Freyburg

I haven’t posted here for a long time for a bunch of reasons, including being busy at work, not having much to say, and blathering on social media. But I’m going to try to get back into it, mostly with random thoughts on goings-on and updates on pop culture. The Current Situation is draining enough via breaking news and the latest outrage without me adding my two cents (note: I may do so anyway from time to time).

I mentioned social media…in the last few years it’s gone from a fun place to dash off nonsense to a fevered swamp of villainy, both in terms of users and the companies running said platforms. So while I’ll still dash off the odd jape and I continue to feed Bookshelf Doctors comics to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram just for the hell of it, there’s something to be said for longer-form stuff on a site I actually own and control.

With that, here’s a list of the stuff I’m reading right now. Gripping!

The Outside: Canadian computer scientist and author Ada Hoffman’s story of an autistic scientist in the far future who gets thrust into a crisis involving AI gods and android angels, a possibly insane mentor and definitely unbalanced ancient horrors that defy physics. Good times!

Helter Skelter: Just saw Once Upon a Time In Hollywood and Tarantino’s usual shoddy disregard for history made me decide to pick up Bugliosi’s tome about the Manson Murders. It doesn’t hurt that I’m also reading his Four Days in November, an excellent chronicle of how the Kennedy assassination unfolding by the minute.

Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History: A sumptuous and from what I can tell comprehensive overview of the art created for and inspired by the popular RPG, along with reams of behind the scenes history and lore. I’ve been playing the game for the last year or so and it’s a really fun way to not only relax but also create worlds of your own with immediate feedback.

I’ve been plowing through more books of late, scattered across various genres. I’ve made a point of not only bathing in scifi but dipping into different genres that up until now I haven’t tried. My method is simple: when an author of note is mentioned offhand in a podcast as someone worth checking out, I make a point of seeking out a sample of their work. This month, the author in question is Raymond Chandler, and the book is “The Big Sleep.”

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About a year ago, I and my compatriots at Radio Free Skaro were guests at Westercon 66, a science fiction convention held in Sacramento. Westercon and a variety of other “pure” scifi cons tend to skew a little older and more towards things literary rather than out-and-out fandom. That’s obviously not a hard and fast rule, given that I was down there as part of a fan podcast focused on Doctor Who, but it is a noticeable difference from events like Gallifrey or San Diego Comic Con.

The upside of the literary bent of Westercon was that the dealer’s room was filled with books, many of them astonishingly cheap. I bought something like thirty paperbacks for around thirty dollars, and I was able to grab many of the sci-fi and fantasy books (classic and otherwise) that I’d missed as a youth.

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