Link roundup

1. Apple's free guide to developing iOS apps. Via.

2. A look at the wild parrot population boom in Los Angeles.

3. I love video game review site Action Button, but I was awfully disappointed with the just recommended iPhone game Ziggurat. (I like Action Buttons reviews so much that I feel betrayed.)

4. On the other hand, I greatly enjoyed Leviathan Wakes by Daniel "James Corey" Abraham. It's excellent pulpy retro-scifi about an oddball crew jetting throughout the solar system to unravel a conspiracy that threatens all humanity.

The Secret World of Arrietty was terrific

I'd heard The Secret World of Arrietty was good, but I hadn't expected to enjoy it so much. As good as any other Studio Ghibli movie I've seen. My 5 and 7 year old boys liked it too.

Comic book review roundup

1. Batman: The Black Mirror by Scott Snyder, Jock, and Francesco Francavilla: Jock's covers and Francavilla's interior illustrations (especially his colors!) are terrific. But the story's a lackluster rehash of Batman stories I've read many times before, and if all of the issues had been drawn by Jock (he drew about half of the issues), I wouldn't have even bothered finishing it. Certainly not bad, but it's been grossly overpraised by critics (or the praise reflects how terrible the vast majority of comics were in 2011).

2. Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba: Why are all the good non-super hero comics emotionally devastating? If that's what you're looking for, you'll enjoy this. I'm not looking for misery in my recreational reading.

3. Ultimate Comics Avengers: Blade vs. the Avengers by Mark Millar and Steve Dillon: I love everything by Steve Dillon, and this was no exception. Really fun.

4. Hellboy Volume 11: The Bride of Hell and Others: Just the latest solid collection of Hellboy short stories illustrated by various all-stars. Hellboy in Mexico, illustrated by Richard Corben and starring a battle between Hellboy and a demonic luchador, is the standout.

5. X-Force: Sex and Violence, Deathlok Nation, and The Dark Angel Saga, Book 1: I loved, loved, loved The Apocalypse Solution, so I went and bought every other collection I could find. These were all fine, but none were great. I found Deathlok Nation to be more confusing than fun, and I never cared for the Age of Apocalypse storyline or character designs (Wolverine especially looks like an idiot), so it was tough to enjoy The Dark Angel Saga too much.

Book review roundup

1. Dune by Frank Herbert: I watched the movie when I was too young and thought it was weird and dumb. But Rob Beschizza's post about Dune without dialog interested me enough that I decided to read the book. It truly deserves its fame. More like Game of Thrones than Star Wars. $10 at Amazon.

2. Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman: Pleasant all-ages novella starring Thor, Loki, Odin, and a seemingly unremarkable boy. I look forward to reading it to my sons. Not crazy about the illustrations, though. Currently $6 at Amazon for the hardcover.

3. I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen: With a $16 cover price, I can't bring myself to recommend this since you can read the whole thing in about two minutes (even if you go slow) and it's basically the same drawing over and over. It really should be a board book at half the price. But. The illustrations are charming, and the book has a very, very funny (and dark) conclusion. I strongly recommend you borrow a copy from the library, or grab the $6 used copy currently at Amazon.

Win a copy of the Baghdad Country Club

UPDATE: Pippa won and has been contacted.



Usually I find nonfiction to be desperately in need of a good condensing, but Joshua Bearman's new Kindle Single Baghdad Country Club is so polished and focused that it's like a handful of diamonds. Here's the official description:

Welcome to a place where even beer runs are a matter of life and death. As the Iraq War draws to an official close, Joshuah Bearman tells the funny and poignant tale of the real-life Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone during the conflict's bloodiest years. Against all odds, its proprietors struggle to keep their raucous watering hole safe and well-stocked as the insurgency rages outside.

And here's a taste from the beginning:

A few weeks later, James was cursing himself for getting into the bootlegging business. He had never handled that much of his own money before—$150,000—much less handed it over to someone he barely knew, in cash. His entire life savings was now denominated in liquor, which he had piled into an 18- wheeler and driven through hostile Baghdad. He wound up circling the Green Zone several times, unsuccessfully seeking entry—wrong badges, wrong checkpoints, wrong turns through the often deadly downtown—and was starting to get nervous when he eventually made it through Checkpoint 18.
. . .
And so James became an extreme restaurateur, opening the only authentic bar and restaurant in the Green Zone. It would be the one place where anyone—mercenaries and diplomats, contractors and peacekeepers, aid workers and Iraqis—could walk in, get dinner, open a decent bottle of Bordeaux, and light a cigar from the humidor to go with it. Patrons would check their weapons in a safe, like coats in a coatroom, and leave the war behind...

