This morning, I realized something:
I’m wasting away my goddamn life.
But the rerun of that episode of The Office where Oscar (spoiler warning) comes out of the closet had just started, and I had only eaten two bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios. Plus it was still five minutes to noon, and I hadn’t showered, and who in the right mind sets goals for themselves before noon?
Honestly now.
So I watched The Office and ate a bunch of Cheerios1 and showered, and having accomplished that much, I decided that a nap and some video games2 were much deserved.3
That was my day. How was yours?
Hey, you know what’s really fucking disgusting? Chocolate fucking Cheerios. There cannot possibly be a god while CFCs are in production. ↩
Here are some video game reviews: 1) Final Fantasy XIII: Remarkably Japanese. 2) Dreamfall: The Longest Journey: They should make more. 3) Mass Effect: The soundtrack is called, Holy Cow, We’re Spacemen: Variations on a Theme. 4) Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney: An authentic simulation of a fictional and nonsensical court system. ↩
Holy cow, that’s kind of a lot of video games. Lest I sink too far to That Side again, I am counterweighting digital media with an equal amount of wood pulp media. Neal Stepenson’s oeuvre takes up the biggest percentage of the to-do stack – not really because I love him so much that I bought all his books, but mostly because he just doesn’t know when to shut up. (Pretty sure 1000 pages is his target length theses days.) Funny (not funny) thing about Cryptonomicon, which I finished last week: I first read it in sixth grade (after reading Snow Crash and loving it because it was about internet ninjas and that was awesome, and anyway I’m probably not going to force myself to read Snow Crash again any time soon), again in seventh, a third time in tenth, and it is only on this, the fourth reading, that I finally realize how profoundly little I understood of the book, to such an extent that I sort of wonder if, all those times before, I hadn’t actually read any words but instead let my eyes glide over them while feeling like a tremendously superior asswipe for reading such a thick book. Anyway, Cryptonomicon is a pretty good read if you’re into crypto and/or technology and you can overlook the fact that Stephenson’s characters aren’t so much people as they are vehicles for upcoming lectures/debates/technological inquiries/sex scenes. (Sidenote: having finished Cryptonomicon several days before starting Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I can say that Girl’s treatment of high tech is, unsurprisingly, utterly laughable. Plus Larsson throws in so many brand namedrops to look cool and relevant [at one point he mentions a Mac program called Notepad and then parenthetically cites the website], but nowadays it all sounds old and dated. [Which is sort of a problem in Crypto, which I mention below, but Stephenson never goes so far as to namedrop real products. Although his use of “Finux” really, really pushes it.] And Lisbeth Salander makes Amy Shaftoe look fucking Shakespearean in terms of characterization. But I got excited and kept reading it and then bought the second in the series, which is probably the nicest thing you can say about a thriller. So Stieg Larsson’s ghost is probably happy about that.) It’s also pretty strange from a modern standpoint in that it discusses some thoroughly modern and relevant issues (online privacy being the really obvious one), and yet there are these really weird moments where Stephenson’s all like, “Look, a palm-sized computer with global internet access! What a cool and largely speculative technology!” and you’ll be all like, “You mean an iPhone?” Anyway, more on this later. ↩
