Early summer haul

I'm just back from Canada, where I was for a lovely week of vacation both escaping the heat and enjoying Vancouver Island. I didn't get out as much this time, though, since most of the vacation was spent playing multiplayer Minecraft.

I love how many different ways there are to play Minecraft, and that makes it even more fun to use a shared world and to play together when all the people playing are in the same room. People like doing different things; one will go exploring or set up animal pens and colored sheep, while another dives to level 8 and starts branch mining.

I got to indulge my favorite thing to do in Minecraft, which is to take the path down to the mine face through the local cavern system and smooth it out and beautify it, make it look intentional, and scatter little bits of art and balconies with good views throughout it. And all the materials that I needed for that (diamonds for good tools, lots of colored wool for decoration, glass for windows) just turned up from what other people were doing, so I could just focus on building for as long as I had new ideas.

The Minecraft playing will drop off a lot now that I'm back, sadly, since I have a huge backlog of things that I need to do and I have only one system capable of playing it (due to the 3D requirements). But hopefully I can continue to drop into a multiplayer world from time to time.

Anyway, just before I left, I put in another book order for things that I'm anxious to read, and that arrived while I was gone.

Ann Aguirre — Grimspace (sff)
Elizabeth Bear — ad eternum (sff)
Andre Norton — Forerunner (sff)
Bruce Schneier — Liars and Outliers (non-fiction)
Karl Schroeder — Ashes of Candesce (sff)
Peter Tyson — Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress (non-fiction)
Catherynne M. Valente — The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland (sff)

I'm now eight reviews behind (six books and two magazines), due to a wide variety of different factors. One goal for the next week is to do some serious catch-up.