Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Here’s something for the kids to do in the holidays! This Korean student attending a winter military camp endures a character building training exercise in Ansan, south of Seoul. Hundreds of students between 11 and 17 years old attend winter boot camp training courses every year. Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
That face is pretty much how I reacted to yesterday.
CUT TO: INT. JOSH’S BULLPEN AREA – NIGHT
Josh walks past Donna then notices her and comes back.JOSH
The Internet people have gone crazy.DONNA
[sarcastically] You’re kidding.The two of them start to walk together.
JOSH
They’re calling the GAO “General Josh’s Standing Army”, and saying I don’t understand it’s mandate and purpose. They’re saying if I could get a review of anything I want, that I should start by reviewing the job of Deputy C.O.S. Then one guy compares me to a poor man’s Clark Clifford, and a page and a half of posts, debating whether or not I was mocking Egyptians with the Sanskrit reference.They come to a halt.
DONNA
[snappishly] I told you they were hysterical.JOSH
I thought you meant they were funny.DONNA
They’re not.
This is my life.
(From “The U.S. Poet Laureate” teleplay by Aaron Sorkin – of course – from The West Wing.)
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
This grinning hyena was photographed in South Africa’s Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park by Bridgena Barnard who describes the encounter: ‘Every time the camera clicked he juggled and gave a new pose’. But the hyena had the last laugh with this hilarious expression, before disappearing into the long grass. Photograph: Bridgena Barnard/Rex Features
So, I think 2013 has already discovered its spirit animal.
From the Guardian:
Fullerton, California, US: A man walks his dog as fog hangs over the banks of a stream in Craig regional park. Photograph: Bruce Chambers/The Orange County Register/AP
This basically constitutes what I laughingly refer to as my “vacation reading,” although my vacation actually only lasted four days. But these are the books that I can remember reading over the last couple of weeks – Annoyingly, I know there’s at least one other that I don’t remember the name of (It was another book about US politics) in there, and at least a couple of other Star Trek books, too (I pretty much finished Peter David’s New Frontier series, for one thing). The Star Trek: The Next Generation trilogy was actually my vacation reading; light-but-not-too-light, and perfect for decompressing on my days off, with the right tone to make them faithful to the show but interesting and full of idea enough to make them worth reading (Note for hardcore Trekkies: Those upset that Data died in the last movie might want to pick up at least the first book). I actually ended up really appreciating the way that Mack structured the trilogy as essentially three standalone books with common themes and a b-plot that ends up tying them together, too. Yes, I’m a process wonk that way.
Of the three non-fiction books above, We Killed ended up being disappointingly scattered and without any real editorial viewpoint, making for a read that left me wanting. It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, meanwhile, was actually overly familiar in its subject matter and didn’t offer enough new insights to overcome that, but Suffering Succotash was a joy to read – An investigation into “picky eaters” written with a sense of humor and smarts that made it all flow by quickly and happily.
I’ve seen people online write about their desire to try to read a book a week in 2013 – or, crazily, a book a day – and it strikes me that I already managed that, or a little-bit-more, in 2012. Here’s to trying to keep that rate of reading up this year.
Weird but true; 2013 marks not only the tenth anniversary of my starting Fanboy Rampage!!! the blog that launched what I laughingly referred to at the time as my writing career, but also the fifth anniversary of the launch of io9.com, the website that actually made that joke into a real career. It’s actually io9’s fifth anniversary today [EDIT: Apparently, I was a day off, and it was Jan 2]; for all my mixed feelings about my time there – Short version, I didn’t appreciate the opportunity it presented at the time (or maybe, I mistook it for an entirely different opportunity?), but it was also a really bad fit for me for various reasons and I think I’m better off out of it – it’s the thing that made me think that maybe I could be a writer full-time, and for that, I’ll always be grateful to the site and everyone involved.
Happy Birthday, io9, and happy oh-my-God-I’m-old to me.