The latest from the lunatic fringe.

PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

WATERBURY, Vt. -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.

PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

"The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "Everyone knows that 'the breast is best,' so Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk."

The ironic part is the Ben and Jerry are both hippie nutjobs in their own right. It's always amusing when you see those liberal wankers try to cannibalize one of their own. I guess that it's unlikely ol' B&J's will be changing their recipe anytime soon. Still, I must admit I do find the imagine of large breasted women hooked up to milking machines sort of interesting. It reminds me of a sci-fi short story I once read. Mmmmm Boobies.

Oh, and in today's HomoNews, it's a shocker. Clay Aiken _IS_ teh Ghey.

Here is info on that short story I was talking about. It's titled 'In the Barn' and is by Piers Anthony.

There are so many luxuries in our lives. By that, I don't mean cars or air conditioning or even the iphone. I'm thinking more about things like justice or compassion or morality. We don't really think of those as being luxuries, but it's not hard to see how they would easily be stripped away if our simple lives of leisure were taken from us. I always start thinking about such things whenever I read novels of post-apocalyptic worlds. Most recently, it was from Cormac McCarthy's The Road and now, Terry Brooks' The Elves of Cintra. In both, the characters exist in a world where society has fallen and mankind has been reduced to struggling to meet the most basic of needs. In that world, you see the many things we take for granted, abandoned because the people cannot pay the cost for them. While you might not realize it at first, there is a huge cost to be payed for any of the things I listed above. A cost payed in the sacrifice of valuable resources that could be better applied. Instead of justice or compassion or morality, the new force that guides an individual would become expedience and survival.

I sometimes think about this even in the context of our world today. Look at socialistic Europe with many of their post-modern nutjobs.. Some of whom spend their time forming committees about the rights of plants. In a world where some people struggle daily just to find enough food to survive, there are others sitting in comfy conference rooms debating the rights of broccoli. The dissonance is almost unbelievable in its starkness. The more that we have our needs met as a species, the more we sink into decadence. I can't help but wonder where the happy medium is in all of this.

I dunno if I've ever mentioned it before in my LJ, but I always loved Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Not the movie, which as I recall was a piece of claptrap, but the book. I'm doubly endeared to the book because it's one of the first experiences I ever had with an audiobook. As I recall, I had gone to the local public library looking for something interesting to occupy my time and scooped up MitGoGaE on a lark. I wasn't really aware of how acclaimed it was at the time and mostly I was just looking for something that was unabridged. To this day, I think that an abridged book is an offense against God and humanity. Whoever came up with the idea should roast in hell for all eternity. I popped the cassette into the car stereo and there it begun.

I loved it. It was wonderful and the person who did the recording adopted some wonderfully hokey accents. The chapter introductions were absolutely fabulous. Even after all this time, I can still remember how great they were and how amused I was by them. After a while, I would repeat along with the narrator whenever chapters started. I'll append a voice post with what I remember about how it sounded.

MitGoGaE began my love for audiobooks and since that day, I've listened to dozens if not hundreds. A couple days ago I decided to give MitGoGaE another try and found it just as great as I remembered. While I was sort of enamored with the moment, I decided to do some google searches on the various characters therein. Since it's a non-fiction book, I imagined I would be able to verify some of the details I had just listened to. Sadly, I found that there's actually quite a bit of dispute about the amount of truth in MitGoGaE. Some people have claimed that Berendt made many parts up out of full cloth and he's never really specifically denied the allegations. I find that sort of sad since it really does take away from my enjoyment of the novel. If you've ever read it, you know that MitGoGaE is full of crazily eccentric characters and stories. I really liked the idea that these were real people and circumstances and it takes away from it to know that chunks might be fiction.

It's funny really. I don't get the same sense of disappointment about David Sedari's alleged fabrications, likely because his books are supposed to be comedic. I'm willing to give someone a bit of leeway in telling a joke. We all have this tendancy to exaggerate humorous stories and they grow in the telling. I just can't cut the same slack of Berendt and I don't think I can ever really look at MitGoGaE in the same way again.

