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.

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.

Also, bacon.

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.

“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.

I went completely off the grid for a full five days – no web, no blogs, no Twitter, no Flickr, not even television. It was glorious in its own way, as I was able to return to the media maelstrom with fresh eyes and a somewhat fresh mind. And you know what? The vast majority of content out there is complete crap. Shocking, I know.

This shouldn’t come as a revelation to any of you, seeing as you’re all sophisticated creative types who are talented and experienced in sorting the good stuff from the ick. But try taking a break from it all for even a couple of days, and when you return, you’ll see what I mean.

My point is that I came to realize how much time I spend sorting the good content from the crap, and the relevant good from the good, and the interesting relevant good from the relevant good, and so on. And that’s just within the scope of the stuff put out by my friends, colleagues, connections, etc. It’s staggering.

It all makes me want to work harder to be a better online media consumer, and producer. I’d love to be able to read every post on every one of my friend’s blogs and Tumblrs and whatnot, but I just can’t. And I know you can’t either. So while I’m going to cut down on the amount of content I immerse myself in and comment on, I’ll also pledge to work harder at producing slightly less but much better content of my own. Deal?

So @fatherjack, a lovely fellow from the UK, has tagged me with this “7 Things” meme whosiwhatsit. Now, I am not familiar with the things you kids do on the interwebs these days, what with your YouTooth and Bluetubes and all. Also, I am generally a very private person, but since I have been recently accused of not participating in Revealing Surveys About Oneself, I feel it’s time to bow to the peer pressure and just get it over with. Besides, I am not at all interesting, and this is sure to bore you to tears of pure pity for my complete and utter averageness.

Onward!

1. I was once in charge of Knowledge Management at Global Crossing. Yes, that Global Crossing.
2. Tony is actually my middle name (Anthony, to be precise). My full name is M. Anthony Delgrosso.
3. As an undergrad in college, I had a 7-legged tarantula as a pet. His name was Boris.
4. I refer to my office as “the treehouse”. I don’t remember why, exactly.
5. I wrote a screenplay remarkably similar to The Da Vinci Code, more than a year before that fucking asshat hack Dan Brown wrote his shitty book, and I’m still bitter that he got all the credit for the concept while my script got shelved.
6. I hate talking about music, because I can’t do it intelligently. I know what I like, and it’s all over the place, but discussing my tastes with people who really know music always intimidates me.
7. Despite my blog/Twitter persona, I am often crippled by my introversion¹; I love being around interesting people, but I can only do it for a short amount of time before I need to disengage and recharge my batteries, as it were.

So, there you have it. I feel so vulnerable… hold me…?

My iTunes library is a metadata trainwreck.

My document management schema is a hodgepodge of notes about naming conventions, redundant backups, and the six local volumes that contain the entire mess, all scribbled in a battered Moleskine.

And my books? Oy, the books. Probably 700 volumes in my office alone, neatly shelved but not organized in the least¹.

The list goes on and on. If you know me personally, you have a good idea of how much nerd-rage this situation produces inside me.

It looks like 2009 is going to be The Year of Getting My Collective Media Shit Together.

Nevertheless, it has come to my attention that I did not send each and every one of my dear friends an individualized holiday greeting card. A situation that I will attempt to remedy, right this instant, by providing a template you can use to create your very own personalized holiday greeting from yours truly.

Simply print out this post, circle and/or insert your chosen personalizations, and voilà - a heartfelt holiday wish from me. You’re so very welcome.

- - - - - - - >cut here< - - - - - - - -

Dear _____,

Wow, another whole year has gone by. Hey, remember that day I [made a hilarious tweet / got your dog drunk / hit on your aunt / got you out of that speeding ticket]? That was so crazy. And then there was the time you [Favr'd my tweet / threw up on my kitchen floor / made that awful gazpacho / hit a pedestrian with your Segway]. It’s been a wild year, huh? Yeah.

You’ve been such a great friend ever since we met [in third grade / on Twitter / at reform school / in the confessional], and I just wanted to wish you the happiest [Christmas / Chanukah / Kwanzaa / Ramadan / parole] ever.

My best wishes to you and your [lovely spouse / girlfriend / boyfriend / mother that you still live with at age 36 / sexually ambiguous live-in "friend"], and good luck with [grad school / your new job / impending cosmetic surgery / recovering from rickets] in 2009.

Your [friend / pal / impersonal internet acquaintance / AA sponsor],

[Tony / Tone / @tony_d / Mr. Delgrosso]

Rebuilding the actual physical infrastructure is all well and good, he argues, before going on to declare that so far there is very little public talk about the massive spending on non-defense research and development that would be required to make such a “green” economic revival possible.

His points all make complete sense; yes, money alone will not help the technical problems and yes, we need to reestablish science as a pillar of our educational system.

Yet with many research universities facing massive devaluations of their endowments and higher education becoming less affordable (if not impossible) for even many upper-middle-class families, I wonder if there will be enough properly educated domestic brainpower to even conduct the amount of R&D Revkin calls for.

At the risk of being called a socialist¹, I don’t see any reason why part of an economic recovery plan can’t include federal grants for college students who pursue science degrees related to the green technologies being tapped as the key to an economic turnaround. That’s not to say that other fields aren’t as important, but if we’re collectively agreeing that we’re fundamentally behind in R&D in the green science we’re depending on to pull us out of recession, shouldn’t we be enabling the intellectual infrastructure by actually getting students into research programs?