zompist bboard

Reading
Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series last week, and this week it's been Jennifer Fallon's Tide Lords series. Both are very good although completely different genres; I quite like the depth and detail of Fallon's fantasy world.

Listening
Arcade Fire. "The Suburbs" is brilliant, but so are both their other albums. They deserved album of the year too.
Radiohead's new album, "The King of Limbs" is weird but it'll grow on me.
Sigur Rós (and Jónsi). Sarah Blasko. Au Revoir Simone. Something for Kate (and Paul Dempsey). Stars. LCD Soundsystem. Phoenix. We Have Band. Hot Chip. Quite a few other bands too but those are the main contenders in high rotation.

Watching
The new series on ABC (that is, Australian Broadcasting Corp, not whatever the American ABC is), Laid, which is brilliantly dark. It's online on their iView but chances are they've geoblocked it to Australian residents only or something.
A few strange European movies come to mind as well but I don't remember many titles.

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Zoqaëski : /θoˈca.jes.ki/

Reading: Anthills of the Savannah, by Chinua Achebe; Kant: A Very Short Introduction (this is basically to clarify one single aspect of Lacan's philosophy of subjective decenterment which draws upon Kant... but it's proven to be good fun!)
Listening: mostly some early stuff by Youssou N'Dour with Étoile de Dakar

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(PDF)

I read Midnight's Children by Rushdie (in English) the past 4 weeks, it was very enjoyable (also, it won the Booker of Bookers, and subsequently is on the English Department's reading list in the 20th century section). Now I've moved on to the Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) by Brecht (in German), which I'm reading for class. Since Amplifier (often space-cowboy themed alt. rock band from Manchester) released The Octopus I find myself listening a lot to that. As for watching? I don't watch films usually. And I don't have a TV either.

Listening to .

Reading:
Listening:
Watching:

Reading: Robert Jordan - Path of Daggers (please don't hit me)
Watching: last thing I watched was Avatar
Listening: Had Blind Guardian's latest album (At the edge of time) on repeat for weeks now. But the most played song is probably (Due to me reading it)

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Don't worry Girls, Explosions fix everything!

He who is also known as Ben

Reading: Nothing, at the moment. Unless you count local newspapers. Last thing I read that was a book: The Logic of Alice: Clear Thinking in Wonderland (it ended up being more or less an introductory logic textbook based on Alice in Wonderland -- not what I expected, but not too bad)

Listening to: Some '80s/'90s radio station at 105.9 FM

Watching: Lots. In the last 14 days I've watched: Megamind, Meet the Robinsons, Moon, Splinter, REC, Red, Toy Story 2, and Young Frankenstein.

Tonight I'll probably go with toilet humor and pop in some Drawn Together episodes.

Reading: Experiencing Politics by John E. McDonough (for school, of course)

Listening: Some Chumbawamba songs I managed to DL some weeks ago

Watching: Nothing

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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

I'm watching a Danish political drama called , kind of a Scandinavian "West Wing." I'm watching it on SVTplay, subtitled in Swedish, because Danish to me just sounds like somebody's playing a mean joke on the speech perception part of my brain. The show is pretty awesome, and I'd like to see it from the beginning but SVT only has one episode up. Oh well.

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kuiva ja pölyinen

Reading: Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks, I've got the whole Culture series lined up after it was recommended to me by a friend. I'll have to reserve judgment on it until I've read a bit more . And I just finished reading the first two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. It only took me five days. Scary I know, I had too much free time on my hands.

Listening: Not much. I bought One Life Stand by Hot Chip recently and haven't really been able to get into it yet, but I'll keep trying.

Watching: The Lives of Others. Excellent film, don't know how I missed it when it came out at the time.

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You've caught me at a bad time, so why don't you piss off?

Reading: The Closing of the American Mind
Listening: Oxbow - The Narcotic Story. My roommate is blasting some Kavinsky, but he's been doing that for several hours now.
Watching: I can't remember the last time I watched a movie

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

The last two books I read were David Crystal's "The stories of English" and John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's progress". The Bunyan surprised me by having some parallels with modern fantasy material. I found it a bit too overtly didactic at times, but it has its moments, and unlike a lot of modern fantasy, it's short!

