And Much Reading Ensued
This morning Whump came over to my apartment to help me set up some Web stats stuff for the SF3 account. Turned out not to be too hard, but we spent a couple of hours poking around at stuff and talking. Bill and I don't know each other all that well (in fact, I think we've only met a handful of times), but he's been perfectly friendly to me, which counts for something.
After he left, I spent much of the rest of the day screwing around on the computer, fixing Web pages, continuing to orient myself to MacOS 8.1, writing some stuff. Kind of a lost afternoon. It got overcast mid-afternoon, when I'd planned to go for a bike ride, and the radio threatened thunderstorms. Instead, all we got was a wimpy rainfall and a lot of glowering clouds. I felt cheated.
This evening I went down to the coffee shop to read. It was really dead in there. Partly this is the yawning wasteland of time between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of summer classes, but partly I think the fact that a Starbucks Coffee franchise has opened half a block down the street from the shop I patronize may have had something to do with it.
I read a bunch of comics I had stored up that I hadn't gotten to yet: the latest Thieves & Kings, the first two issues of the new Marvel Universe series, which are a lot of fun, and Jon J. Muth's Swamp Thing work of a few months back, which was rather confused and dull.
I also read about half of Michael Swanwick's Jack Faust, which has been nominated for a Hugo Award. It's a good book so far, a new twist on the tale of Dr. Faustus, only this Faust is mentally contacted by alien beings who give him knowledge of advanced science and technology which he delivers on Medieval Europe. The book would be a little better, I think, if Mephistopheles had given him the knowledge and disappeared, rather than sticking around as a sarcastic and malevolent advisor, but them's the breaks.
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