So I’m a day late on this one, but I did publish a thing yesterday, that the good people at Mbird will also be publishing on their space sometime early next week.

This week has mostly been focused on buttoning up minor things at work before next week’s trip to California for year end meetings. I’m also staying a couple extra nights to see some friends.

J. and I spent much of today making some much needed furniture purchases. Thank God for Cville’s Habitat for Humanity Store and Circa. I honestly never imagined that purchasing high quality furniture could be such an affordable and accessible experience. Friends, if you have a Habitat store or any sort of used furniture store, seek it out. I promise you, you are not damned to an endless cycle of particle board and opaque instructions from big box stores for the rest of your life. And, surprisingly, we’ve been able to make purchases that cost little more than what you’d find at said big box stores, and I think we’ll need to make fewer purchases in the long run.

Reading

Still working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell and Fleming Rutledge’s Advent. Stephenson’s novel touches on the eschatological in such a clever way that I never would have expected from an almost satirical sci-fi novel. I’m still forming thoughts about it, but there’s likely a dedicated post in me that I’ll write once I’ve finished reading it.

Watching

Last night we watched Prospect, an indie sci-fi film that was surprisingly good. The plot is a straightforward survival story, but the world was fascinating and immersive. It felt like a small glimpse of a large narrative universe. My only complaint is that there was so much left unaddressed about the world, that it almost felt like a film was the worst medium to employ this setting. Nonetheless, I’d recommend it.

Listening

Finally listening to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’s Ghosteen. Beyond what I said in the aforementioned post, I have nothing more other than an admonition for you to listen.

Links

The Weight of Advent: Speak What You Feel, Not What You Ought to Say - Ian at Mockingbird

The 8 Requirements of Real-Time Stream Processing — For any programming nerds out there, this was really interesting, especially given that it was written in 2005. Also see The Morning Paper’s summary.