- You know, I’m all for preventing the spread of AIDS and everything, but I’d pay good money to keep a lot of these people off Twitter.
- The New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2010 looks like an interesting list. I’ve read — count ’em — one of the books on the list.
- I may have discovered a reason to use Facebook as something other than a Scrabble-delivery system: supposedly there’s a Monty Python game coming soon.
- Swede broadcasts music from his stomach. Apparently he was disappointed by the sound quality, however. [via]
- And finally, Scott McCloud on comics [via]:
books
“I just really like talking about Farscape.”
I spent the day building book records in our system, running profit and loss calculations and researching competing products, doing a lot of data entry for some new proposals, with an eye towards contracting a couple of these books before the year is out. Or at least sending the contracts to the authors before I shut down my computer and put up an away message for the last two weeks of December. If you’re imagining the glamorous life of a book editor, chances are, this isn’t what you’re picturing.
But it’s Friday, which is always nice. The week went by weirdly fast, especially for a week that started off really slow. I guess it’s that whole “time is relative” and “eye of the beholder” thing again, but I had to stop a couple of times during the day and just confirm that it was indeed, truly the end of the week. Even now, I’m a little unsure. Am I going to wake up tomorrow only to discover I was supposed to go to work after all?
Well, until then, I’m acting under the assumption that it is, in fact, the weekend. I can always claim delusion afterward if I’m proven wrong.
I don’t have any real plans for the weekend, beyond maybe getting a haircut. I’d like to do some more writing, which I’ve been slacking off from recently, and there are a few things I’d like to read. Right now, I’m a little more than midway through Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, which I’m really enjoying a whole lot. But it is a long book, and it seems to be taking me quite a while to get through it. I’m only at 39 books for the year, and that’s including some novellas and graphic novels. I try to aim for at least 50, and I’m worried with only a few more weeks left, I’m not going to hit that target. And while you’d think two weeks off from work would leave me plenty of time to read, it also leaves me plenty of time to slack off and not get any reading done, which I am all too prone to. But I’m going to try.
This evening, though, I mostly just watched last night’s episode of Community, which may have been my favorite ever, and certainly one of the sweetest the show’s ever done. My geek brain nearly exploded when Abed started talking to guest star Paul F. Tompkins about Farscape.
Wednesday various
- I like Todd VanDerWerff ‘s write-up of Dancing With the Stars a lot more than I think I would ever like the show itself.
- Popular Mechanics looks at shipping scientifically: “One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked ‘Fragile’ or ‘This Side Up.'” [via]
- The Harry Potter series from Hermione’s point of view [via]
- John Scalzi’s accurate but misleading descriptions of famous science fiction films. Mild spoiler warnings all around.
- And finally, John Cleese on the creative process [via]:
Sometimes a Tuesday is just a Tuesday
The iPad upgrade didn’t take quite as long as I worried it might yesterday, and I did manage to finish reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle before I went to bed. More about that, hopefully, at some near future point, but I really liked the book quite a lot.
And that’s about it, really. Today was mostly just a placeholder of a day, spent researching continuing education providers for mental health professionals at work, and trying to get the bulk of that done before tomorrow, since that’s the end of my work week. And tomorrow only runs to three, since they’re letting us out early for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Tuesday various
- Behind the Scenes of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Exactly what it says on the tin.
- Earth from Above: a collection of aerial photography. There are some stunning shots here. [via]
- Jeff VanderMeer on best-of-year lists:
…when I see a book title or author I don’t recognize on a year’s best list, my immediate reaction isn’t usually “WTFâ€, but instead, “Excellent! A chance to find some new, shiny thing that I might love.â€
- Hate captchas? Maybe simple logic questions are the better solution. [via]
- And finally, a history of Soft Skull Press. It’s nice to know something good has come out of a Kinko’s. Maybe that’s why the people behind the counter have almost never been of any help to me: they’re too busy building their independent press empires. [via]