Friday

A busy day at work, but luckily it’s the start of a three-day weekend. The office is closed on Monday, and I’m working from home on Tuesday, and honestly I’m looking forward to it mainly for an extra hour or two of sleep in the morning. I am indeed that dull.

I do plan to do some more writing over the weekend, as I’m fast approaching the deadline this short story was meant for. It’s not the end of the world if I miss that deadline, and I can easily rework the story. I just worry that, with that deadline gone, I’ll have an excuse to avoid the work. And I don’t want that. I want to finish this story.

Meanwhile, the stories in the most recent issue of Kaleidotrope — that quarterly online zine I edit and publish — were reviewed at Locus Magazine’s website. Reviewer Lois Tilton, who’s had mixed things to say about the zine in the past, calls these stories “almost all dark, to a greater or lesser degree. Several quite depressing.” But I think she means that in a good way.

And I finished reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, which may have made me tear up just a little. But I am a big softy like that. It’s not a perfect book, occasionally a little too clever for its own good, but it’s very touching, and it does that thing that all good books should do: make you miss the characters when they’re gone. I recently discovered Green through his YouTube channel, which I think I discovered mostly because I wanted to subscribe to a YouTube channel that didn’t then immediately vanish.

Anyway, it’s a good book, sweet without being maudlin, and I quite enjoyed it. That, as they say, is all.

Oh, and I (re-)finished playing Portal. On to Portal 2. (You think I’m kidding. I am not.)

Thursday various

Tuesday various

Tuesday various

  • “The body of a Massachusetts woman went unnoticed for two days in a Fall River public swimming pool, which remained open to the public and was even visited by health inspectors, generating outrage and calls for an investigation.” More here, including how such a bizarre and awful thing could actually have happened. [via]
  • I think this song by Paris Hilton is, predictably, dreadful, but I actually prefer when Hilton does stuff like this, when she’s at least doing something. The paparazzi paying attention to a lousy pop star is marginally better than its paying attention to a do-nothing heiress, right?
  • Well I for one am shocked — shocked! — that drug trials aren’t conducted realistically in the world of superhero comics!
  • Roger Ebert on Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

    I have a quaint notion that one of the purposes of editing is to make it clear why one shot follows another, or why several shots occur in the order that they do.

  • And finally, Improv Everywhere’s latest mission is just lovely:

    I used to work right around the corner from that park. (We’re now maybe 10 minutes away.) [via]