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A Natural History of Dragons (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #1)

2013-10-23 00:00

Cover for A Natural History of Dragons (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #1)

Review:

I have said that I dis­like when a fan­ta­sy world is just re­al coun­tries mixed up and trans­plant­ed. Well, this book has that in spades and I did not mind one bit.

Sure, Scir­land is ex­act­ly Eng­land, and Chi­a­vo­ra is ex­act­ly Italy and so on, and ap­par­ent­ly it all takes place cir­ca year 5800 in an­oth­er plan­et where by sheer co­in­ci­dence an ex­act repli­ca of ear­ly Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land has come in­to ex­is­tence.

But you know what? The tone. This book is writ­ten ex­act­ly in the tone of a cranky old nat­u­ral­ist Vic­to­ri­an la­dy. No, I have not ev­er read such a thing, but if I had, I hope it would read just like this book.

It's in some ways a re­al­ly old-­fash­ioned book, al­though writ­ten with a mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ty.

Plus, rea­son­able(ish) drag­on­s.

Look­ing for­ward to Trop­ic of Ser­pents (which is, just like this one, a awe­some ti­tle).

DMQZ

2013-10-17 00:00

Cover for DMQZ

Review:

The first 80% or so of the book is awe­some. Then it's not.

The end­ing makes me want to throw the book in­to a fire. Luck­i­ly I did­n't be­cause I was read­ing it on a kindle, and it would have been an ex­pen­sive ges­ture.

It's the most bla­tant "pay me for the sec­ond half of this book" I have ev­er read.

Locche: The Untouchable Pastebin

2013-10-10 22:17

TL;­DR:

I did man­age to write this thing, sort of, in 2 hours. You can see it in ac­tion here: http://tinyurl.­com/loc­che1 and it has some rather un­usu­al fea­tures :-)

  • You can hack Loc­che in­­­side Loc­che.

  • You can go back to pre­vi­ous ver­­sions of the text (or Loc­che) from any copy of Loc­che

  • It us­es no serv­er what­­so­ev­er (other than a CDN to get JS and codemir­ror)

What's miss­ing?

  • Mak­ing it pret­­ty

  • Short­­en his­­to­ry URLs so the size does­n't ex­­plode so much

  • Fix han­dling of ' " and prob­a­bly oth­­er char­ac­ters in the text

  • Doc­u­­ment it

But I think it's cool. Be­low is the live­blog of how it was done. Have fun match­ing it with the com­mit his­to­ry at http­s://github.­com/ralsi­na/loc­che

I am go­ing to live-­code a paste­bin, with a few twist­s.

It's called Loc­che, in hon­our of Nicol­i­no Loc­che, The Un­touch­able.

This page will up­date ev­ery 5 min­utes un­til I am done, or 2 hours have elapsed.

Read more…

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