Planet Binder

Island of the Sequined Love Nun is a novel I will confess to buying solely because of the name.  Names, actually.  One name was the title, which was titillating, and the other name was that of Christopher Moore.  I’d previously enjoyed his novel Lamb and so I was interested in reading others by him.  This is the first other one I’ve read and it did not disappoint.

It’s a small scale picaresque of a lovable loser who is driven from scene to scene by the actions of others until he has finally had enough and then his will drives him from scene to scene.  There’s quite a bit to like in this book, from a naked bitch goddess to a cautious and thoughtful tribe chief, from a cannibal to a fruitbat.  This is a fun, fast-paced romp which even has a couple sex scenes, neither one with much romance to it.

Things I liked about this book

• good pacing, chapters weren’t any longer than they needed to be
• a naked drunk petty goddess
• the presentation of an exotic location
• a Brooklyn descended post-mortal protector

Who might like this book

• people who think that Tim Powers is too serious when he writes about spooky cults
• people who’ve always wondered what happens to people who cross Texas matrons
• fans of pilots
• fans of cannibals

Who might not like this book

• men with castration anxiety
• sharks
• strict realists who are looking for a wholesome morally uplifting snore-fest

Sometimes I find myself typing something over and over in a bash window and even with tab-completion, it’s still boring and tedious, in a sort of first-world no-one-is-killing-me fashion. But it’s still more work than I want to be doing, as a terminally lazy softcase. So I wrote a little one-off script to do the work for me. Like so:


#!/bin/bash

echo Indexing $2 as level $1/$3
if [ ! -d by-start-level/$1 ];
then
mkdir by-start-level/$1
fi
cd by-start-level/$1
ln -s “../../$2″ ./$3
cd -

The effect I’m going for here is to end up with a symlink farm of files, indexed by minimum character level.  Pulling that out of the files themself is more work than I wanted to do, but it’s easy enough to open a file, eyeball grep out a number, and then call the script with the original name, character level and destination short name.  As a side-effect I can group otherwise unrelated files thematically.  So I can have a set of adventures designed for 5th level characters with a short handle of run_this_next-1, run_this_next-2 or use-these-maps-4 or whatever.