Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

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/

They are:
Machine of Death, a short story collection which is nicely illustrate by a video called This is the Way You Die. The Machine of Death takes a quarter, a drop of your blood, and spits out a piece of paper that tells you how you will die. But it's not always as straight forward as the slip saying Old Age. Watch the video.

Also:
xkcd volume 0
The Poison Eaters, by Holly Black
and
Signal To Noise, by Neil Gaiman and David McKean

https://www.humblebundle.com

The Humble Bundle, for those of you who are unaware, is a pretty cool project used to promote things that may not be easily promoted by the creators and also raise money for charity: when you make your payment, you adjust sliders controlling how much money gets paid to the creators, to charity, and to the Humble Bundle organizers themselves.

The charities supported are: the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the Child's Play Charity, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Over $7 million has been raised through various Humble Bundles.

Normally Humble Bundle is used to promote computer games that are cross-platform, that is they run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. They're also DRM-free, which is a cool bonus. This time they're promoting eBooks! And with some good names: Cory Doctorow, Mercedes Lackey, John Scalzi, and Neil Gaiman. Some of these books have never before been available digitally, and Gaiman's book is making its digital debut here. They're available in Kindle, ePub, PDF, and MOBI: and you can download all of them! And, like the games, they're DRM-free!

Now here's the interesting bit: YOU decide how much you're going to pay for this bundle! You can pay $1, you can pay $100, you can pay $1000: it's your decision. There is one catch to the eBook bundle: two of the books, Neil Gaiman & David McKean's Signal To Noise, and John Scalzi's Old Man's War, are only available if you pay more than the average donation. Yesterday that donation was a bit over $10, right now it's $12.17. It's still a great deal, and they got $15 from me for over $50 worth of eBooks.

Now if I could only find my Nook's cable...

https://www.humblebundle.com/