This is a post about music and books. If that doesn't interest you, press page down now.

New Rules For Boats
New Rules For Boats are a local Perth band that formed in about 2004. I remember hearing them once after reading about them in The Pelican (UWA's student newspaper) and then seeing them somewhere. They were pretty cool (and had a pretty awesome name). They released an EP that I never bought.


A couple of months ago they were getting a stack of airtime RTRFM with newer stuff that I really enjoyed and a little while back they also played at the UWA Tavern. I ended up impulse purchasing both EPs. I'd never heard some of the tracks on these EPs, they'd never played on the radio. Strangely enough these are probably my favourites.

A couple of weeks back they released their first album (I actually missed the launch). I got a copy of it and I've been listening to it over the weekend. It's not bad, but some of the songs are different versions of those on the EPs and I prefer the EP versions more.

So yeah, if you want to listen to some awesome Australian indie rock/pop, check them out. You can hear some tunes on their Myspace and order the CDs online from JB Hifi (and probably other places). If you're local and not madly writing a thesis right now, you can also catch them live from time to time.

Books
I haven't mentioned the last two books that I've read yet.

I was browsing in a bookstore when I came across a volume called Dark Alchemy, advertising itself as a collection of short works of modern fantasy, including stories by Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix and Orson Scott Card. To me this seemed like a good enough reason to buy it. As it turns out, the stories by Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix and Orson Scott Card were all quite excellent, but with one or two other gems most of the rest of the collection was disappointing. Some actually descended into a realm of narrative usually reserved for Mary-Sue quality fan-fiction.

I'd not read anything by Charles Stross, but James A lent me Accelerando a cyberpunky exploration of post-human society. I don't know if you could call it "hard" sci-fi, but in general the technology seemed vaguely plausible. Richard Stallman gets a name drop, as does Python. Besides this book actually being reasonably awesome, Stross has made it freely available on the Interweb under a Creative Commons license. I picked up another book of his last week while I was in town, Iron Sunrise, but I discovered that I'd accidentally purchased a sequel.