Cyberpunk'd!

I suggest to you, For Your Reading Pleasure, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Given that my main exposure to the cyberpunk genre up to this point has been Blade Runner, The Matrix, Carl's work-in-progress comic Middlemen and, in a looser definition of the genre, Ghost in the Shell, I was kind of surprised to find as much humor as I did in the novel. Certainly, there's an overarching philosophy to the book, expounding on some very post-modern and linguistic theories and involving somewhat far-fetched linguistic theories and neo-Sumerian cultists, and the requisite cynicism of our technophilic society.

But, this books is FUNNY. Consistently! Battle scenes are actually not taken particularly seriously - they seem highly realistic, and always gritty, but the descriptions keep it from seeming like the combat is the focus of the plot. So, all in all, very entertaining! Much more cerebral towards the end than I thought at first, but it has a hilarious, scary, and oddly tenable view of the future. Plus, the main character is named Hiro Protagonist. Yup.

Office work here is increasingly lonely - my comrades-in-arms and fellow procrastinators are now going off to school (suckers!) but I still have a few weeks left...you don't really realize how much of a difference having company makes until they're not there anymore! So, I poke at blogs and e-mails and essays and read articles excessively.

It's funny how jumpy one can get about terrorist threats and such, even when one doesn't see it as at all likely. Like, just now, there was a huge, loud jet noise that sounded very low over the city - I heard it loudly and I'm inside and have headphones on - and my first thought was "plane flying into something! crap on a crap stick!" Then I realized that it was just the jets from the Air & Water Show doing practice passes. Still, scary, and goes to show what repetition of propoganda and 9/11 images and movies can do, even to skeptics.

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Meetings and goodbyes at airports and train stations are, in fact, a force of their own.