Justin Howe's Blog, page 50

Images. Millions of Images. That’s What I Need.

Like most people I have folders and folders full of pictures glommed from all over the Internet. Lately I’ve been making crude collages with them on power point. The above is for a short story about a junky ghost hunter and the codependent relationship he has with his assistants. I made it after the story was written, which is a bit different than using it to brainstorm.

That’s one for a story in process. It hasn’t come together yet like the first one, but that’s likely because the story’s not...

A Few Things

I’m putting these here so I remember them.

John Coulthart has a great post on past attempts to produce covers for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence. Am I fan Harrison? Of course I’m a fan. Coulthart then has a follow-up post on what he’d like to see in new covers. Speaking of Viriconium, over at M. John Harrison’s blog there’s a new piece of fiction set in that city.

Another thing…

This essay by Ursula K. LeGuin over at Book View Cafe. I can’t agree with it enough. How about these quotes:

Li...

This Is Not the Coconut Cheese You Were Looking For

Spectacles

“He had read endless books, he had digested them, pondered over them. Day by day, year after year, he had turned over all the problems of human beings. Yet there were all sorts of simple things he didn’t know how to do: he couldn’t even walk into an inn and sit down at a table.”

- Georges Simenon, The Strangers in the House

Finished this book this afternoon. I think Simenon’s terrific but he’s one of those authors I can’t read a lot of in one go. Great stuff and he’s writing on all cylinders he...

One Book Five Covers: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker is a bit like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz mixed with Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Set in a post-apocalyptic England that resembles the Iron Age, Riddley’s written in this odd, “degraded” style of English that is difficult to parse at first but after a bit takes on a poetic power.

A quote:

“Where ben that new life coming in to? Widders Dump. You know what they ben doing there. It ain’t jus only forming they ben doing there with stock...

Likenfreude

Likenfreude: When you recognize exactly which blog post/youtube clip someone’s opinions came from.

This is a working definition and liable to change.

“-Freude” means joy and this feeling isn’t really “joyful”.

Maybe it should be “linkenfreude”.

International Anklebiter Illustrator Day

Thanks to Zak over at Playing D&D With Pornstars* for giving me an after-school class’s worth of stuff to do.

On to the displacer beasts:

This one looks like that short guy at the bar who’s always super-pissed off and looking for a fight:

“Why I oughta…”

I love this one:

Yeah, no color – but he looks like something out of an old grainy Japanese superhero serial:

Here’s a monster one kid drew. Yeah, fuck owl bears. How about a bat-winged, fire-breathing, horned tiger shark? Vaults-players be warned,...

Friday’s Here

Since I’m teaching 1st grade this year, I’ve found myself needing to reacquaint myself with nursery rhymes and children’s songs. Trust me. It’s a matter of self-preservation. You wouldn’t believe how quickly you can channel the energy of a rambunctious class with the song “Five Little Monkeys”.

Here’s a song I stumbled upon that pretty much had me smiling all day. So much so that I’ve broadcast it on every social media site I’m on except maybe Good Reads — though with this post here I’m probab...

One Book Three Covers: Missing Man by Katherine MacLean

This is one of those books I read about on a blog somewhere discussing “forgotten classics” of SF. The premise sounded neat: a pair of heroes (more psychic EMTs than cops) roams the weird streets of a future New York City that’s fragmented into communes.

The novel began its life as a series of novellas in Analog before going the fix-up route, so it’s no wonder that the Analog cover with its Apocalypse Chair is the most apt, sort of. The second picture is the first paperback novel printing and...

Translation Telephone

Jin received her copies of the John Shirley book Rapture that she translated. She wrote a blog post about it. It’s in Korean, but there are pictures.

The reaction from the Korean BioShock community has been interesting. Some people are annoyed that the book doesn’t match the fan-made patch (where one thing named INCINERATE got translated as FIREBALL ATTACK!) Other people are a bit confused as to who this John Shirley guy is anyways. Some folks thought Ayn Rand was made up by the creators of Bi...