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Quick update on boring things : a friend of mine went to bat for me at his place of business, which is hiring, and I have another interview this Saturday. We made a strong pitch for Stand Alone on Wednesday, and we're waiting to hear back on if they'll sign the contract, and Katie is doing a lot of work on personal commissions and commissions for a Flash-based MMO called Glitch.
Glitch went under a few days ago, leaving a bummed out community. Personally, we'll probably switch to Lord of the Rings Online because I already have an account, and I'll probably go back to writing and Minecrafting, but Kay already had contacted the owners of the game to determine if selling commissions based on their property was okay and got the go ahead. So, there's that. If you play Glitch and want a shrine of one or more giants, message me and we'll get you set up. We've mostly been asking for money to pay for materials, so they're not terribly pricey.
In my down time, of which I continue to have surprisingly little (though I do tend to count social obligations as busy time; nature of the game for me, I suppose), I had made a decision to read every book in the house that I hadn't read yet. Of my own, there were pretty few. Just ones that tended to stack up when I was still buying things, but I had always tended to buy then read as quickly as possible. I mean, I think I still need to read my Sartre and I don't think I ever finished Ian Banks' Surface Detail, but that could be it. But, well, I did move in with someone who worked at a book store. Between the two of us, our house is almost literally floor to ceiling books on most available walls.
My tendancy, when given no other marching orders, is usually to read in a line unless something particularly catches my eye. I mean, I'll get to all of it pretty soon, anyhow. Katie occasionally mentions that I should read something next, so there it goes. Some of the books are a little insipid; there was a 'geek logic' book that was a series of equations for determining your path of action that relied a little too heavily on weak steriotypes and slightly sexist humor, for example, that wasn't terrible but I felt pretty lucky that it was so easy to get through.
Others were really thought-provoking. I read Toure's "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?" and he really gave me a lot of food for thought, reminding me heavily of the interesting, occasionally uncomfortable conversations and lessons of my college instructors Prof. Redmond and Prof. Rambsy. These guys deeply influenced my thoughts on race and especially America as a whole, so in that vein, I heartily recommend Toure, as well.
Finishing Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" was literally the last thing that I did before hitting the lights last night. My good friend in literary arms, The Jenna, did not find it particularly good. In fact, she reserved a special kind of venomous intolerance for its contents, and while I consider her a good judge of textual character, I felt like it was pretty alright. It tries to hit a few too many points in its 400 pages and it's a little mean-spirited. The protagonist isn't an especially great human being, though neither is he irredeemable. Epic things happened, but the scope of the text itself wasn't epic at all, it was narrow and personal.
I feel like there's a reasonable chance that I'm going to come back and talk about the books I read in greater depth. Probably not all of 'em, since there's really too much and not all of them really deserve it? But this is my original bag, so it's good to be picking it up again and testing its heft.
Glitch went under a few days ago, leaving a bummed out community. Personally, we'll probably switch to Lord of the Rings Online because I already have an account, and I'll probably go back to writing and Minecrafting, but Kay already had contacted the owners of the game to determine if selling commissions based on their property was okay and got the go ahead. So, there's that. If you play Glitch and want a shrine of one or more giants, message me and we'll get you set up. We've mostly been asking for money to pay for materials, so they're not terribly pricey.
In my down time, of which I continue to have surprisingly little (though I do tend to count social obligations as busy time; nature of the game for me, I suppose), I had made a decision to read every book in the house that I hadn't read yet. Of my own, there were pretty few. Just ones that tended to stack up when I was still buying things, but I had always tended to buy then read as quickly as possible. I mean, I think I still need to read my Sartre and I don't think I ever finished Ian Banks' Surface Detail, but that could be it. But, well, I did move in with someone who worked at a book store. Between the two of us, our house is almost literally floor to ceiling books on most available walls.
My tendancy, when given no other marching orders, is usually to read in a line unless something particularly catches my eye. I mean, I'll get to all of it pretty soon, anyhow. Katie occasionally mentions that I should read something next, so there it goes. Some of the books are a little insipid; there was a 'geek logic' book that was a series of equations for determining your path of action that relied a little too heavily on weak steriotypes and slightly sexist humor, for example, that wasn't terrible but I felt pretty lucky that it was so easy to get through.
Others were really thought-provoking. I read Toure's "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?" and he really gave me a lot of food for thought, reminding me heavily of the interesting, occasionally uncomfortable conversations and lessons of my college instructors Prof. Redmond and Prof. Rambsy. These guys deeply influenced my thoughts on race and especially America as a whole, so in that vein, I heartily recommend Toure, as well.
Finishing Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" was literally the last thing that I did before hitting the lights last night. My good friend in literary arms, The Jenna, did not find it particularly good. In fact, she reserved a special kind of venomous intolerance for its contents, and while I consider her a good judge of textual character, I felt like it was pretty alright. It tries to hit a few too many points in its 400 pages and it's a little mean-spirited. The protagonist isn't an especially great human being, though neither is he irredeemable. Epic things happened, but the scope of the text itself wasn't epic at all, it was narrow and personal.
I feel like there's a reasonable chance that I'm going to come back and talk about the books I read in greater depth. Probably not all of 'em, since there's really too much and not all of them really deserve it? But this is my original bag, so it's good to be picking it up again and testing its heft.
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