Crap from Facebook: April 17th, 2014

I am Facebook friends with a lot of republicans. I could tell you why, but I won't. Well, maybe I'll tell you this one reason: it's for the comedy...

I was scrolling through Facebook and seeing a lot of those images people post that have text all over them, because we are living in the future and now just posting plain text doesn't use enough bytes or whatever. I don't actually understand anything about this stuff. Anyway, someone had posted this image:



See what I mean? There's a picture of Barack Obama. And I guess it's in bluescale? But it's covered up by the huge words that are plastered on the image, and there's no discernible reason for presenting information in this way. This happens on Facebook all the time. The site is infested with these stupid word-pictures that are presumably made by the worst graphic designers on the planet. And that's not what this post is about, so I digress. You see, I scrolled right past this image, because I scroll past stupid images every day. And then, just a little over one full screen down, I saw that the same individual who had linked to this image had also linked, around the same time, to another image. This one:



To reiterate, the same person on my Facebook feeds shared both of those images on the same day, mere minutes apart. Explaining why I would find this hilarious is left as an exercise to the reader. You're a big girl, you figure it out.

Dreamsongs Volume I & The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I haven't updated in a while, so I figured I'd mention these books I read. I've been reading other books too, but I don't know if the KCLS website will let me see my checkout history anymore. Whatever.

Dreamsongs is the name for a two-volume collection of George R.R. Martin's short stories. I checked out the first volume because I was waiting on some other books. While most of the stories are quite good, this collection would be of particular interest to those who have already read some of George R.R. Martin's novels, as these older stories provide a fascinating look at some of his idiosyncrasies as a writer. If you like his novels, you'll probably like his short stories too. While Tuf Voyaging is better overall, these stories have a lot of variety, and would be of particular interest to fans.

As for The Boy Who Would Live Forever, I was eventually going to say something about the Gateway series (if that's the proper name for it). Actually, I have a whole lot to say about the series: it's one of my favorites. I think there might be a few short stories in the continuity that I haven't read yet, so I'll hold off on that rambling until I verify that I've read all of the works in the series. However, for this particular book, I will make a few remarks. I got it through interlibrary loan, because it's not very popular or well-known. Frederick Pohl wrote most of the series in the 1970's and 1980's, and then came out with this in 2004. He didn't become a bad writer in that time. This book is very good, maybe even some of Pohl's best. But just because of that seventeen-year gap, the book apparently fared poorly. Part of that may have to do with the fact that unlike all of the other novels, this one isn't narrated by the character Robinette Broadhead, so it seems removed from the rest of the series thematically, in addition to temporally. If The Boy Who Would Live Forever is treated as a standalone work, it's true that some of the background exposition is half-assed for that purpose (although as reinforcement for those who read the earlier books, it's fine). However, this obviously isn't a standalone novel, so I don't really consider that to be a mark against the book. I'm not sure that I like it better as a way to close the series than the previous novel, Annals of the Heechee, but it's still a fine addition to the series, and for closure, will have to suffice.