Well met

I met iamleaper today! She's in town, so we hooked up for coffee, and then when we realized we had closed down the cafe, we moved on to some pizza. It was great fun to kick back and talk fandom, and academia, and life in general, and I enjoyed our time together very much. :)

Also, I have a lot of linkspam to share with you all, but I can't wait on this one:

A Timeline of Extinction

(warning: links directly to a PDF)

It's by some futurist type who makes predictions about when certain things will either disappear or lose relevance: oil, the Internet, glaciers, etc. Probably most disconcerting is that libraries are going to disappear in 2017, which only gives me 9 more years to have it as a career. And I won't even be able to retire, because that's gone as of 2014. What will save me? Copyright. It goes extinct in 2020. So that means I can start writing fanfic for a living, as long as I find some way to tide myself over during that three year gap. Sounds like a plan.

SpecFic Challenge Book #6: "Tailchaser's Song" by Tad Williams

This is one of those books I've been meaning to read for many years, because it's a book about cats and what's not to love about that? But I never got any specific recommendations for it, so I never got motivated until now.

It was good. Not earthshaking, but enjoyable. It's a first novel, and it shows -- I found the writing in the Otherland series to be much more polished, and the ending is pretty much telegraphed with a microphone -- but there are enough twists on the epic quest formula that it kept me engaged, and I thought the depiction of cats and other animals was spot on. ("Rikchikchik" is such an awesome word for squirrel, I can't even tell you how much I love that.)

And with that, my participation in the Speculative Fiction Challenge comes to a close. One book I loved, three I really enjoyed, one I'm glad I read so I can say that I read it, and one that I love to hate (and one that I was finally able to get rid of without finishing and with a clear conscience). I'd say I did pretty well. Now, back to the to-read pile!