marramgrass

I don’t know how I stumbled across this blog post at igeekrev.com, but I did. Two thoughts jump out at me from it. The first is a bit of a no-brainer:

I started attending a Presbyterian church regularly in high school. In that time I’ve been a part of seven Presbyterian churches and their worship services were all basically the same. Seven congregations, in different parts of the country, over a span of twenty years. Think of how much has changed in twenty years in terms of how we communicate and interact. Think of how little worship has changed. This is why I am here. The gospel doesn’t change but how we communicate it needs to.

The second is interesting to me in light of the community work-focussed new job that I’m enjoying so much:

The other reason I’m here is because I’m trying to figure out why progressive Christians don’t want to talk about Jesus, and how to change that. We’re all into love your enemy, care for the poor, stop AIDS, and give peace a chance. But to hear how little some progressive Christians talk about Jesus, it makes me wonder why the bother with the church? If being a Christian is simply about joining the right causes then I want to drop out of the church and just join the causes, because it’d make things a lot easier.

Click through for The Bourne Ultimatum, the condensed version.

(Little sweary-word if that offends you, hence the click-through.)
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For some reason, yet to be determined, I have been moved to sign up at Twitter. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s the real low-point of the new, interactive, 2.0 web, but at the same time it is strangely fascinating.

Cue questions of self-censorship and the further shrinkage of the already miniscule online ratio of signal to noise.

I’m at http://twitter.com/marramgrass/.

World War Z by Max Brooks

I bought this book almost by accident. I was in the bookshop looking for a couple of different things; with two novels in hand, I was casting about for something to make up a 3-for-2 and grabbed this one almost at random. Subtitled “An Oral History Of The Zombie War”, I was expecting something pulpy and trashy, and instead I found intelligence and feeling.

Dead simple premise: the world is over-run with zombies (or the Romero type), humankind does its best to survive. But that’s only the background action. In all the best traditions of zombie fiction, this is all about the hard-biting social commentary. Everyone from politicians counting votes first and cost later, to opportunistic big pharma, to mass-media as big business takes a proper hit. There’s enough gruesome and technical detail to get things going, but the crisis could have been almost anything. Told as a series of interviews with survivors from all parts of global society, read it just as a story of ordinary people doing their best to get by in a frightening situation.

A deep surprise.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

My cousin left me a comment here a while back recommending the first of these books - it’s actually the first of seven intended books to make up the wonderfully-named Gentleman Bastard sequence (Red Seas is naturally enough the second volume). It’s rare that one of this cousin’s recommendations doesn’t go down well with me, so next time I was in a bookshop I picked it up.

And then I had trouble putting it down again :)

The Gentleman Bastards of the name are a small gang of con-men, anti-heros who just aren’t as bad as they want to be. Their tale is a rollicking one of honour and dishonour among theives, cross, double-cross, triple-cross and so on… It’s a great ride, fast and furious but made more immediate by some really excellent characters and characterisation; when there’s death in the ranks we’ve come to care enough to be moved.

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Volume two is, if anything, even better. The characters are given room to breathe a bit more, and some fab new ones are introduced.

The books are tricky to pigeon-hole. You’ll find them in the SF/fantasy section of the bookshop, and there’s elements of both in there, but not in an obtrusive way. It’s not like Iain M Banks or someone where you’re always aware that it’s a genre novel you’re reading. Swashbucklers, heist stories with elaborate schemes that would make Danny Ocean weep, romance (in any sense of the word you care to think of), social commentary… Deep and broad is the order here.

When I visited the author’s website and discovered that there’ll be seven of these, I did a little dance inside.

Easily the best new series I’ve come across in a long, long while.

It seems there’s a guy in Sweden who was tired of writing on white paper with darker-than-white lines on it, so he decided the way forward would be pale grey paper with white lines. So Whitelines happened.

What a bizarre idea. Apparently it also means the lines disappear in the photocopier.

/shrug.

Still, I ordered a couple of pads (although I could only find one UK stockist, and they got a bit silly on the postage) because I’m a sucker for a cute gimmick. They came today, and in person the whole idea seems a bit cooler than it sounds. First impressions are that the white-on-pale-grey is actually oddly relaxing to work on.

When I get round to it, I’ll post a pic or scan or something.

There’s this guy whose blog I read, his name’s David Seah. One of the things he does is make up forms to help people be more productive. The one I’ve found to be most useful is also dead simple: his Compact Calendar. I find it most useful in Bruce Marriott’s UK localization.

But I’m getting to the time when I need one for 2008, so I spent a few minutes altering it for next year. Now available, with much kudos and credit to Dave and Bruce, the 2008 UK Compact Calender, in MS Excel and PDF formats:

• CompactCalendar2008_uk_ms.pdf (48 KB)
• CompactCalendar2008_uk_ms.xls (39 KB)

Enjoy.

I came out of work today, and the rain was such that I was soaked through - as in, my clothes were completely saturated - in 15 seconds.

I didn’t think that was possible without being actually submerged.

I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think I can go to a party without photographing glasses.

(Sorry for the naff title - I was struggling with that one!)

Brodie made an interesting post last week. I’d recommend going and reading it and the comments it’s attracted, as it’s what sparked off the thought processes that have lead to this post, but if you don’t want to the gist of it is about another blogger who drew the attention of the photographer of an image they had used. The discussion that follows is very interesting, and has got me asking lots of questions of myself and my own attitudes. My thoughts are a work in progress, but that’s always the way if we’re honest.

(There’s lots of long, dull faffiness in this post, but I hope it ends up somewhere worthwhile.)
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