has to offer. Then I'll provide some running commentary on a comparison of features of the two sites. I will warn you ahead of time though, that I'm likely to prefer LibraryThing, as I'm already biased.

First off, the main pages... LibraryThing and Fantastic Fiction. Now, it may be just me, but I really do prefer the general color scheme and layout of LibraryThing. It's easier on the eyes, and just looks a little more polished.