Here’s another batch of What I’m Reading reactions:

21. Diaspora – Greg Egan
22. Gardens of the Moon – Steven Erikson
23. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
24. Deadhouse Gates – Steven Erikson
25. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser – Fritz Leiber

The Fafhrd and Grey Mouse reaction includes a suggested reading list for skipping over the chaff in that series.

I am terribly sorry for my five month, almost to the day, absence from updating these pages. The long version I’m not going to share. The short version is this:

In a chain of events which began on August 8th, and was most obliquely referenced on these pages on August 9th, I attempted to save someone from a truly horrific situation. Into this effort I poured essentially all the time, energy, and money that I could; gave it everything I had until it nearly broke me upon the wheel. In the end…

… I failed.

I am trying not to think of it as a colossal failure. I am trying to nurse the small hope that I planted seeds that will take root and give a truly remarkable human being the power to save herself from herself. But I’m hardly the first to try, and the Quote of the Month from Marten (look up) more accurately reflects my state of mind at this time.

If you come back tomorrow, there’ll be some actual content on these pages. And, barring any more Drama with a capital “D”, this will hopefully become a regular occasion once more.

Well, that was fun.

For those of you who read the Forums, you know that I have spent more than two months since my last update trying to get my computer working. Basically, my boot drive was failing. It was probably a mechanical problem at heart, but it had corrupted key system files and was seriously degrading the performance of the machine. My plan was simple: Replace this aging 40 gb system drive with a new 80 gb drive, perform a completely fresh installation of Windows, and give my system a fresh start.

Needless to say, it wasn’t that simple. I replaced the drive, did a clean install of Windows 2000, and got the system to boot up… once. The next time I tried to boot up, I got a blank, empty screen where Windows 2000 should have been loading. So I tried reinstalling Windows. That didn’t work. So I went back to my old 40 gb. That had a different problem, but it wasn’t working now either.

And thus began the two month odyssey of computer repair. By the time it was done, I had replaced the hard drive, the power supply, the case, the CPU, the motherboard, the CPU again, the floppy disk drive, and the sound card. We also replaced the video card, only to conclude that the problem was not the video card, it was the AGP slot on the new motherboard… so we replaced the motherboard again and went back to the original video card. So, instead of replacing a single hard drive, I ended up essentially replacing the entire computer…. one component at a time.

On the positive side of the ledger, my (essentially) new computer is vastly superior to my old computer in almost every way. On the negative side, most of my creative work (including all the original files for this website) were stranded on hard drives which were essentially inaccessible to me between August 14th and October 18th. I was reduced to using a 2000 Thinkpad lacking not only the software but most of the actual projects I wanted and needed to work on. This would not have been an insurmountable problem, except that it always seemed as if my main computer was only “a few days” away from being fixed up, so it never made sense to invest the two or three days of effort needed to rig my aging laptop into something more functional.

So, if you’ve been reading the Forums, now you know the rest of the story (as Paul would say).

And if you aren’t reading the Forums,, you should start. You can get there from any of the “Comment? Click Here.” links scattered around the blog pages. Post something. Tell me how wonderful I am.

[[ The Forums were later removed from the site due to spam problems. ]]

See? Didn’t I tell you not to put any money on it?

I’d tell you why this update has been delayed, but you wouldn’t believe me anyway. In order to distract you from gnawing curiousity, allow me to present some nice, shiny What I’m Reading content:

16. The Graveyard Game – Kage Baker
17. The Mote in God’s Eye – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
18. The Gripping Hand – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
19. Ethan of Athos – Lois McMaster Bujold
20. The Misenchanted Sword – Lawrence Watt-Evans

And speaking of Lawrence Watt-Evans, you should check out the Spriggan Experiment. Mr. Watt-Evans is writing an entire Ethshar novel and offering it to the general public under a variation of the Street Performer’s Protocol and the Storyteller Bowl. I think of it as a Distributed Patron System, and I think it presents an elegant solution to the problem of compensating creative artists in an era when the enforcement of copyright is becoming an increasingly difficult (if not impossible) task.

“Justin!” I hear you cry. “Why have your updates not been forthcoming? Why have you left us bereft upon the cold currents of the barren Internet? Why have you abandoned us? Why have you robbed us of your pearls of wisdom?!”

Or, at least, the six of you who check this page on a completely irregular basis may be wondering why I’ve only updated twice in August. Possibly. (I’m not putting any money on it.)

Well, partly because of My Bedroom the Swamp. And partly because my brother graduated from Iowa State University yesterday. (Congrats!) But for the past couple of days it’s because my brain has been eaten by a Bigger Better Fnord. Check it out. And then you can pop over to this thread and give us all a helping hand in untangling the unfathomable mysteries of the Fnord.

And tomorrow I’ll have some honest-to-god content. Maybe. (I wouldn’t put any money on it.)