Concrete Lunch

Throwing this one out to my friend MMS. I feel that we (both of us) need to seek out young badass artists, lest we become the new version of the old guys in the crowd at the public television Doo-Wop festival.

Been sitting on this for a while, but set it up tonight. New setup. I’m 50 years old, but a new board still gives me a nice tingly feeling.

I’ve been running a roleplaying game campaign in the cyberpunk genre lately using the GURPS system, so I wanted to re-read some cyberpunk stuff to get in the right frame of mind.  So I downloaded Willliam Gibson’s Neuromancer to my Kindle.

I read it back in the early 1990s, after reading some non-fiction stuff about computer hackers. I dug it, and when I saw that I could learn about the internet by getting a masters degree in library science, that’s what I did. So really, it was William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy that got me interested in my profession, not some love of literacy and reading (that stuff developed later).

So I’m about halfway through Neuromancer, and I realize that I need to start over.

I just don’t find Gibson’s style easy to read. It’s written in that whole film noir style with lots of fictional jargon and cyberspace tomfoolery added in. Really, I think it needs to be read aloud. Some books just demand it — to be read out loud and listened to. They need to be read with some drama. I feel the same way about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. If you just try to blast through it like you were reading an instruction manual, it doesn’t work. If you hear it out loud, it’s fantastic. You need to hear the author’s rythym.

Thing is, I’ll feel like a lunatic sitting somewhere reading this thing out loud. “Hey, there’s that guy reading out loud! Let’s steal his lunch money!”.

On a somewhat contradictory note,  I think that about halfway into a book like this, the reader starts to come to grips with the language and slang, and the reading gets easier. I had this experience when reading A Clockwork Orange years ago.

I’m really beginning to appreciate a good audio book. I may seriously look into audio for this novel. Hell, I’ve already read it once. Now why not listen to it being read really well?

I want to re-read (or listen to) the entire Sprawl Trilogy, then also read Burning Chrome again, and the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades.

EDIT: Holy Smokes! Audiobooks are really expensive!

Went out skating my friend Chris yesterday. He has a new camera. We used a tripod, and then I made this slide show of me doing a 1-footed 540 on this banked wall of a ditch. We need to bump up the speed of the high-speed burst to get more pics per second. But here it is…

Oh, I think I failed to mention that back in November I passed my 1st Kyu test in Aikido. So about 2 years until Shodan (black belt) test.

That will be 10 years of practice. Seems like a long time, but aikido is a difficult art, and the United States Aikido Federation doesn’t just sell belts like some bullshit organizations do. When you reach Shodan in USAF, you have accomplished something.

The holidays are behind us, the new year has begun, and it’s time to use that aribitrary marker of the passage of time to blast into 365 more days — hopefully good ones.

FAT

I came back from the November-December time block about 8 pounds fatter. I have lost 3 of them already. They were the result of the aikido dojo being closed, holiday food, cold wet weather preventing skateboarding, and travel. Looked in the mirror and noticed I was getting my fat guy face. Not good. Already losing my hair. Nothing I can do about that, but but I refuse to be bald AND fat.

GAMING

Not sure if I mentioned here, but in the last quarter of 2014 I began planning a paper and pencil role-playing game campaign. Using the GURPS RPG system, I created the beginnings of a Cyberpunk gameworld, after finding out that 4 friends from my youth through college live in town and would like to do some RPG playing.

OK, actually, I started to mention the game thing here, but quickly created a sub-domain of this blog…Concrete  Lunch Gaming, after getting all stoked on gaming again. Been writing about gaming and started documenting my campaign there.

So what lead me back to this hobby?

What happened is this: Last summer I noticed that my nephew and his friends were playing Minecraft in a way greatly resembling a D&D game. I mentioned this to him. The next morning it was obvious he had stayed up reading about D&D, and he began asking me questions. Frankly, this started to rekindle my interest in the RPG hobby, and I liked the idea of my nephew doing something imaginative that wasn’t a damned video game. So I sent him the new D&D Starter Set. Flash forward to January 2015 and I taught him to play. That next weekend he had his friends over playing. Not sure if they will continue, but I hope they do.

Anyhoo, we had our first Cyberpunk gaming session the other night. Fun was had by all. Here is the nerdish writeup.

 OTHER STUFF FOR 2015

Other projects for this year included continuing to write articles for Broken Fingers Freestyle Skateboarding ‘Zine, continue writing other stuff and blogging as much as I can, read 20 books, and skate and do aikido as much as I can. Overriding all of that is support my wife’s efforts to write her dissertation.

NOAA Weather Radio Deck the Halls Extended Holiday Noise Remix.

Put this on REPEAT and have some nice background sounds for your Christmas gathering!

I watched Guardians of the Galaxy on Amazon Instant yesterday. It was my 2nd viewing. I saw it in the theater.

I thought it held up pretty well. Really fun movie.

I guess my only “thing” about it pertains to all the Marvel movies.

It would be interesting to see a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie in which there was not giant release of cosmic energy or huge ship crashing at the end. I realize they are comic book movies, but man, it seems like I’m kind of seeing the same damned movie every time. Maybe the Iron Man movies have not fallen victim to this quite so much.

Back in highschool, my friends and I used to play Champions: the Superhero Roleplaying Game. One of the guys used to end every game he GMed with the same thing — an atom bomb detonating. So yeah, Marvel should come up with something new.

I woke up a couple of weeks ago with this image in my mind. A person buried under a sidewalk, with only his hands and tips of his feet sticking out of the ground.

Next stop – insane asylum. I know.

This weekend I’m going to write a short story – kind of a micro-story – about this.

Today is quite beautiful here in North Texas. Cool and Sunny. Perfect, really. I wish I were 1)not still sick with a cold and 2)out skating. Oh well.

Part of my lunch ritual is usually reading. Over the course of the year I get most of my reading done during my lunch hour, which is why I don’t get a lot read in a year. Lately I’ve been having trouble finding a good place to read. My workplace really has no good place to sit and read. If it did, like the restaurants in the area, it would be full of people talking and babbling about whatever is on their minds. That’s fine — people need that — but it sucks for reading.

Today I took advantage of the nice weather and just sat out in my car for 30 minutes to read. It was perfect. No one talking. Windows down and cool breeze. No internet. No phone. No computer. No distractions. If the weather were like that all the time I’d do that every day.

My reading has been been very weak the last few months. At this rate I will not even match last year’s pathetic reading of about 18 books. Too much time spent surfing the interwebs. I have about 4 books I’m halfway through, which are all good books. Since I’m sick right now, I will devote myself to finishing them up and try to get to 15 books read for 2014.