Though with Google+ around, it’s tough to see support for Google Wave continuing too long now, and it will be missed. Here’s a set of the top 5 links from the last week from very mraaking wave. Some are NSFW–probably the minecraft one as well because if you start playing it may not be safe for your worklife for a couple weeks.
a collection of henti word bubbles. Another gif that keeps on giving.
From a few years back:
To whomever left the stack of old Dreadstar comics in the 3rd floor men’s room…
At first I laughed at them. But during my restroom visits over the past few weeks I have come to appreciate and enjoy the adventures Of Vanth Dreastar, Oedi the cunning cat-man, Iron Angel, and the rest of this rag-tag crew of space-adventurers. Plus I think the reading is keeping me ‘regular’.
So please bring in more issues, preferably where the other one’s left off. I want to see how Vanth and Co are going to destroy the fat green guy they just mistakenly made ruler of the universe.
I’ve known about this series for a long time now but never picked it up until last week spurned on by the “get to it before Hollywood does” mantra. I’ve had my doubts as so much fantasy in book form is just absolute tripe. Fafrd and The Grey mouser, Elric stuff, LoTR, Wizard of Earthsea and a couple of the Warhammer novels (I think actually only Konrad) is all I’ve been able to stomach from the genre. I don’t count John Gardner’s Grendel as that falls so far into the literature realm that it’s not even in the Fantasy section in bookstores.
As for Game of Thrones, The first couple chapters are rather weak, especially the prologue, and I felt I was getting into a generic fantasy novel the exact opposite of what I want to be wasting my very limited reading time on. This year so far I’ve read Suttree, Blood Meridian (for the second time) and The Far Side of the World (book 10 of the Master and Commander series). Except for the last one, those are some weighty acts to follow. Certainly, Game of Thrones is not literature, and you won’t be wowed by Hardy-esque descriptions of the Winterfell environs, or challenged by post modern discourses on language, but by chapter 3, the vast number characters, subplots and plots began unfolding and you realize sheer scale, and it really starts to rock and roll. The pacing is excellent and I think that’s what’s going to keep me reading. If I can squeeze in a chapter here and there– things happen and happen fast.
As for the show– it’s gotten glowing reviews from both critics and the impossible to please fans. I’m rarely one to say anything I read is great (except for say, Blood Meridian or Grendel; which are simply titans of modern literature) but Game of Thrones is solid stuff that ha yet to ring my cheese-bag fantasy bell.
And there it goes, my main gaming rig (I have a win2k box in the basement for the old stuff…. so much good old stuff….) died this weekend and it simply has to be replaced, what with the computer desk I just got a few weeks back. I’ve been waiting for awhile to get a new one and here is the perfect excuse. Honestly I think it’s just the power supply, but really, the socket 939 has got to be put out to pasture. The rig served me well since late 2006 with long hours of Oblivion, UT3, Mount and Blade, Fallout, BF 2142 and allowing me to play through the single player of BFBC2 stretching to the limit it’s capabilities with only one video card upgrade.
Needless to say I haven’t gotten any computer gaming this past week at all, and I’m going to start feeling withdrawal symptoms soon– a week with no Torchlight? No Shogun Total War 2 Demo? And what will my Caribbean beer empire do without me in Port Royale? My biggest issue with getting a new rig is that I have no more excuses not to spend a heap of cash and months on Starcraft 2, or splurge on Crysis 2, Bulletstorm and shortly, Brink. Mraaak!
I really am not a fan of politics– as a history buff, it gets all too cyclical for me at times. However, I took a listen to Dan Carlin’s Common Sense this afternoon for the first time and it deals quite a bit with the attack on public sector unions, teachers and the like by Wisconsin’s corporatist-cunt-in-residence-governor, but more importantly, America’s failure to manage it’s decline properly (a theme Dan Carlin has focused on in a couple of his history podcasts in the last year). Good stuff and worth a listen certainly, especially since it’s explicitly centrist. I for one think Wisconsin deserves what it gets for how it’s people voted last year. Though, how can you stop a group from collectively bargaining? They can strike or have sit ins or marches– you can’t stop it no matter how you legislate it. What are you going to do? Put all the teachers in the state in jail? Can they be replaced by Chinese workers making $.50 per hour?
Dan Carlin continues his fan-historian run down of the decline of the Roman Republic in part 2 of the Death Throes of the Republic.
Well the western obsession as an escape from the realities of the first month having two kids continues unabated. As tough it was to find, I tracked a slightly worn copy of Blood Meridian down a few weeks back and read it. While not a huge fan of westerns, I took a Western literature class in college that started with The Virginian (of course) and ended with a few post-modern Indian novels. Why the prof didn’t have us read Blood Meridian I will never know as it’s one of the best books I’ve read, and possibly the best picaresque (I know, I know–what can top Unfortunate Traveler?). In trying to piece together the ending I stumbled upon this two part lecture by a Yale Professor for what looks like a freshman lit survey course. While they dig into the book something fine, the lectures thankfully do not get into the sad and rather pathetic mental masturbationist textual analysis I suffered through in a few classes, wherein the professor spends a majority of the time dealing with what other professors have written about other professors writings about the text in literary journals (in exclusionary language no less) rather than the book itself. What’s more, there’s apparently a movie in the works.
Though I knew of Ellis’s writings in high school and college as some random drama books the girls liked, he wasn’t on my radar at all until Glamorama which, being a big William S. Burroughs fan, was right in my wheelhouse and I have gobbled up everything he’s written since (except Lunar Park). That said, I ripped through the 165 page Imperial Bedrooms over the last couple nights, not even realizing until 20 pages in that it was a sequel and while I don’t remember the Less than Zero movie, I remember even less if I read the book or not. I think you could get away easily with knowing of the old movie and book and that’s quite enough. I’m certainly no modern literary critic, but I would compare the writing to McCarthy’s The Road (both are essentially a series of journalistic vignettes) and After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson. For all the weight of ‘automatically’ being literature anything Ellis puts out, I found it just a really solid pulp noir mystery novel– with the obligatory scenes of violence, torture and murder all thoroughly described rather than implied as Ellis’s M.O. demands. Ellis is awesome at creating and maintaining the creeping dread until always delivering with a crescendo of horrific violence and while his characters are people who rarely feel anything at all, he’s greatly aware that his readers have feelings and are both dreading and greatly looking forward to the decent into madness his plotlines roll into. It was a little short, and since not all of the main characters have been tortured to death yet, I bet there’s another one with this same group– but if he waits 25 years again they’ll all be flaccidly in the old folks home. Good Stuff!
