slimepsychic

Excellent book that changed my perspective on relationships inside and outside of work.

An enjoyable hard-boiled detective graphic novel. I didn't feel like the story diverged enough from it's ilk to make it stand out.

This book has some fine mech illustrations and the ideas are there but it's part of the 1 ... 2 ... Poof! School of drawing instruction. Start with blobs, draw them straighter, done! A fully detailed robot has been realized from start to finish.

I didn't read this per se, but perused it quite a bit. There's a lot of information that could be considered, “Old School” but that was part of the appeal for me.

I really enjoyed this compilation of audio lectures. I'm not a huge fan of books on tape, etc, but this was good to listen to in the car. It's entirely possible that I'd listen to it again in the future.

It's a fun and quick read, though it didn't thrill me.

The Moebius part was great, the non-Parable part felt tacked on.

Doing the right thing used to suck. In 2004 I left my aspirations of being a full time web designer behind. At the time techniques like the ones described in Responsive Web Design were possible but IE6 had no support for this stuff and held too much sway.

Responsive Web Design puts these methods together and because of the browser landscape of today it can put them to good use too. More than that he steps back from the technical side and ponders how this understanding can affect out design patterns. A great book for someone fluent in CSS.

Thanks to prior editions of Dungeons & Dragons being released under an Open Gaming License and the work of Proctor there is a resurgence of popularity in the roots of Role-playing Games and a lot of new material is being released. Labyrinth Lord is essentially a clone of the Basic/Expert D&D rules that were immensely popular in the 1980's - if you see something about D&D's popularity in the 80's it's related to the Basic/Expert rules.

What started out as a nostalgic reopening of my old school D&D materials quickly morphed into a full-blown Labyrinth Lord game - not using the D&D materials at all. Labyrinth Lord is well written and well organized and I found myself picking it up exclusively and not bothering to look up rules in my D&D books.

It's an interesting prospect - a do-over of an immensely popular game that grabs at the nostalgic heartstrings all while offering a game that became so popular because it was relatively easy to play. For example: Stonehell Dungeon - a third-party book compatible with Labyrinth Lord (and thus D&D). While it harkens back to the old-school roots of D&D it's fully new and has the chance to take all the lessons about adventure and dungeon design from the past 30+ years and create something wholly new. It's old and new at the same time.

I will save my review of it for another time but I must also mention the Advanced Edition Companion which essentially revives the rules from the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. If you are not familiar - the publishers of D&D had two different games released at the same time - Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. They had similarities but were intended to be separate projects and incompatible. Over the course of the years they became more and more different and even at the beginning quite a few tweaks were necessary to bring AD&D elements into D&D. What Proctor does with the AED is truly remarkable. He decided to make the Advanced Edition Companion fully compatible with Labyrinth Lord. This means if you like you can pick and choose elements of AED and plug them into the rule system of LL. One thing that you might do - in Labyrinth Lord a player can choose to be an elf, dwarf, or halfling but cannot choose their class, e.g. - you cannot be an elven thief. AD&D changed this so that a player could pick a race and a class. So the AED is terrific because it allows one to simply bring that idea back into Labyrinth Lord (and thus D&D) without committing to the entire Advanced rule system. I mention AED because when I discovered this it dawned on me that Proctor approached Labyrinth Lord with passion and intelligence - this isn't merely knockoff product but a masterwork in itself.

There are a few versions out there - the PDF version (which I am reviewing here) which is free and contains no artwork, the PDF version with artwork (which is currently $6), as well as paperback and hardcover editions available from Lulu.

This book gave me a great overview of what I was missing in my site planning skills, planning content and working with it structurally, as well as from a marketing perspective. I found some of the book hard to get through - I think the second chapter - and almost gave it up. I think part of it is I was expecting a lighter book - the other two A Book Apart books have pictures, video, code, and examples. The Elements of Content Strategy is about the same length but packed full of text.

This book contains some sort of mind-altering chemical in it's pages. In the following days I've wondered what wabi-sabi web design would look like, if Lady Gaga is a wabi-sabi pop star, and wandering around my home admiring the cracks and inconsistencies in my old apartment. I loved the comparisons to modernism, as well as the bullet-point list of what wabi-sabi is about. This work stands in stark contrast to the vague descriptions I've read elsewhere, without invalidating the built-in vagueness of wabi-sabi itself.

I don't buy books until I've already read them and know I'll love them, and I'll be buying this one.

I have been writing HTML for a long while and I'm familiar with the glacial pace of the W3C. For that reason I simply ignored the ongoing progress toward version 5 of HTML.

