So much for posting more often than once a week. We'll just set that resolution to the side for now, shall we?
Anyway, I'm reaching the end of spring break. It was great to relax, but not to the extent that boredom set in (which it did, quite often). The only real event took place on Wednesday when I went with Eric, Mel, and two former classmates named Elise and Damon to $BIG_DOWNTOWN_MALL. We did the high schooler thing and wandered around, not really shopping, but enjoying each others' company. We went to $EXPENSIVE_BUT_DELICIOUS_FOOD_RESTAURANT for dinner.
Aside from that lone event, I've divided my spring break between surfing, reading, and watching TV, in that order. Reading, I've burned through all the Bloom County books, an entertaining , , and beautifully-written . Some notes about each:
- The Bloom County books were even funnier than I remember. This is no surprise seeing as I was but a wee toddler when they first came out. The strips got progressively more political, but even so, they remained amazingly timely despite being almost 20 years old. Replace "Reagan" with "Bush" (or "Bush" with "Bush") and "communist" with "terrorist" and they could have been printed yesterday. The only thing that dated the books was the plastic record in . Because I'm a bit short on record players, I had to uncover some . Very cool stuff. I'm tempted to burn the MP3s off to a CD and stick it in the book alongside the record for some future reader.
- Yes it's true, I read Star Wars comics. It's my one truly geeky vice... aside from being a Computer Science major... and keeping a website... and having a fanatical devotion to the Super Nintendo... and reading science fiction constantly... aw screw it; it's one of my many geeky vices. I first read a Star Wars comic when I came across the of Timothy Zahn's which I had read not long before. Since then, I've picked up a small handful of additional books, with being the latest. It's entertaining in that goofy Star Wars way, though I don't like how the artist drew Jade's nose and forehead. Nitpicky, nitpicky.
- had some cool ideas (ad-hockracy, whuffie) and a decent story, but it was still a bit disappointing in some intangible way. I think it was mostly because the book made it hard to like the main character. He goes off on all sorts of irrational tangents that made me, the reader, feel like smacking him around a bit. The narrative also seemed a bit stretched even though it's a short book. I thought Doctorow's short story collection was far better.
- was simply beautiful. It was like reading science fiction poetry. Engrossing, present-day story. Good stuff. Filled with sentence fragments.