Sweet merciful crap. I just finished Chung Kuo, David Wingrove's enormo-series. Or rather I thought I finished it. Turns out there's an eighth book.
These books actually have a few things to recommend them, but not nearly enough for me to recommend them to you. To be honest, they suck. The man recycles characters shamelessly, descends into some of the worst clichés I've ever seen, and worst of all, uses the word "sex" to refer to character's genitals (as in "his sex" or "her sex". Try a few examples on your own, you'll see how retarded it is). Seriously, I've seen better sex scenes in the Stories sections of free pr0n sites.
Why the hell do I keep reading them then? Why would I waste at least a day per book for this garbage?
I started the series in eighth grade, more than ten years ago, and for a while I read each of them as they came out. I don't know why I stopped, maybe I couldn't afford them anymore, but I did. Then a couple of years ago my brother sent me Gormenghast as a gift. It's by Mervyn Peake, and even though it gets better near the end, it ranks as the worst novel I've ever read. But I finished it. Even though I tried to put it down a few times, but I couldn't stand not knowing what happened. I read all twelve hundred pages worth of it.
It was kind of an epiphany. I've been fishing through the central branch of our library system here, trying to find out if some of the series I never finished reading are still available. It's like an itch. Imagine you've had an itch for so long that you don't even notice it any more. Now imagine how thoroughly satisfying it would be to scratch it.

Bandwidth! Sweet, sweet bandwidth...how I've missed it.
I finally called my old PC out of retirement, dug out a couple of Plug-n-Play NICs, and cobbled together a decent firewall/router. For those of you wanting to do this shit, there're a couple of things you'll want to know.
First, older network cards are better network cards. If you can find PnP cards, they're the shit...they take a huge amount of the aggravation out of setting up your ethernet interfaces.
Second, if you're rocking the DSL action, head over to Roaring Penguin and grab the text version of their PPPoE package. It beats the hell out of anything that ships with most Linux distributions.
Third, Bastille. Everyone should be running this. Plus, the wizard-style set-up is a nice touch.
Since I set this up, my connection is far more stable, FIVE TIMES FASTER (since I'm not behind ICS anymore), and I've regained the ability to use HTML forms...meaning I can blog from my own computer again. Still no job, still no cure for cancer, but at least it's something.

The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology I was reading suddenly switched almost entirely to stories dealing with the second world war when I picked it up this morning. More than three quarters of what I read today was either speculative or historical fiction dealing with that period.

You know those people who do nothing but post about how much their life sucks? I hate those people, which is why there hasn't been a whole bunch of fresh content up in this piece lately.
Look for the debut of several new areas in the next few weeks, and a completely new site within a month or so, provided I can't hook up a job.