Maybe instead of marketing genres we should have genres like “Interesting,” “Funny,” “Touching,” “Sarcastic,” “Snarky,” “Romantic”, etc? So a story could be “Funny Snarky Romantic”. And lets focus on story, anyway. Story can be book, movie, joke, short, etc.
Month: May 2017
युद्ध अौर शांती War and Peace
So sad that this is still happening.
Great visual images and other art pieces and how they were created
This was fascinating: Great images and installations, plus short write ups on how each was made:
Great visual images and other art pieces and how they were created
Dark Paradise: Mysteries in the Land of Aloha – Tentacles of Death
After the tight focus of the other stories, this one feels sprawling. And sloppy: SWAT, Swat, swat – three different renderings of the same acronym? Yes.
It starts with a man murdered using a tako spear, apparently because his wife brought home the wrong picture from her Wine and Canvas event. Apparently the picture she brought home was actually a clue to a conspiracy by a large militant Native Hawaiian group (led by the obligatory evil maniac) to take over the state. Even at the end, when the maniac is caught, we’re told that this group has its deadly secret tentacles everywhere throughout the islands.
Nothing new here, with a strong trace of racism to it. And hypocrisy, since it was white American business men conspiring with the captain of a US Navy vessel in Pearl Harbor who took over the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii using force. I regard this story as the usual “because we (white colonialists) are violent thieves that take things that belong to others, EVERYONE ELSE IS OUT TO DO THE SAME THING TO US!”
Bah. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Not just for the racism, but also for the weak plotting and so-so characters. I might award this the booby prize as the worst story in the book.
Perhaps you’ll like it, anyway, so go buy your copy of the anthology, read it, and let me know what you think in the comments.
Odd
According to my blog stats, Mondays are the most popular viewing day, and 6:00 PM is the most popular viewing hour.
Flattering to think people view my blog to reward or console themselves after their Monday work day!
Well, I want one
It’s official: AMD’S ThreadRipper will bring 16-core, 32-thead performance to the desktop
Given that:
- Intel has whittled down the i7’s 4 cores to only 2;
- All my graphic processing tools support multiple cores/hyperthreads;
- And I’m planning someday to move to a camera with 24 or 36 megapixels, which will make working with panoramas really processor intensive
Someone please buy me one when it comes out, OK?
Appreciate the people who sell you books
Here’s Powell’s City of Books May page about their staff:
Portrait of a bookseller
No matter where your local bookstore is, appreciate the people who work there!
Dark Paradise: Mysteries in the Land of Aloha – Palm It Off On Murder
In this one, the author a character, or at least bears the author’s name. The author likes to incorporate herself and her real boyfriend into her stories, so how much of the characters’ behavior and lives are real and how much are fictional? That adds a bit of fun to it.
The narrator is a chiropractor who’s also a master of Shaolin Temple Kung Fu. (Isn’t every chiropractor these days?) His girlfriend (who bears the author’s name) is a palmist. He prefers logical, scientific thinking, she prefers mystical thinking.
A new patient (referred by his girlfriend) dies of a drug overdose in his adjusting room. Turns out the heroin she was using was poisoned. The police visit his girlfriend’s home, and find a baggie of poisoned heroin taped underneath the girlfriends table after she was visited by a notorious drug dealer named Asian Ace. (That strangely enough, the police don’t seem to know what he looks like?)
The whole ‘scientific vs mystic’ thing is pretty simpleminded. If palmistry and such things are your thing, you’ll enjoy this story quite a bit. (Since she’s writing the story, you can guess which side “wins”.)
The story builds to a climax in which Asian Ace is set to poison the girlfriend as the chiropractor races to save her. To find out IF or how he saves her, buy your copy of Dark Paradise: Mysteries in the Land of Aloha, and find out.
Dark Paradise: Mysteries in the Land of Aloha – Haunting Lono
This story is by Doris Chu, whom I have known since our Wednesday night writers group was meeting at the now-long-closed Borders store in Waikele ages ago. She’s a genius editor and creatively-imaginative writer with her own unique way of telling a story.
“Haunting Lono” starts out with that imagination. Our narrator is the Hawaiian demi-god Lono. What’s he doing? Paying bills! Yes, he owns a SCUBA diving business. First, he has to deal with a tourist’s daughter who decided she wants to be a mermaid, and knows kung fu so well she can concentrate weight until she’s so heavy no one can lift her from the bottom of the pool … where her dive tank is out of air!
He talks her out of being a mermaid (“Well, you have to eat underwater and poop there, too”), then we’re on to the main part of the story: recovering the body of a friend’s son, whose plane had crashed in the sea off of one of the islands, and figuring out just what happened.
Things are never quite what they seem in a Doris Chu story, and this one effortlessly and enjoyably continues the tradition. So go buy your copy of Dark Paradise: Mysteries in the Land of Aloha immediately and dive into “Haunting Lono”. Yes, I’m so bad that the pun IS intended. 🙂
Nice post at my friend’s blog about forgiveness
My friend Dawn’s post about what forgiveness is, in response to that thing going around about how you would explain what forgiveness is without using the words “forgive” or “forgiveness.” Only a few comments, but almost all are gems:
We All Know What Forgiveness Is – Don’t We?
She also writes good stories, check them out at Amazon. Both of her books are great, and I still love Daffodil and the Thin Place.
Dancing Treefrog 