5 books in 5 years

Often when I talk about books I like with people they start pulling out classics that are great but we've already read, dissected, and some doof has writen a thesis on it. Dude, how many times are you going to read lord of the rings?

So this is vain attempt to start a meme, Suggest 5 books published in the last 5 years you've read, reccomend and a little about them:

1. Halting State - Charles Stross. Very cool near future cyberpunk detective story with distributed massively multiplayer virtual games as a central element. Written mostly in the second person which is fucked up in a way you will love or hate.

2. Rainbow's End - Vernor Vinge. Another nearish future cyberpunk story, only this one is more spy/military than detective lots of interesting tech/social predictions.

3. Accelerando - Charles Stross. Stross is definately one of the new lights of sci fi. This is one of the few novels that attempts to take you through the singularity. Concepts and creations come at you so fast and furiously it's hard to keep track and not much explanation. I started keeping a list of things to look up on wikipedia on the flyleaf.

4. Old Man's War - John Scalzi. Starship troopers with updated tech and more modern sensibilities.

5. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement - Lois McMaster Bujold. A very realistic sort of fantasy novel about nomadic ":Lakewalkers" who have psionic talents and mundane farmers that resent but depend on them. Bujold does fantastic characters that are insanely easy to fall in love with.

Storm coming

There is a storm front headed for austin from the northwest. Lot of hail, lightning, and cloudbusts. There's a storm out over mason (~100 miles west of here) over 40k feet tall that they are pulling hooks off of that's headed due east 40-50mph.

Just starting to hear thunder in the distance.

An halfhour or two from now things might get exciting.

Hail

Got a bunch of hail
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Big stuff (that's a quarter)


The sound the hail made when it hit the street/walk and shattered was waycool.

shoot 'em up

People on chat were mentioning a report of a patron with a concealed weapon who shot and killed a guy trying to rob a fast food place in florida (I think it was this story but I never saw any explicit links).

I expressed that I thought that was a bad idea. I just don't think it's worth killing someone over a the pocket change you can pull from a burger king till.

For that I got called a faggot, fool and "the kind of spineless asshat that would just look down and keep stuffing his face with fries in that situation". *eyeroll* gotta love internet conversations

I've become pretty skeptical about the wisdom of more widespread handgun possession and potential use. While all these guys giving me grief (and of course it is usually guys) were getting hardons from their vigilante fantasies I wondered about the family of the guy who's life was sucking so much that armed robbery of a fast food place was the best option.

It can be argued that he (and by extension his family) got what he deserved for robbing a place with a gun, but especially in this economy a little compassion doesn't cost us much. But the bigger issue is escalating to a gunfight in a crowded public place is a really bad idea. Particularly when you consider the alternative is the guy getting away with a handful of cash belonging to a megacorporation that's covered by insurance.

There are some very few, limited circumstances when I think it is appropriate to use deadly force, this sure as hell wasn't one.