Month: December 2005

Hi there, I just got off the phone with Giancarlo and he was telling me about his new book about getting what (and who) you want with the power of Witchcraft. Yes, I said Witchcraft. But not the bad kind that brings violent and negative effects in your life. It’s the helpful, spiritual way of the matter. It teaches you how to use easy spells and 5 minute rituals to bring more abundance, love, health and joy to your life. Anyway, he told me about the amount of copies he was selling on a daily basis and (after my jaw absolutely dropped) I was convinced we are in the middle of a ‘magic revolution’. He has many ecstactic customers writing testimonials and words of praise to him every day… He doesent know how long he can offer this book because he has to limit the number of copies, so I wanted to make sure you had your chance to read it before its gone. I am SURE you will love it 🙂

I also find, on the occasion that I do have something worth jotting down, that book margins often don’t afford me enough space for decent notes. I carry with me at (almost) all times a small Moleskin notebook, which I find serves my purposes much better. That’s where I write down thoughts, or reference pages I’d like to remember later. Most of the reading I do is on the train to and from work, and the sometimes bumpy ride and not infrequent lack of seats can make for some sloppy handwriting. I’d much rather have that sort of thing in a notebook, where I can edit after the fact, than in the margins, where it can make an inky mess of the page and make future readings simply difficult.

As far as dogearing pages go, I hate the whole idea. I like bookmarks, and if I want to remember an earlier page or section, I write it down. There’s always the index-card-as-bookmark, which I think is a happy medium between marginalia and a notebook. Write on the card as you go and keep that in the book when you’re done.

Any thoughts? What do you do when you read?

Fans of [Philip K.] Dick, [Samuel R.] Delany, and their ilk warn neophytes not to read too many of their books too quickly: Doing so, as this reader can attest, tends to result in pronounced feelings of irreality, paranoia, and angst.

Tell that to one of my English professors in college, who assigned no less than three Dick novels in his science fiction course^*.

Games:

• Flash required:
  • The Dark Complex and the earlier The Dark Room [via]
  • Samorost 2 and the earlier Samorost [via]
  • Build a Robot [via]
  • Drifts [via]
  • Christmas tree GROW game [via]
  • Levers [via]
• Other:
  • News of an unofficial King’s Quest sequel [via]
  • Comic Book/Strip board games [via]

Politics:

• George W. Bush’s iPod — the man can barely figure out “shuffle.” How can he be expected to understand complex concepts like the Constitution? (Also: Cheney and his iPod) [via]
• Two from Gawker:
  • Valerie Flame Hot Sauce: “It’ll blow your cover.”
  • Poor Bill O’Reilly. Even Fox News is going with “Happy Holidays”
• Oakland Tribune collecting copies of George Orwell’s 1984 to send to members of Congress, the President and Vice President. They certainly need a refresher course on what kind of society they’re creating here. [via]

• “In ‘Azkaban,’…I swear, the thing I heard the most from kids was not how great Buckbeak looked or how scary the Dementors were but how funny they thought it was when Hermione sees herself and asks, ‘Is that how my hair really looks from the back?'” — Steve Kloves^* [via]
• “Usually I say something like, ‘I write stories with zombies in them.’ I figure that either the person who asked is going to be charmed by this, because, like me, they’re fond of zombie stories, or else they’ll know to steer clear. I believe in truth in advertising. If that doesn’t seem helpful, then I’ll elaborate by saying that I write ghost stories or that I’m a science fiction writer. My suspicion is that when people say things like, ‘You’re a writer! What kind of things do you write?’ they’re merely being polite. Or else you’ve startled them badly and they’re suppressing an urge to flee.” — Kelly Link
• “I’m impatient with genre as a label of quality. But if we could stop critics being ignorant, genre would be interesting.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
• “I was always exploring, even when I was only nine or 10, and my parents didn’t seem to mind me disappearing. I wanted to be an explorer but it was a very frustrating ambition because, back then, every few months another bit of the world would have been discovered so by the time I was about 16 I’d given up on the idea.” — Michael Palin
• “You’ve got to give kids really beautiful children’s books in order to turn them into revolutionaries. Because if they see these beautiful things when they’re young, when they grow up, they’ll see the real world and say, ‘Why is the world so ugly?! I remember when the world was beautiful.’ And then they’ll fight, and they’ll have a revolution. They’ll fight against all of our corruption in the world, they’ll fight to try to make the world more beautiful. That’s the job of a good children’s-book illustrator.” — Tony Millionaire [via]
• “The question is, ‘Did you get it right? Did you tell the story? Did you find the moment? Did you give them the emotion you were looking to give them?’ If you did that, it doesn’t matter if three people saw it or if everybody in the world saw it. If you know that you accomplished the thing, if you told the story, you can’t worry about how many people you’re telling it to.” — Joss Whedon
• “I’m sorry my father isn’t around for a great many reasons. One is that he would have enjoyed seeing just about everyone on both sides of the political aisle decide [Robert] Novak was low-level bottom-feeding plankton. My father used to watch Novak on CNN and say, ‘There’s nothing that matters to that man beside making sure the rich get everything they can out of the government but that the poor pay for it all.” I have yet to see any indication that my father was exaggerating.” — Mark Evanier
• “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.” — John E. Jones III (PDF) [via]
• “People who support a clandestine program of warrantless domestic spying are not ‘conservatives’ or ‘libertarians.’ Neither are people who support the creation of a worldwide archipelago of secret torture sites. Neither are people who support the usurpation of the functions of government by the executive branch; who espouse the theory that the executive branch is the final arbiter of the legality of the actions of the executive branch; and who call for the investigation or prosecution of a free press that dares to report on the executive branch’s secret programs of domestic spying and outsourced torture.” — Michael Bérubé [via]