weekending
Things have been pretty relaxed around here over the weekend. Yesterday, I had a haircut in North Raleigh, and afterward we paid a visit to a thrift store where all the proceeds go toward animal rescue (I think). Then we drove around a bit, getting lunch at Qdoba, then stopping in Tales Resold, a secondhand bookstore / comic book store that I spent a lot of time in when I was in high school. It smelled exactly the same as I remembered, and the same old dude who owned the store was still sitting behind the counter.
Last night, we watched Good Bye Lenin!, a funnysweetsad film about an East German family living through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany. Only the mother has a heart attack and slips into a coma whilst all this change is occurring, and once she wakes up, the doctors tell her son and daughter that any big shock could kill her. Since she was staunchly supportive of the GDR party, the son spends the rest of the movie rewriting history through his actions so that his mother will not realize the truth. It's a well-done and understated film, and I encourage y'all to check it out.
In about an hour, Janet and I will head to the Colony for a screening of WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price.
And continuing in our filmish theme, Alex Wilson has released three of his short films -- "All's Fair in Love and Police Actions," "The Three Rs" and "Tommy" -- in M4V format, which can be played in iTunes and on the iPod video. Go check 'em out.
And following the proto-meme of posting favorite stories published at SciFiction, here are mine:
"Partial Eclipse" by Graham Joyce
"The Pottawatomie Giant" by Andy Duncan
"Non-Disclosure Agreement" by Scott Westerfeld
"Water Master" by Carol Emshwiller
"What I Didn't See" by Karen Joy Fowler
"The Wages of Syntax>" by Ray Vukcevich
"Jury Service" by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow
"Death Penalty" by Leslie What
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford
"Angels and You Dogs" by Kathleen Ann Goonan
"At the Mouth of the River of Bees" by Kij Johnson
"House of the Future" by Richard Butner
"Zora and the Zombie" by Andy Duncan
"The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" by John Kessel
"The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe
"Super 8" by Terry Bisson
"Heads Down, Thumbs Up" by Gavin J, Grant
"Anyway" by M. Rickert
There are, of course, many other wonderful stories there, including the classics (such as "The Heat Death of the Universe" by Pamela Zoline), but they didn't impact me as much as the above list. For the full set, go visit the archives before they're all taken down.
Oh, and I did a little work on the ol' website, taking some things down and moving others around. The feed for this blog is now featured on the front page, and any biographical/bibliographical stuff was moved to an "About the Author" page. I like the way it looks.
Last night, we watched Good Bye Lenin!, a funnysweetsad film about an East German family living through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany. Only the mother has a heart attack and slips into a coma whilst all this change is occurring, and once she wakes up, the doctors tell her son and daughter that any big shock could kill her. Since she was staunchly supportive of the GDR party, the son spends the rest of the movie rewriting history through his actions so that his mother will not realize the truth. It's a well-done and understated film, and I encourage y'all to check it out.
In about an hour, Janet and I will head to the Colony for a screening of WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price.
And continuing in our filmish theme, Alex Wilson has released three of his short films -- "All's Fair in Love and Police Actions," "The Three Rs" and "Tommy" -- in M4V format, which can be played in iTunes and on the iPod video. Go check 'em out.
And following the proto-meme of posting favorite stories published at SciFiction, here are mine:
"Partial Eclipse" by Graham Joyce
"The Pottawatomie Giant" by Andy Duncan
"Non-Disclosure Agreement" by Scott Westerfeld
"Water Master" by Carol Emshwiller
"What I Didn't See" by Karen Joy Fowler
"The Wages of Syntax>" by Ray Vukcevich
"Jury Service" by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow
"Death Penalty" by Leslie What
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford
"Angels and You Dogs" by Kathleen Ann Goonan
"At the Mouth of the River of Bees" by Kij Johnson
"House of the Future" by Richard Butner
"Zora and the Zombie" by Andy Duncan
"The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" by John Kessel
"The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe
"Super 8" by Terry Bisson
"Heads Down, Thumbs Up" by Gavin J, Grant
"Anyway" by M. Rickert
There are, of course, many other wonderful stories there, including the classics (such as "The Heat Death of the Universe" by Pamela Zoline), but they didn't impact me as much as the above list. For the full set, go visit the archives before they're all taken down.
Oh, and I did a little work on the ol' website, taking some things down and moving others around. The feed for this blog is now featured on the front page, and any biographical/bibliographical stuff was moved to an "About the Author" page. I like the way it looks.