Gary Peterson > Recent Status Updates

We're on the Moon! Very compelling reading.

Loads of fun in these early and primitive strips. I'm going slowly, savoring each one and reading a few pages at a time. Sunday strip just started and I'm in January 1952. PS: Schroeder is the one character who's annoying more than funny. He's only a baby or maybe a toddler and just got his Beethoven bust.

I read and read... yet there's still so many pages to go! This was a packed collection. I'm enjoying to some degree most all of Bob's columns. The occasional fictionalized fabulism or maudlin dud hasn't deterred me.

Read in recent days 23 through 27. The Kan two-parter was pretty good space opera melodrama. The Dr Doom one-issue story was a bunt. And the two-part Attuma story I read tonight was a dud. Even Janet Van Dyne in a one-piece swimsuit couldn't boost this loser. The title is in its desert wandering era now...

Tedious going... but I'm hanging in there.

Fun book! Closer to Hidden Dungeon than SAO or Dan Machi. I needed some lighthearted adventure. I already want to read further volumes, and when looking on eBay discovered to my delight there is a two-season anime, so add that to the list too.

A ton of fun! Just what I needed to dispel the malaise of SAO Progressive vol 1. Great to be enjoying a light novel again.

Can't believe I'm DNF'ing SAO! But "Progressive" is a misnomer as this book crawled along at a snail's pace. Give me the fast-moving main series.

Good book and not dated at all. The depth probers' effect on the 1952 and '56 elections demonstrates The Selling of the President was going on long before Joe McGinniss and the '68 election.

Good and galvanizing my decision NEVER to own a cellphone. Man, people in here are addicted like junkies and drunkards. There are professional shrinks whose job it is to help phonies overcome their addiction. One guy trying to quit his smartphone was gonna jump on the tracks before his shrink talked him down. Phones are a dangerous and dare I say demonic device!

NOTE: I only read Part One, about diet and health. The second half of the book was about politics and challenging claims that a plant-based diet is better for the environment. That was not my area of interest.

Is this a diet guide or an evolution textbook? So much speculation presented as dogma about our alleged ancestors as hunters eating animals nose to tail. How does Paul know this? He doesn't... but don't tell him that.

Pretty good... when it's good. Lots of namedropping, gobbledygook, and lost in the weeds labyrinthine paragraphs summarizing boring studies. I skim through those pages.

Great start! Long introduction that hit on a lot of points. The ecology angle bores me nowadays, but that is what motivates a lot of vegans.

In the homestretch. Shocked the Narrator murdered the Curate... but he had his reasons. I resent the Curate character--weak, sniveling, afraid and weepy. Just Wells' mocking Christianity. We don't reach, Herbert.

Sad to say I'm reading on just to finish. "What We Saw from the Ruined House" was an interminable chapter I had to skim through at the end as Wells just data dumped everything about the Martians from biology to agriculture. Yeah, this one has worn out its welcome...

The Fog of War is setting in with a LOT of repetitive reports and repeating same things from different perspectives. That's a nice way of saying it's getting a little boring. What continues to leap out at me is how much stuff the refugees from the southwest are lugging into London. People addicted to stuff... even in Gissing's time. There were no halcyon times or places.

Good so far but I keep neglecting this book to read Wells and Packard. Gotta get back into this and clear the light novel deck for Accel World 2.

Fascinating stuff, especially how image-makers distinguish between indistinguishable products like soap, whiskey, and cigarettes. People buy an image not a product for its merits.

Book pivots to narrator's brother's experiences in London. Harrowing first 60 pages with Martians wreaking havoc in rural England. Enjoying it thus far. One insight: Fleeing citizens lugging boxes of material possessions; one couple is carrying an outhouse door like a table with stuff piled upon it. Addiction to stuff is not a modern problem.

Guess who else read this great novel? The Master! Yep, it happened in DR. WHO "Frontier in Space," which I watched today for the first time. Fitting as the Master was plotting to pit the earth against the Draconians.

Rereading after many years and even better than remembered. Went on eBay looking for the Waste Makers and found it as part of a bundle with The Status Seekers and Naked Society... all for $15.

Serendipitous start about a shooting star, which is exactly how SAO Progressive vol 1 started. Two very different books with a century-plus between them both start with shooting stars. I'm taking it as a good omen!