The book is also illustrated, but the illustrations are fairly lackluster, and really superfluous (you can get a sense by watching the animated trailer). The characters and locales leap off the page:

As the charming maître d’, it was Danny’s job to defuse any commotion. And despite his small (and clearly civilian) stature, he was pretty good at it. James thought Danny’s self-deprecating Jewish-guy-with-glasses routine helped him keep people from killing each other or getting out of control. There was, for instance, the time when Tony the Mouse, a notorious Lebanese pimp, showed up in the BCC brandishing his goods. Tony was short, sleazy, and self-confident; Danny noticed him the moment he walked in. Tony tried to dress like the contractors, but his gear was too big. Danny thought he looked like a kid in his dad’s hunting outfit. With him were several Iraqi girls of questionable age, done up in even more questionable makeup, doused in perfume, and wearing what in theory was passable Islamic dress but in material looked more like harem couture. “You smelled the girls before you saw them,” Danny recalls.

It's just begging to be turned into a series of novels or turned into a movie.

Highly recommended. You can read a longer excerpt here, and apparently see the club on Google Maps. The full version is available from The Atavist for the Kindle, the iPad/iPhone, the Nook, or iBooks.

I also have one digital copy to give away. For a chance to win, simply comment on this post and include your email so I can contact you if you win. One comment per person, and this contest is open worldwide. I'll pick a winner on Monday.

The Magic of Reality

Above are the UK and (terrible) American covers for The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, a new basic science primer written by Richard Dawkins, and illustrated by Dave McKean. Each of the twelve chapters, on topics including rainbows, gravity, evolution, and atoms, starts with a whirlwind tour of various myths, before moving on to an explanation of the applicable science at a level I think a fifth grader could grasp (my six year old is a bit too young). The writing is uninspired, and needlessly insulting to religion - - I certainly have no interest in reading anything else by Dawkins.

But I bought the book because of Dave McKean, and I wasn't disappointed. Every one of the 265 pages features his illustrations. Below are a few samples:







The hardcover is $18 at at Amazon and a no-brainer for Dave McKean fans.

Wildwood

Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis:




I had high hopes for this one, and maybe my expectations were too high. The book itself feels special - - it's slightly and endearingly undersized, and it features a charming cover by Carson Ellis. The first 100 pages or so offer a terrific fairy tale start - - a young girl sees her baby brother abducted by crows, and sets off into the mysterious forest surrounding Portland to rescue him. You can read the first 100-something pages here.

But after that fast start, the book settles in to be little more than a competent remix of elements from the Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit. Your enjoyment will probably depend on how many other fairy tales you've already read. I was hoping for a fairy tale with a hipster edge, but really the main character is just a generic fairy tale heroine in a hoodie. $11 at Amazon.

There are some cute items at the companion webstore:




And I'm definitely now a Carson Ellis fan.

The Secret World of Saints: Inside the Catholic Church and the Mysterious Process of Anointing the Holy Dead (Giveaway)

UPDATE: Timothy won and has been contacted.

I've been trying to read Diarmid MacCullouch's heavily-praised Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, but after three months, I've made it through less than 300 pages. It's just too much of a slog, and I find I'm retaining almost nothing.

By comparison, Bill Donahue's The Secret World of Saints: Inside the Catholic Church and the Mysterious Process of Anointing the Holy Dead was a pleasure that I devoured in a sitting.



Here's the official description:

When Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian, converted to Catholicism in 1676, she did it with gusto. She slept on a bed of thorns. She had a friend whip her. She put hot coals between her toes. She suffered from smallpox, and the disease left her almost blind. Yet she still fasted, in penitence, and ministered to the sick and elderly. When she died, it was said, the smallpox scars instantly vanished from her face. It wasn’t long before people began to credit her with miracles.

Indeed, the Vatican has just announced, 300 years after her death, that Tekakwitha is a miracle worker. She will be named a saint—America’s first indigenous saint, no less—as early as next fall. But what, exactly, does that mean? How does someone become a saint? What’s the vetting process?

