Our big digger is down for a month getting some renovations done. New hairdo. Air up the tires, that sorta thing. I don't know if I ever mentioned here, but our more littler digger is no more. Retired unexpectedly. I was the second last guy to operate it. They asked me if I noticed a strange vibration, and I was like, you mean, stranger than all the other vibrations?

Our even more smaller digger is also slated to get two new engines (it's a diesel/hydraulic shovel, unlike the electric shovel pictured here which has no engines) right away.

Now might be a good time to invest in a company that makes handheld shovels, because pretty soon they're just gonna hand each one of us one and tell us to start digging.

If this doesn't make your selfsoul happy, I dunno what will. I just read the first two TPBs of the new New Mutants comic, and that makes selfsoul happy too. The first volume is a Legion story, it was alright though I've never been a fan of Legion and his dumb hair. If he's so omipotent maybe he can get a better haircut. But the second volume is where writer Zeb Wells' lifeglow really starts to shine.

Digression. The New Mutants book of the 80s was one of the best for sure. Younger, more inexperienced, not-quite-ready-for-the-majors students of Xavier's, it was consistently well written by X-Men legend Chris Claremont and had a sizeable run by surreal artist Bill Sienkiewicz. Warlock was one of my favorites, though they all were, except maybe for Doug Ramsey, whose mutant power was understanding languages. Anyways, he met a violent end in a comic book that I missed, so I dunno how he died but he did. Warlock might have, too. They were best friends.

Okay. So Zeb Wells, in volume 2, decided to bring both Warlock and Doug back to the fold. Fair enough, happens all the time, with mixed results. But Zeb does it right. Not only does Doug come back in a convincing and kinda unique way, but his language power is revealed to be way more kick ass than Claremont or anyone in the world ever imagined.

Like I said, it made my selfsoul happy. Definitely going to read Volume 3: Fall of the New Mutants

These are not the droids you're looking for.

About 15 years ago now I took a science fiction class at University. It was a 3rd year English course, not Science Fiction 101 or anything like that. It was a great class, but now I don't recall much of it. Two books stuck with me though- Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, of which i have blogged about plenty since it's pretty much my favourite book ever, and the other one made less of an impact but I never forgot it, either. Iain M. Banks' Player of Games, a Culture novel.

I just finished reading Matter, also set in the Culture universe. Now I have a mission- to read all the Culture novels. If you like high concept sic-fi, and who doesn't, you should do the same. Did you ever read Ringworld? Or play Halo? In both of those the central environment is a huge artificial ring encircling a star. Pretty cool concept- never having played Halo I dunno if they do much with it, but Larry Niven does with his Ringworld novels (which I loved the first two when I was a kid, read the third a few years back and found it kind of terrible). Anyways, Matter is set on a similarly creative planet- a Shellworld, an artificially constructed hollow planet with layers in it. Cool.

Gotta acknowledge 11/11/11 right? And it seems wrong to not at least give a nod to Remembrance Day.

Other than that, though, not too much to say. Well, a photo is always worth a thousand pixels. Here's two:

Some random silliness and/or awesomeness. See if you can tell which is which:

YodaHulk!

Ahsoka Tano Halloween Costume!

I got my DVDs of Clone Wars Season 3 finally so it's time for a Clone Wars motif. Even just a spacey motif in general since I have been enjoying Peter Schilling's Error in the System, which was my second ever tape I ever got. William Shatner recently did a cover of Major Tom (Coming Home) and though it is, uh, Shatnerrific, uh, I love the original. Interestingly, on the same album (entitled Seeking Major Tom) Shat includes Mrs. Major Tom, sung by Sheryl Crow and without any accompaniment from the man. It's quite lovely.

Took a couple days off after that marathon blogging sprint in October- I blogged every day in October, a feat only accomplished two times before in the previous nine years right here. Yup. Some days it was pretty weak, and in all honesty I count it a bit of a failure since I never did get around to writing any sort of Halloween poem or story or anything. Two kids is a Harrison Bergeron effect if there ever was one.

You know what's awesome? The Wire. Finally got around to watching Season 1.
You know what's less awesome? Metallica and Lou Reed's collaboration, Lulu. Master of Puppets and Lou Reed's New York are easily the two albums I could have on a dessert island stuck with some sort of infinitely rechargeable iPod that also somehow only had room for two albums. So put them together and it should be instant head asplode awesomeness right? Well, not at first. But you know what, I'ma go against the flow here and give it more chances. Lou and Jaymz together at last? A pairing not even Cthulhu could have conceived of? How can I say nay? I can't. It's awesome just for trying! Yup, I'm declaring it awesome!

Therefore what must bear the brunt of my anti-awesome venom is OSX Lion. Sorry Apple, I love you and have one of everything you sell (except an Apple TV which isn't even a TV at all! ) but Lion really sucks. Srsly. Safari never crashed on me once with Snow Leopard, but with Lion, about a hundred billion times so far. Since yesterday.