So I finished the Odd Thomas books a couple of days ago and I'm not sure exactly what I think. Overall, I liked the first book quite a bit and I liked the last book as well. It's the two in the middle that are giving me some serious issues. The basic plot runs like this, a guy named Odd Thomas has the ability to see dead people. In fact, he's accompanied everywhere he goes by the ghost of Elvis (well, up until the end of the third book where Elvis leaves and Frank Sinatra tags in). In addition to being able to see the dead, he can also see...well, the best comparison is to those little black crawly things in Dead Like Me who kill people. He calls them Bodocs. I think that's how it's spelled. One of the obnoxious things about listening to books instead of reading them is it's really hard to figure out the spelling of some words. Anyway, Bodocs don't actually kill people. They just tend to stick around whenever there's going to be a mass casualty event and munch on demonic popcorn and cheer.

As you can imagine, because of these two abilities, he tends to get into all sorts of crazy issues. The most endearing part of the character is that despite his special abilities, he is preternaturally down to earth. It'd be hard to write up a more humble, self-effacing, average Joe sort of character. He even calls every single person 'sir', which I find sort of fascinating. I thought about it a few days ago and realized that I've never called anyone sir in my life. At least, when I wasn't affecting a military posture for a gag. I don't think I can call someone sir or ma'am. It's just not wired in me and would stick in my craw. It somehow seems sort of degrading to go around 'sir'ing people. I have no problems with being polite but that just seems to take things a step too far.

Anyway, my problem with the middle two books is that they both seem to spend a lot of time running around in circles. I get to the end with this feeling that not much of anything has really happened and yet a huge amount of wordage has been spent. The timeline for both books stretches less than a day each. Actually, it's probably more like 12 hours, if that. There's a lot of internal monologue and sometimes you just wish that something more would happen. The most recent book, Odd Hours, is the first that seems to have started a multi-book plot arc, which was about time. Things were getting a bit too episodic for my tastes and I was hoping for something bigger.

Whenever I read a book about someone with an ability like a two-edged sword, I always wonder if I would be willing to have it. Frankly, I don't see many upsides at all about seeing fucking dead people all over the place. I'm not usually a timid person, but I do have a well-developed startle response and it's not fun. Still, that would be balanced out by having absolute knowledge that there is an afterlife of some sort. Wouldn't that be a bonus to know that there is life after death? Actually....is it?

Poll #1223526
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Would you want to know for sure if there were life after death?

I ran across something today that I thought was pretty interesting.

"Are words actually any use to describe what pain really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful."

-Alphonse Daudet

Daudet was a french novelist who apparently suffered a pretty unpleasant decline and death due to syphilis. He meant to write a book about pain, but it never got past the note taking stage. What scraps there were have now been translated and one reviewer called it the bitter version of Chicken Soup for the Soul. It was published under the title In the Land of Pain and I've been looking at a few reviews of the work. The title quote is also from him and I can really get what he's saying as only someone who suffers through chronic pain can. Trying to write or think during the pain is almost an impossibility. I've tried to tap out LJ entries when things have been bad and it's always a stalled effort. It's only when the pain has receded and I once more have some control of my faculties that I can try to express what it was like. By then, it all sounds trite and loses all that terrible urgency of now that existed when the agony roiled and tossed.

As I'm reading some of the other bits he wrote, it's perhaps not surprising that I can relate to so much of it.

"Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him. Everyone will get used to it except me."

There's a reason that it was so long before I even mentioned pain issues on this journal or discussed it at all with anyone I knew. The pain is visceral and immediate to me, as sharp and focused as a slap in the face. It's impossible to ignore and there is no habituation with time. Each time it visits it's are fresh, crisp, and attention getting as the first time I felt its touch. While I will likely never experience tolerance to it, it's hard to imagine that those around me won't. How long before it becomes tedious to read about? How long before what is so poignant to me becomes simply something trite and banal to everyone I know or who reads my words?

"Poor humanity — you shouldn't tell it everything. I shouldn't inflict on people what I've endured, this painful, all too self-aware end to my life."

I'm feeling crappy. That could probably be inferred from the fact it's almost 5am and I'm up and posting entries. There are seldom good and happy things that people find they need to write on LJ at this time of night. It's not like it's anything truly horrible but I'm just feeling a bit crappy. It started with general pain issues, but I finally got the codeine refills around 9pm last night and while it took a while to kick in, I'm not currently in any pain. My stomach feels a bit wonky though. You know that weird hollow feeling where you get the impression your stomach is churning and churning around nothing and is perhaps trying to eat itself? Usually I associate that sort of feeling with hunger, but I'm pretty sure I'm not hungry. That being the case, I can't quite figure out why my stomach keeps rolling over. It's a sort of unpleasant feeling and drinking water hasn't settled it down. I might have to go and find something to eat just to see if that will make it shut up.