I should have waited longer. This book was well written and easy to understand for those with a basic understanding of HTML as it is now. Unfortunately a lot of the whiz-bang features working their way into HTML5 aren't supported well enough to implement. A lot. Reading this was kind of like propping your friend up on your shoulders so he can see over the construction fence and describe the unfinished work to you.

An excellent overview on the current state of CSS3. The book focuses on the CSS3 features that are supported by most up-to-date browsers today and how to use them in a inessential way – ensuring not to break anything for older browsers.I'd consider myself of intermediate to advanced understanding of CSS and had no problem understanding everything in the book though I had never used CSS3 prior to reading this. Those who are beginners might try [b:Zen of CSS Design 565 The Zen of CSS Design Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) Dave Shea http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157058871s/565.jpg 4821] followed by [b:CSS Mastery 563 CSS Mastery Advanced Web Standards Solutions Andy Budd http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157058871s/563.jpg 4819].

I'm not vegan, but interested in making some kick-ass seitan. I was looking for [b:Cooking With Seitan 1701182 Cooking with Seitan The Complete Vegetarian Barbara Jacobs http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187107395s/1701182.jpg 1698226] in the library and stumbled across this. This book is one of the most amazing cookbooks I've read. The Seitanic Jambalaya and the Lower-fat Deep Chocolate Bundt cake were huge hits. I don't feel like I'm missing out on something (read: cheese) when I eat these recipes. The other great thing is that, of the recipes I've made, all of the items are available at Whole Foods. PS- the seitan in this book ends up being great in the recipes but my hands-down favorite recipes for making seitan come from [b:La Dolce Vegan 48313 La Dolce Vegan! Vegan Livin' Made Easy Sarah Kramer http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170353362s/48313.jpg 47266]!

This cookbook contains the best seitan recipe I've found, and five or so recipes for flavoring that have not disappointed. Worth the price of admission alone. There's also a great, basic scrambled tofu recipe.

Amazing. A superhero story set in the 1890's with characters from classic stories. Even Oliver Twist was represented.

To get the most of this book you need to copy the styles presented in order to learn. Simply reading the book straight through will likely not result in learning much.

A terrific look into the life and work of my favorite Children's book illustrator. Half of the book is an overview of his life and half is a look into his process. The most fruitful page for me was where it went over his method of coloring and the paints he used, even what colors they were.

This book didn't blow my mind as I had read a bit about Richard Scarry (all I could find, actually) online before I had read this. It's nice to have it all in one place, and from reliable sources (the two publishers he worked with all his life).

This was a quick and fun pep talk book.

The illustrations were cool. The book reads from right to left, as does most manga, but inexplicably the introduction is printed at the back (what would be the front if it were a typical book). I read through the whole thing and was completely confused. If I had read the introduction I would have had the right frame of mind – Yokoyama apparently creates “serial images” that are as divorced from human emotions as possible; a temporal painting of sorts. Sounds cool... I wish that is how I read it. Instead it was a lot of cool but confusing panels.

I was disappointed that the stories here were often incomplete – many of the Batman Manga that exists is in poor condition and many stories are missing pages. That, plus the fact that it was originally in a foreign language, makes for some confusing story telling. It's often funny but ultimately a let–down. I can tell it was a project of love but ultimately it would have been better as a website with scans of the original works, not a big and incomplete book.

Prior to reading:I would recommend reading a book about Tarot (such as [b:The Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot 680918 Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot Rachel Pollack http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1177099374s/680918.jpg 667311] and then [b:The Book of Thoth 243001 The Book of Thoth A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians (Equinox III 5) Aleister Crowley http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173059843s/243001.jpg 836251] (companion to the Thoth Tarot). Also watch the Alan Moore documentary. I cannot help but think that he was in the middle of writing Promethea while being interviewed. The story (particularly in later volumes) will make a lot more sense and there will be a lot to pick up on, both in the writing and the illustrations.

Another graphic novel I liked the idea of but felt it was a little flat. There are multiple mythic stories of floods here, each with unique settings and characters... but it skipped around too much to really submerge me into something meaningful.

I'm on the fence about this book. On one hand it was terrific to see these characters re-imagined in another time and place. But I felt the beginning of the story was a bit slow and in the end I was left wishing it would have been a little deeper. In all it was fun.

I couldn't make it through the last part of the book. It was a really long and not excitingly illustrated poem of Lovecrafts. I feel like the first story was the best and that my interest quickly declined thereafter.