I’m not sure if I can embed a video in this, or not, but if you want to imagine the song from the end of Portal while you read this post, that would be just fine by me.

Here’s a link: SONG

I could spoiler-tag that, as it’s the end of the game, but I imagine anyone it might mean anything to has already seen it, etc., etc., worlds without end.

So, how’s everyone doing?

As some folks, who’ve asked me in person (or the internet variation on such) know, I’ve been having the devil’s own time connecting to this blog. Until just now, of course.

Clearly, I have gotten back in.

Beautiful Handcrafted Animals still sits, neatly piled up, waiting for me to dig back into it (just in case that’s why you’ve found yourself here). It’s resting right now, as am I.

Also, I got myself an Amazon Kindle. If you don’t know what that is, it’s essentially an e-book reader on steroids. Electronic paper means you can read without eyesore, and using minimal battery life. Plus, you can buy a book “on-the-go” which is really just a non-fancy way of saying you can flip a switch, connect to Amazon.com and buy (at a heady discount) any of the 90,000+ books currently available via their Kindle store.

It’s pretty sexy.

We got my Dad one for his birthday, back in December, and it’s taken literally until right now for mine to arrive. It sits, waiting, charging, next to my keyboard.

One of the very nice things about this Kindle is you can download, for free, a sample of any book you might be interested in reading. I’m sure normal humans would use this to test out a book, or see what they thought of the author, but I’m using it as a sort of “shopping cart” for Kindle books. Grab the first chapter, and then I don’t have to worry about remembering what it was I wanted to read later on.

When you buy a book, it takes about a minute to download. When I think of all the crappy books and magazines I’ve bought, over the years, racing through Penn Station, so I’d have something to read on the ride home . . . well, its’ very nice.

Right now I have some twenty-odd books on my Kindle. These include:

  • Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter books
  • W. Somerset Maugham’s, Of Human Bondage — which seems to just be too damned thick to take with me in any other format
  • All three His Dark Materials books
  • Heinlein’s, Stranger In A Strange Land (I hope it’s the unabridged version)
  • The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (for like, six bucks — how could I resist?)
  • The Caitlin R. Kiernan, Beowulf movie adaptation, which I also could not resist.
  • A couple Douglas Preston / Lincoln Childs books, mainly solo efforts I haven’t read yet
  • William Gibson’s, Neuromancer
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby (I think it was $0.99, for pity’s sake)
  • Clive Barkers, Imajica (great, heavy, book)
  • Joe Hill’s, 20th Century Ghosts
  • Aaaand, another twenty or so “sample chapters” of other things.

This crazy thing weighs about the same as a trade-paperback. So I’m carrying all that around with me, in a form-factor about the same size as a book I could blow through going downtown and back uptown again.

Amazing.

I’m reading a lot now (as you might imagine — I’m just polishing off Christopher Priest’s, The Prestige, the basis for the Christopher Nolan movie), and that usually means I’m not writing. That’s okay. I’m getting ready for a break and that means writing, writing, writing.

What else? Oh, we went for a double-feature this past Saturday, catching Enchanted (we loved it) and The Orphanage (uh-mazing). We still want to see No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and we’re aiming to catch at least one of them this Saturday.

So, what’ve y’all been up to?