Anyway, other than that, I just finished listening to the audiobook of Dean Koontz's Forever Odd earlier tonight. I think vala_amaris once sent me a copy of one of his books in that series, but I have no clue where it might be now. I snagged a copy on the spur of the moment after getting back from Origins and I liked the first one enough to try the second. I'm sort of enamored with the name Bronwen at the moment, and Stormy's character in general. I'm not usually one for the whole destiny says we'll be together forever sort of sappy crap (well, not anymore anyway) but I found the relationship between Odd and Stormy pretty touching. You just knew that it was going to end as a clusterfuck though. Nothing gold can stay. (-Robert Frost)

I just don't get how some people manage to truck along with their lives given all the crap. Sometimes, the urge to just drive off the road and over a cliff seems almost overwhelming. I mean, what's the point of it all anyway?

It used to be that I stayed up at night as a preference. Nowadays, I'm not given much choice over the matter. For some reason I've yet to figure out, pain issues are significantly worse at night. The past few days have been quite atrocious and it's become a common theme lately. I've had to take increasingly ridiculous amounts of meds and they don't work like they used to. Even at doses 2-3 times normal there's often spillover and more pills need to be popped. I usually don't find any real pain relief until around 5am or so at which point I manage to doze off for a few hours. I'm usually up again by 8-9am and then it's sporadic naps throughout the rest of the day all depending on when my meds are working out. Tired and sleepy are almost a constant state of being nowadays.

I've been meaning to get around to those Christopher Moore books I bought a while back. The set I purchased on ebay arrived around a week ago in beautiful condition. With the exception of one, they look brand new and unread. The problem is I'm one of those people who much prefers to read at night and reading is one of those things that's easily disrupted by pain. I've been spending the time instead listening to audiobooks, for which the pain is less of an issue. I can either tune in or out since I already know how the stories go and it's not like I have to put through any effort. In between gaps where things are not as horrible I twiddle around on the net or post on LJ like right now. I've also been spending some time trying to pick up additional audiobooks. After converting all of Terry Brooks' Word and the Void series, I'm also trying to download all of McCaffrey's pern stuff, Neil Gaimon's work, all of Janet Evanovich, and perhaps even some of Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant if I'm lucky. If this whole nighttime pain issue doesn't work itself out, at least I'll have plenty of books to listen to to pass the time.

I joined a private bittorrent tracker a couple days ago and have been downloading audiobooks. It's pretty sad really since I must've had this particular set of books at least 2-3 times now. I used to have a huge collection of audiobooks that would repeatedly get mauled by harddrive crashes. It's only now that I'm trying to actually burn them to dvd in a systematic manner. The sad part is, it's harder and harder to replace what I once had. The only place I found Terry Brooks' The Word and the Void available was on a private tracker and it took me 4-5 days to join it. I was just sitting back, ready to enjoy the fruits of my labor when I realized that the files wouldn't play.

Gone now are the days where everything is a mp3. The damn files were in m4b format, something that iTunes came out with that can only be played on their player and has a DRM built in. Luckily, there are people out there who have hacked that and I'm in the process of trying to convert each file to a usable format. It's not hard now that I have the software needed but it takes forever. Dozens of files and each one will take 5 minutes or so to process. There's no way to schedule them ahead of time so I have to cue up each one as the previous finishes.

Oh well. It's not like I have something more important to do.

I feel, as the British say, like a tit for posting the above but someone did make the nice icon and I figured, what the hell. I'm sure most of you have no clue what it means, no should you. It's just a discworld reference and only comprehended by those who have delved a little too deep into the pit that's known as fandom.

A lot of the people on a discworld community I watch went one step further and were all agog over a commemorative pin put out just for this occasion with the proceeds to go to Alzheimer's research. Now, I love the discworld novels as much as the next person, but I just can't see spending 50 dollars to buy something that I know I would never wear and even if I did, no one would get. I imagine there must be more Pratchett fans in the UK so if you picked up something like this you could at least exchange knowing smiles with people on the street and the occasional enthusiastic high-5. After all, what's the point of sending out a message that no one will ever receive and understand. It's like throwing a party for 1 in your closet.

Anyway, for those of you who are discworld fans, happy lilac day. For those of you that aren't, you probably weren't missing anything all that interesting anyway. It also just happens to be mock26's birthday. I should try to remind myself to give him a call sometime today.

