Look what I found!

Just so all the viewers, stalkers and searchbots can get to know me a little better, here are some sites that I've stumbled over in the past few days.

Judge A Book By Its Cover and Awful Library Books do exactly what it says on the tin. My mother works at a library, and I'm sure she would find these two blogs absolutely hilarious - and then she would immediately go to work and rip off half the shelf stock.
Pop Sensation takes a look at covers and blurbs of various pulp fiction paperbacks from the 20th Century. I recall my folks having a few books like this on the shelf (well, perhaps not quite as racy as some of the one shown here- I hope).
PhotoShop Disasters - I mean, really. Do we still hold any illusions about what we see in the media any more? Pictures don't lie anymore, they Blur with added Lens Flare!

I also received the books I'd ordered off Amazon last week (early, in fact) so that makes me happy. I'll try to find some other books I've been hunting down, but not just yet - I still have other important things to spend money on and save up for.
I ordered Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (spelled that without checking ;D ), the first of which I'd already read but really liked; the second one is what I'm reading now. The other book was the paperback version of Unicorn Jelly, which I've been trying to order for a while - I have an eye for weird stories like this, and wanted to check out the hard copy version. It's a very nice book!

Oh, and also, I'm waiting for this to buffer, download, install - whatever:

I'm sorry, what? The Bee Gees? Aerosmith? Alice Cooper?! Doing The Beatles' back catalogue?!? What is this I don't even

Word Up!

Hey! I just found this new Java-applet-site called Wordle. It lets you create works of art using typography and word frequency. All you need to do is provide a block of text, let the program generate the pattern of words, and tweak according to taste.

This being totally relevant to my interests, I naturally had to have a go. I cut and pasted a paragraph from Alice in Wonderland (courtesy of the Gutenberg Project). Click the picture to see it bigger at the actual site.

If you want to have a go, remember this: Anything you post on the site will stay there permanently, so don't go posting anything personal or obscene.
Have fun, and let me know if you create anything nice!

Stuff I'm Doing Right Now

Playing:

Castlevania - Portrait of Ruin (DS)

Reading:
The Lucy Family Alphabet, By Judith Lucy

Listening:
Past Masters, Vol. I and II - The Beatles

Watching:
...nothing at the moment - I don't really watch TV and movies as much as I used to

Wearing:
The T-shirts Ma made me for Christmas...

House of Leaves

Another book that I'd been searching for (and found at the library) was House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. I'd seen it mentioned somewhere, and I thought it would be exactly the kind of book I'd like.

I read through it a couple of nights ago, and all I can say is

Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow.¹

___________
¹You want a synopsis? Try this: it concerns a documentary film called The Navidson Record², a video archive of a series of bizarre events occurring within a suburban house. By bizarre, I mean that a new hallway appears where no such hallway could possibly exist (where, logically, a doorway would lead outside of the house). Even spookier, the new hallway is dark grey, featureless, and nightmarishly labyrinthine. Seriously, people get lost inside the house for days on end.

²I should also point out that said documentary may not even exist. The only reference to this film is contained within an essay written by a blind man³, and which was discovered by our narrator (Johnny) who found it in the man's apartment after he died. Johnny has presented the essay as he has found it, but, incidentally, there's
good reason to suspect he's not telling the true story.

³The essay also included plenty of visual artifactsº, such as photographs, sketches and supplementary materials. These are shown in the Appendices, however, a lot of the said items Do Not Exist. A lot of the interviews included never actually happened. A lot of the references included in the footnotes refer to nonexistent publications. In fact, a lot of the story Does Not Exist either, for reasons which become all too - no, wait, you can never really understand what's going on.ⁿ

ºI haven't even covered the interesting typographical layout yet. The book abounds with plenty of footnotes and cross-references (and plenty of ramblings from our friendly narrator Johnny, who incidentally has some interesting tales of his own). Soon, the footnotes themselves threaten to overwhelm the main copy itself, and the layouts change dramatically over the course of the book. And then, once the characters start to investigate this dark hallway, the very fabric of the book changes -

ⁿThe way I feel after reading this book is the same way I felt after I watched this. Nonetheless, I liked House of Leaves very muchly.

The Salmon of Doubt

But no, I haven't just been watching TV.

I finally managed to find a copy of The Salmon of Doubt, the posthumous collection of Douglas Adams' essays and articles published after his death in 2001. I've been scouring the bookshops for a copy, and gave up, when I realised, "Duh! That's what libraries are for!"

It's not the kind of book you read all at once, but rather a "pick it up and sample it every now and then" type. And, it's frickin' brilliant. He had a great sense of humour that really comes through in his writing, and it makes me miss him even more. (Is it even possible to miss someone you've never met?)

I'm afraid I'll just have to buy a copy now, assuming I actually find one for sale. I only get to keep this book for two weeks, after all!