"This is a special day for me, and everyone is here and eating cake and singing because of me. Also, I get to wear a crown all day. Bonus."

Another upgrade (considerably less significant in the grand scheme of things, but still nice) was that I got a new computer system (see picture, which is entirely accurate). This new Dell XPS comes in as a replacement for my five and a half year old workhorse (getting quite wheezy and easily overheated in its later years), which has served me very well (easily the best run of any of my previous machines).

I'll be completely honest -- this new comp is primarily a gaming rig -- it's got a lovely (and huge) video card, obscene amounts of storage space and memory, a quad processor setup, and runs all my current games and entertainment with a kind of flawless perfection that makes me waste fifteen minutes taking screenshots of the intricate stitching on my avatar's leather pauldrons.

So, clearly: gaming. Which is fine, since I'd rather do my writing on a laptop most of the time anyway, and I now have a fair number of options in the house for doing just that.

One other thing that makes writing on my laptop(s) preferable to writing on my PC: Office 2007. Specifically, my new desktop has Office 2007, my laptops don't, and I think Word 2007 should win some kind of not-award for discouraging the actual act of writing in what is (still) rumored to be a word-processing program. I'd honestly rather write a full novel in Notepad just to avoid the intensely intrusive tool bars at the top of the window - massive Publishing and Layout buttons that seem to scream 'WHAT YOUR NEW STORY REALLY NEEDS ARE SOME EYE CATCHING FONTS, DONCHA THINK?"

No. No, I really don't. For writing, I need a program that:

• Spellchecks with some degree of intelligence.
  
• Allows you to boldface and italicize type.
  
• Allows you to center the occasional line.
  
• Saves the file into a format that pretty much anyone on the planet can read.
  

And that's about it. Everything beyond that is probably a distraction.

For my money, Rough Draft (a free, 1.6 megabyte program with both American and British English dictionaries installed) is all I really need, For that matter, there are a couple good reasons for me to at least consider writing Little Things my next story using Google Docs.

How about you? What's your preferred sandbox?

That's nothing. Check these two videos out.

Shift Happens.

A vision of students today.

I need to find a wholesale supplier of robotic servants chocolate-covered espresso beans.

Let's hope the "constant reinforcement and crushing peer pressure" method works!

* - Not actually 'we', in that I am not actually wearing big girl undies. Or potty training. I haven't done that in years.**

(** - unclear sentence structure makes me laugh)

At the moment, I'm singing snippets of "with my freeze ray I will..."

Also (and unrelated): How to make a fairly attractive tote bag out of duct tape. It's no freeze-ray (and is definitely no Penny), but it's pretty neat.

I'd desperately like to write stories in that city.

A more literal approximation is "ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other".

Some of them are interesting...

Once, your moral depravity nearly killed you - will helping those in need finish the job?

And some are ... well, kind of silly.

Now its just a question of which will pull you down - deep-seated prejudice or a natural disaster.

To which I say: "It's a random generator: interesting + silly is what it does."

And then, at some point, you try to become a cook.

Maybe you're cooking is bad, or maybe it's okay -- maybe it's even good, and people compliment you on it.

But no matter what, that first major dish you cook? Even if it's good, it's not going to be great, not by the standards that you, as a consumer, judge such things.

That is the point where people often decide to not work on cooking as a serious endeavor anymore, rather than working on getting their cooking to catch up to their taste. If they need to make themselves some food, they do it, workmanlike, from a prepackaged thing out of the pantry, or they have some soup and a sandwich; they make it well enough to do the job, and that's it -- it's just meant to fill you up. If they want great food, they feed that desire by consuming someone else's cooking.

But if you're really gung-ho about becoming a great cook (or if you sort of like your cooking anyway, even if it's not the best thing you've ever had), time and practice and the long, slow teaching of years will eventually improve your end product to the point where... well, you might still be able to nitpick it to yourself, but you can usually step back and stay, objectively, "This is pretty great."

Make sense? Okay.

Rather than make you reread that top bit and play mental word-substitution, I'll do it for you:

Let's say you're really good at reading. You know what's good... you've done your homework, and even know why it's good.

And then, at some point, you try to become a writer.

Maybe you're writing is bad, or maybe it's okay -- maybe it's even good, and people compliment you on it.

But no matter what, that first novel you write? Even if it's good, it's not going to be great, not by the standards that you, as a reader, judge such things.

That is the point where people often decide to not work on writing as a serious endeavor anymore. If they need to write something (maybe for work), they do it, maybe following an established formula for the genre or topic; they do it well enough, and that's it. If they want great stories, they feed that desire by reading someone else's work.

But if you're really gung-ho about becoming a great writer (or if you sort of like your writing anyway, even if it's not the best thing you've ever read), time and practice and the long, slow teaching of years will eventually improve your end product to the point where... well, you might still be able to nitpick it to yourself, but you can usually step back and stay, objectively, "This is pretty great."

(Ira Glass talks about this whole process in this YouTube video, (mostly) unflinchingly using his own old work as an example. It obviously inspired this ramble.)

I know the people who've done this, both for their cooking and their writing (in one special case, it's the same person), and it's really something to see.

I am lucky to be someone who likes the food they cook and the stuff they write even when it's not that great, and when it's only actually even good after some work -- the actual cooking and writing is enjoyable enough, I suppose (it's just the cleanup/revision that I dislike). Even when it's the literary equivalent of bachelor omelets in the microwave, I like it, and like it enough to keep fiddling with it. I think it must be so much harder for someone who doesn't feel that way, and works to get their skill to catch up to their taste while disliking all the products that come from that learning period. Rather defines the term "tortured artist" for me.

Or maybe there aren't people like that; maybe we all secretly like the taste of our own horrible culinary experiments, even when we know they'd make most people sick to their stomach?

No, I'm sure that's not right -- people throw their 'bad' stories out all the time (or so I hear).

I don't, but that's me.

You?

Yes, the whole time.

Bar none, the worst summer I've had for this stuff that I can remember.

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -- Halfway through all three.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -- been sitting on my too-read shelf for years...
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -- seems like I read another of his books as well, Freshman year in college
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -- redundant list, much?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -- I am a bear, he is a bear... only seems natural
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -- again, thank you Freshman Honors English
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath -- ... don't think I'll thank Freshman English for this one...
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -- we were a well-read bunch of college prats, we were... I remember discussing her obsession with a needlestick puncture at some length in class
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -- I tried, but man it started out slow.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -- haven't read the complete works, but did read this. thank GOODNESS they put it on here twice.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -- In English, and about half of it in its native French

First: Johnathan is a great musician, and his songs are fantastic. You should be listening to him.

Second: this is a really smart series of pages for introducing new fans as well as suggesting where to go next. Steal this idea, internet people.