It's just about time that I should set off to the Bill's for their memorial day party. I'm thinking about stopping at some stores on the way there. There are some pretty unbelievable deals on video games that start today and if I could actually find any in stock, I could easily flip them on ebay for some small amount of filthy lucre.

So a while back, chelledg recommended a book by Christopher Moore. I had meant to head over to a pyramid books (1/2 price used book place in town) and see if they had a copy but I kept putting it off. I don't venture out much and I wasn't exactly having a good stretch with the whole pain management thing. Instead, I decided to see if there were any of his audiobooks on bittorrent and after a week or so of sporadic connections, managed to snag two of them: You Suck: A Love Story and A Dirty Job: A Novel.

I just started listening to You Suck and it's been fantastic so far. My only regret is that it's the sequel to another book. I usually like to experience books in the order in which they're written. Partly that just makes sense from a story/plot point of view and second, it's always interesting to see how an author develops with time. I'm almost halfway through the audiobook and there's nothing I don't like. The writing is hilarious and the person they found to read the book is fantastic. Abbey Normal's journal entries are just perfect. The basic idea is that a woman, Jodie, is turned into a vampire and attaches herself to a slacker/loser, Tommy, who works at a Safeway with his insane stoner friends. In the first book, they form a vampire fighting squad and proceed to defeat the elder vampire who turned Jodie and in the process completely blow up a yacht and run off with millions of dollars in stolen art. The second book starts right after the first ends when Jodie turns Tommy into a vampire as well. It basically documents his transition and the problems of finding blood and acquiring minions. Toss in a good handful of crazed monkey love and that's been the book so far.

I'm currently bidding on a set of the books being sold on ebay right now. Assuming I win the lot, I'll be able to pick up the remainder on Amazon and they should keep me occupied for a few weeks. The audiobook version has been impressive enough that I'm even thinking about signing up temporarily to Audible just so I can pick up a few more and convert them to MP3's. It doesn't seem popular enough for there to be lots of torrents around. I was pretty lucky to have gotten the two I did.

It gets harder and harder for me to read fantasy trilogies nowadays. I love the genre in general, but the classic tropes just don't agree with me like they used to. In many fantasy novels, the hero is always some young person who from humble beginnings goes on to defeat some dire evil that threatens their world. Our young protagonist is always one of two archtypes. The first is some ignorant hillbilly bumpkin who has no idea that they might be destined for greatness. They may be the long lost heir to some throne or possess some internal talent for magic or swordcraft or whatever it happens to be that sets them apart from the average person. I have no problem with this sort of main character. My problem is with the other common narrative.

In this case, it's another young person but they're petulant and iconoclasts. They're upset at something and rage at the system in which they're born. This could range from having controlling parents to not wanting to follow traditional gender roles to not liking the current social structure or whatever. I find that I just can't handle the teenage angst and whining anymore.

Even when the thing they're bitching about is a just cause, the sniveling and self-righteous prattle really gets on my nerves. I just can't relate to it anymore, if I ever did. This sort of fantasy writing caters to the disaffected youth and I just find it incredibly tiring nowdays. I wish I could just reach through the pages and slap some sense into the little bastard.

What sparked this is that I finally got around to starting Mercedes Lackey's Obsidian Trilogy. The main character is a spoiled brat named Kellen who's upset that he has to live up to the great reputation of his father and his entire family tree. So, true to teenage nature, he rails against the expectations and complains incessantly about how his life, the city, and the world is too controlled. I keep thinking about the thousands of people who would cut off their arm to trade lives with him and he spends all his time so far griping. Hell, most people would love to live in a city even where everything is clean, safe and orderly yet he finds the whole idea to be stifling.

Now, I will admit I'm only 30-40 pages into the book, but he's pushing all of my buttons right off the bat. I think what it comes down to in the end is that I just loathe teenagers. I didn't have much patience for them when I was one and it's only gotten worse as I've aged. It's too bad we can't just euthanize all the mouthy ones.

It's been a long, long, long time since I've added a new author to my read list. I've pretty much stood pat for the past 5 years or so, and since then a lot of the old standbys on my list have gotten old, died, or otherwise contracted a horrible debilitating disease that makes them write unmitigated crap and then try to cash in on it. I think the last author I actually added to my list and was happy with was Terry Pratchett, sometime back in chicago. I still remember ordering a huge lot of his books off of ebay and being ecstatic with it.

