Permutation City Blog

A Japanese game that I was looking for for a while. It's got a weird backstory but that doesn't matter. All you have to do to win is roll a ball around. Everything that's smaller than your ball sticks to it, which makes the ball bigger. It starts small with pencils and ends up huge with supertankers and whole islands. Great fun.

The second of The Sandman Library this story sees Dream repairing damage done during his imprisonment. I'm particularly fond of the tale of Hob.

Another literary trick like A Void. Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that contains all the vowels. This book of the same name has five chapters named after the vowels. Each chapter is only allowed to use that particular vowel. They were all intelligable and surprising but some were difficult to follow. I think I'm going to give these book's of tricks a rest for a while.

Everything you wanted to know about chocolate: a history, manufacture, and worldwide variations.

The first of The Sandman Library this story introduces us to Dream of the Endless.

An account of the investigation, by Mr Whicher, of the Road House murder of 1860. There is historical information about the creation of the post of detectives, the investigation itself, and the massive media interest. With this crime it is never possible to be sure what actually happened, you only know what different people say happened.

This is a summary of everything they know about migraines, originally from the 1970s and updated in the 1990s. Comprehensive though it is they still don't really know why migraines happen or how to reliably stop them. Each individual may have different triggers, different symptoms, and a different regime to cope. Most interesting was how much goes on aside from the headache.

This is small story at about 90 pages. It's very familiar but I like it. It's well thought out, both the time travel component and the future worlds he visits. I particularly like the way the world rushes by when he's in the machine.

I've seen and read this story or versions of this story so many times. It's interesting to go back to the original and compare. Adaptations drop the character of the brother and just make it happen to the main character instead. References to the future seem out of place. They'd spoil the end if I didn't already know it. But hey, it is a classic.

A collection of scientific papers about the sense of smell and it's links to culture. The papers were many and different. Interesting notes included: the distinctions between rural and urban appreciation of smell interesting, a series of perfume reviews, odour as a representation of class difference.