Ben Crowder / Blog

Weeknotes #8

  • This has been a week for avoiding novel editing, I’m afraid. Not much to report. (It hasn’t been a week for side projects at all, in fact.)
  • Hubris snagged me. The path tracer I thought was done last week wasn’t. It is now, though. I’ve since started work on the semester paper (a brief survey of procedural modeling), which I’m hoping to finish quickly so I’ll have plenty of time for the final project.
  • I’m on the third day of a corneal abrasion, which has been buckets of fun, let me tell you. Visited the ophthalmologist this morning and got antibiotic drops to keep it from getting infected. I’m now in the blurred-vision stage, but a) it shouldn’t last more than two weeks and b) thankfully it’s not so bad that I’m unable to read.
  • Nonfiction reading this week: I finished The Dream Machine. So good. Part of me wishes I’d been able to work at Xeroc PARC during those golden years. The rest of me, though, is mighty glad I’m living in the age of laptops and iPhones and Wi-Fi. But yes, if you’re at all interested in the history of computing, read this book. Highly recommended.
  • I also finished The Last Days of Socrates. In another time it might have held my interest more, but this time round it unfortunately fell dull upon my eyes.
  • To sate my thirst for more things medieval, I’ve started on Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, about 14th-century Europe. Much more my style, and while I’ve only just begun, it’s good so far.
  • Fiction reading this week: I ended up bailing on ’Salem’s Lot after a chapter or two. While I think Stephen King is a very talented storyteller, I’m realizing his books aren’t really my thing after all. Which is a mild surprise to me, but I’m glad I’ve finally figured that out.
  • In its place, I’m now about halfway through Jim Butcher’s Peace Talks, the second-to-latest book in the Dresden Files series. Easy reading and fun, if occasionally cringeworthy.
  • By the way: The Dream Machine ended up being book #1,000 (see my reading page). A thousand books in pretty much exactly twenty years. With my hundred-pages-per-day goal, I think it’ll only take around half that time to read the next thousand. (This year I’ve already finished eighty books — eighty! — and expect to pass a hundred without too much difficulty. But it’s also 2020 and I have a corneal abrasion, so who knows.)