As you may be aware, dear reader, I’m a big fan of the kind of pop culture meta piece like this one from (surprise) Amanda Marcotte about what she perceives as the ascendance of mass-market mediocrity in modern American popular culture as being inherently more “worthy” than properties with more limited, niche appeal. I include […]

I finished several things yesterday. It feels like I accomplished something. writing my NaNoWriMo project. A solid 50k + word first draft. Might be a good 35k word novella in there with some judicious editing. a first read-through on a huge pile of documentation. Useful and necessary for an ongoing extracurricular project. reading a book. […]

I haven’t had a lot of time to be online this week. In between meetings, dealing with non-specific evening issues, not feeling all that great, and the beginning of NaNoWriMo (giving it another shot, this time with…an outline!), I just haven’t had much blogging inclination. I have seen/heard a couple of things worth passing on […]

For reasons that still kind of elude me, this weekend involved cramming more stuff into 72 hours or so than is really possible or advisable, but a lot of it was quite a bit of fun. Still, I’m finding myself dragging a bit, largely due to sleep deficit and a few aches and pains as […]

A couple of visits to the Lone Star State this time around, representing my slightly less-awkward alt-country phase, a latter day disc from a new favorite, and an underappreciated aberration from a vast, critically praised catalog that I still quite like a lot. Enough explanation? ♦- Dixie Chicks – Taking The Long Way: This record […]

Woke up this morning to the news that Steve Jobs had passed. Wherever you stood on the Mac vs. PC spectrum, the fact that you’re standing on that spectrum at all is largely due to the work of a couple of Steves (this one and Woz) in a garage in Cupertino. I haven’t used Apple […]

Sci-Fi musician and all-around decent guy John Anealio addresses in song one of the more interesting hazards of social networking with “Pr0nbot”: Shot live at balticon this past year, where I was sitting on the opposite side of the room from this camera person. This is what you people miss by not going to these […]

Now, when it comes to comics, I’ve always been more of a Marvel kid, though I’m relatively familiar with the Distinguished Competition, and have been sort of keeping up with the news about the latest reboot over at DC, where they’re starting the universe over at square (or issue number) one for all the characters, […]

Like a lot of things, in the exclusive <cough>, elite <coughhack> world of the pre-release movie screenings, once you’re in the system, you’re in the system, and more opportunities to participate find you without you spending a whole lot of time looking for them. For example, last night, I had managed to find myself holding […]

Last Friday morning while taking care of a few errands, I stopped at Target to check out the electronics clearance rack, where over the years I’ve found many great deals on video games and computer storage media. While poking around amongst the marked down ipad cases and wii shovelware, I found one of these: This […]