I so lied when I said content would pick up last post ... Just had a bunch of other stuff going on in meatspace, but I'm back. I think I'll just blorp out a mish-mash and let you poor folks slog through it rather than splitting into separate tech and "-lish" posts, so hold on tight.

Neil Gaiman recently made some headlines by releasing his masterwork American Gods for free. If you haven't read this book, I can't recommend it enough. Gaiman is unsurpassed at creating modern mythology that dips deeply into prior mythological work, and American Gods and the Sandman graphic novels are not only Gaiman's best, but the best literary works of the genre, and definitely among the best works of modern fictional storytelling. It's free now, so go git it!

I've begun reading Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a collection of short articles that Bryson wrote for a British readership after moving back to America. They are absolutely hilarious diatribes about various oddities of American life delivered with Bryson's brilliant blend of razor wit and deep reverence. This may be his best, narrowly beating out In a Sunburned Land as my top Bill Bryson book. Bryson's neck and neck right now with Dave Barry as my top literary humorist.

Moving on through the "-lish", here's an unbelievably cool tropes wiki. What's a trope? From the front page of TV Tropes, they are "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." This means tropes are important to writers, critics, and anyone else interested in modern story-telling, including roleplaying gamers. It also means absolutely fascinating reading because the entries are just about everything but dry.

I found some gems of awfulness on the TV Tropes "So Bad It's Horrible" entry to share. Beware, these are toxic. First, The Eye of Argon, one of the most terrible fantasy epics ever. (This is "terrible" in the senses of both really bad and terribly violent at the same time) Next, widely regarded as the worst poem in English, I present the short horror of Theophilus Marzials's "A Tragedy".

Finally, in the roleplaying game category are two stinky examples of So Bad It's Horrible that I have to spotlight. The second is near and dear to my heart, as you'll see. Read this review of FATAL. FATAL was an RPG that I got maybe a page and a half into before I completely wiped my freely-obtained copy online somewhere. There's a link to the FATAL PDF at the top of the review if you're really desperate. I'd rather say I'm not linking to it than linking to it. Then there's the Wraeththu roleplaying game. As some of you may recall, I subjected myself to the first Wraeththu novel and started on the second before tossing the whole series out as utter rubbish, so this review of how terrible the RPG is strikes a sympathetic chord with me. The review's more oriented toward gameworld and setting analysis than system mechanics, and it's hi-lariously harsh. Shockingly, people are evidently paying money for the Wraeththu game.

I'm done with purely literary topics for this post. As a bridge to tech topics, here's an interesting article about "cultural" aspects of free operating system users (i.e. Linux). Especially interesting are items 5 and 6 in the list: "Free software users explore" and "Free software users expect to help themselves". In other words, free software users tend to be more confident and technically savvy with technological tools, something I find to be generally true. Linux nerds, ho!

Speaking of Linux, Anyone mounting FUSE filesystems under Linux should check this article out about setting up afuse, a FUSE filesystem automounter. I'm using FUSE to ssh into my iPod Touch, but I have a pair of scripts I run manually to do the mount and unmount of the FUSE filesystem that are working fine for me. Still, automation is good, right? So I might look into this on down the road.

Finally, I present InfoWorld's all-time top 25 flops list. I disagree heartily with some of these, such as iPod imitators, and wanted to link this up to air my strong ongoing opinion that money flows from sources to media makers to promote their products. I don't have any evidence to back this up on this particular article, but just from the iPod imitators entry I have to wonder how much InfoWorld and/or the author of this article benefits from Apple. My iRiver media player beats the shizzle out of my iPod Touch in one major area: media compatibility. I like Ogg Vorbis audio much more than MP3, so thanks to Apple's unwillingness to allow their media players to play this totally free compressed audio format, I'm highly inconvenienced. Dicks. There are workarounds, but why should I have to go there? Just open it up, Apple! Sorry, started ranting a little there. I also disagree with other entries in the list, such as the PS/2. The PS/2 wasn't popular with consumers, but it was an important interim step in the evolution of PC hardware that shouldn't just be discounted as an outright failure, for example. So this is thought-provoking on a couple levels for people who've been teching for a while.

Adam Boeglin, the excellent porter of various apps to the iRex iLiad, generated a new FBReader version a month or two ago. I plopped it excitedly onto my iLiad and found that I have almost no use for the new version unless I can get it to be the default reader for .txt files and I can access the options to change the font and alter text formatting for different files. This bums me out, because otherwise, it looks to be a nice update. Adam's now beating on a usable browser for the iLiad that looks hawt, but I'm browsing via my iPod Touch these days if I need a portable browser.

One more note about the iLiad and then this post's toast. I have read bunches of formats of ebooks on my iLiad and I have to say that the iLiad-formatted PDF offerings at Feedbooks are the finest. You download a book, move it to the iLiad, find it in the iLiad's hierarchy, pop it open, and stop thinking you're reading something in an electronic format. No resizing, fine legibility, and the flexibility of the iLiad's built-in PDF reader all combine into an excellent, seamless reading experience. Bravo, Feedbooks!