Current location:	Radio Shack
Current mood:	bored
Entry tags:	books, bsg, movies, writing

The Snowstorm, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the AoE.
So. This snowstorm that's supposed to obliterate the midwest is here. So far, reality has not ceased to exist for me, and I am not surrounded by unending whiteness as far as the eye can see, indeed, some of it is now sludgy-melty-snow-on-road-brown... But I have been open for an hour and a half, and have seen only two people,and the guy from another store that was supposed to be here-- so I'm not running the store by myself while the manager is on vacation-- didn't show up... *sigh*

I'm bored! There's nothing to do!

Well, I suppose I could do paperwork. There's a small pile of receipts sitting about six inches from the keyboard that needs to be sorted and filed. That will consume about ten minutes, including the time it takes to print the electronic journal stuff that needs to be printed up for the daily report. I also have a book, Accelerando by Charles Stross, that I can read. However, I am on page 100 or so, and it is only 415 pages long.

I read about four hundred words a minute. 315 pages left in a novel may not get me through the day if I am uninterrupted until 3:30 when my coworker comes in.

The snow is coming down a bit heavier now; not a white out, but if it gets much harder, it will be.

*sigh* I suppose I should go work on the daily report.

Interesting note on Cyberpunk SF: I am not a huge fan of William Gibson-style cyberpunk, preferring Bruce Sterling's Schizmatrix to, say, Neuromancer. However.... I find that comparing Accelerando to Neuromancer is much like having a Budweiser after drinking a Guinness. It seems thin and watered down.

Gibson-style cyberpunk seems to be rooted in the Cold War; the paranoia of a time when to superpowers were staring at each other over the fuselage of an ICBM (Rather than the barrel of a gun) seems to be inherent in it.

Schizmatrix is more my kind of thing, a sort of Space Opera/Cyberpunk hybrid.

We all, of course, know how I feel about Space Opera. There is a section of my book shelf dedicated to a Space Opera shrine; I have perpetually lit candles surrounding a model rocket, a copy of Dan Simmon's Hyperion and John C. Wright's The Golden Age.

I exaggerate greatly. But Space Opera makes Josh go "Squee!", potentially in a high pitched teenage girl sort of way, rather than the usual monotone, laid-back Josh sort of way. It's why Battlestar Galactica makes me so happy; it's good Space Opera. It works on every level; I care about the characters. I care about the plot. I am thrilled by the combat and ticked by Kara and Lee's betrayals of their spouses. (Not to say it is perfect; lately episode resolutions have been a little overly neat.) But on the Grand Scale of Good Stories in a Visual, Noninteractive Medium, it ranks along side Macross and Firefly for quality.

Hmm.
Casablanca. Seven Samurai.
Rah Xephon. The Big Sleep.
Macross. Battlestar Galactica. Firefly.
Lost.

No. I'm not gonna bother trying to actually compile the Grand Scale. It's too emphemeral, too easy to say "Today, I am in a Lost mood and not a Casablanca mood."

A Battlestar side note: the funny thing is, the characters I am most attached to are not, say, Apollo and Starbuck, or Helo and Sharon, but Admiral Adama and President Roslin. Out of all the characters in the show, they are the ones I care most for. Odd that I should identify with two characters my parent's age rather than ones my age.