“As a Christian, I follow Jesus for his teachings of love and tolerance; it is people like you who make me sick, I hope you die in a lake of fire and get your eyes pecked out by crows, so that you may go to hell and exist for eternity in a lake of fire getting your eyes pecked out by crows.”

FSM HateMail

or, Books I Have Read (recently).

I found out that I'd missed the memo on Julian May's new works, to the point where they're about to release the third in a new trilogy (series) when I didn't even have the first two.

So, I decided to re-read all of May's other books, starting with the Milieu Series (4 books) and its prequel/sequel the Saga of the Exiles (4 books - though I've lost the final one and had to re-order it). I then read her Ramparts Worlds trilogy.

Actually, I couldn't read all of them since, as I recall, I only ever bought the first of the Trillium books, the collaboration with Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley and never really liked it enough to get any of the sequels, by May or otherwise.

Long before I got through all those, the new series arrived, but I waited until I'd finished them before starting the new “Moon” books, which, unlike her earlier works, are pure fantasy (so far. And you'd be hard pressed to tell the others weren't from some of the moronic covers they gave the Exiles books in the US) and revolve around a small island split into four kingdoms. The plot revolves around the plans of the ruler of the southernmost kingdom (the titular Ironcrown of the second book) to unite the kingdoms under his almost benevolent rule, and the degrees to which he'll go to do this. Magic is available to some on the island, either naturally or, for more power, by entering into painful deals with the non-human Beaconfolk. Whilst they're not on a par with the Exiles/Mileu books, it's an interesting spin on old ideas.

The other book I've read recently is an interesting one. Like probably most players of The Secret of Monkey Island, I accepted Ron Gilbert's statement that Disney's Pirates of the Carribbean ride was the inspiration. However, on one post on Ron's blog he complained that Dinsey's Pirates of the Carribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest was a ripoff of his work, which confused the hell out of me. Until, perusing the comments led to a way earlier post from before I'd seen the light, wherein Ron describes the impetus of Monkey Island as being Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides. As luck would have it, there's been a 2006 reprint of the book, which was out of print on 2004. Whilst not a comedy, you can see where the ideas for voodoo pirates and an undead pirate captain came from. If you've got the time, and like a rollocking good adventure, check it out.

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

(via Kotaku who seem to have since deleted their post for some reason): Sexy Couples Halloween Costumes - His and Hers Halloween Couple Costumes

Nicotine and tobacco... lordy. It's a good job you can't combine those two...

“"Some drugs haven't been legalised because it will ruin the other drugs, like nicotine and tobacco," he insisted. "Nicotine is more addictive than heroin. I'll leave the preaching to the preachers - my grandfather is a preacher - but I believe that you don't do anything to excess."”

Digital Spy - Showbiz - Justin Timberlake admits to drug use

OK, so: we're off to the Emerald Isle for the wedding of my friend and ex-colleague Siobhan and her globe-trotting husband Rob. Here's what happens when I fly somewhere...

Read more »

...we're available

(Taken by Eric - who was threatened with violence if he also tried to liveblog - before the ceremony, which kicked off an hour late, to no-one's surprise)

The Gentoo install moves apace. I've got rid of the annoying keyboard error on login (had the wrong settings) and now I've got the two screens running seperately under the default Xorg Radeon drivers (see screeny). I've as yet failed to get direct rendering working though. I think I need a more recent DRM driver than the one currently supplied by the Gentoo peeps. I could also try the official ATI drivers, but they apparently won't do 3D acceleration with two screens (or I couldn't find the correct settings when I last messed with them on Ubuntu).

This, I think, officially qualifies as “nifty”:

Sometime during the Gentoo install, I must have typed mke2fs /dev/hda1 because I wiped the XP partition and replaced it with an empty ext2 partition.

Oh well, the registry was pretty funky anyway so maybe a reinstall will speed things up. It's a pity moving your Documents and Settings dir to a different partition is so difficult in Windows, or it would be a much less of an oops.

I'm almost tempted to not bother - I'm pretty certain I can replace every program I routinely use on Windows with a Linux version, apart from the games (which, ironically, all survived the ooops because they're on a different drive). Wine and Cedega are almost there, but seem to fail on the games I like to play (had a stab with Auto Assault earlier with no luck). Or maybe VMware could do the job - I'm installing FC5 on the freeware Windows version on the laptop at the moment, just to see what it's like.

Just using this post to “claim” my blog on Bloglines.

FIrst post from Gentoo/Gnome. It took a little while to get everything up and running, but I think we're there now.