An Rud A Lionas An Tsuil Lionann Se An Croi

Steampunk has come to Boston.  The Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation  in Waltham is currently  exhibiting  steam punk-inspired inventions and Boston-area fans have been coming out in full Victorian era regalia. The trend, which has picked up media coverage in  The Boston Globe , has become largely popular in this area. As graduate student Kimberly Burk said in an article from November, "Boston lends itself to steampunk. You have the MIT tinkerers, the co-ops in JP, the eco-minded folks.’’ For the Bostonians not quite ready and willing to squeeze into a corset or strap on a gas mask there is the aforementioned exhibit and increasingly popular steam punk literature. Scott Westerfeld's young adult novel  Leviathan  is an exciting and easy read for those who are curious about this latest fad. Leviathan , the first book of the series, takes place in a alternate-reality Europe at the beginning of the First World War. In this book the continen...

A guy I went to high school with passed away last Thursday. I didn't know him very well, but I always thought he was a good kid. He was hilarious, made seventh grade science class bearable, and an unbelievable athlete. He had an easy and boyish smile. He served our country in the Marines. And he was taken too soon. I was, I am , totally shocked by it. When our servicemen and women come home from deployments we think, That's it. They're safe. But it's things like this that remind me how fragile we are, and how fleeting life is. How one minute you can be there, and the next...you're gone. Elsewhere.  I read his facebook wall, all the comments that people have left and what he last wrote...it's strange, really. Our five-year reunion is approaching and he wrote on the group's wall that he would be unable to make it (due to deployment) but that we should have the party anyway, joking as always. But now those words have new meaning. It's eerie.  But there...

M.T. Andersen's  Feed  will scare you. Not in a Stephen King way, not even in a George Orwell or Aldous Huxley way, but it will scare you. Why? Because it's not far off. The novel, published in 2002, takes place in a future where the Internet, renamed "Feednet", is installed in the brains of America's people. Computers, television, iPods, cell phones, and all the technology familiar to readers is obsolete; the characters are able to chat with their friends and buy the latest clothes within their minds. The story begins with the main character, Titus, and his group of friends as they vacation on the Moon. The Moon, however, is not all it's cracked up to be, with Titus proclaiming that it "sucks" and that he wishes they had never gone there. This apathy is rife within the story, with flying cars and trips to Mars merely accepted. However, Titus' trip becomes more exciting when he and his friends and their new companion, Violet, become victims of a ...

A thousand thoughts went through my head as I watched the house burn down. How did this happen? What do we do now? All the Christmas presents. The books. Two days after Christmas I awoke to a shout of, "Christof's house is on fire!" We, his brothers, cousins, and myself, jumped out of bed, pulled our boots on, and ran down the hill to see the 30-year-old log cabin in flames. No one was hurt, thank God, but it was still numbing to watch all of our things, all of our memories, go up in smoke. My boyfriend has, had , an extensive book collection. Picture books, books on carpentry, classics, theological texts, architectural manuals, children's chapter books, and the occasional oddball novel. There were hundreds of books, no exaggeration, that had found a home in his house. I can think of no one else who has had (or who will ever have) a shelf where a biography of Walt Disney stands next to Cormac McCarthy's The Road . As cliched as ...

I am anything but brief. And I need to work on that. Lately I've been wanting to delve into the world of short stories, but I'm too monogamous - I can't create characters for a one story fling, I feel dirty and like a bad person. Stupid, I know, but sometimes us writer types are weird like that.  It seems like the only time I'm good at being brief is when I am (or, at least, think I am) being witty. You know, like in facebook statuses. I'm not the kind of person to write, "Ohh nooo all this snowww! It snowed like 2 feet OMG!" More like, "Today is the first day of April. It's been spring for about 2 weeks. It's fucking snowing." Or some random observation. Just spice things up a bit. Ok, I realize I'm tooting my own horn. I'll stop. The whole being brief thing has been bugging me (partly because I realize I don't know when to shut up and be concise when explaining things to people) as I've been editing and writing m...