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Furries Read?
19 years ago
Questions? Emo? Naah.
How about weird stuff I've been reading lately. People do still read, don't they? Here are my latest awesome textural discoveries.
Make: Vol. 06. BEAM robots, Tensegrity, Rodent powered nightlight, Steven Roberts, Panzeroids, Roboraptor (rawr!), and much more. The most awesome 'zine ever. I need to subscribe and also get their first year box set. Seriously. I'll probably sit down with those first four quarterly issues and ignore the outside world for a couple of days except for frantic searches for PVC pipe, hacksaw blades, 5k resistors, and silicone sealant. This issue also contains a brief mention of The American Boy's Handy Book, the greatest inciter of creative delinquency since 1896. Do I have a copy? You betcha. *fires up his Reynst combustor*
The Pencil by Henry Petroski. Not a mystery or comedy or drama. It's nonfiction about the history of pencils. I picked it up and couldn't put it down. It's fascinating. No really. I guess I'm weird.
Also picked up a copy of Racso and the Rats of NIMH. Haven't gotten to it yet. It should be a quick read. And found a copy of the Owly FCBD comic from last year. How'd I miss this one? Both of those were a quarter each at the used book store.
How about weird stuff I've been reading lately. People do still read, don't they? Here are my latest awesome textural discoveries.
Make: Vol. 06. BEAM robots, Tensegrity, Rodent powered nightlight, Steven Roberts, Panzeroids, Roboraptor (rawr!), and much more. The most awesome 'zine ever. I need to subscribe and also get their first year box set. Seriously. I'll probably sit down with those first four quarterly issues and ignore the outside world for a couple of days except for frantic searches for PVC pipe, hacksaw blades, 5k resistors, and silicone sealant. This issue also contains a brief mention of The American Boy's Handy Book, the greatest inciter of creative delinquency since 1896. Do I have a copy? You betcha. *fires up his Reynst combustor*
The Pencil by Henry Petroski. Not a mystery or comedy or drama. It's nonfiction about the history of pencils. I picked it up and couldn't put it down. It's fascinating. No really. I guess I'm weird.
Also picked up a copy of Racso and the Rats of NIMH. Haven't gotten to it yet. It should be a quick read. And found a copy of the Owly FCBD comic from last year. How'd I miss this one? Both of those were a quarter each at the used book store.
I sold/traded/threw out 90% of my books before I moved, but some of the favorites I held onto include Charles Rosen's THE ROMANTIC GENERATION, an exhaustive study of Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and Schumann, who were writing the avant-garde music of the 1830s, and Vicki Hearne's ADAM'S TASK, in which a specialist in the philosophy of language brings a poet's use of language and a professional trainer's background and skills to a challenging book about relations between humans and domestic animals -- relations built on the balancing act of mutual respect.
Among the books I'm reading for the first time, I'm finally digging into the writings of the 13th century Scholastic philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, for his surprisingly liberal efforts to put Christianity within a framework of Aristotelian reason. Bertrand Russell's essays in WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN are crackling polemic pieces (much more entertaining than the average blog), and Willard Van Orman Quine's elegant essays in FROM A LOGICAL POINT OF VIEW are not only stimulating arguments in the philosophy of logic, but are literary works in their own right, representing to my mind some of the finest prose ever to come from the pen of an academic philosopher. (If Flaubert had written about ontological commitments and the dangers of bound variables, the results might've sounded an awful lot like Quine.)
Too bad I lost all my comic books, though.
Anyways, Make seems pretty damn cool. I hadn't heard of it yet. The closest I came was a mention of the Makers Faire on Cockeyed.com. I checked out the website, and I may just have to follow it more closely. The last time I did anything like that was in highschool, however, when I wrote assembly programs to run on my TI-82 graphing calculator.
"Rodent powered nightlight" brings this to mind: http://www.otherpower.com/hamster.html
History of the Pencil? I used to be in the Air Force, and there was plenty of time during my stationing in Alaska where we'd be just chilling in the breakroom. "Don't let Bartels have the remote! He'll watch the history of cement on History channel!" Odd as it may sound to many people, I have no doubt that there's plenty there to enjoy.
Racso is an okay read, and you shouldn't miss your quarter. As you predict it won't take long. (I used to be a hardcore NIMH fanatic.)
As for "Owly FCBD"... I'll have to consult Google if you don't have anything further to say about that...
Ixy & Roochak- keep on readin' & drawin'. I'll read & gawk.
(I'll admit to Roochak, though, that I'm not sure I can follow some of your reading material. It sounds intriguing, though. I'm just not sure I'd follow.)
The Owly comic was a Free Comic Book Day giveaway that I missed somehow. The copy I got even has the sticker from my comic shop. *erf* It's a cutesy story with no dialog from Andy Runton from Top Shelf comics. There's probably stuff on Owly online somewhere.