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Showing posts from September, 2015

You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) but you can procrastinate there - a lot

I was just sitting here playing a game on Facebook in a time I'd specifically arranged to do some writing, and while the guilt gnawed me further into inaction so I continued to play and feel more guilty, so worse, so less likely to do something constructive I remembered one of the things I wanted to write about. That is Felicia Day's book You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) . Felicia Day is an actress known for her roles in Buffy , Supernatural and others. I saw her in Buffy , but it was when I was belatedly introduced to Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog that I first really noticed her and learnt her name. Not long after that I was, also belatedly, introduced to The Guild , which is a web series (made before such things were things) that Felicia wrote and starred in. It's hilarious and well worth watching if you haven't. From there I naturally discovered Felicia's online media company Geek and Sundry - this time just as it was launching, huzz

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

As Amanda's book led me to think of giant squids as a sort of personal emblem, it made sense that the next book I read be John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes . Of course, at the time I thought there was an actual kraken in the story, there isn't. This was my third Wyndham novel. The first was, unsurprisingly, The Day of the Triffids , which I read for English in Year 9. I loved it and I'd say it was an important novel in shaping my fictional tastes. Years later I read The Midwich Cuckoos , which I enjoyed but is a much slower story that relies heavily on a sense of wrongness and foreboding. The Kraken Wakes falls somewhere between the two. It follows a couple and their adventures in a bizarre and world-changing alien invasion. This is probably the only alien invasion story I've read where no-one on Earth knows it's been invaded till over halfway through the book. The narration is made by the husband and starts with an introduction that establishes that the inva