[Book] North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud

Book cover North American Lake Monsters is a collection of short horror or at least suspense stories.  One short, The Monsters of Heaven, won the Shirley Jackson Award, and this book is on its third printing. Several of the stories introduce a monster, but the monster itself is inactive ... in one case, already dead, leaving these stories to be more about the evil we bring with us where the monster is just a catalyst or even excuse for some all-too-human transition into bad behavior....

3 Oct 2018 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Book cover Since this is a non-fiction and educational book, I'm not going to worry about inadvertent spoilers as I usually do with fictional, or even narrative true-stories.  This book does have a narrative flow, better that a lot of the fiction books I've already reviewed, but it is the narrative flow of a documentary, moving from subject to subject, building knowledge. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the top science communicators alive today....

19 Sep 2018 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Tech/PC] VirtualBox, Windows 7 and a new CPU

As I've done from time to time, this blog serves as a bit of a bench-notes of what I did.  However, maybe someone else hits the same problem, and finds my blog via search. About a month back, the new nVidia 2080 Ti card was announced.  I decided to hit up eBay to see if anyone was selling off a 1080 Ti, and I was not disappointed in the price drops....

15 Sep 2018 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Leia, Princess of Aderaan by Claudia Gray

Book cover This book is a Star Wars story.  It takes place during Leia Organa's 16th year.  I would like to say that familiarity with the Star Wars universe isn't absolutely necessary, but I cannot be sure of that.  It is, at its base, an exhilarating and sometimes sad, coming of age story, where we see Leia grow from a teen who thinks she's all grown up, to a woman who knows she isn't quite there....

12 Sep 2018 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink