More bits and pieces

If you know anyone on other fannish platforms thinking of making the jump to Dreamwidth, goodbyebird has set up a fantastic comm, starterpack, designed to help new users get to grips with this platform (which can be quite a steep learning curve if you're used to Twitter or Tumblr). Feel free to share it around!

With naye's encouragement, I think I'm going to try snowflake_challenge this year. It's not great timing (as we're moving house on the 5th), but I'll do my best.



I've been spending the day trying to sort out various things relating to moving house before everywhere closes for New Year's Eve. I've also had a chance to do a bit more reading. I've read:

'The Long Tail', a free online short story by Aliette de Bodard, which the author describes as being about 'war, work shifts, and how to get out of sticky situations using statistics.'

A Sky Beyond the Storm, the concluding work in Sabaa Tahir's dystopian fantasy YA series. I really enjoyed the preceding books, and I liked this one for the most part, although it felt a bit bloated and a lot of the plot and character tensions seemed to retread the same situations and problems repeatedly, to the point that it felt like overkill.

'Seven of Infinities', the latest in Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe of space opera stories. This one is about a sentient space ship and a human scholar teaming up to uncover a mystery, and it draws very heavily on the Arsène Lupin stories, of which de Bodard is a huge fan.

I hope everyone's been having a good day.