In this thoroughly entertaining investigation into the mysterious world of saints, Bill Donahue tells the strange and fascinating story of how the holy get their halos. The journey to canonization is long (sometimes, as in the case of Tekakwitha, it can take centuries), lurid (decayed body parts play a role), and, nowadays, surprisingly cutting-edge. Tekakwitha earned her saint status thanks to a medical miracle she allegedly caused in 2006: A boy suffering from a fatal flesh-eating bacteria suddenly and inexplicably recovered after his family prayed to the Blessed Kateri. Church experts grilled the boy’s doctors, studied his MRIs and hospital chart, and came to the conclusion that a force stronger than modern medicine saved him.

In addition to Tekakwitha, Donahue introduces us to a cast of celestial characters, from Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II—both on the fast track to sainthood—to Saint Francis, Joan of Arc, and the shady Padre Pio, who claimed to suffer stigmata and raise bodies from the dead. But it’s what happens after these holy folk die that’s arguably even more intriguing. Mixing legend and science, history and on-the-ground reporting, The Secret World of Saints sheds light on one of the Catholic Church’s most arcane and captivating traditions.

The book alternates between Donahue's anecdotes about his own life, and the history of Catholic saints. The characters he writes about really come alive.

Here's just a taste - - part of a footnote about his mother deciding to no longer display Saint Christopher in the her car:

Saint Christopher was gone from the dashboard by the time I entered first grade. And it was only recently that I discovered why. In 1969, when I was five, Pope Paul VI removed Chris’s feast day from the Church calendar. Christopher was a third-century Roman martyr. Sixties-era research revealed that almost nothing was known about him: The cult around him may have been a corny sixteenth-century invention; he was almost make-believe. My mom read the news reports and then cooled to Chris. “I got a new car,” she told me recently, “and I thought, What’s the point of carrying Saint Christopher around if he didn’t exist? Plus, having a Saint Christopher medallion was just one of those clichéd things that Catholics do—like rooting for Notre Dame. I wasn’t going to knock myself out for it anymore.”

Highly recommended, and available as a $2 download at Amazon.

I also have one copy to give away. For a chance to win, simply comment on this post and include your email so I can contact you if you win. One comment per person, and this contest is open worldwide. I'll pick a winner Sunday night.

The Thorn and the Blossom

The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story by Theodora Goss is a charmingly-packaged modern day love story loosely connected to the story of Gawain and the Green Knight. The story itself is a pleasant, albeit short page turner, illustrated by the excellent Scott McKowen. But what really makes the book special is its design.

The book is called A Two-Sided Love Story because it is a tale of two star-crossed lovers, split into two halves - - Evelyn's story and Brendan's story. The book itself is bound accordion-style. When you finish one lover's half of the story, you turn the book over and see the romance from the other lover's perspective:





It won't take anyone very long to read, but in this era of digital downloads, the design really turns the book into a memorable gift. You can preorder The Thorn and the Blossom for $11 at Amazon.

The Art and Making of Star Wars: The Old Republic

I'm more excited by the prospect of new Star Wars art then actually playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, so the The Art and Making of Star Wars: The Old Republic is perfect for me. It's 160 pages packed with character, spaceship, and location designs, including many rejected concepts. Most of the images were new to me, even though I've closely followed the game's development.






The text is fairly thin (reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall DVD commentary), but there are interesting details about the game design. For example, want to write for Bioware?

Candidates must submit writing samples and a fully playable quest in the Neverwinter Nights toolset to demonstrate their ability to write dialogue and nonlinear storytelling. If that submission is accepted, they repeat the process under a forty-eight-hour deadline, sometimes several times.

The book is 34% off at Amazon.

Gigposters Volume 2

Gig Posters Volume 2: This is one heck of a book (I received a review copy yesterday). It features 101 perforated and ready-to-frame posters by many of artists regularly featured on Super Punch, including The Silent Giants, Mike Saputo, Clinton Reno, DKNG, and Doublenaut. Each page in the oversized and very heavy book (that's my four-year-old son's hand in the photos) is dedicated to a different artist (ready to frame poster on one side, interview and smaller images on the reverse). The $25 price price is probably worth it just for Matt Leunig's Norah Jones poster:






If you like the concept, also available is the DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book, which I posted about last year.

