Bad news: Tornado watch until 4am or thereabouts.

Good news: Ginchy thunderstorm which allowed me to stupidly go out on the porch and snap off pictures until I caught some lightning. Man, I’m an idiot. The lights in the foreground, incidentally, are my neighbor’s house.

Nothing makes me want to go out and strangle a cat more than writing up a long entry only to have something go horribly wrong and to lose it all while uploading. Say what you will about the typewriter age, but that, at least, never happened.

So, Adam R., rather than responding to your e-mailed question about whether I use Internet filters on Athena’s computer in great and substantive length, you’re going to have to settle for the super-brief response:

1. No Internet filters, because they’re a stupid idea.
2. Instead we talk about what’s appropriate for her to see and what’s not.
3. At the moment it’s not too much of an issue because currently her Internet interest is limited to a small handful of age-appropriate sites.

You’ll have to trust me that the longer response was both more interesting and rather better, but since at the moment what I really want to do with my computer is to put my foot through it, this is going to have work for you for now. Sorry about that.

It’s the third review in the column here; Ian McDonald’s River of Gods and Christoper Moore’s A Dirty Job are also reviewed. Good company.

The reviewer Michael Berry gives TGB a positive review and also says, “it will be interesting to see whether Scalzi ventures into a new fictional universe with his next novel.” As it happens, yes; The Android’s Dream is not set in the Old Man universe at all, and neither are the books planned for after The Last Colony. It’s that whole “don’t want to put all of one’s eggs into one basket” thing.

It’s the third review in the column here; Ian McDonald’s River of Gods and Christoper Moore’s A Dirty Job are also reviewed. Good company.

The reviewer Michael Berry gives TGB a positive review and also says, “it will be interesting to see whether Scalzi ventures into a new fictional universe with his next novel.” As it happens, yes; The Android’s Dream is not set in the Old Man universe at all, and neither are the books planned for after The Last Colony. It’s that whole “don’t want to put all of one’s eggs into one basket” thing.