english blog

Proving that you can find anything on the internet, Etsy merchant schnabuble has made leather armor for cats. Yes, for five hundred dollars, you too can outfit your cat in body armor before it goes out and murders anything and everything it can. In all seriousness, I can't believe that people have actually spent five hundred dollars on something like this. (via Laughing Squid )

But good freaking god, I didn't expect it to be this cold. When I went to bed last night, it was 1 degree Fahrenheit. ONE DEGREE, PEOPLE. It's less than 10 degrees now and it's almost noon. Did I mention that I live in the Southern U.S.? Friiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!

d20 ice mold from ThinkGeek ! I'm not even going to pretend that most of you folks don't know about this already, but it's so freaking cool, isn't it? Just imagine playing an OSR game, Traveler, whatever, with one of these bad boys in your glass. Like a classy gent. They're only $11.99 too, which is surprisingly cheap. h/t Laughing Squid .

Went to a B&N today for the first time in six months and headed straight for the scifi/fantasy section. On one hand, I saw some books that I plan on getting next month or in January, but on the other hand, I saw something that actually ticked me off a little: four shelves dedicated to George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Four shelves, all carrying varied types of hardcovers, paperbacks, and box sets, with only five books not part of that series. What ticked me off about it is the realization that in order to make room for the Martin bounty, they had to remove a lot of other writers' books, meaning that those people are going to get less money, especially if other B&N's did the same thing. Now, this might not be a problem for the more established writers, but what about the new ones? The folks who are just starting out and need every dollar they can get from book sales? I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting, but it just seems like Barnes & Noble i...

I mean, they are the richest of the great houses, so clearly, they're doing something right. Stannis wouldn't have let it happen either, but he would probably start putting people to death until the solution was solved. With the Starks, it probably wouldn't have happened to begin with because they would be more austere. Apologies to anyone sick and tired of hearing about the shutdown or who have a distaste for politics. The comparison popped in my head and I couldn't help myself.

Like I mentioned in my post about Imager , one of the really interesting aspects of the book was the imaging ability of the titular imagers. As I explained, imaging is the ability to create or even move objects from one place to another (I suppose teleporting would be the right word) by imagining it with their minds. An early example of the latter is shown in an scene where Rhenn, the main character, moves a raisin from his bowl to his spoon, which allows him to finally come up with a solution to a problem that his teacher had him working on for several days. An example of the former is when he images a comb as a personal test to see whether or not he had any significant imager power. There is a counter-balance to imaging, much like magic in other books. Imaging can be taxing, depending on the object being imaged. Simple objects are inconsequential, but the bigger, more complex an object is, the more exhausting it can be and it can also lead to headaches. The composition of an object ...