Instead of our usual Dungeons and Dragons game, (most of) the crew decided to head up to the Oriental Institute Museum. I remembered to bring my camera and filled it up full of hawt piccies of Really Old Stuff. It’s humbling, in a way, to be able to see these artifacts from thousands of years ago. Experiencing them in person makes me feel both completely different and completely alike the people who took the time to make these objects, whether decorative or mundane.

Onwards with the photos!

This guy looks surprised at the size of his nuts.

This shot is using a MySpace angle.

There are so many duck figures at the Oriental Institute. Duck Hunt!

This bowl is like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal bowl I once sent away for.

Look at the animals they used to have!

He's not happy about you being in his gallery.

Gaming equipment. The d20 is an advent of the modern age.

I think this photo turned out really well.

Not sure what the lion is doing, but it made me feel like a voyeur.

I always enjoy museums (which I think is obvious from my stories). Despite the problems that they face and the sometimes dubious decisions they make, I think they do an amazing job of capturing slices of the human experience and preserving them in the face of a consumerist, right-now attitude that permeates a lot of decisions made. No, there isn’t a lot of economic worth in preserving a scrap of broken urn from two thousand years ago, but it’s undeniable importance helps point out that we cannot just measure our society in dollars, yen or euros.

That said, I bought a nifty ring and a “make your own papyrus” kit from the gift shop. From what I can tell, the latter requires lots of days and lots of fussing.  I’m looking forward to making the finished product, and then I’m going to grab a quill and ink and write out a message in lolcat speech, before giving mysel a fatal paper cut as a service to the world.  One less douchenozzle.

I heard rumbles about Stephen King’s new novella that he’s releasing for the Kindle 2.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/10/stephen-king-kindle-ur

I don’t want to bother with the phrase “ebook” – I was reasonably sure that marketers playing fast and loose with the “e” prefix had died long ago and marketing, as a profession, had moved down the vowel ladder to “i” (the precursor to both vowels being, of course, the indefinite article “a.”  Buy futures in “o” prefixes now because it’s going to be big!).  Is an ebook a novel?  When does “book” need an extra vowel?  Where is the line between medium and message?  “Songs” are called “songs” even on the e-internet.

Although, overall, it is rare for a person to use the term “novel.”  Outside of literary circles, an everyday person usually only uses the word “novel” while attending a party, their glass of spirits rapidly warming in their hands as they keep their ears open for a place to inject a pithy comment about the terribly literate NOVEL that is sitting, ignored but not forgotten, on their bedside table.  Novel and book are interchangeable to them.  But ask the other poor party-goers who find themselves on a forced march towards the land of intellectual braggadocio whether or not it’s a novel or a book that they’re being told about.  They’ll reply, It’s Just A Sodding Book – the sort of thing that you might toss into a bag for a plane ride or skim on the toilet instead of fuming at your choice of restaurant the night before.

Novels (and novellas, and stories) are nothing but abstract ideas and words.  Their medium gives them shape.  And thus ebooks take an ephemeral shape.

Books, though, are physical, tough things.  They’re sometimes sturdier than the ideas that produced them.  They’re small bricks of paper that have been used since their invention to prop things up.  Don’t tell me that a scrap of illuminated manuscript, discarded from official inclusion for an unfortunate, lewd misspelling was never folded up and slid under the leg of a monk’s chair.  Gutenberg himself* kept a brisk side business of selling people “magick shimmies” that were “divine fyxes for househoulde wobbles” made from cast-off proofs (note how we’ve shifted from the -e suffix to the e- prefix?).  I wager that a Kindle owner wouldn’t allow me to prop up a failing table with their widget.

Also, protip: don’t touch anyone else’s Kindle.  You know where it’s been, and that’s even before there’s any e-erotic fiction released for it.  Let alone when the DRM gets opened up and you can enjoy your porn in glorious, 16-shade grayscale.

None of this is to discount novels released as ebooks or as HTML formatted documents or audiobooks.  I’ve stories online, and plan to continue releasing them that way.  But to imagine that a device which costs over three hundred dollars will replace the book, able to be read as well as used as a magick shimmie, is foolish.

Stay tuned for an announcement concerning my upcoming obook! (I told you that you should’ve bought futures!)

*I’m a goddamned liar to whom you ought not listen.

Did several Left 4 Dead speedruns.  Protip: your bones will turn into fillet knives inside your skin if you jump from too high a height, and you’ll pwn yourself.

Played Dungeons and Dragons with the gang.  Everybody was in a giggly mood, I assume because of the Faux Spring we’re experiencing in Chicago, so we said screw it and just hung out.  Although Moebius was covered in spiders during our brief game, so I consider it a certain amount of success.

Cooking up a rich, delicious root-vegetable soup.  I intended it to be vegetarian but I remembered that I had an unopened pack of bacon.  I fried it up, added the bacon to the soup, then fried slices of potatoes in the grease, then added both the potatoes and grease to the soup.  Yum!