delgrosso dot com

Are you participating in Infinite Summer? If not, you should be¹

Infinite Jest is an enormous yet rewarding read, and is one of my top five favorite novels.

Yes, it looks intimidating, but as Jason Kottke explains in his excellent forward to the project:

It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

So, go out and get a copy right now, and dig in. You won’t be sorry.

It seems my Muse has left the building, with no forwarding number or address.

She even stole my fucking stapler. I mean, WTF? It has left me irritated, frustrated, and generally pissy.

So, it seems I will need to disappear for a little while, as I hold auditions for the next Muse, and try to get some solid preproduction work done on my next novel.

The new project is larger in scope than anything I’ve attempted so far, and before I dive into it, I will need to recharge, recalibrate, and reinvent myself to some extent. Perspective is usually one of the sharpest tools in my kit, but it has been dulled lately and needs honing. Hence the short break from the blog and other forms of social media.

Back soon, kids. Play nice while I’m away.

I haven’t had a chance to add a link to it from the front page here, but I’ve decided to move a considerable number of my shorter bits, photonerdery, and video stuff over to Tumblr, and reserve the blog for longer and slightly more “serious” pieces.

Also, bacon.

Last fall, as a side project, I wrote a little serial novel and published it for free on the web. It was never intended to be sold or published elsewhere; it was something I did just for fun. But it got a great response, and I decided to publish it in softcover format through Lulu, while still leaving the original PDF chapters up on the web for free download.

So now I have a very small quantity of signed copies of Mr. Abernathy, and if you’re interested, you can buy one from me directly for $20, which includes shipping via Priority Mail. I might even throw in a personal note or some other fun piece of ephemera.

If you don’t want a signed copy and just want the book straight from the publisher, you can click this and buy it directly for $21.95¹.

If you don’t want one at all, then that’s fine too. But you might as well just come over here and take food directly out of my mouth while you’re at it.

No, I kid. I don’t really care if you buy it or not.

But you don’t want me to resort to this lifestyle again, do you? No, I didn’t think so.

The two monitors on my desk give me a combined desktop area of 6,400,000 pixels.

“Wow,” I hear you say, “that is indeed a metric assload of pixels.” So it would be no surprise, statistically speaking, if at least one or two of those pixels were broken. Dead, as it were. Le petit pixel mort, as they say in Spain.

But no. I’ve been lucky to have two awesome Apple cinema displays that are pixel-perfect. “A rarity!” you cry out. And you would be right.

Until this morning.

The first thing I noticed when I started working was an irritant in my left eye, like a tiny ache. I turned my head to the left, and it was gone. Looking forward again, it was back. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the irritant wasn’t in my eye, but was in fact on the far side of my left monitor. A stuck pixel.

A stuck pixel is, in my opinion, an order of magnitude worse than a dead one. A dead pixel emits no light, so if you have a dark desktop area (like I do), it simply blends into the background, and you don’t notice it unless you’re looking at a window directly over it.

But this pixel on my left side, it is stuck. On green. Not a light green, but a glowing neon green. It has been irritating my peripheral vision all morning long. It stares at me, like an evil green Lovecraftian eye. Watching me. Tormenting me. Judging me. When I look directly at it, it looks away¹, feigning innocence. But I know it’s there, casting its green gaze upon me all through the day.

I hope it goes away on its own. Perhaps one day it will tire of watching me, and return to the inky blackness from whence it came. I can only hope.