Review roundup

1. Reamde: A Novel by Neal Stephenson: 500 pages is a good faith effort, right? Because I can't make myself read anymore. This one's been marketed as a straightforward thriller, but I think that's just the kindest way of saying that it's mindless. Mindless in two ways. First, in 500 pages I learned no new fact, and noticed no keen insight. Second, the characters are brilliant hacker killers when it suits the plot, but helpless morons the rest of the time (Sokolov accidentally gives the terrorists a map to his partner's home? seriously?). At one point, a young woman captured by Muslim terrorists bluffs them by saying she used the phone hidden in her boot to call for help. And of course, why didn't she call for help?! The book also devotes far too much time to describing a Warcraft clone called T'Rain, whose distinguishing feature is that it has really, really realistic geology. (It's as interesting to read about as it sounds.) The only portion of the book I actually enjoyed was the short sections at the beginning about Richard Forthrast, sections that seemed to better belong in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. All in all, an enormous disappointment. For a genuinely intriguing thriller about Chinese gold farmers, read Cory Doctorow's For the Win instead. That's available as a free download and for $7 at Amazon.

2. Speaking of, I also just finished Cory Doctorow's short story Clockwork Fagin (free at Amazon) about an orphanage for children maimed in steampunk factory accidents. Cliched concepts told masterfully.

3. Finally, Zero History by William Gibson ($10 at Amazon): It's more or less a remix of the plot points and characters from Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, but still a pleasure to read with a thrilling caper at the end. No one fetishizes objects as well as Gibson (this book features a denim jacket (+5 to cool), an ugly shirt (invisibility), and darts (always hits)).

Mail-Order Mysteries

Mail-Order Mysteries by Kirk Demarais: As you can see in the photos below, this is a beautifully designed book, devoted to the trinkets that used to be regularly advertised on comic books. Chip Kidd puts it well:

If childhood disappointments could ever be considered an art form, then Mail-Order Mysteries is a masterpiece. Really. The metaphors for life itself are inescapable, the disillusion heartbreakingly laid bare, the tackiness a drug you just can't quit.

Photos of 150 items and their accompanying ads, and the cover glows in the dark, too. $13 at Amazon.

Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film

Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film by Ian Nathan: I received a review copy of this and am pleased to say it's probably the best book I've seen dedicated to a single film. It's filled with artwork by Moebius, Giger, and more, candid photos of the crew, including one of the six foot ten inch tall mime who played the Alien, and very cool inserts that you can see above (emblem sticker, storyboards, prints, posters, and more). All of that is enough to make the book worthy of its cover price, but it's also unusually well-written and filled with fascinating anecdotes. Indeed, at least one major blog devoted a post to numerous anecdotes from the book. But I'll share just one - - The script was adapted from a story called Gremlins:

It was about a B-17 bomber returning from a mission to Tokyo. Halfway over the Pacific, with no way of landing, the plane is attacked by these creatures, gremlins, that get in via the tail-gun. The weren't funny--they were nasty. The crew had to fight them off and hopefully reach home.

Everything you see above for $20 at Amazon. Below are a few images from the book, including some of the rejected poster concepts:

Review roundup (three things you should not buy)

1. Aliens Infestation DS: Chalk the positive reviews this game's gotten to the intellectual property and the mere fact that it's a genuine DS game. Other than that, it's a huge disappointment. Gameplay is walking down identical hallways and shooting the same few respawning enemies over and over. Instead of clever gameplay and creative level design, it features inconvenient save areas and unreasonably low health and ammunition supplies. Sound effects are movie accurate, but I usually play my DS on mute. Available at Amazon, but you're better off buying a few Aliens toys, pointing your finger at them, and saying "pew, pew, pew."

2. Incognito: Bad Influences by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips: Another big disappointment. The previous volume in the series was outstanding - - the comic I'd give to an adult if I wanted to introduce or reintroduce them to comics. But this waste of a volume simply retreads ground from the first book. I was genuinely stunned when I realized there was only a few pages left. Available at Amazon.

3. Choke Hold by Christa Faust: It's a pulp novel about the world of MMA. For example, on page 89, the narrator (an aging porn star) attends a beginner's MMA class and describes it in great detail. But MMA bores me to tears, so maybe you'll have better luck with the book. You can read a sample chapter here, BoingBoing posted a feature on the book here, and it's available at Amazon.

