Oh, whoops. Is it already six hours since I downloaded my preorder copy of Cold Days the instant it was available? I didn't notice because I'm 77% through it.

I guess I should probably go to sleep. Or not. Damn. This is Harry Potter all over again, you know, except with instantaneous wireless delivery. The upside, of course, is that I don't have to go to the bookstore and buy a second copy to avoid waiting for the first one to come in the mail.

Well, anyway, can't write, busy reading.

Boy, I've been working on these sentence trees for my grammar class, and it's taking longer than it really has any right to. All the sentences are full of extra adjectives and adverbs that don't really make them difficult, but sure as hell make them take longer to draw.

Well, I suppose I'll be all right, since I'm working with a solid buffer before the deadline. The objective in having so many modifiers is presumably to drill them until they become routine, as is standard practice with homework in many such disciplines. I just wish they could take up less space on the page. At this rate, I need a full page for each sentence, and I'm losing paper faster than Mitt Romney is losing Facebook "Likes".

I also had to write up an essay about Robinson Crusoe for English 10C and do a poetry workshop writeup for 5P, so I've been busy this weekend.

Unrelated: I'm finally getting around to reading the Thursday Next books. I finished the second one this morning. So far so good; I'm enjoying them. Pretty nifty premise. But of course, I'm also excited about the impending release of a new installment in The Dresden Files--so much so that I went ahead and preordered it from Amazon to get it delivered instantly to my Kindle as soon as it's available. The sample chapters have been trickling in on Jim Butcher's website, and it's all very thrilling.

What I've been reading this week

Today I finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It was pretty good. I guess.

Before that I read Anansi Boys, which I think was better. And just today I realized that the title is supposed to be a pun on "Nancy Boys". I think that's not fair. They don't even rhyme unless you have a British accent. Neil Gaiman's puns are anti-American.

Before that, I re-read Legions. Man, that cycle was weird. I mean, Sash and Waistcoat? And the whole thing with Sanctum/Averru? And Braids and Stonebrow converting to Ixidor-worship? And I still find pregnant Phage the Untouchable hard to believe. It's so crazy how there used to be all these absurd things going on in the novels that never showed up on the cards at all. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, I also read Rath and Storm, which consisted of pretty much exclusively events that were depicted on the cards. I mean, damn! I'm not sure which is worse--cards that have nothing at all to do with the storyline, or cards that are so tied to the storyline that they make no sense unless you see them in exactly the correct order. Probably the second one is worse, although I'd snap-take either of them over Wintermute. Also, Rath and Storm uses this framing device of an old man telling the story of Gerrard & co. to a young apprentice, but with the benefit of hindsight, it makes no sense that he'd never once mention what they're most famous for, i.e. "Heroes of the Invasion". Like, the kid is all like, "Who's Gerrard?" and the old librarian is like, "Well my son, he was the heir to the Legacy who made a journey to Rath where he lost his friend and fought his foster brother and blah blah blah" and never bothers to mention "Oh BTW these are the guys who killed Yawgmoth and saved the entire world and have their own monument that's one of the biggest goddamn tourist attractions in all of Dominaria." That bothered me. (Yes, I know Tempest block came out years before the Invasion cycle, and they hadn't planned that far ahead. It still bothers me.)

Next on my list, I'm either reading Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, or Robert Shea & Robert Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. Haven't decided. Might just go for several at once--it worked with Dexter and The Dresden Files.

I'm reading the Odyssey Cycle novels. Just started on Chainer's Torment. I gotta say, Odyssey was kinda meh. Laquatus is all like "Herp derp I are schemey scheming! I liek frogs" and Kamahl is like "Mirari plox" and Kirtar is like "Hey cool a Mirari durrr..." and Aboshan is like "zomg everyone are traitoring me blurpy durp" and Braids is like "lol noobs" and Seton is just kinda chilling with Kamahl.

I only just started Chainer's Torment but Chainer seems like a decent guy. I guess he gets tormented though. That's sad.

Laquatus is lame. He just lies and schemes and lies and schemes. Sometimes he hangs out with his gigantic anurid frog familiar. Occasionally he takes a break from lying and scheming to do some plotting or conspiring or subverting. But mostly scheming. Kind of a one-trick pony. Or one-trick seahorse as it were, hardy har.

