I just bought a supporting membership to Anticipation, the upcoming Worldcon. I'm not actually going to the con; I just bought in so I could get the Hugo packet, a zip file full of stuff that's been nominated for Hugos this year. And, of course, if I manage to read through enough stuff before the voting deadline, I'll actually be able to vote on the Hugos, which is kind of cool.

I haven't read any of the stuff (novels, short stories, or anything in between) that's been nominated this year, though all of the nominated novels have been on my mental "someday/maybe" reading list. I just started reading the PDF of The Graveyard Book, and I'm enjoying that about as much as I'd expected to, given that it's written by Neil Gaiman. The other stuff in the packet is in a hodgepodge of different formats -- PDF, HTML, and RTF mostly. The HTML and RTF files are pretty easy to load onto the Kindle; PDF files are sometimes fine, and sometimes not so good. I'm not even sure when the Hugo voting happens. Obviously, it's got to be before the con, which is in August. So, I've got myself a bunch of stuff to read on the Kindle this summer!

Labels: books, Kindle, scifi

Go now. Watch.

Labels: comics, scifi

I'm pretty sure these are the sheets I had on my bed in 1979. I don't think I'm going to go out and buy a new set, but I'm sorely tempted.

Labels: scifi

The RiffTrax guys will be doing a live event during the San Diego con this year, riffing on Plan 9 From Outer Space, at the Balboa Theater. This would likely be quite fun, though it's on Saturday night, and there's going to be a lot of other stuff happening on Saturday night. Of course, since this is a ticketed, off-site, event, this might be a good way to escape the craziness of the convention center for a little while.

Labels: comics, scifi

The BBC has a bunch of Doctor Who ebooks available for free download. So that's another three or four free books I've got loaded onto my Kindle now. I don't know if any of them are any good, but they didn't cost me anything, and they aren't taking up much disk space, so no big problem there, right?

Labels: books, Kindle, scifi

Life on Mars is a great little show on the BBC. I think season two is supposed to air on BBC America soon. They use a lot of great old 70s rock on the show, so, since I've been messing around with iMixes, I decided to try and create an iMix with all the music from season one. I used the episode guide on the BBC site to get the names of all the songs they used -- there's about 50 songs, over just eight episodes. Some are well-known, like "Baba O'Riley" and "White Room", some are a bit more obscure. I managed to create an iMix with 45 of the songs. Here it is:



I only had about 5 of these songs in my collection already. I used up the last of my iTunes credit to buy a few more of them, and I'll probably buy the rest by cashing in some American Express points for a new iTunes credit.

Listening to some of this stuff, I've definitely gained some new respect for bands like Thin Lizzy, T-Rex, and Deep Purple. Go ahead, laugh all you want, but this stuff is fun to listen to!

Labels: music, scifi

When I left work today, I'd gotten down to about 10 messages in my Notes inbox. Everything else was filed away into appropriate folders. I decided to pull up Notes on my iBook just now, and clear out the rest of my stuff. I have now achieved an empty inbox, for probably the first time since 1997, when we first installed a Notes server. Yay!

I did a pretty good weekly review today too. Probably closer to an ideal weekly review than I've done before, but still not quite what I should be doing.

On an unrelated topic, I picked up the Heroes season one DVD set today at Target. I was trying to resist it, since I already have all the episodes on my computer via iTunes, but Target had a special edition set with four notecards illustrated by Tim Sale, and I'm a sucker for Tim Sale stuff.

Labels: GTD, scifi

According to this article, new episodes of Heroes will be available on Amazon Unbox rather than iTunes this season. I bought the first season from iTunes, and I might find myself looking to buy digital versions of the show this year, too. It's nice that they didn't shoot themselves in the foot and choose not to offer it at all, which is what it was starting to look like after the iTunes thing fell through last week. I've rented a few movies from Unbox (downloaded to my TiVo) and the quality is OK. I imagine the quality on Heroes would be similar to the iTunes quality. It's kind of annoying that Unbox doesn't work on Macs though, so I wouldn't be able to watch Heroes on my Mac if I got it from Unbox.

Labels: comics, scifi

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays." -- see Wikiquote for many more Hitchhiker's quotes.

I started listening to the audiobook version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy today. It's read by Stephen Fry. He does a great job with it. I last read the book back in high school, probably, but I still remember a lot of the dialogue. Great stuff. It really made the commute into work today much more pleasant than usual.

And Stephen Fry lends his voice to this alarm clock too, which is pretty amusing.

Labels: scifi

You know, I hadn't even noticed that Star Wars Celebration IV started today. I was never seriously thinking about going to this, but it does look like fun.

Labels: scifi

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