So, in the interest of expanding my list, I'm going to give some of you a chance to recommend one book to me. I've mostly been a fantasy fan and my ventures into other genres have been hit or miss. I've made entries about some of the books I've read, and you can find most of them here. It's not much, but I haven't been keeping tags for a hell of a long time and I don't end up making entries about everything I read.

I'm in the process of putting in an order online, so if you do have a suggestion, please try to make it as soon as possible so I can add the book to the order. In return, I promise to read the book you recommend and then wax poetic about why it sucked and the author is a talentless hack. Well, okay, it's not a guarentee that that will be the outcome, but I'm just playing the odds here.

Heh, I just got my first post-debate de-friending out of the new batch of people. Frankly, I would have thought it would have come sooner but it's not like I've been commenting as much as I used to. It takes a good back and forth to really send someone off in a snit. I just can't help punching rhetorical holes in certain people's idiocy. It ecspecially gets my goat when the opinion expressed is some PC, regurgitated crap. In this particular case, the comment that started the whole thing was that "Oppression, or actions similar, does not equal faith". If you think about it, the entire phrase is idiocy. It all depends on what your faith demands, right? If a tenent of your faith is that you should go out and oppress someone, and you go oppress someone because of it, then it's all about faith.

I should have suspected it was some sort of touchy-feely, hippiecrap right off the bat. You know, the sort of message which sounds all nice but generally means absolutely diddily squat. I guess it's not surprising in this day and age. Plenty of people would like to believe that what you feel or what you think is more important than what you do. What the hell does it matter what you believe if you don't put whatever it is into action when it comes to faith? It's just as well I don't subscribe to any religion. I seriously doubt I'd be much for follow through.

The whole thing reminds me a lot of when I was reading The Year of Living Biblically. There was this great little question asked by a Rabbi and related in the book. There are two men, one schedules 15 minutes each day to pray to God and does so without fail. He takes his time and the prayer makes him feel closer to God and buoys his spirit for the rest of the day. The second man is having an incredibly busy day at work where he's barely keeping up. In between meetings, he manages to mumble a quick prayer before dashing off to what he has to do next. Which of these two men is more faithful? The answer is the second, because he prays for no other reason than because of God. In fact, it's a sacrifice to even take the time to utter the prayer when he's so busy. The other man prays too, but he gets something out of it. The prayer makes him feel good, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's clear that it's not in the same league as the man who prays with no gain. Interesting when you think about it.

Over the past few days I've been re-reading an old series of books that I last picked up around 10 years ago. It's a trilogy called The Great Game by Dave Duncan. There are certain concepts from the novels that stuck in my head and I thought it might be interesting to give it another look. A couple years ago, I got into a discussion with some people at Charliecon where some ideas presented in the books came up. Here's the skinny....

Basically the idea is that there are multiple words next to each other all accessable through points they touch, much like the idea of parallel dimensions and the like. By singing, dancing, and drumming you can create certain patterns that allow you to fall down the rabbit hole into another world. Everyone has a 'home' dimension where they're born and everywhere else, they're 'strangers'. Strangers have certain abilities that aren't avaliable to the natives, namely that of charisma and an ability to accumilate mana. Mana comes through worship and sarifice and can be used to do all sorts of things from influencing other individuals to casting lightning bolts.

What the books basically provide is an explanation for God, of sorts. In the alternate world of 'Nextdoor', there are more Gods than you can shake a stick at, each having staked out a portfolio over which they rule and derive their power. A God of Knowledge would have his priests stockpile books and information, doling it out in exchange for offerings and whatnot. Each person that believes in the God provides him with mana with which he can influence more minds or cause miracles. It's sort of like a pyramid scheme of sorts. The big Gods will go out and hire on people to play lesser Gods and the lesser Gods will send a portion of the mana they receive up the ladder.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to read the books again is because I always sorta liked this idea of faith providing a real manifestation of power. It's not stated explicitly in the books, but it's not hard to chalk Jesus or Muhammad or Moses up as just another Stranger from a different world that came here and set up shop. I'm not sure if it was Duncan's intent to take God down a notch or two, but I wouldn't put it pass him. He is canadian after all. As for me, I just just it from a more metaphysical point of view. If faith were a measurable quantity and could actually be used to perform miracles or affect the environment, then the possibilities would be endless. Frankly, I think I'd find it to be a mroe comforting way to think about God if it were true. At least then you can sort of understand the equation instead of pondering the unknowables.

