Books Books Books

I really kind of like Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It’s got this easy laid-back slacker charm to it, even if the ending is a bit of a let-down. How can you not like a hero named ‘Jim Wormold’ who spends all his time being desperately bad at spying. He ends up deceiving the entire British secret service because it seems a good idea at the time.

Golden Notebook is going into a downward arc of slightly annoying, past page 150 or so. Doris Lessing writes very well…when her narrator is observing other people. After a while she breaks out all the internal monologues and the self-doubt and the crippling lack of self-esteem and the dependency, which grates because the main character is otherwise very very intelligent and likeable. Ugh, grow a spine Anna Wulf. No wonder the Clinton feminists spent so much time being upset.

Orlando is like… eating a giant old-school rainbow swirl lollipop while sitting on an old-school swing set. It’s been called a love letter to Virginia Woolf’s lover or to literature and it really kind of is. It’s a book very in love with itself, but not in a pompous way. It also drips of post-Austen-ness. I don’t know how else to describe it, and I think I’m mangling my literary periods but what the hell. It’s interesting, I might finish it later.

I don’t really know why I like Sam & Max so much. Steve Purcell is a great artist, and considering he did both the writing and the art himself, a really all-round fantastic person, but the original Sam & Max comics weren’t that funny, aside from the odd moment. Maybe it’s a childhood thing. Anyway the writing and the comedy for the Lucasarts games were so fantastic I guess it retroactively makes the comics a lot more fun.

Anton Chekhov

This guy is supposed to be the great grand-daddy of the modern short story (I’m also pretty sure he was an Admiral in Starcraft), so I thought I’d pick one of his collections up and see what the deal was. I didn’t get it. His characters are sometimes so passive you want to stab them, anything to make them do something.

I read some literary reviews that say that his short stories leave a lot of work to the reader to puzzle out the character motives. That’s actually pretty interesting, because that means all his short stories are condensed little bits of analysis waiting to be teased out. It’s sort of like literary sudoku: quick, dirty, rather ambiguous. (Ok, not really like literary sudoku)

Anyway the average Russian reader of the late 1800s to early 1900s must have been a pretty patient type.

Violence As Real Life

Terrorism is getting increasingly bizarre. Back in the Cold War era there were all these rather distinct groups with very specific ambitions and slightly camp, melodramatic names like Red Army Faction and the Irish Republican Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army (though those guys were more like kitsch Batman villains. Their leader was ‘Donald DeFreeze, a.k.a. Field Marshal Cinque’. Seriously?).

These days nobody really seems sure who’s blowing what up anymore, or why. It’s becoming a really lousy way to advertise anything, because everybody’s doing it. It’s sort of like trying to go viral on youtube. Some days I think people join just for the excuse to blow stuff up.

It’s Friday!

Fallout is really, incredibly vast. It must have taken an army of programmers and an army of writers an age to get it done. There’s something like fifty square kilometres of map you can travel on foot, full of interesting places, and it’s actually possible to play by ignoring all the quests and the side-quests and just wandering about seeing what you can discover. And the way Fallout plays, every single bit of junk is so valuable it’s worth it fighting through a busload of raiders to find a crate of shotgun shells, scrap metal, junk guns and lunchboxes (yeah you actually can use them for stuff). I think game-developers are on to something here.

I’m really quite sick of putting in effort for a place I don’t believe in anymore (and even if I did I wouldn’t put in that much effort), but on the flip side I kind of enjoy writing the papers proper. I keep on getting the feeling the subject matter is interesting despite the best efforts of everything else. There’s some really interesting themes in one of the books we’re doing that I really wish we had time to explore. As it is, we covered it in 2 lectures (which I skipped) and 2 tutorials (I can’t remember anything from them).

But oh well! It’s been fun, really. In the ‘that was fun but let’s not do it again’ way. I like learning, I just don’t see why it has to be so very dull.

It’s a Mystery

I picked up Fallout 3 today after one of my papers. For some reason, it ships with a bilingual manual but all the game text and voiceovers are still in English. I don’t know why anybody who can’t read English well enough to need a bilingual manual would buy this. Beats the heck out of me what a Chinese kid would think they’re doing in all the dialogue options.

Hey, wait I’m a Chinese kid

Quantum of Solace

It’s actually very enjoyable. It’s really short for one, and the pacing’s pretty good, so you don’t get sick of Daniel Craig and his cold, cold, expressions. The plot’s pretty alright if you don’t stare at it too hard (it’s got Bolivians in it! everybody in Bolivia wears these awesome hats) and Daniel Craig gets some pretty good lines. I’m going to miss the camp villains though. All the main bad guy in Quantum does is scream like a girl and swing an axe about a bit. His henchman looks like Percy from the first season of Black Adder and the only thing he manages to do is fall down the stairs. Really.

Hobos Pack Plasma Rifles

“I’m like this post-apocalyptic Hobo in Fallout 3″

“Normally, I don’t collect stuff but I just have to hoard everything when I play it”

“It’s the post-apocalypse. You need to hoard everything “

So.

Met Ali this morning for brunch and had an excellent chat. It’s always nice meeting up with Christians to talk and discuss things. After that, met the old team at BK to talk (though it seems everybody is busy and rather bored these days). Also! Picked up a Gorillaz album. So today’s been pretty fun. I’m crashing Ethan’s with a bunch of people tomorrow and I’m really looking forward to trying out the drum kit on Rock Band.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor is so infinitely listenable.

OH YES

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Oh yeah

Playing around with new blog skins. I LOVE the way the title font looks against blue.