General Life Update

I have failed at blogging regularly as of late, but never fear! I've been working on lots of projects, just not ones I can post yet. In other words, we're nearing completion of all the perler bead sprite requests that spawned from Nathan's kickstarter, but I don't want to post them until they are in the hands of the owners. So expect some new Zelda, Breath of Fire, Earthbound, and more coming up! Plus I have a hankering to expand our Zelda wall, and I've come up with lots more ideas of stuff to make... including Portal turrets, experimenting with a 3D companion cube, Secret of Mana, Super Mario Kart, Wario's Woods, and some Earthbound sprites of our own... I guess my last post was way off, saying I was nearly done. :)

In other news, I finished reading all the Hugo nominees for this year, with the exception of Dance with Dragons because I didn't want to read the 3 books before it I haven't read yet in the series. (Game of Thrones was really good but I think I'll leave that series to those that prefer the dark gritty fantasy.) Here are my favorites, now that voting is closed (not that I could vote anyway, since we sold our tickets):

For my favorite novel nominee, Among Others by Jo Walton - I'd never heard of it but I really enjoyed it a lot. Deadline was my second favorite, but then, I picked Feed (to which Deadline is a sequel) for my favorite last year, so... not surprising. The rest were meh. (Except I didn't read Dance with Dragons so I can't comment on that one.)

For best novella, I really enjoyed "Kiss Me Twice" by Mary Robinette Kowal and "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson. The rest were all pretty good too, though I don't think I'll ever really "get" anything written by Cat Valente. My favorite novelette by far was "Ray of Light" by Brad Torgersen, and my favorite short story was "Movement" by Nancy Fulda.

I have also read Redshirts, The Long Earth, and The Hollow City recently, all of which I enjoyed. I just started Brent Weeks (The Way of Shadows) today, and I'm liking that so far as well.

I beat Final Fantasy VI finally (I tend to putter around a lot as I approach the end of long RPG's) and plan on replaying Link to the Past next. Other than that, it's just life as usual - work, kitchen experiments, staying up too late, and trying to do the best I can.