Currently reading: In Fury Born

David Weber’s expanded reissue of Path of the Fury (now with more background information!).

I’d last read the orignal several years ago, so I think I’ve forgotten enough of the details to make the rewrite/reissue enjoyable. I’m not reading a physical copy, either; because it was released on one of the Baen CDs, it’s available for download as an ebook for free (!) over at the Fifth Imperium.

Which is an excellent place to get a huge percentage of Baen’s more popular series (at no cost to you), including all of John Ringo’s novels, most of David Weber’s (Honor Harrington and his other, shorter series as well), most of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series,  and several of Eric Flint’s (particularly his 1632/Ring of Fire series).

I’m reading the epub version on my iPhone using Stanza, and it’s pretty good. I can see why the Kindle is popular; I like having dozens of books in my phone, and if the battery life were longer, I’d like it even more.

That said, In Fury Born is a fun read so far; plenty of action, and I’m maybe ~20% into the book and haven’t yet gotten to where Path of the Fury began. The added material delves more into the main character’s backstory, instead of starting off in medias res.

Pointless trivia of the day: according to the afterword in one of his books, John Ringo was indeed named after that John Ringo.

I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire

Fallout 3, Bethesda’s revival of the classic post-nuclear-holocaust RPG borrows quite a bit from their Elder Scrolls game style, and less from the turn-based gameplay Black Isle Studios built the first two games in the series around.

After creating the main character, and playing through a short orientation section (set in the character’s childhood and adolescence), the game jumps forward to his (or her) late teens, when the player must leave the Vault in search of his father.

The Fallout games are all very much in the style of what everyone in the 50s believed a nuclear-powered future would be like, from the pulp sci-fi style rayguns to Robby the Robot style robots to Cold War style propaganda and posters.

Unlike the first two games, which were set in California, Fallout 3 is set in the ruins of and around Washington, D.C. (dubbed the Capitol Wasteland). While wandering around, sometimes the player will come across radios, and can listen to this song by The Ink Spots:

I didn’t think Cave Johnson had it in him…

But it looks like he actually did  get his engineers to invent a combustible lemon:

The lemon grenade (H/T Uncle)!

Is there anything science can’t do?