Besides, I wouldn't mind treking through a wardrobe and setting myself up with a slice of divinity. I think I'd make a pretty spiffy God overall. I would watch over my people and see that they prosper. Well, until they piss me off at which point I'd probaly smite a whole bunch of them. But they'd deserve it. Who are they to fuck with God anyway?

A couple weeks ago I made an impulse buy from Amazon and picked up The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson. It's 1,272 pages of Far Side goodness collected over a period of 14 years. Interspersed through the comics are essays and commentary by Larson and the whole thing weighs in at an unbelievable 18 pounds. If I never get around to reading it, I can always use it as a blunt object to killer burglers or any large mutated insects which wander by.

There's a lot to admire about The Far Side and Larson. For one, it's the only comic I can think of off the top of my head that had a real scientific bent at times. Lets face it, unless they're of the insane mad scientist and doomsday device bent, you don't often see a lot of science-related material in comics. Not to mention that it's pretty remarkable the guy chose to retire the strip when he could have kept on milking it for years. He had finally reached that pinacle of achievement where it dosen't matter how much effort you put into your work or what sorts of egregious crap you churn out because the brainless masses will still buy it and fill your pockets with filthy lucre. If you want an example of that, whoever's been writing the scripts for The Simpsons since around 1995 is a prime example. So instead of taking the path of ease, he decided to pull the plug before it could go downhill. There's a lesson there.

Anyway, I haven't actually gotten around to opening the shrink wrap yet. I was thinking tonight might actually be a good time to go about it. Maybe I'll even keep the camera close by and snap a few photos of the panels that catch my fancy.

Just a quick note, I finished James Patteron's London Bridges last night and I'm still a bit stunned at how poorly written and paced it was compared to some of his other works. It felt like a series of disjointed scenes and half of them didn't even make sense. None of the character responses to the plot really seemed genuine, nor did the setting and environment.

I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised really. After so many books, he's just rolling around in the money and it's probably just dialing it in. God knows that's probably what I would be doing. I imagine it's much like Piers Anthony writing his 40th Xanth book or whatever it's up to now. After a while, it's all about the royalties check and considering his fan base, he could probably string random words together and still sell a million copies.

Still, it's sort of disapointing. I was hoping to see if anyone else had read it and had a similar impression. At this point, I've finally finished the entire series except the last two books, both of which I only have on audio format and haven't gotten to. I would have finished over a month ago if it weren't for the fact that I hadn't been able to find my copy of London Bridges. It wasn't until the grand cleaning that it finally resurfaced.

Anyway, if you've read it, let me know. I'd like to bounce some feedback.

I've spent an amazingly long period of time attempting to clean my room today. I actually didn't get to bed until 10am this morning working on the task and then after I woke up, toiled again. It was fucking unbelievable. There were piles of dust that had grown so thick and been left to its own devices for so long that I think it was only a few weeks away from coalescing and achieving sentience. I've got so much crap piled into the closet that I can't get in through the door and the bookshelves are so over-crammed that I'm having to seriously worry about structural failure.

All in all, I'm just shocked that there's still so much clutter when I must've pulled out a pile of garbage weighing more than 50 pounds and the volume of a small elephant. I can at least see into some of the corners of the room now, though large swaths of surface area are still piled high with assorted crap. The simple fact is that I don't have enough shelving and storage space for the sheer amount of stuff I own. I seriously doubt I could put a dent into the mess remaining without another 2-3 bookshelves. There's only so many ways you can try to maximize space until the floor becomes the only alternative. Then it's like one of those Jenga-like games where you try to make the biggest pile of crap possible it falling over or crushing whatever's at the bottom.

Hell, I figure a picture is worth a thousand words. Take a look at one of my two bookshelves.



It might be kind of hard to tell from the perspective but that's paperbacks 3 rows deep.

26 books per row x at least 20 rows worth of books = 520 books on a shelf designed to hold a small fraction of that. If anything, it's even worse in the walkin closet with the games where there's a single shelf around head height and the boards are bending at a truly alarming angle already and the floor is stacked silly. I definitely need some expansion room.

