author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

It's been a very slow Monday, full of distractions and laziness. Here are some of the things I've been distracted with:

Two Dots - It's an app for Android and iPhone. It is also a very addictive game. I downloaded Bluestacks specifically so I could play this app despite my lack of smartphone. Then I downloaded Windroye when an update to Two Dots proved glitchy on Bluestacks. "Why don't you just buy a tablet?" Well, for two reasons. One, perhaps quixotically, I want all my things to work on one device. Secondly, I'm not buying new hardware just to play a free game, darn it.

The nice thing about Two Dots is that lives regenerate at a rate of one per twenty minutes, which means the distraction has a limited lifetime. Use up your lives, get back to work. Except now that I've got it running on both Android emulators (having rolled back the update on Bluestacks so that it's not glitchy there), and each "device" generates and maintains a separate life count, the distraction's duration is potentially quite long.

I promise to be a lot more disciplined about it tomorrow, though.

Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and sequels - Overall, this series is rollicking good fun. What Douglas Adams did for traditional SF with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Fforde does here for English literature overall. It focuses on the classics, but it gets its licks in on all the genres. Fan fiction, vanity publishing, and the oral tradition are not forgotten either. The story takes place in a version of the U.K. which benefits/suffers from an alternate history to ours, undoubtedly because time travel shenanigans are going on all the time. Also interfictional shenanigans--characters commonly pass in between the real world and multiple fictional ones. The books have flaws, no doubt, but the ride overall is a good on. The plots are surprisingly tightly constructed. It's hard to put these books down even on the reread.

I have copies up through One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011), which book I am about to begin rereading. It's about time I picked up the next one, The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012). I just now tried to visit one of the websites advertised on the back of One of Our Thursdays is Missing but the domain, www.thursdaynext.com, appears no longer related to the book. One can get so behind the times.

"My father had a face that could stop a clock" is a first line that deserves to be considered in the company of all those other first lines. "The primroses were over." "Call me Ishmael." "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." "There was a boy named Eustace Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." Any first lines you like.

Reasoning with Vampires - Dana has a Tumblr. On that Tumblr, she dissects Twilight. She diagrams its sentences, critiques its commas, reminds us that sentences are not minivans, and scolds irrelevant parentheticals for interrupting the flow of the narrative--such as it is. She holds up for ridicule and horror those passages that best display everything that's wrong with the book's central romance. Might be the sort of blog that only a dedicated language geek could love, I don't know. I'm a fairly dedicated language geek. Gods forfend I ever abuse a comma again. (Whatcha doin' there, little comma?)

Dana's way with a line-edit makes me laugh out loud, sometimes for long uncontrollable minutes. Reading many posts in one sitting has a cumulative effect similar to I Can Has Cheezburger?--the funny bits are even funnier for having followed the funny bits before.

I got on a kick of rereading RwV from its very first post because Cleolinda, queen of Twilight recaps, recently livetweeted her experience reading the genderswapped follow-up Life and Death.

Hey, I never said my pastimes were particularly noble. I laugh a lot, though.

So... like I said, tomorrow I will be more disciplined. Especially since Friday I need to leave on a roller derby road trip at like 2 PM, which means all the Friday things need to be done done DONE by then. But today was Monday, and sometimes you get Distracted Niki on Mondays.