Several awesome things make a post

I’ve been total Scattershot Girl when it comes to blogging for some time–like many, I’ve found most of my day to day online communication shunted over to Twitter and Facebook. But that said, I’ve had several recent lovely things happen that are worth sharing with you all in longer, blog-based form. So! In no particular order:

• Finally saw The King’s Speech, since spazzkat got it via Netflix. That was a very satisfying film, and I’m not at all surprised that it’s spawned so much fanfic across my various Friends lists and such. Everyone in that film did an amazing job, and I have much increased respect for Mr. Colin Firth now. Also, mad love for the scene where the speech therapist’s wife comes home and discovers the King and Queen in her dining room. :D

• Also, as of today, finally saw Source Code with solarbird. Mad, mad props to mamishka for recommending that! It’s a nice, tight little SF flick, and if you like alternate-reality type plots, try to catch this before it vanishes entirely. If you’re local to Seattle, it’s still playing at the Meridian 16 downtown, and it’s running at the Crest as well.
• I have finally found a way I might actually read more comic books: the Dark Horse comics app for the iPad. I installed this on the grounds that a couple weekends back, Dark Horse had a sale of all its digital versions of Serenity and Firefly comics. Since I didn’t have Shepherd’s Tale yet, I thought what the hey, I’d buy ‘em all. The iPad is definitely more suited to digital comics reading than the iPhone, that’s for sure, although the iPhone does actually talk to this app as well.

Also on the iPad, I have a shiny new app called TunePal, recommended to me by Marilyn, one of the fiddle players who attends the weekly session solarbird and I have been going to. Those of you who know the Shazam app will find the way this works familiar; it basically identifies songs. But in this case, it identifies traditional Irish tunes! You can play them at the app on an actual instrument, or, it’ll identify ‘em if you’re playing them in iTunes as well. Then it goes out and hits up a big ol’ database and yoinks back several guesses as to what it thinks you just played it. It’ll show you sheet music for its guesses, and it’ll play the sheet music for you as well. And, you can add tunes out of the database manually by searching for them as well. You can’t import your own tunes, which is my only complaint about the app, but it’s otherwise very, very cool. Any of my fellow music geeks out there who are interested in trad tunes, you should be checking this out.

• Speaking of the iPhone, my coworker Joe pointed me at my new favorite iPhone game: Tiny Wings. You play a birdie with, of course, tiny tiny wings, and the object of the game is to get the birdie to fly as far as possible by tapping. It’s super-cute and only 99 cents, so check it out.
• FOLKLIFE! Well, that deserves a whole separate post, but I’m noting it here anyway.
• And while I am still technically on book buying hiatus, I’ve picked up a few freebies. And I will unrepentantly, UNREPENTANTLY I TELL YOU, break hiatus wide open to buy seanan_mcguire/Mira Grant’s Deadline this week. Because GIMME. Seriously.
• My friend ravyngyngvar is sending me a Blu-Ray of a-ha’s last concert in Oslo! Thank you, Yngvar!
• I am sorely behind on Doctor Who posts, and will shortly be doing a catchup post. It’s an indicator of how much I’ve not been paying attention to the net lately that I totally missed that BBC America did NOT air the second half of the two-parter on Saturday, to wit, bah. I did not however give enough of a damn about this to actually try to find and download the episode; it’ll air next week as far as I know, and I can wait that long. Especially given that we’re about to have the mid-season hiatus anyway. Just nobody spoil me, mmkay, those of you who’ve already caved and downloaded the ep anyway?
• And because it’s always worth saying, mmmmm blackberries of my marketboys mmmmmm.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

The roundup post of free ebook goodness

As mentioned, I’m on book buying hiatus for a bit, mostly because of wanting to try to put at least something of a dent in my monster To Read list, but also because solarbird and I gotta look at putting a new porch roof on MurkSouth. And that’ll be a big ol’ pile of moneys.

But that doesn’t stop me in the slightest from grabbing free books! Here are the ones I’ve grabbed lately.

• Soft Apocalypse, by Will McIntosh. This is an SF novel along the lines of “what happens if the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper?” It promises to be exceptionally grim, and I’m not sure when I’ll be in the mood to read this, but I grabbed it anyway when B&N offered it as the weekly freebie. Just to encourage them to do this more with SF.
• Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper. SF. Bought this one by way of interest in John Scalzi’s newly released reboot of same, which is called Fuzzy Nation. I’m not quite prepared to break my hiatus for Fuzzy Nation, but I AM interested, so I’m reading the original first by way of comparison. (Besides, I have a couple other Scalzi titles I need to get caught up on first.)
• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente. YA/Fantasy. This was available very briefly as a freebie, so I took advantage of that offer while it lasted. I expect I’ll eventually buy a hardcopy too.
• The Winds of Khalakovo, by Bradley P. Beaulieu. Fantasy. This was this past weekend’s B&N freebie, courtesy of Night Shade Books. Yoinked because, again, wishing to encourage B&N to cater to the SF/F audience!

110 for the year! Tomorrow, though, there will be breakage of hiatus for Deadline, to take me up to 111. Tasty, tasty Deadline. GIVE! TO! ZIM! *grabby hands*

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.