Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions for my LJ feed problem with Bloglines. I’m currently trying out Google Reader, and I like it so far. It’s got a bunch of handy features, and a slick interface, and being that it’s very similar to Gmail (which I use), it feels very comfortable and familiar even though it’s new to me. We’ll see how well it works; so far it seems to be finding all of the LJ feeds I keep track of.

One cool thing Google Reader offers is a shared items page, which allows you to mark posts you find noteworthy and share them with your friends. You can see my shared items page here. Right now, it’s just got two posts I marked to test the feature. I noticed the shared items page also features an RSS feed of its own, so you can subscribe to the feed of my shared items, which would be, in essence, a “best of the blogosphere” according to me.

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I continue to have problems keeping up with LiveJournals on Bloglines. Some of them show up consistently; others seem to never show up at all. 

I’m contemplating wielding the power of my own LJ account to use the Friends feature to read LJs, but it sounds like it will  be a tedious process to create the list. Also, is there a way to setup filters and whatnot, so that I can have only a certain group of Friends listed on the page where I see updated posts from my Friends?

 

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Fairly recently, I came across a story in the slush which mentioned a special, one-time birthday everyone has once in his/her life called a “golden birthday.” Curious if it was real or not, I googled it. Wikipedia defines it as: “the day when the age someone turns is the same as the day in the month he or she was born. (For example, someone turning 26 on December 26 celebrates his or her golden birthday).”

This was especially of interest to me because this year will be *my* golden birthday. My birthday is July 31, and I turn 31 this year. Seems like fate that I should discover this concept just in time to celebrate it myself. So…what should I do to celebrate?

UPDATE: Just wanted to add that I don’t drink, so if you’re thinking of that kind of celebration, that won’t work for me. :) 

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The other day, Doug Cohen posted about his encounter with two similarly-named writers and a pesky email address that caused him to confuse the two. Long-time readers of my blog may recall that I had a similar encounter a few years ago, though mine happened to be with another John Adams, rather than with two other writers. I also had what turned out to be a false-alarm with a doppelganger.

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If only I had time to read it right now. Alas, I won’t be able to get to it for like a week. Damn commitments! 

 

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Go forth and download! 

As of Friday, June 15, 2007, SCI FICTION will no longer be availabe on SCIFI.COM.

SCIFI.COM would like to thank all those who contributed

and those who read the short stories over the past few years.

Soon it’ll be gone forever!

I can’t say this makes any sense to me. Why take it down?

UPDATE: Eugene Myers suggests archiving the site on  your own PC for your own personal private use if you want to be able to access the site later. He recommends using HTTrack Website Copier.

UPDATE 2: Several people have also mentioned to me that SCI FICTION is completely archived on The Wayback Machine, here. On the internet, nothing ever dies!

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Holy crap. I can’t believe it–CBS gave in to fan demand and renewed Jericho after announcing it would be canceled. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen one of these fan organized “Let’s save the show” protests work before.

Clearly letter writing campaigns are not the way to go. You must bombard studios with legumes if you wish to effect change.

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Does anyone know if LiveJournal purposely disabled RSS feeds or something? It seems like none of my LJ feeds are working in my RSS reader.

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Matt & Stephen

Originally uploaded by slushgod.

Matt Kressel is Stephen Colbert’s “Geek Friend.” Don’t worry about Stephen, BTW; if you think he looks a little, well, flat, it’s just because he had a lot to drink before his BEA appearance to calm his nerves (being surrounded by all those books made him uncomfortable).

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Speaking of BEA, at the Tor booth, I picked up an amusing item: a brochure designed to be an introduction to SF publishing jargon for the uninitiated. It’s called “Science Fiction and Fantasy: an Introduction from Tor.”

It begins with basic definitions of SF and Fantasy, then inside discusses conventions, the various awards, categories and sub-genres. One odd thing I came across in the pamphlet is a term I actually wasn’t familiar with:

Ruritanian: Witty, swashbuckling adventures set in imaginary European nations in the post-industrial era. (Overlaps with STEAMPUNK.)

Is that really a whole sub-genre? I’ve never even heard of that. Googling the term revealed that it is derived from the novels of late-19th/early 20th- century fantasist Anthony Hope. However, there seems to be some discrepancy between Tor’s definition of the term and what I found on the web. The Tor definition is spot on with other references I found, except for the post-industrial part.

Has anyone actually heard this term before? What are some classic examples of it?

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