geekery – Books and Coffee

Cover of the book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin
published by Penguin Random House
2022

The pen friend who recommended this to me was so right – and so good – to encourage me to read this!

Sadie is visiting her sister in a hospital when she meets Sam after his life-changing accident. The fact that he speaks with her (and almost no one else) leads to her return, and then to a friendship that spans decades – and the creation of multiple immersive video games reflecting their joint and separate (and often disparate) visions. Estrangement, reconnection, deep friendship, creative collaboration, fundamentally knowing each other at the geekiest levels, affection, exploitation, and the fraught business of being opposite sex business partners in the world of video gaming make for an engaging, emotionally developed story.

Zevin creates a window in time when real innovation in video games was possible, when leaving MIT to create a game as one’s life’s work felt right, when friends made in youth become lifelong, when life happens to members of a group at different rates, and when creative credit and blame were never evenly distributed.

The collaborative elements, design, and friend-strife all feel compelling. It is hard to dream and create with other people! Even people you know well. ESPECIALLY people you know well.

This is an adventure story, a tech story, several relationship stories, a tribute to geek culture at its university-spawned-finest, and the story of several entwined lives running on slightly-misaligned-yet-deeply-caring tracks. I was deeply engaged throughout.

The sunrises remain a striking yellow-gold. This still has the capacity to surprise me. The wildfires are still sending particles to the upper atmosphere, and I am sad that I’m becoming used to the yellow tint to my surroundings. I don’t want to get used to it, but it is a daily filter. It is becoming normal.

~~~

I don’t write here about everything I read. I try to limit myself to books I strongly recommend. And the bulk of what I read each day aren’t books!

I read both US and international news each morning (not just the book reviews!), and I’m trying NOT to provide running commentary on that. (I’ve done that in the past on blogs, and it’s tiring. Also, you can get personal commentary on just about everything all the time on social media, along with an endless collection of reposts of things you’ve already read.) I don’t write about books until I finish them (notes for myself notwithstanding), which means I am always in arrears on endorsements.

I fall into Internet research rabbit holes, and love that Wikipedia has a t-shirt on this theme.

On Twitter, which can consume an entire afternoon if I’m not careful, I read posts by my favorite authors, journalists, comedians, artists, and activists. There is a beneficial crossover of articles and other media on topics that interest me, recommended by people with similar interests, and written about by professional sources. It allows me to have a positive experience of Twitter, which wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t filter carefully.

That makes it sound like I only do super-professional research on Twitter, which is not the case. Twitter is also full of jokes, puns, highly charged commentary, mockery, illustrations, photos, AI software being used to match celebrity outfits to natural phenomena, and dumb-but-funny observations. I have geeky sense of humor, so I wind up with a lot of this sort of thing (below, sung to the tune of “That’s Amore“)

This is posted to Twitter from other sites by multiple posters, so I’m unsure who to credit. Twitter only lets me see a few days’ worth of these posts on the “That’s a Moray” topic, which appears to have a longer history than you actually want to know about. If you searched now, today, you’d see this and other variations of this coming up, including more song lines… Be warned: you’ll find yourself singing this in the shower.

This continues in many flavors, and is also enjoyed by the professional media (though non-media types shared the links with me in the first place):

🎶 When an eel climbs a ramp to eat squid from a clamp, that’s a moray

When an eel wants a squid that’s on land — god forbid! — that’s a moray

If the squid is too flat, there’s no problem with that, that’s a moray 🎶https://t.co/h77J9n9SAH
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 22, 2021

This, in turn, reminds me of the collection of Guardian headlines that they are very pleased with themselves over:

Making a splash: the best – and funniest – Guardian headlines over 200 years

Witty, pithy, pretty and hitty, sometimes the headline is better than the story it sits upon

…and now you know too much about my non-book reading time.

Tag: geekery

Book: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Life: Smoke-Tinted Light and Casual Reading