New LGTB+ Fantasy StoryBundle for Pride Month, Curated by Melissa Scott

LOTS of stuff in here! And unlike Humble Bundle, this one is available for 22 days! There's also a good chance that another book or two might be slipped into the bundle....

From Melissa's blurb: "This is admittedly an extremely eclectic group. You'll find short stories and novels (and, as I mentioned, a game); you'll find contemporary werewolves and steampunk, dark Edwardian fantasy and stories that draw on myths ancient and modern, a "year's best collection," a year's worth of Glittership, and a wildly diverse collection of pirates. What they have in common is queer visions, visions that celebrate our multitudes, all written by authors at the very top of their game. You'll find diverse characters, an equally diverse range of styles, and stories that will hold you entranced until the very last word."

The titles are:
Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) by Catherine Lundoff
Underdogs by Geonn Cannon
Transcendent 3 edited by Bogi Takács
Sea, Swallow Me by Craig Laurance Gidney

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all four of the regular books, plus SIX more!

Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures by Alex Acks
GlitterShip Year Two by Keffy R.M. Kehrli
Skin Deep Magic by Craig Laurance Gidney
Underdogs 2: Beware of Wolf by Geonn Cannon
The Eagle's Heir by Jo Graham and Amy Griswold
Spectred Isle by KJ Charles

All of the titles are, of course, DRM-free and come in both Kindle and epub formats. One thing that StoryBundle does which I really wish Humble did is the download is just a single zip with both formats, makes for a very convenient download.

https://storybundle.com/pride

We've really been enjoying the Good Omens TV mini-series!

It has been one of my Desert Island books basically since I first read it, and I have a first edition signed by Sir PTerry! Now if I could get Neil to sign it....

We've been taking it easy watching it, watched the first two Sunday night, Russet had to work Monday, and watched #3 last night. I love how they're filling in little bits and pieces here and there yet still sticking to the core story. Just a marvelous job, definitely will buy the set when it releases.

John Kovalic posted this cartoon today, I thought it was quite marvelous.

http://www.dorktower.com/

Attention Standing Stone Games: Your communications skills SUUUUUCK!

My wife and I started playing Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). We enjoy it quite a bit. My wife is a minor Lord of the Rings scholar, and they have a free mode: you can play two characters per server with only minor restrictions. It's a pretty good game, all in all. One thing that I particularly like is that everybody is playing a good guy: there's no Horde vs Alliance in this game. You can duel other players, but I've never seen it.

And best of all, they have a Mac client, letting my wife and I play! Well, I could play anyway since Dave gave me that gaming laptop monster Windows machine. They also have a WINE client, so if you're running Linux on a beefy machine, you can also play it. Pretty cool!

They have one serious problem: they don't patch their code base. When you download their game, you're downloading nearly their 1.0 version, so you're going to spend a lot of hours downloading that beast, then you're going to spend another bunch of hours bringing it up to date with seemingly every frickin' patch ever released.

Early Tuesday morning was a patch day. No big deal, took about an hour to download and apply.

And all our Mac installs broke.

None of them could connect to any server. My Windows laptop: no problem. And I couldn't see any activity on the forums, nor did a Google search for the error turn up any screaming. So I sent in a ticket, updated this morning by a screen shot with a little more observational commentary.

This afternoon I got a response, pointing to a page posted mid-April, so about 50 days ago.

With the latest update they discontinued the Mac client and Mac users have to install the WINE client.

No notice in the little news box in the loader. No popup in the software if it detected it were running on a Mac, which is trivial to detect. No notice in the last three patch readme files.

Just this announcement on a web page, if you happen to dig in to the forums, three layers deep, in the basement, behind a locked door, in a file cabinet, in a disused lavatory, behind a sign that says Beware The Leopard.

What really pisses me off is it takes over 12 hours to install it on my new laptop, and probably 18 hours to install it on my iMac. AND I'VE INSTALLED IT ON BOTH IN THE LAST WEEK!

HAD I KNOWN I HAD TO INSTALL THAT WINE CLIENT, I COULD HAVE INSTALLED THAT AND ONLY DONE IT ONCE ON EACH INSTEAD OF HAVING TO REPEAT THE FIRK-DING-BLAST PROCESS!


Grrrrr..... Masters of communicating to their users they ain't.


If you play LOTRO, let me know: we're on Brandywine, Crickhollow, and Gladden. We created a Kinship on Gladden called Those That Abide, gotta get a Big Lebowski reference in there - then on another server I saw a guy named Duderino!