the horror…

Just finished At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft.  Fascinating, no dialogue whatsoever.  A good book to cleanse one’s reading palate, though I admire Lovecraft’s gift for vivid description.

review – modern ranch living

In Modern Ranch Living, Mark Jude Poirier spends a great deal of time detailing the eccentricities of life in Tucson. It’s an entertaining read, as bright and sweeping as the Arizona sun’s perpetual blanket upon the desert. How quaint are the characters within, specifically a sixteen year old exercise-obsessed and grammatically challenged Kendra Lumm, along with her awkwardly inanimate neighbor Merv, Splash World employee extraordinaire who lives with mother…at the age of thirty. How amusing it is to behold Kendra’s incessant indignation toward the unfit and uneducated in the ways of proper weightlifting and dietary habits as well as Merv’s altruism in adjusting the catheters of certain Splash World patrons who need that extra bit of customer support.

One can undoubtedly progress through Modern Ranch Living without much of a care as to the result of the novel’s plot. Roughly, it concerns the whereabouts of a missing neighbor shared by Kendra and Merv; really though, it’s about how the characters find a release from the stagnation of the Arizona summer, as well as their own lives. As carefree as the atmosphere is, Poirier foreshadows almost too well, for towards the very end of the novel he destroys the whimsical and eccentric nature of the desert dwellers with a gut-check of uneasiness lingering well after the novel concludes. Modern Ranch Living deals with overcoming the disturbing behavior that while born out of weirdness and eccentricity, is nevertheless disturbing.

apps for LT

Wishing LibraryThing had one.

Here’s the word from the man (message 23):

So, there’s some back story here.

According to Amazon, iPhone applications that use Amazon data are forbidden by their terms of service. They have told us we can’t develop one. Meanwhile, a number of other companies have developed them, and… Amazon has done nothing about it.

You can imagine how I feel about all this, particularly as Amazon is, through Abebooks, a minority investor of LibraryThing. It’s no fun to have your minority owner directly competing with you, through Shelfari, and stopping you from doing what even even companies they don’t own are doing. I hope they either enforce their rules and cut off the iPhone apps., or allow us to build one.

We will be debuting an Amazon app soon, but it will not be a cataloging app. For that, we need to develop an iPhone-optimized web version