As ahvia points out, for some reason the longer you keep from posting to LJ the harder it gets to post. Perhaps because you've got too much stuff to go over? Dunno. I keep coming up with these long essay-posts in my head, but not actually posting them due to laziness.

Anyway, long and the short of it is I don't have all that much to post about if you don't want to hear about Warhammer minutia and so on. I have been painting a lot, reading, doing some writing (finally), not watching as much anime due to a slightly crappy season, and so on. Watching Rome, which I've had the DVDs of forever. (It's good.) Playing video games, notably Prototype, which has good gameplay and a slightly ridiculous story. (As Zero Punctuation notes, the hero carries on as though he's a good guy, when his basic M.O. is "run around the city eating people".)

Book-wise I haven't been motivated to do real reviews lately so here are a few capsules.

Drood, by Dan Simmons. Doorstop historical fiction/fantasy about Charles Dickens, a jealous associate, and a mysterious figure who may or may not be a supernatural monster stalking Dickens. Or, possibly, an opium fantasy. Solid throughout but long and with a disappointing ending. SPOILER: Dickens dies, page 938!!!!1!

The Black Company, by Glen Cook. This is a whole series, of which I've now read the first six. They are v. good. I'm not sure how I failed to notice them before now. The influence these exerted on Steven Erikson, mentioned by him in interviews, is apparent; sort of a ground-level view of huge events, with the same kind of well-written camaraderie that Erikson loves to write. Good times all around.

The Civil War, by Shelby Foote. Listened to the audio version of this, all 145 hours of it. Fantastic. I wish all history books could be written like this. Foote gives a wonderful sense of character to the various personalities. Anyone with the interest (and the patience) would be well advised to take a look. SPOILER: Snape kills Lincoln, page 2156!!!!1!! Also, the South loses, and all the other characters die too.

Bright of the Sky, by Kay Kenyon. "Science Fiction", of a sort, although it involves a far-future protagonist traveling into another universe with a vaguely magical feel. I gave up halfway through. The sci-fi part of the world makes no sense, and the writing is decidedly lackluster. Don't bother.

Shadow, Memory, and Pattern, by KJ Parker. Parker's writing style is distinctive, which can be good and bad -- at least I know what to expect of her. No long descriptions of siege weapons in this one, although there is an extremely detailed tour through a button-manufacturing plant. Like most of her writing the structure and metaphor are very visible, and the focus here is on inevitability, coincidence, and memory. As usual there are no happy endings, but the writing is tight (better then the Fencer series, I think) and the plot moves nicely, although the second book is a bit of a weird detour at first. Unlike in Fencer, she manages to tie up the various loose ends in the conclusion, leaving us with a very satisfactory (if dark) end of the series. If you like the sort of "intricately interwoven events plunging inevitably toward disaster" style of thing, this is the series for you.

Swords and Deviltry, by Fritz Leiber. Another classic, though oddly not on the WFA list. Anyway, good as expected, and the source of an enormous number of now-standard fantasy tropes. In particular this is the proximate origin of much of the Discworld series. Theoretically "swords and sorcery" but v. different from Conan and the rest of that sort.

Right now I'm re-reading R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing series, for the purpose of being able to understand his new series. It's reasonably good, but unfortunately (in terms of recommending it to people) it gets much better as it goes along, with the first book having a pretty large wangst factor and getting more and more plotful as it gets through book three. I'm hoping this bodes well for book four but it makes it hard to get into.

Because what everyone on the internet wants to see is ( pictures of your troops. )

Once again I'm trying to be clever. I will post something real here someday I swear. ( Euler 42, 43 )

Haven't had time to do one of these (or post at all) in a while, but here is ( Euler 38, 39 )

In addition to painting new minis, I determined when I re-started playing Warhammer to redo how I transport my army. My previous solution, which involved two big foam-encased boxes and one cardboard box with bubblewrap, was unsatisfactory in that a) sometimes guys got crushed or broken, b) it took forever to pull stuff out, and c) it required me to have three hands in order to carry. My goal was to dispense with the foam-compartment boxes, which store each individual model in a little foam square; these are both non-optimal in terms of storage (because the guy rattles around and protruding bits like spears or guns can get broken) and extremely inefficient. One of those cases could transport six layers of guys, with 28 spaces per layer, in something roughly the size of a big tackle box. So!

( A picture is worth a thousand points. )

Good weekend. We saw Up, which was pretty fantastic. Pixar has the magic touch, as usual -- able to create movies that work for kids, that are also genuinely funny, that also have real emotional depth. Artistically it's an amazing accomplishment.

Also had D&D, which is going along. Something I planned as a relatively brief diversion has become kind of lengthy, but eh. Soon we will get back to the "main plot", such as it is. This campaign has, best guess, been running for about a year now, which makes it one of my longer-running games ever. I'm sort of surprised. It helps that 4E allows D&D to remain playable over all levels (so far) instead of the relatively narrow "sane range" that characterized 3.0.

( More Euler, Problem 8, 9, 10 )

Should I create a filter for these?