What I am reading, work update

As you can see from the title this is not the next large post in my “about me” series, this is just a small post letting people what I am reading and writing right now. I finished Mainspring and am in the midst of writing up the small review for it that I hope will appear in the next Steampunk Magazine. I liked the first half of the book which was a fine adventure/coming of age novel but half way through it became strange, a mix between a heretical theology tract and bestiality erotica. Bizarro (You really do need to click on that link). I’ve started reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which I am loving. The book’s premise is this: What would happen tomorrow if every human of on the planet just disappeared today? Weisman explores when and how all the infrastructure and changes we’ve made to the planet would disappear, in so doing he looks at our past and explores the hypothetical homo sapien free future. You don’t have to wait for a review of this book, head down to your public library and pick it up, I don’t think you will be disappointed. As far as writing goes, I’m working on a blurb about myself for Gawker‘s Artist program, the Mainspring review, an essay on how a organized religion is often an excuse for laziness in the here and now, an essay exploring gothic horror in videogames, and some scraps of poetry.

Next post is the one you are waiting for.

A little about me, Part 1

I don’t know who, if anyone reads this blog. I assume there is only myself and perhaps one or two others who occasionally drop in to see what is going on in my life. I don’t do any of the things I am supposed to to make this site successful in anyway. I don’t link to other blogs or post comments on their forums. I pretty much write about once a day on whatever seems to be of interest to me. I assume that this will continue to be the case. I have never described myself here, I never thought it was necessary. If you read this blog you already know me personally and there would be no point in posting a picture or writing out a long description. I’ve also never poured much of myself into the site. I don’t know html and I am reluctant to attempt “learning” a new language (the BASIC, Visual BASIC, and C++ I “learned” are all completely useless to me), so the site remains in the default template with just the colors changed around. There are no pictures of me, no about section, and I’ve never once gotten e-mail from someone about the site, though the options is there…

What am I doing with this blog? Why do I continue to do it? Who am I? Finally, why should you care? These are questions I am going to attempt to answer in the next half a dozen posts or so. Perhaps I will canvas a few of my favorite blogs, try to get someone to notice me. I am not optimistic. I will answer the first question now though. This blog is my journal, where I write about the things that interest me, where I write about who I am and what I have been doing (though it has been particularly light on that subject). Why a public journal? All journals are eventually public. When you die and your children, family, or friends begin to sort through your things they will find your journals, and they will re-discover their mother, or father, brother or sister, son or daughter. They will learn how you saw yourself, this blog is the same thing, I am just not waiting for my life to expire to share all of this with you. I do so in the hopes that getting to know me, will make myself and you closer, closer to each other and to everyone else… When we realize that the people and things that we are so busily hurling our hate at, or worse our explosive devices, are just like us it, it becomes much harder to belittle, marginalize, and kill them. I realize it is a large hope and naive and idealized one, but I do not believe there is any point to being pragmatic when it comes to dreams. I also write to improve myself, I have dreams and hopes, one of those is to write. Write so that when people read what I have said they are moved, touched. That when they have put down what I felt important enough to commit forever to written words, they will have to think. They can hate what I say or they can love it, as long as they feel something. As long as they are moved and changed I have not failed. This of course has not happened, and I have the suspicion that I am failing a lot more than anyone should ever be comfortable enough. You do not get better without working and here is my work, for everyone to see. Here is where I hope to grow and improve in the craft.

I promise more. My next post will concern itself with who I am and what motivates me.

Some thoughts on “He who has made Billions”

There is a depressing article over at the Washington Post. Before you read anymore of this I think it best that you click over there and read it. I’ll wait, semi-patiently, if you are lucky by the time you get back, I won’t have have become bored and wandered off to play video games… …. …. *bleeping and blooping noises can be heard in the background*. I’m back hopefully you are as well. So where do you stand on the whole Harry Potter thing? Do you agree with Mr. Charles? If you disagree can you say why? Can you point out the thriving reading culture in the United States that he happens to be missing (I’m missing it to). That might be to hard of a question, so here is any easy one for you: point out where in the Harry Potter books there is an instance of greatness, great writing, great characters, great plot line, great anything? What, that might be the harder question. I’m grateful I won’t be working this Friday when all the over boils all over my store. Regardless of whether the book deserves such attention and praise, it will receive it, people don’t invest that type of energy into something without it delivering, even if the delivery is largely delusional. I do hope that Mr. Charles is wrong though and that some of the people when they are done with Harry Potter will stand up, look around, and walk out of the cave into the light.

On cooking

In the last month I’ve finally started to learn how to cook. So far I’ve learned that it isn’t as difficult as it looks, and that even a moron (me) can cook. It’s only a matter of collecting the ingredients and following the recipes. My mom spent the first 20 years of my life trying to get me interested in cooking and making my own meals. She failed miserably, but by no fault of her own. I was very resistant to the whole idea. Why learn to cook when your mom makes superior meals for you everyday? I failed to think long term and when I moved up here to Davis, I could only make 4 things, scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, quesadillas, and Top Ramen noodles. Those and some frozen meals pretty much got me through my first year here. You can only take so much of that kind of thing though before you go crazy. I mostly just didn’t eat. Very healthy of me I know, but that too gets tiresome. So I bought a cookbook and another one and with some encouragement (translation: a lot of encouragement and coaching) from Diana I started cooking. It turns out it’s a lot of fun and tasty! We’ve picked up an Indian and an Italian cookbook and I go through those and find recipes that I like, I show them to Diana and then we have dinner dates where I cook for her or she cooks for me. Of course this is always at her place, the kitchen in place is disgusting all the time, my roommate cooks but never cleans. The cleaning is by far the worst part, it seems the better the meal you make the more dishes it requires you to dirty. Great meals require a 30 minute dish washing session at minimum, good meals take about 15.

I’m having fun and learning a lot, the problem now is that I’m always looking for more recipes and spending way to much time scouting out the cooking section at Borders!

%d bloggers like this: