Daily Blog Thingie
Early to bed and early to rise.  Went to bed (crashed) at 9:30pm, and after dozing fitfully for a while, got up at 7:30am.  Longest I've slept in months, and feeling pretty good other than my right side, which is still throbbing.  Have to sit here sort of leaning over to the left, and I just took a couple of Advil and got an ice pack.  Strained muscles, over stretched by me the last two days, inflamed by the Tiger's Balm, and now they are angry.

It only hurts when I sit upright.

The continuing saga of IsItGermanOrSwiss.com?

So it turns out that both those quotes yesterday were German, even though the hot or not site initially mentioned is Swiss.  More from maik, who mails when he's bored at work.

Switzerland, languages: German (Official), French, Italian, Roman => Our official language is german, the same german the germans speak. 

We do have our own "language", the swiss german, but that's not an official language, so it isn't used in books, newspapers, internet sites etc. it's only used in conversations and personal mail/letters etc. There's also no official gramar for swiss german, and it is used so differently in the different regions that I (living in the north of switzerland) don't understand a word from one living in the south west. (well, and then there are the ppl that only speak italian and/or french, which doesn't really make communication easier....)

And the 2 passages you posted on your mainsite are both german.

Being as my original quote from the HotorNot page was, "A similar page in German can be seen here" it seems I was correct all along, at least about the language, with my only error assuming that since the language was German and the models Teutonic, the site was German as well.  That's the problem with language and nationality being the same word for so many countries; easily leads to confusion.

Looking at the site stats, I had my first referral hit ever, the first entry to the site from other than a direct entry, or from one of the posts on the D2 site forums. It came from http://www.gbase.ch/forum/topic.asp, which isn't a live link anymore, tragically enough.  Odd there's not a single search engine hit yet.  I should mail my ass to a bunch of blog sites, maybe get some linkage that way.  I need to make a couple of buttons too.

It would probably be better, more satisfying (in the long run), if I didn't try to advertise at all, and just let the site grow in popularity by incremental jumps, word of mouth and such.  But satisfaction is overrated, and so is delaying gratification.

First read the Barker one years ago, and it didn't do much for me then, and had the same effect now. It's a children's book, sort of a fable, and as such has no gore or sex or much in the way of adult communication, that he does so well in his other work.  Doesn't do much for me as a kid's book either, but it's not bad.  I feel no need to own it though.  I regard Barker as the best horror writer ever, as you'll see on my Horror Review Page, so I'd like to like all of his work, if possible.

The other two novels were both good.  Hopefully everyone has read Ender's Game by now, it's probably the best sci fi novel ever written, in the opinion of many readers.  Most enjoyable one to read, at any rate. The second book in the series, often packaged in with Ender's Game, is Speaker for the Dead, which I now think is a better novel than Ender's Game.  When I first read them both at like 14, Speaker bored me, and Ender was the bomb, with all of the action and intrigue.  However with maturity the quality of plot and writing and interesting action in Speaker seems more impressive.  So you get the better novel vs. more fun to read novel, and it's hard to pick which.

In any event, both get my highest recommendation. Nothing in the rest of the series is as good, though there is a lot of very interesting stuff going on. Species colliding, lots of very intelligent higher level thinking, in terms of how species will interact, political maneuvering, etc. I should probably do a Misc Novelists page and discuss them there, and add some other books, since it's not like I only read Fantasy and Horror.

The Ender series takes a weird fork, since as it continues, Xenocide and Children of the Mind are the 3rd and 4th books, and those follow Ender, 3000 years after the events in the first two novels.  Then the 5th and 6th in the series, Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon, are back in the years right after the first two novels. So you know how things in this time turn out, more or less, from stuff in Speaker for the Dead, the second novel.  But the actual events are still fascinating, and it's become a sort of military history of the future, with the entire world at war and various factions trying to unite or conquer.  There are still two books in the series to come after Shadow of the Hegemon, which will wrap up the events of that time.  I've not read the 4th book, which is the last one in the 3000 years into the future timeline; the library never has it. And the 7th book should be out soon, (if it's not already) since 6th was in early 2000.  Anyway, if I do another novelist review page I'll include this series in more detail.

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