Thumbs up for the robot animation in Real Steel

I took my boys to see Real Steel. They liked it a lot (and are currently reenacting scenes as I write this). I thought the fight scenes were very well done, and would have liked to have seen more of the futuristic ring girl. But otherwise, terrible movie. Terrible acting (other than Kevin Durand, who I always find scary), embarrassingly bad dancing (who cast the kid?), way too long, poorly conceived futuristic world (cash and newspapers?), and lackluster robot design (rag doll faces are neither cool, nor endearing, and a robot with a rag doll face is just stupid).

*Buy Real Steel posters at eBay.

Book review roundup

1. The Postmortal by Drew Magary: I was largely disappointed by the book. That's partly because it's an amalgamation of an embarrassing number of science fiction tropes (what if people stopped aging, and there was a killer virus, and zombie bands were on the loose, and there were Universal Soldiers, and there was a nuclear war with Russia), and partly because of my own expectations. Magary is a very funny writer. His weekly columns for Deadspin are crude and hilarious - - very similar to Howard Stern's show. And the goofy cover for The Postmortal suggests that it's a quirky, funny take on a world without natural death. But there's not a hint of humor in the book. It's unrelentingly grim. On the other hand, he's excellent at writing creepy suspense. The greenies are the most memorable villains I've come across in a long time. His next novel should be pure thriller, without the science and political predictions. Available at B&N and Amazon.

2. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes: What if Philip Pullman's Lyra Silvertongue (and her daemon) grew up and became a down on her luck detective in a Raymond Chandler story? Terrific book, highly recommended, despite an embarrassingly bad cover. Available at B&N and Amazon.

3. Quarry's Ex by Max Allan Collins: I'm on a hot streak with Hard Case Crime novels. This one is about a former master assassin who decided he could have more fun defending people (in this case, a movie director) from hired killers. Lackluster cover, but engrossing from page one, and you can read the first chapter here. Available at B&N and Amazon.

From Dust, Does Well in Reviews!

From Dust is an amazing looking game that was release on July 27. It is about using your strange and supernatural powers to change your surroundings - including using lava, oceans, earth and everything in your power to protect your people from the elements of nature.

So far, the collective reviews average out at 7.9 / 10.0 - which is very good!

Source: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/from-dust/review.html?mode=web&tag=scoresummary%3Bcritic-score

Source 2: http://ced66.deviantart.com/art/From-Dust-17-178728518

Someone needs to write the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Seven Seas.

Today I was thinking, daydreaming perhaps, about escaping across oceans.

I've no idea how to do it, so someone needs to write a guide.  

Boatsurfing.com?

I don't want to be a stowaway, I just want to pay my way to exotic locales with honest labor.  Like deckscrubbing. Or whatever it is that boats need done to them.  I'm not imagining a sexy boat party, mind you - just hearty voyages where my labor is my ticket.

So that's a good way to introduce myself as any.  As Steve mentioned, I really should slow down and say hello.


Well, hello.  My name is Aaron.  My mind wanders and I have an overactive imagination.


Most of my scrawling is fiction in the fantasy/science fiction cubbyhole.  I like to write more than anything else, so that's what this blog is about.  The majority of what I write has some anchor in nature, hidden or plain.  That's vague, but if you read the poem I posted it is about both hidden and plain natures.  If you read my short story below that, same sort of theme.

Keeping this short and sweet! I just have to say something about the blog itself and the people who read this and my other stuff.  THANK YOU.  From the bottom of my wee-scotty of a heart.  I will follow each one of you who has shown me that kindness, and I'll make sure I check out all your blog has to offer.  In that vein, I plan on keeping my followings contained for a while at least, so I can really pay attention to what you have to say too.  Rest assured though, I will visit each of my followers at least once per day, and check out anything new or re-check out old things.

Now a little poem (really little this time) to stay consistent with my theme.  I wrote this the last time I was in Italy.  I was staying in a building that was once a 12th century monastery, with floors warped from centuries of monkish foot-traffic. I was staring at the ceiling above my bed, which had the names of monks etched into it, when this popped into my mind.

The tree will lean

And it will fall

Or it will be cut

And so will we all