Also, already having read Onslaught sort of spoils the ending since now I already know that Kamahl gets the Mirari and uses his new Mirari sword to kill Laquatus in a showdown in the Krosan Forest, but he ends up accidentally killing his own sister too and deciding to become a druid in repentance, and then Braids kills Seton as a sacrifice to reanimate Jeska and so Jeska turns into Phage, who kills Ixidor's fiancee and inspires him to create Akroma and take revenge and then some demigods manifest and Karona happens and it's a whole thing.

It's all sort of tragic, isn't it? I mean we're already in a recovering postapocalyptic setting, and then we up and get another apocalypse. That's a downer. Karn really needs to stop leaving artifacts of doom lying around.

So today was pretty uneventful.

Now that I've finished The Dresden Files I decided to re-read it because seriously. I chomped through Ghost Story again between last night and today, and now I'm going back to Storm Front. I haven't decided which book is my favorite. I guess you could say I never had a favorite--never really felt like I needed one. Aye?

Apparently I'm supposed to write some essays and stuff for next week. So that's also a thing. I've set aside some time tomorrow to do some work on that. Tumbling some ideas around in my head for my myth/legend/folktale rewrite. The story of John Henry from the machine's point of view? The story of Persephone via Persephone's diary? Hades's diary? Or maybe through the letters that Hermes might have delivered back and forth between the characters during the crisis? Who knows.

Didn't do anything terribly interesting in class. Statistics discussion was boring. English, we talked about some erotic poem about a flea. Myths & Legends was some lecture or other. All pretty mundane. I had noodle soup for lunch and ramen for dinner.

Weather's getting hot. Very sunny. Much better for biking than the cold and wind, though, of course.

Watched the newest episode of The Legend of Korra on the Nickelodeon website. Bolin is funny in a Woobie sort of way, but Tenzin didn't show up at all. At least the airbender tots got a scene.

Anyway, that's pretty much what I did today.

Today was fairly uneventful.

We formed up into groups of three in my writing class. Next week we're going to do some draft-looking-at or something. Gotta have something to work with by Saturday night. Should be doable.

Talked about Proto Indo-European stuff in Myths & Legends. Shared cultural roots leading to similarities in mythology and folklore, blah blah blah. And we watched a video of a Welsh folktale called "King March" about a king who's embarrassed to take his crown off because he has horse ears and it looks very silly. Only his barber knows the secret, but the barber is bad at keeping secrets, so he whispers the secret to the ground. Except then reeds grow from the spot, and the local piper uses the reeds to make a new pipe, and when he plays the pipe it whispers the secret to everyone. So the king is embarrassed but it turns out everyone still respects him and nobody laughs at him, and it's a happy ending.

We're still on Henry V in Lit class. Not my favorite Shakespeare play, I gotta admit.

For Plant Science we had a lecture on soil. Stuff about soil composition and saturation and...stuff.

Played some Beat Hazard to pass the time. Finished a few random tracks. Some 38 Special, some Beatles, a little Taylor Swift, a couple of the built-in ones. *shrug* Got 37/47 achievements in that game now, which isn't too bad if I may say so myself.

Watched this week's episode of Game of Thrones. I am pretty sure it deviated from the book, but the spirit is the same. It's a good show. I like it.

Went to Wal-Mart for groceries. Restocked on bread, milk, dried fruit (it's not as juicy as fresh fruit but there's less pressure to eat it immediately), and all that grocery stuff. Had a bowl of soup for dinner.

Currently reading Side Jobs, which is the Dresden Files short story anthology. I like it. Also got around to catching up on The Legend of Korra which I also like. Good stuff.

And that's what I did today.

I didn't realize this before, but my school day starts at a different time every day of the week. Monday, my first class is the freshman seminar (which meets once a week) at 11 am. Tuesday I have my PLS005 lab (which meets once a week) at 9 am. Wednesday I have the discussion section for statistics (which meets once a week) at noon. Thursday I don't have any classes until statistics lecture at 4:40 pm.  And then on Fridays my first class is Myths and Legends at 1 pm.

I have a very oddly-staggered schedule. This has never happened to me before.

