Review: Forest Mage, by Robin Hobb

I read Shaman's Crossing, the first book in Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy, with great anticipation. A fantasy series? With only three reasonably-sized books? That isn't Wheel of Time or Sword of Truth? And written by a woman? SOLD!

Which is why I was disappointed when I didn't love it as much as I'd hoped. I actually had to put it down for a few months and come back to it to make it all the way through. And while it did recover -- substantially -- in the second half, it wasn't enough for me to put it on any top-ten lists.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the sequel, Forest Mage (dat title! ;-) hit all of my buttons. Powerful, emotional, affecting, and most of all, personal.

Penny-Arcade's boneheaded response to the Dragon's Crown controversy

A few days ago, Kotaku's Jason Schreier posted an excellent takedown of the absurd, ridiculous, embarrassing art from Vanillaware's newest title, Dragon's Crown. In case you're not familiar, here's some of the artwork:

In response to the criticism, Vanillaware's lead artist called him a homosexual. So, yeah. That happened.

Author's Guild Facepalm of the Day

I can't even deal with this shit this morning, so I'll make it brief. Go take a look at latest screed from Scott Turow, the head of the Author's Guild. I'll wait.

Assuming you can remove your palms from your forehead long enough to continue reading this, I'll note that Turow's Guild was the one who fought against the text-to-speech function on the Kindle because he didn't think blind people should be able to read books (all right, not his real reasoning, but it doesn't make him any less of an ass). He also fought Google's book scanning project, because I guess he doesn't like people to be able to find books.

Now he's fighting against ... libraries, I guess? But the whole essay is less about authors and more about politics, as is evident when he starts to rant about our "socialistic" public library system and "Soviet-style repression."

I have no idea why any author in their right mind would be a member of this organization.