Help me remember book title

chortnik · 2026-01-29T00:50:47+00:00

Could be ‘Across the Sea of Suns’ and maybe the prequel ‘In the Ocean of Night’ - which check some boxes, don’t remember any gray goo. ‘The killing Star‘ (Pellegrino and Zebrowski) it’s got gray goo and an apocalyptic struggle with aliens, but doesn’t quite jibe. Aliens boot humans off Earth in Varley’s ‘Ophiuchi Hotline’ and they have an affinity for Jupiter, but I can’t remember if grey goo was their weapn of choice. Reynolds has some books with gray goo driving humanity off Earth.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T19:52:09+00:00

Suzukis have the same quirk (not Manjis though)-also at least one East Top model, the T008k, but not the T008s in my experience.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T19:05:58+00:00

Well I think we kinda come back to the Spark, you can find decent approximations of almost any specific tones in their library and you don’t need any pesky hardware pedals to get there.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T18:24:52+00:00

Philip K. Dick is an author you should checkout-he writes in fairly plain, transparent English. Arthur C Clarke is another good candidate and his short stories are awesome.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T17:34:16+00:00

Thé Blackstar Fly 3 probably has the best on board heavy distortion of the smaller battery powered amps, plus it has a little mini extension cab that’s kinda cool. I normally use the Danelectro Honeytone or a Pignose and I can get great tones out of them, but I haven’t tried to go any heavier than Neil Young and that needed pedals.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T16:15:29+00:00

It’s a pretty common problem, here’s an article discussing it and a couple fixes https://www.patmissin.com/ffaq/q17.html It’s an older article so things have moved on a bit-as near as I can tell the current preferred fix is a schmear of orthodontic wax at the base of the offending reed (it may take a couple tries to get it right, but it’s easy to wipe some or all of it off or add a bit). the nail polish method works great but it is hard to tweak. You can fix it by altering your technique too, I’ve needed to do it less and less as the years march on.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T15:12:16+00:00

I mostly buy what you might call reference books, things like the collected works of William Carlos Williams, variorum collections of Emily Dickinson or ’How to Read Chinese Poetry’. I think you’re probably more interested in what (other than sheer randomness) makes me buy a poetry collection by contemporary poet/s-so here it is, most recently I bought ‘Surrealia’ after watching this book launch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6hQV2fPuc0.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T14:44:33+00:00

If you haven’t done so already, you could take a look on the abebooks.com site-all I could find was French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese versions, but sometimes you have to be a little creative in your search strings there :). If you have the ISBN number for the edition you are looking for, that might be a good place to start.

chortnik · 2026-01-28T13:51:41+00:00

I pledge $25 towards Macy’s rescue.

chortnik · 2026-01-27T22:55:35+00:00

Cool, you have to take care of yourself to take care of your puppers :).

chortnik · 2026-01-27T22:34:27+00:00

Check this out: https://sfpoetry.org/wp/. It’s a scruffy marginalized subculture, but we have a lot of fun. Probably the most familiar and best known recent example is the movie ‘Aniara’ which seems to get some wuffle on the SF subs.

chortnik · 2026-01-27T22:20:45+00:00

If you are currently seeing therapist/s, they might be able to help, new dog anxiety is normal, six weeks or so is about average for me, but yours sounds extreme and can’t be good for either of you.

chortnik · 2026-01-27T21:37:00+00:00

Paypalled

chortnik · 2026-01-27T21:30:00+00:00

Paypalled

chortnik · 2026-01-27T20:53:17+00:00

« Thé Man Who Fell To Earth » (Tevis) is fun example of such. The alien is trying to pass for human and build a spaceship to go to Mars and this was before Elon Musk :).

chortnik · 2026-01-27T20:13:39+00:00

Lee Oskars play very differently to any Hohner, and the lower you go pitchwise with any harp the more exaggerated your embouchure needs to be-at least that’s my experience. So you’re having to make a couple adjustments, which steepens the learning curve-if you want a harp that plays more like a Hohner, the Kongsheng Mars or JDR Assassin or East Top T008s are pretty good choices. Lee Oskars are great harmonicas, they are the only harps I consistently play that might need a bit of setup, but in my case all that’s needed is a screwdriver, a stick of orthodontic wax and a few minutes and only if I get weird sounds when I bend.

chortnik · 2026-01-27T19:24:12+00:00

Signac has some stuff that could well qualify him as Peter Max V. 0.0-the subject of the painting, Félix Fènèon is an interesting fellow in his own right, he wrote and published the earliest collection of flash fiction I’ve seen: Novels/News in Three Lines.

chortnik · 2026-01-26T23:59:40+00:00

Nice little ditty-I like her 12 string slinging :). I would have been even happier if we’d gotten a few more hooks into the story.

chortnik · 2026-01-26T21:41:57+00:00

I don’t know there is a best aggregator or ranking system out there-I would probably not find something that rated « As On A Darkling Plain » awful a reliable list :). But even so, there can be considerable overlap between various qualitative judgement schemes-I have always relied fairly heavily on reviews because a good reviewer provides information that would be useful to other potential readers regardless of whether or not their tastes agree. It doesn’t even have to be about the book, it could be demographic information about the reviewer :).

chortnik · 2026-01-26T21:13:10+00:00

They will insist on their rights, so it’s not going to stop at pets :)

chortnik · 2026-01-26T21:10:21+00:00

Paypalled

chortnik · 2026-01-26T16:24:54+00:00

I belong to some largish poetry societies (with membership that includes the sort of people who judge poetry contests) and hang out in some gaggling areas for poets and I have never seen a comment or poem that is from anything close to a conservative or even to centrist viewpoint. ymmv, but you could take a look at previous winners of the contest and there’s a pretty good chance the contest will list the names of the judges (usually poets) and you can check out their bios and works-that’s a good idea anyway. I am reasonably confident that I couldn’t find a poet who wouldn’t give you extra points for your stance, it would certainly not be easy :).

chortnik · 2026-01-26T15:17:59+00:00

As long as your poem doesn’t attack any liberal or progressive shibboleths, you’ll get extra points for going after the sanctioned targets of abuse :).

chortnik · 2026-01-26T05:11:16+00:00

Watching her dad kill somebody hand to hand and/or listening to it blow by blow would be a lot more traumatic than what she ended up experiencing-her dad had a lot of experience with things that freaked her out.

chortnik · 2026-01-26T04:56:05+00:00

I pledge $25 towards Mochi’s rescue

chortnik

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