Busy? No excuse!

I really seriously dislike Facebook. This is a thing about me. Those who know this thing about me are most likely to be my actual friends. (In a world where "Facebook Friend" is a term, another thing that I dislike is having to qualify the word "friend".)

The reasons that I dislike Facebook are laid out fairly neatly in the Wikipedia entry called "Criticism of Facebook." The latest atrocities/idiocies/inanities to be laid at the feet of Zuckerberg and his posse are par for the course.

But enough about me. Or rather, enough about my problems with that thing over there. Despite the prevailing wisdom to the contrary, merely complaining about a thing does not fix it. There is a movement afoot to participate in a "mass-suicide" of Facebook accounts. quitfacebookday.com is the vanguard of the effort.

Katie and I together, on our Facebook account, have I don't know, maybe 200 friends. Which is about right. We don't approve everyone who tries to friend us, we don't join any groups or anything. We are highly antisocial when it comes to Facebook. I am sick of typing that word. We are highly antisocial when it comes to That Thing.

Still and all, what's the alternative? Yes, you can come to this website, but when I don't post anything for three months, it gets sorta boring. You can leave a comment to say hi, but nobody does that. If only there was another way that people could communicate with their actual friends and say something substantial....

I briefly toyed with the idea of writing actual physical letters and putting them in envelopes and sending them to people. And I may enact that plan sometime soon when the twin boulders of Work and More Work are lightened to some degree. But for the interim, I've decided to go back to the way things used to be, in simpler times, and write some reasonably-long-winded (medium-winded?) emails to people. Just one or two a week probably, just to reach out and touch base with someone I haven't heard from in a while. It's not a perfect solution, especially since I live so far away from 99% of the people I care about, but it'll have to do. Because it'll be a damn sight better than That Thing. Have you ever actually tried to figure out how someone's doing by looking at their That Thing account? You look at a bunch of smiling pictures, read 15 or 20 ten-word-or-less status updates, get confused by conversations you aren't involved in, see what groups or whatever they've "fanned". The voyeurism would be obscene if it wasn't so superficial.

Anyway. Watch out, you might get an e-mail from me. Send one back if you want. It's a fun new technology! I've recently started an e-mail correspondence game of chess with a very good friend of mine. The game is slow-going, but interesting. If you play at all, let me know, and we can arrange something.

About me: As it often happens, famine is followed by feast, raining is concurrent with pouring. After eight months of sitting on my bum, looking for jobs which stubbornly refused to materialize for Nonimmigrant Aliens, BookLinks now needs me to manage projects full time, while a project for Oxford University Press is finally building steam as well. It's better to be busy than to be fallow, but damn, little Adams need sleep, too. My work permit came through, as did my travel document, which let me get home for a rest and visit with my grandmother, Elizabeth Williams, who died three weeks after we came back to New York. I love my grandmother, and I'm going to miss her.

Katie and I have an interview with the Department of Homeland Security on June 2nd to prove that we have a real, loving, honest-to-God relationship, and that ours is not merely the story of a Canadian editor marrying an American to avoid deportation. Ahem.

I'm reading the last of my Christmas books, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon. It's quite good, but all the yiddish vocab can be a bit dense at times. I found it due to its having garnered both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction, so I've been surprised more than once when people who I know for a fact do not read such a genre ask me if it's any good.

I've been slowly chipping away at the monolith that is Final Fantasy XIII, but it's slow going. I've read that the game really picks up after the thirty-hour mark. Which seems like a long time to wait for a payoff, until you consider that the game's main storyline is expected to take nearly 100 hours to complete. Either way, chip, chip, one hour at a time.

Do not judge me! I will just say these things: I have been playing World of Warcraft. My guild, the Windrunners (of which I am "2nd-in-Command", lol), has been successfully raiding the first two wings of Icecrown Citadel, in both the 10- and 25-man versions. My GearScore (because such things matter) on my Paladin, Alessan, is over 5500. This is a "good" GearScore, I'm told. Most of that is gibberish, and I'm sorry. I'll make up for it by showing you my Paladin and his pet Baby Blizzard Bear outside the Human capital city of Stormwind:

Pretty slick. Alessan's sword is called "Rimefang's Claw", Rimefang being a fucking dragon that I killed.

Now I am tired, so I will present you with a video dump, for fun.

Since we were already talking about World of Warcraft, here's a funny song about zombies with a video using the game's engine (these things are called "machinima," for some reason). EDIT: As House helpfully points out in the comments, the song is by one Jonathan Coulton, who has become ensconced as the poster boy for geek rock. (That may not be the correct term. One could fill volumes with what I fail to know about music genres.) Please pursue him, it is well worth it:


Tron 2 (which is not actually called Tron 2) is coming. I continue to build barely-suppressed anticipation for it:


This is an excellent news story about news stories, which I'm sure you've already seen 2000 times on That Thing:


And this is a short LEGO-based sequence that manages to be significantly cooler than two-thirds of the Star Wars prequels:


Thank you for reading. I will close with a half-hearted promise to post more frequently as I find things floating in the twisting nether of the many internets.

Now fuck off.

Love, Adam
Cormoks and unruns are delicious.