Anyway, I just finished Dearly Devoted Dexter on the bus ride home. Less disturbing than the first book, but heavier on the nightmare fuel because the bad guy does this thing where he surgically removes all his victims' body parts one at a time without killing them, ultimately leaving them a limbless, tongueless abomination. He does it in front of a mirror, and keeps them conscious so they can watch. And the most disturbing part is that he does it while playing annoying Cuban dance music. The first book was more disturbing, though, because while this one had a creepier villain, Dexter himself was a much creepier protagonist in the first one because he kept having these quasi-sexual fantasies about chopping up bodies. And having a creepy viewpoint character is more disturbing than having a creepy villain.

Game of Thrones Season 2 is imminent

With the season premiere of Game of Thrones coming up, I thought I'd skim back and re-read some of my favorite bits from the books.

I wonder how they're going to handle the sex scene between Sansa and Tyrion. And I always thought it was kind of cruel to kill off Arya with an axe to the back of the head before she even got to use her weird Braavosi coin thing--I mean why even bother setting up the whole "Valar morghulis" bit if it wasn't going to pay off? That was disappointing. And I still can't believe Davos got killed off so anticlimactically. But it should be nice to see Bran walking again (although it was kind of bittersweet for him to have to lose his direwolf), and Joffrey getting poisoned to death was extremely vindicating. I'm looking forward to the part where Sam fights and kills the white walker, too--that was a great scene in the book.

Yeah, yeah, I know, spoilers. It's April Fool's Day. They're not really spoilers. Yeesh.

Oh man, these books are awesome

So I've been reading The Dresden Files and it's...well, it's great, is what it is. I love it.

If you haven't heard of it, The Dresden Files is a series of mystery thriller novels by Jim Butcher. Also, it's awesome. I'm just finishing up the third book and I have to force myself to put it down.

It's a lot like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if Buffy were a private detective instead of a superhero. Or Angel, if Angel were a wizard instead of a vampire. In any case, it's got that urban fantasy/horror vibe, and it's fused with that good old "Tracer Bullet" detective noir, and the result is...well, I like it a lot. Anyone who likes Buffy will probably like The Dresden Files.

This, by the way, is yet another case of TV Tropes enhancing one's life. I kept seeing this series pop up on trope pages in my wiki browsing/editing and it seemed like an interesting read, so I picked up the first book to see what it was like. And now I am devouring them.

Most of the chapters end on a suspenseful note because, well, it's a mystery thriller novel, and that's what thriller novels do. I figure it's not really fair if I get to a cliffhanger and just bowl right through to the next chapter, so I'm trying to let it stew in between chapters. Right now I'm doing that by taking a break to write this thing I'm writing right now. My main strategy, though, is to switch between two books. I'm reading the Dexter series simultaneously. I finished Darkly Dreaming Dexter a little while ago and now I'm a quarter of the way through the second book, Dearly Devoted Dexter. It's okay, but it's also actual disturbing. I knew going in that I was going to be reading about brutal murders from the perspective of a sociopathic serial killer killer, but wow, it turns out there's some pretty sickening things in there. The sort of things that make you close the book for a second to take a couple deep breaths. But it is a page-turner, and I'm still reading it, after all. Not as awesome as Dresden, but, eh.

This, by the way, is one of the perks of reading on a Kindle. I can switch between them on the fly...wait, I feel like I already did this bit. Yeah, I did, didn't I. Exact same shpiel, about a month ago. Hmm.

Now I'm reading a bunch of books at the same time. I'm still reading A Dance With Dragons, and I'm at the Windblown chapter. I just finished The Faeman Quest this morning, and I started re-reading the first book too cuz why not. I'm re-reading So You Want to Be a Wizard cuz I'm about to start the newest book in the series. And I've also started on The Dresden Files because, well, I don't know much about it, but it seems like the sort of thing I would enjoy, and I've read the first chapter of the first book so far and it's promising. Oh, and I'm re-reading The Eyes of Kid Midas because I never got around to doing the thing where you read it again but keep an eye out for tropes to add to the trope page, so I'm doing that now. And I'm listening to audiobooks of the Peter and the Starcatchers series. (Jim Dale does the readings. He's the same guy who did the Harry Potter audiobooks. He's pretty good; I like him.) Also, I've got the books from two of the freshman seminars I'm thinking about taking next quarter if they're open, and I've been looking at them in advance because hey, why not? And of course there are the readings I have to do for my classes. We had a Ray Bradbury short story "Mars Is Heaven" assigned in my Lit class, and some bits about rap and hip-hop for Sociology.

