Fanatical Pupil

It does not get shorter.

So, I went to the library a couple days ago to pick up the first two volumes of Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time (nee: Remembrance of Things Past), and I decided to take a quick turn around the audiobook section since they have a couple racks of books on CDs.

Turns out they had Ender’s Game, Anansi Boys, and The Pillars of the Earth (Deluxe Edition) (Oprah’s Book Club)“>The Pillars of the Earth. I’ve read Ender’s Game, but it’s been practically half a lifetime since, and I’ve been wanting to re-read it. I’ve also wanted to read Anansi Boys for a while, and my mom has always maintained that Pillars of the Earth is one of the greatest books ever. I’m glad to have the audiobook, though, because even when someone is reading it for me, it’s going to take 40 hours to get through it.

At least with audiobooks (on CD), I can rip them into iTunes and then return them for other people to borrow instead of trying to plow through huge books in 3 weeks (because it seems like someone always puts a hold on the books I have checked out right when I start to get into them).

Cory Doctorow is serializing his next novel Makers on Tor.com. Here is the official announcement. It’s not the first time he’s done it:

Cory Doctorow … serialized his novella, Themepunks, [on Salon.com] sometime around 2005.

The index page is here, but unfortunately, Tor is not providing an RSS feed. So, I guess it’s true, RSS is dead. I’m not of the reasoning behind not providing a feed, since it’s not like there’s a whole bunch of ads on the Tor.com (which I appreciate). So, they’re not trying to get people to visit the site instead of just staying in their RSS readers – a strategy employed by a lot of blogs/sites that I don’t subscribe to for that very reason.

But, they do have it timed well in that you’ll be near the end of the novel when it’s released so that if you’re really into it, you can just buy the book and finish it in one sitting without waiting for the rest of it to be released on the site. Definite marketing strategy points for that.

It strikes me as odd that I mentioned Terminator: Salvation in this post about The Spirit because it seemed to me like the latter came out almost a year prior to the former. It was actually only a mere 5 months (a few days less, actually), but it seemed like a virtual eternity for me.

Anyway, I saw The Spirit over at a friend’s house in full Blu-Ray definition, and wasn’t all that impressed. I think the main reason was that I thought it was going to be a more serious movie, and it was actually more “comic book”-y and funny than I’d expected. It’s funny how much of my enjoyment of a movie is determined by my expectations of it. Nevertheless, I’m afraid it’s not a movie that I could recommend to anyone. Maybe if I’ve ready the comics/graphic novels, I would have been more into it, but it just didn’t seem to all fit together for me.

I realize they have to be refrigerated anyway, so it’s not like Veggie Burgers are going to make it through to any sort of post-apocalypse or anything. But in case you were wondering, your Veggie Burgers probably won’t survive SkyNet’s nuclear assault. I hope you have plenty of pork’n'beans.

So, I’m with some friends watching UFC, while I think I’m going through some fairly major caffeine withdrawal. I am reading Dr. Daniel Amen’s Making a Good Brain Great, and decided to cut out caffeine. I had a major headache pretty much all of yesterday and a slightly more minor one today.

I’m not sure if watching (or perhaps just observing) UFC for the first time is such a good idea, but seeing Brisby get cold knocked out does make me appreciate my brain, and helps me deal with the headache because I know I’m doing something healthy for my brain instead of stepping in a ring to get my head pounded on.