The Crystal was very readable and interesting, as you'd expect from him. Like the title suggests he studies the history of the non-standard language. He adopts a non-standard format, too, full of divergent breakout boxes. The format is odd at first sight, but it reinforces his points about the diverse developments within English.

Haven't watched much film or television of note lately, I'm too busy campaigning and conlanging. I like to have music in the backgound while I type away though and have been rediscovering Fela Kuti (Nigeria's Bob Marley figure). I'm pleased to note that his son is following in his father's footsteps. I've also rediscovered , who mixed post-punk, psychobilly and folk elements with songs set in a warped re-imagining of rural England. Oh, and my son has introduced me to the work of the wonderful singer-songwriter

My next move will probably to replay Radius's link to Loituma Ieva's Polka!

I'm reading The End of the Affair for one class, Woodman's translation of Tacitus's Annals for another, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for a third, and To the Lighthouse and Shakespeare's Sonnets for the second time on my own. I'm listening to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the moment and the last TV show I watched was Absolutely Fabulous, which my boyfriend has me hooked on. Before that I watched Kill Bill and The Seventh Seal, the latter of which was pretty stunning.

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So take this body at sunset to the great stream whose pulses start in the blue hills, and let these ashes drift from the Long Bridge where only a late gull breaks that deep and populous grave.

Listening to the "Good Omens" audiobook. Does that count as reading? Well, not really i guess...

Just finished , which was quite amusing (albeit in a bad Dutch translation). Before that, , which was also quite amusing, albeit preaching to the choir. Before that, (recommended, like all of Sacks's books), and before that, but we're talking almost a year ago now, probably Muggepuut by Herman Brusselmans. I have very little spare time, and read only when I'm ill (last week) or during holidays.

The last CD (yes, I'm that old) I got was Volbeat's , which I listened to extensively (it's quite entertaining), the one before that was Duke Special's trio containing The Silent World of Hector Mann, The Songs from Mother Courage and Her Children and Huckleberry Finn. Apart from that, I usually listen to the radio when I'm driving my car. I used to listen to music a lot, but having hearing problems and wearing hearing aids takes most of the fun out of it, unfortunately.

I'm not watching much of anything. I try to avoid tv, although I sometimes watch some Grey's Anatomy, if my wife is watching.


JAL

Reading Wilde Reise durch die Nacht by Walter Moers at the moment, for myself, but I've got to deal with Die Dreigroschenoper by Brecht, Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre by Schiller, and Unterm Birnbaum by Fontane for a class, and the next larger thing to read for a hands-on class I'll hopefully get in is Zero History by William Gibson, although in German translation.

Listening to Porcupine Tree a lot recently.

Still watching nothing, but I've meant to watch the Bourne trilogy for 2 weeks now and always forgot to get around to it.

lately i've been listening to:

Abruptum - a pretty weird band, could be described as free-form black/death metal/noise. the demos and the Evil EP lean more towards death metal and have actual songs. evil sounding shit
Clan of Xymox - the 80s ftw
Helmet - groovy, heavy, early 90s metal
HorrorPops "Hell Yeah!" - a friend of mine turned me on to them. pretty cool girl-fronted psychobilly
Venom "Welcome to Hell" - dirty, raw heavy metal. can't believe i didn't check this album out sooner

currently watching: random episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation

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scientists have discovered a capsule that makes you not a gullible fucktard!

Reading: by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm almost finished with the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - haven't got to Hound of the Baskervilles yet.

Watching:
This is the best TV series ever, of all time, seriously. Too bad it was left to languish on ABC Family with no promotion whatsoever and cancelled 12/13 of the way through the first season.

Listening to: by Johnny Foreigner
JoFo is a decent band, but I can only take them in small doses. This is a pretty good song.

-Rob

Reading: Finally finishing up Solaris by Stanisław Lem. There's such a cool idea behind it, but the book is a little boring.

Watching: I don't watch much TV, but in the past few weeks I've seen a lot of really good movies. Most recent was (whose title I adore). It was very stirring, and visually gorgeous. I saw it at 1:30 and for the rest of the day it was hard to get back into the real world.

Listening to: is super cool.

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

No— is it worthwhile?

Definitely.

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.