I've been looking at those portable e-book readers lately. I've never really given them much thought in the past, being a devotee of good old hardcopy. Besides, when you buy a hard or paperback book, you can at least be sure you're helping to kill trees which is surely pissing off the hippies. I think of it as an underappreciated fringe benefit of sorts. All of that aside though, I recently thought it might be interesting to have a device where I could load all my books and have them on hand without needing to shuffle through my incredibly overstacked bookshelf. It's pretty ridiculous having to search for a particular book as it is. I practically have to pull all the books off it row by row since it's packed to 4-5 times normal capacity and 3 rows deep.

So it was with this in mind that I set off to take a look at portable readers online and just about had an apoplectic fit when I saw the retail price. $3-400 dollars? WTF? I know I must be missing something fundamental here, but people have been reading text documents and the like on crappy cheapass palm pilots and PDAs for years. It's not like I'm asking these devices to also play movies, cook me dinner, and provide a happy ending. It's just supposed to display freaking text, right? So why in the world does it cost more than some laptops? If someone with some know-how can actually answer that, I'd appreciate it.

After goggling at the price, I spent some time looking at the specifications for the two main contenders out on the market right now: Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader. I can't see how either is really all the special from a tech point of view nor do I understand why both of them hype the fact that their screens 'look like paper'. There's nothing holy about paper, is there? Certainly not enough if you have to spend hundreds of dollars more just to create the faximile of it. The only standout detail was the Kindle's wireless whozit which uses the Sprint network and allows you to transfer books to the system from any place in the US (barring Alaska and Montana). For all that convienance, page turning still seemed pretty slow on both systems and far from instantaneous which sort of baffles me. I'd have expected a level of responsivity equal to hitting the page down button when in a word or text file.

The thing that really killed the idea for me though is the price of the books. It's fucking ridiculous. I figured that most books would be half their cover price at the most, with the grand majority being even cheaper than that. Instead when I browsed the amazon and sony sites I found that when the prices weren't indistinguishable from normal paperback prices the discounts tended to be on the order of 20% or so. Considering the tremendous savings in production costs, I can't believe that both companies are still gouging people and having them pay $6 or $7 for a glorified text file. At that price, I can't imagine anyone not simply choosing to get the paperback instead. At least you can sell the paperback when you're done with it and recoup some of your losses. Doing so with either the Reader or Kindle violates their terms of service.

So in the end, it was a nice idea for a while but I just wasn't able to find any upside. It's expensive, the tech seems relatively primative, and the books are pricey as hell. Why the frak would anyone be buying this crap? Does anyone reading this actually have either a Kindle or a Reader? Care to try to defend the product or at least explain why it isn't just a barrel of suck? I'm really curious at this point.

I'm feeling pretty craptastic at the moment. I'm having some pain management issues which means that there's little chance I can get to sleep until the meds kick in and things subside. I have not a happy camper at the moment. Since I'm up and I've got nothing better to do, I figured I would try to catch up on some things here.

This is about a week after the fact and I'm sure that if you care at all you've already gotten the news but it seems that Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's. He posted a public message about it and the only details he provided was that it was some form of early onset version. As far as I can recall, that's never a good thing. The early onset ones are usually genetic in basis and hit harder and faster once disease progression is underway. All of this comes on top of the fact that he had a mini-stroke back in August and didn't even realize it until recently.

When I think about it, it's around the time that authors I follow should start kicking off. Robert Jordan's passing was a bit early and ahead of schedule but I'm reaching an age where a lot of the actors and authors I loved are hitting ages where they'll start dying off. I still remember when John Candy passed away and thinking to myself that that was the beginning.

All in all, I really wish it were someone else other than Pratchett. Over the past few years, I've become more and more of a fan, due in no small part to audiobooks. I tend to listen to them over and over, going through the various story tracks one after another. Even as we speak I've got Thud! playing and I've been through the whole Guards series of books at least a half dozen times. Multiply that by the hours each book takes to play and it's not an insignificant number. I find the constant readings to be sort of comforting, much like how when I lived in chicago my tv was on all the time turned to one of the cable news networks. It's just something you can follow along with half your mind without it actually distracting you. I get out of audiobooks what I imagine a lot of people get out of just playing the radio.

Oh well. There's no reason to get maudlin about it yet. Even with early onset, he'll likely have at least another decade to work with. It's not medical defecits that will stop him as much as just the existance of the mortality looming I imagine. As he's said many times, he's got more money than he knows what to do with so there's no fiancial incentive to keep writing. He may just decide that given the situation, it's a good time to slow down and spend more time with friends and family or in trying out new treatments. I can't begrudge him that, but it's going to be a shame to not see as many books come rolling off the line.