Miscellanea Exotica

Maybe I'll do better chronicling the Steelers next season. Suffice it to say, hooray for yesterday, and next Sunday's gonna suck. Patriots are gonna whip our asses. (Unless not. They got beat by the Buffalo freaking Bills, after all.)

I got my replacement Kindle, and there was much rejoicing. In celebration, I bought Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. Four hundred and some-odd pages of pure self-indulgence, and I basically had to wring the testosterone out of my hair afterwards, but it was fun.

Next up, Shogun. Because I never actually finished it, and I've always meant to.

In other news, work sucks, but we knew this.

So, I forgot I was doing this. So. The game against the Seahawks was awesome. I do believe that was the first shutout game I've actually seen (as opposed to heard about). There was some redemption, although considering the Steelers' complete domination of the Seahawks, the score was a little disappointingly low.

I didn't get to see the Colts game. Not having TV sucks sometimes, and it was a night game, so I couldn't watch it at Aunt D's. I hear we won, but only by the skins of our teeth. Really, even the freakin' Browns were able to whip the Colts with Peyton out. We need improvement.

In non-football related news, I may have stepped on my Kindle. It may have gone crunch. If this is truly the case, as opposed to a particularly cruel hypothetical, that would make me very sad. A paycheck would be required, in that case, to have it fixed. Fortunately, although it's out of warranty, Amazon does offer to fix broken Kindles for a fee that is rather smaller than a new ereader. So, that's nice. Or would be. If I needed it. Which I might not. I admit nothing. Though let me tell you, if Amazon does what everyone thinks they're going to do tomorrow and announces their Kindle tablet, I'll be getting one of those.

And now for something completely different.

Back in December of last year, I panicked along with every other Delicious user and exported my bookmarks everywhere I could think to put them, for fear they would be lost when Yahoo yanked the plug. One of the locations I picked was pinboard.in, which is a one-time-payment, old-school del.icio.us clone. Not long after I paid my money and moved my stuff there, Yahoo announced that they'd never, how could we think, we should never listen to the reckless reporting of the press, and they weren't shutting Delicious down, just selling it. And nothing happened, and the site stayed up, and I breathed a sigh of relief, and continued using Delicious. Then it got bought, and nothing continued to happen, and I breathed another sigh of relief, figuring that the new owners would maintain continuity and just work on the back-end of the site. Today, I was proved tragically wrong.

WHERE ARE MY BUNDLES?! AHHH!

Sorry. Needed to get that out. Anyway. Delicious, for several reasons, has been rendered basically unusable for the time being. So, I decided to switch back to Pinboard. I figured, I already had most of my stuff there; I haven't been marking fic as aggressively this year as in years past, so it wouldn't be too much trouble to move this year's stuff over. But hark! I got to Pinboard, and discovered that, lo!, it had continued to mirror my Delicious account, even after I'd forgotten about it. So I don't have to do a thing! It's all just there, already. This makes me happy.

Even if I still want my freaking bundles back. Gimme my bundles!

I haven't been reading as much as I used to, when I was younger. Used to be, you couldn't pry my nose out of a book with two burly men and a crowbar. There are a number of reasons for the sharp decline in book-reading -- some good, some bad -- but the long and short of it is that I'd really like to get back to my books.

I just moved into a new apartment last weekend, and I'm currently in the middle of rebuilding my bookshelves and putting my many (many!) books back on them. As I re-shelve the books, I'm reminded of how many I still need to read, and I feel a great motivation to get started on that. We'll see how long that lasts, but sometimes my whims are stronger and longer-lasting than firm convictions.

In the meantime, I'm going to play a game. There are all sorts of "You really should read all of these books" lists, compiled by all sorts of people. What I'd like to do is, over the next however-long, is to compile some of these lists, see which books on those lists I've already read, which ones I have no desire to read, and then maybe get started on a comprehensive To-Read List.

( Game behind the cut )

So, elsewhere, the topic came up of older novelists very quietly inserting gay characters into their books and never really mentioning it, but leaving clues for those who are interested in seeing them. The best, cleverest example I've come across is Dorothy Dunnett in the The Lymond Chronicles.

( Blithering about and some spoilers for The Lymond Chronicles, which anyone who hasn't read it and has even the slightest interest in historical fiction should read. )

So, who's eating a whole coffee cake while on a diet? Yeah, I'm bad. But it's not my fault.

So, I was in class on Tuesday. The Business School building shares its bottom floor with a Panera. I have a three-hour evening class, and half-way through, the instructor gives us a fifteen minute break. Not surprisingly, a lot of us make a bee line for Panera. I wanted something sweet, and the thing I thought looked best in their bakery was the coffee cake. So I go and order a piece. And the girl says, "You want the coffee cake?" And I say, "Yeah." And it's late; I've already been sitting through over an hour of truly mind-numbing accounting fundamental concepts. I'm zoned out. So I don't actually pay any mind when she charges me six bucks. Then she says, "You want it in a box?" And, still thoroughly zoned out, I say, "Yeah." Well, she then proceeds to take about three minutes putting this box together, and I'm still zoned out and thinking, "Huh. Why did she want to put it in a box in the first place? I'll have to remember not to agree to it next time. My little piece of cake isn't worth all this, and my that's a big box for a little piece of cake." The girl then picks up the whole cake, and I think, "Oh shit."

So, now I have a whole coffee cake, which is quite delicious, but which I should not be eating by myself. But I'm not seeing anyone I can foist it off on till Saturday. By which time it will be either stale or gone. Probably gone, the way I keep sneaking "just one more piece." I'm trying to be serious about this diet, but it's being sabotaged... by FATE. Or me. I can't tell.

Aside from getting a hold of a copy of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, which my professor recommended, and which is so far surprisingly interesting, the coffee cake incident was the most exciting thing that has happened all week. This says something about my week, I think.

Back to laundry.