Unable to sleep tonight due to my brain going on and on about various things.
The 18th, today, now, is the 3 year anniversary of my dad’s death.
I took the day off from work since it appears I’m not sleeping tonight.
You’d think after 3 years I’d be over it but I think, like most American males, when it happened, I bottled up my feelings and let mental scar tissue grow over and once again it’s festering in there and starting to poison me.
I think I’m going to need to anesthetize myself someday soon and stick a needle in there, let it all flow out. It’ll probably be messy.
I haven’t felt very motivated for a while now. Haven’t read hardly anything. Obviously don’t write in the blog anymore. Mostly watch movies/tv or play video games.
Getting old and facing mortality sucks. Having both my dad and brother in law die right after another the way they did seems to have short circuited some part of my brain. I get depressed more often. Days where I look to the future and see nothing but boring and annoying work till I keel over.
All my old friends have moved away and I rarely see them anymore.
I buy stuff I don’t need just for the small pleasure of getting packages in the mail. It’s something to look forward to.
I think that’s what I hate most about my job, how it makes me wish away 5 days of every 7.
Life is too short to be wanting 70% of it to zip past as quickly as possible.
Thanks to the nice people at NetGalley.com I got a free early ebook of the new fantasy by Joe Abercrombie.
Abercrombie is a fairly new author (his first book came out in 2006) and this is his seventh novel. He is fairly well known for his First Law series and for his grim and gritty dark fantasy style. He also manages to add a bit of humor to keep his books from turning into The Road.
I am a fan and have read all his previous books and this one provides more of the same style of fantasy, though it seems to be a different setting than his First Law books. Lots of violence, cool characters, betrayals, oaths sworn, vengeance dealt and fun stuff like that.
There isn’t really much in the way of magic, if any. Off hand I can’t remember any, certainly not of the wizards casting spell variety, but there might have been some subtler magical stuff that I am not recalling at the moment.
I read it in a day. I got an email from Netgalley after work saying the book was available, sent it to my Kindle and finished it a little while ago. It’s an easy read and it rolls right along.
If that sounds like your cup of tea, the book will be out in the USA in mid-July. Till then, if you haven’t read any of his other books, go get The Blade Itself and start with that.
My Dad is 72 and has Parkinsons Disease. He spent 22 years in the U.S. Army, including 2 years in Vietnam. He had already been in the Army for several years when Vietnam started and he was a Sergeant. His men called him Sgt Poppa because he took such good care of them.
He proudly supports President Obama in this election, just like he did in 2008.
My parents recycled their Obama/Biden yard sign from the last election by putting an American flag over the ’08 part.
Below the word ‘Biden’ on this sign you can see some discoloration. That is where they had taped a ‘Veterans for Obama’ sign.
Somebody came by in the middle of the night and tore it off. My parents taped it back up again, and again, some cowardly, low life piece of shit snuck up to their house in the middle of the night and tore it off.
My parents glued the sign, taped it and stapled the sign the third time, and once again, some local conservative goatfucker crept up to their house when it was dark, to avoid the 72 year old man with Parkinson’s, and ripped that sign off and threw it on the ground.
They put the ripped sign up again, tacked onto the post they use to fly the American flag. It’s further away from the sidewalk than it’s previous location, so maybe the nutless fucktard Republican that has been tearing it down won’t be able to get up enough courage to venture that far onto their property to vandalize it again.
I am tempted to tape the sign in it’s original location again and stay at my parent’s house all night, watching the sign, just to catch the person doing this. I bet that un-American asshole talks lots of shit about ‘supporting the troops’ while violating the home of this old veteran, who has fought off cancer three times. The cancer and the Parkinson’s is thought to be the result of the Agent Orange he came into contact with in Vietnam, where he was risking his life, missing his family and living in horrible conditions to protect the lives and rights of all Americans, even human vermin like this.
But the best revenge will be to have President Obama win re-election.
Alden Bell – The Reapers Are The Angels: An odd book but I liked it quite a bit. Sort of The Road meets Night of the Living Dead but not as depressingly grim as The Road. About a young woman trying to get by in the world after some sort of zombie apocalypse. I found it to be much more lyrical and literary than I would have expected from a zombie apocalypse book.
Daniel Abraham – The Long Price Quartet (A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, The Price of Spring): A four book series of books that starts when the main character is about 10 years old and jumps forward 15 to 20 years or so with every book, continuing to follow the same characters through their lives.
It’s a pretty great series. Probably unlike any other fantasy series you’ve read, it caught me by surprise at least once. You should definitely pick this one up while you’re waiting for G.R.R.M. to finish his next book.
Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank (as James S.A. Corey) – Leviathan Wakes: A gritty noire science fiction detective novel. Set in our solar system and not too far in the future, a space ship hauling water to Mars (I think) finds a derelict ship and stops to investigate. And then things go wrong.
Very different than Abraham’s fantasy books, but just as good in it’s own way.
As you can see in this picture from one of my bookshelves, I really like the graphic novel version of The Walking Dead. (Not as much as Hellboy, but still, I dig it).
So, when I heard that AMC was going to make a TV show based on this I was pretty excited. This comic seems like prime TV show material. I didn’t see how anybody could fuck it up.
But, in my opinion, AMC did. Their version of The Walking Dead is very disappointing to this particular zombie fan. It has a few glimmers of goodness (Norman Reedus as Daryl is the best part of the show), and I am still watching every episode, but I think AMC is really screwing the pooch on this show so far.
Hopefully the show will gel somehow and start not being annoying sometime soon.
I loved this book. A tale of an orphan who is taken in and raised by a con artist, along with a group of other orphans. They are trained to be a team of con artists and they take on the really big scores, stealing fortunes from nobles. An assassin known as the Grey King starts offing gang bosses throughout the city they live in and makes things complicated.
The characters are cool. The setting is cool too, a fantasy city with a splash of Italy or something like that.
Set in America in 2044, an America that sucks. The main character is an orphan that lives in a mobile home (along with his aunt and something like 14 more people) that is stacked on top of a dozen other mobile homes to make an apartment block of sorts. The only good thing in the dude’s life is OASIS, the virtual game world/internet (they sort of combined over the years) that was created by a reclusive billionaire game designer died 5 years earlier. He left no heirs and instead left a final game for the people of the world. A quest through OASIS to find three keys and unlock the final gate to get the ultimate video game ‘easter egg’. The winner inherits his entire estate.
Of course, this causes a huge rush of people trying to figure out the puzzle and win the fortune, but after 5 years, only the hardcore still search. They specialize in 1980’s pop culture because the dead billionaire loved that shit and the clues to figure it all out are in that old stuff.
In addition to the many solo searchers there are also clans of searchers and one evil mega-corp that has an entire department of searchers.
And after 5 years, our hero finds the first key and then it’s on like Donkey Kong.
A horror novel where some event (that is never really explained) starts changing people. These changed people are called ‘Haters’ because they hate non-changed people and attack them and kill them. The main character is a married guy with three young kids in London.
I didn’t really like the book all that much. None of the characters were sympathetic or likable. In fact, they were downright annoying.
Supposedly the first book of a trilogy, I doubt I’ll read the rest of them though.
I’m sure I’ve read this at some point in the past. It’s one of the classics of a genre I read a lot of and it’s been around nearly as long as I have (published in 1968). I don’t remember reading it though. I’ve certainly heard of it.
Nothing really much to say about it. It’s a classic for a reason. The story of a boy known as Sparrowhawk and how he became a mage.
If you consider yourself a fan of fantasy you really should read this one.