The great thing is that I can do this. I mean imagine carrying eight or nine different novels around with you everywhere you go. What a drag. But since I have my Kindle, I'm set. I can swap between them whenever I like. Just this morning when I finished The Faeman Quest, I got to immediately swap over to a different book. That's a nice feature.

Man, I keep doing this thing where I write the titles as a WikiWord and have to go back and add spaces. This is what happens when you spend too much time editing TV Tropes. It's dangerous.

Anyway, I have this homework assignment where I have to do a reading response about this reading that I did for Sociology about how black fans and white fans interpret rap and hip-hop music in different ways, so I'mma start working on that.

I'm boycotting textbooks.

Textbook prices are ridiculously inflated. Supply is monopolized and demand is inelastic. And publishers come out with new editions frequently to make it so that bookstores have to stock brand-new copies, and anyone who uses the old version will discover that all the page numbers are out of whack and they can't follow along properly. They get away with it because the professors who assign the textbooks don't have to buy them or even know how much they cost, and the students who pay for them have no choice.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, the textbook manufacturers can go to hell. I'm not paying.

If I need the book during class, I'll mooch. If I need it for homework, I'll go to the library. If the library doesn't have it, I'll go to the bookstore and read it off the shelf. And I'd happily pirate it* if I could--if you call it theft, then I'll say that's giving them a taste of their own medicine, because a hundred bucks for a textbook is highway robbery. It's not as if most of them even offer legitimate ebook editions anyway, or if they do, they price it the same as the paper edition so what's the goddamn point?

So yeah. Textbook companies can go die. I'll save my money, thank you very much.



* Disclaimer: Oh, don't take this the wrong way. Intellectual copyright violation is ethically dubious. I do not endorse digital piracy. Pirating the works of people you hate is like the scene in Jurassic Park where the Tyrannosaurus eats the jerkass lawyer. Or like this. It's awesome. But at the same time, you know that it's illegal to eat people, or to cut someone's car in half. So by all means, support your local used bookstore.

When I walked out of the house this morning, I put my hands in my pockets and realized that I had a glove in my left pocket and no glove in my right pocket. This is a terrifying thing because it means that one of my gloves fell out of my pocket. So I spun around and looked on the ground behind me, but I didn't see anything. This is also terrifying because it means one of my gloves fell out of my pocket and I have no idea where it is. Now, the ideal situation is that it fell out of my pocket when I tossed my jacket on my bedroom floor. But by this point I was halfway to the bus stop, and if I turned back, I'd end up missing the bus and have to bike to campus instead, and even then I probably wouldn't have time to comb through the bushes searching for a missing glove.

So all day long I'm at school and I keep putting my hands in my pockets, and every time I do, I feel the empty space in my right pocket and I'm grimacing because I have no idea if I'm ever going to see that glove again.

I had a cup of soup for lunch. Clam chowder. Heated it up in the microwave at the MU and sipped it on my way to my Sociology lecture. It tasted like clam chowder. Those little soup cups are nice because I can heat them up in the microwave at the MU and drink them while I'm walking to my Sociology lecture. Bought a plate of rice and spicy chicken from a food cart for dinner. It tasted like the sum of its parts. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't very good value either...seven bucks and it's mostly rice and lettuce with a little chicken. Tasted fine, but I'd rather have the value. This is why it's better to pack a lunch. If you don't pack a lunch and you get hungry, you have to buy food on campus, and the value is so much worse. One bagel sandwich at the CoHo is like $2.50, but you go to the grocery store and that same price will buy you bagels for a week if you're willing to spread the cream cheese yourself.

I'm on the fifth Song of Ice and Fire book now. I just finished the part where King Joffrey forces Robb and Arya Stark to duel to the death. I can't believe Arya would cut off her own brother's head, just like that. Did not see that coming. Oh, sorry, I guess that's a spoiler.

Anyway, I got home and my other glove was on my desk. Phew.