Valamity!

There are no beats here.

Okay, I’m still not feeling inspired, but I guess being a real, actual-factual blogger means that you have to write regardless of whether you’re feeling inspired or not.

Um.

My Computer Science professor is an odd guy. He has this odd idea that creating odd, complex analogies relating the way computers work to things like light switches and cameras and human brains will somehow make it easier for the fluff-brains who took the class because it looked easier than chemistry to understand the concepts. This leads to him saying purely odd things that I find startlingly vivid. Well, one thing. He was creating an analogy about how long-term memory is stored in a computer even when it’s not receiving power, and he noted how this was different than how human long-term memories work.

“If you turn off the oxygen, human brains lose long term memory.”

I couldn’t help but be thoroughly bemused by the odd logic of this statement. There’s a certain…I don’t even know quite how to say it, right now. Uninspired, you know. The idea that humans have some switch on the back of their skulls that one can nonchalantly flip and then the oxygen no longer flows…it’s like something out of a monologue from a Science Fiction novel or something. Post-modern literature even. You can piece it together in your mind, but I’ll take a stab anyway.

We’re all just machines, you know? We consume, we excrete. We’re nothing but fleshy circuitry on the inside, wires and veins and complex processes that make up a whirring, spinning, breathing human being. And then one day, someone flicks the switch at the back of your skull, and you go out like a light. Oxygen, man. We’re fucked without it. Fucked.

Yeah, that was pretty shitty. This is why I don’t write fiction.

I want to reread every book I own. I have a rather impressive collection, so this would be quite a feat, but I just finished rereading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and I really enjoyed it. There’s a good feeling that comes from traveling through a story you already know. I find the familiarity comforting, but there’s always little details that surprise me. Or big details which I forgot and fall in love with again. American Gods is one of the best damn pulp novels I’ve ever read. I love how Gaiman only bothers to give me details which are interesting. There’s no long, dull pages full of opulent throne rooms and arched halls, it’s all small, cramped, dingy, seedy, battered. It’s both refreshing and far more interesting than traditional fantasy. I think I’m going to start Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy next. I’m very proud of the hardcover version I found in Waldenbooks for cheap.

I adore the little greens guys. I think I fell in love with HGttG based purely on how endearing these fellows are.

That’s all I really have to say for now.

I’ll make a good post yet, promise.

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