I continued listening to artists alphabetically on my computer and randomly on my phone.

1. Childish Gambino (92 listens) - Came across his music in my alphabetic romp. Currently conflicted. I enjoy the verbal jiu jitsu, but find a lot of it whiny (after hearing for the 15th time) and just so overly aggressively sexual I feel wrong listening to it with my daughter around. 2. Billie Holiday (64 listens) - long-time readers know that Danielle and I listen to pretty much everything from the latest music to the oldest music. Billie Holiday is awesome and more people need to listen to her. 3. Danny Baranowsky (61 listens) - Listened to the Super Meat Boy soundtrack. It was fun. 4. Chance the Rapper (47 listens) - Still really enjoy Acid Rap and don’t enjoy #10Day. 5. The Black Keys (46 listens) - I always start off happy listening to The Black Keys, but the sameness drags on me by the end. 6. Alan Menken (45 listens) - for Scarlett. 7. Celia Cruz (44 listens) - I can listen to Celia Cruz at any time. Really enjoyed revisiting these songs. 7. Brave Saint Saturn (44 listens) - Although the first album’s a tad cheesy, I really enjoy where Reese took things for the second two albums. I continue to hold out hope that he will do another one. 9. Mandy Moore (43 listens) - Scarlett wanted to listen to a lot of Tangled this quarter. 10. Anberlin (31 listens) - Maybe it’s just the quarter in which I bought it, but the last album failed to make a lasting impression. I’m sure, with time, I’ll come to enjoy it as much as I enjoy the other albums. 11. Christafari (30 listens) - The music is a great groove. I have the first two albums and I think I like more songs in the first one, but I do like a lot of the second one. Although no longer an evangelical, I still find it to be pretty uplifting. 12. Ben Shive (29 listens) - There’s a certain timelessness to the songs. Some of them remind me of a subdued Billy Joel. 13. The Chipmunks & The Chipettes (28 listens) - Playing some Chipmunks for Scarlett. 13. The Weeknd (28 listens) - I know there are issues with some of the lyrics, but I do like the sound of a few of the songs. Especially “High for This” 13. Ben Prunty Music (28 listens) - The FTL soundtrack. Quite moody. I enjoy it.

Last night I had a dream that combined Games of Thrones and Perl programming. Like it was in the GoT world, but we had to do some Perl programming to defeat the Lannisters.

Poker Night 2 (3 hrs): Before going on my recent business trip I wanted to take  a small break from school work so I played PN2 the night before my trip. I reached the point where I’ve heard all the in-game dialogue so many times that I don’t even listen any more. I can generally last a while, but I wasn’t able to win any tournaments. I usually got knocked out by the last man standing.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you take Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods and combine it with Scott Snyder’s American Vampire, Vol. 1, you’d have a pretty close approximation of what this book is about. Given that this book has been out since 2001, I’m not going to bother with marking spoilers. I’ll say here at the top that I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who enjoys mythology. Also, not for the faint of heart - lots of profanity, violence, and explicit sex.

For all those who say the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a gun…..

“William Coleman III of Gresham, Oregon, was robbed of his Walther-brand P22 handgun. The gun was stolen by a young man who walked up to Coleman, pulled out his own gun, and said, ‘I like your gun. Give it to me.’”

I hope it’s a little more mature in Windows 10 - I’ll definitely consider it when I update my photography hard drive.

Adobe is doing some pretty despicable stuff - logging EVERY book (whether or not you are using Adobe Digital Editions) and sending it back to a server. ( Here’s the guy who first discovered it).

Why is this an issue? Because the books you read can be used to discriminate against you or, in some countries, land you in jail. In the USA it could put you on the no-fly list. As soon as I get home I’m uninstalling ADE - I’d installed it for the possibility of checking out digital books from the library. Forget it! I’m sticking to the no-DRM books and physical books at the library.

Pwned by Shannen Crane Camp My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In my first status update I was unsure of whether the book would catch on with me. I’d bought it as part of a bundle, and it wasn’t the book that sold me on that bundle. The concept was interesting, but I wasn’t sure. The main character was a girl, in fact a cheerleader. And she played a WoW-like game. A Venn Diagram in which I was one of the cirlces would have pretty much no overlap with Reagan, the main character. Well, other than that I also lived in Oregon, but what was when I was in middle school, not high school. I also wasn’t sure of whether the premise rings true to today’s high school kids. When I left HS nearly 15 years ago, gaming still wasn’t as pop culture as it is today. As I said in the status update, with dude-bros playing Call of Duty, should Reagan actually feel paranoid for playing computer games? Is that the sole provenance of nerds? I think I would have found it slightly more believeable if it was more explicitly about the MMO. I could buy that most people in her high school gamed, but still made fun of her for MMO gaming which still seems to have a tinge of nerd to it. But, in the end, it’s a quibble (a quibble I’ve wasted a paragraph on); a MacGuffin.

I was explaining bands to Scarlett and she wanted to see an example. The only concert movie I had was from the I Fight Dragons Chicago show. I put that on and she rocked out; And asked me to dance with her. The first video (blurry because she’s so close, I think) she is spinning on my finger. The second she’s dancing on her own. I didn’t think to record video until well into things so she’s not going as crazy with the dancing as she had been.

I, Zombie by Hugh Howey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That was extremely intense. I don’t think I’ll ever look at zombies the same way again. I got this book as part of some pay what you want bundle. I never would have bought it on its own - I’m not a big zombie person. I read World War Z because everyone spoke about how incredibly good it was. And, just like The Walking Dead (pretty much the only other zombie story I consume), World War Z was about the people, not the zombies. Really the enemy could have been a contagion virus or out of control vampires like The Strain.