April fools

A few good day-appropriate jokes:

- Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink
- Gmail introduces Autopilot

And the Backloggery seems to be adding random video game name elements to your now playing list.

My favorites: Chrono Trigger: Ace Attorney, Star Ocean: The Last Hope: The Quest for More Money, and Tom Clancy's Star Ocean: Second Evolution (not to mention Leisure Suit Larry in Star Ocean: Second Evolution.

Also I see jokersama is playing that infamous weeaboo game, Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories: Ace Attorney. But at least she's balancing it out with Bioshock Kart.

The Mystery of Grace

After turning in my comps portfolio on Monday, as a reward I went to Prairie Lights to check if there were any new books by any of my favorite authors out. As it turns out, the universe clearly knew that I was in need of reward, because on the New Books table I found The Mystery of Grace, the first non-YA book in three years by my favorite author EVAR, Charles de Lint. It's not part of my favorite of his series - the Newford books - but is nevertheless one of his best, if not his best.

I didn't really have a chance to read it until today, and probably should have spent those two hours working on comps prep since I've spent the last two days running around doing stuff that was necessary and urgent but completely unrelated to comps, but I felt I needed that couple of hours of break from the comps grind. As usual, I loved it, though I'm still not entirely sure what I think of it. In some ways it's very much standard de Lint, and in some ways it's very, very different from anything else of his I've read; I don't know how to articulate those differences, though. I want to say it's darker or more depressing, but that's not it (because it's really no darker or more depressing than his other books). Maybe it's just that because of the subject matter, it feels like it should be?

( The short version? Charles de Lint does Silent Hill; some early-book spoilers, but they're big ones )

Also today I totally discovered that one of my fellow grad students is also a huge de Lint fan, which was kind of awesome. Yay for more exposure for him, because he's a great, great writer; y'all should read him if you get a chance!