I was going to go off on another aural association story, but I decided at the last minute to instead point you, the reader, to one of my all-time favorite essays, by none other than Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…was the Command Line.

All of those who think I’m a bit — ahem — snobbish in my choice of technology would do good to give it a read. A bit dated, yes, but it does a good job of explaining where I, personally, am coming from when I look down my nose at certain operating systems/software/social networking whooey websites/etc.

And for those already fully familiar with my biases, or those having similar biases of their own, if you haven’t read In the Beginning…, it’s really worth it.

I’ve written before about how, like what I imagine is common for music aficionados, I have a habit of associating music (generally, whole albums) with events in my life, or things I’m doing, or whatever. The concepts can be abstract “high school” or specific “that wide turn to the left around a hill somewhere right after Wildcat Mountain on Highway 33 heading east from La Crosse” (seriously), but they’re always associations that become hard to shake, in no small part due to how lovingly I embrace them.

In lieu of any sort of real informative update (er, I’ve been playing a lot of Etrian Odyssey and Rock Band, and so far fighting off my daydreaming of a new video card…), I decided to list another one, a more recent one.

Part of it, honestly, is because it is the merging of two suggestions I quickly grew to appreciate: Nightwish’s Dark Passion Play and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I’ve listened to Dark Passion Play too many times to count since I got it, and still have yet to finish A Game of Thrones (in part because I felt I was going through it too quickly), but nevertheless, this one is sticky. Two suggestions from two people. Doesn’t hurt that they arrived in the same box from Amazon.

For a week or two, my evening ritual was firing up DPP in Amarok, crawling into bed, and flying through five or so chapters of AGoT, enjoying both in tandem. The song that I think really makes the link, for whichever reason, is “For The Heart I Once Had,” which opens in a certain way that makes me think of cold Starks — I think it has something to do with the opening and the guitar bridge riffs. I don’t know why, so I won’t try to explain it.

Two updates this month… I must be getting sick. :)

I got an Amazon.com Associates Program thing in order to try to make a couple bucks off the website. I didn't want to do Google ads because they're too layout-invasive and annoying (in my opinion anyway), but I figured that since I've been mentioning a lot of stuff you can find on Amazon, I might as well give it a whirl.

So without any further boring preamble, my book of the month-or-so is World War Z by Max Brooks, a surprisingly compelling serious fiction about the living dead rising across the globe in the near future and how it shaped history. The details of the war, and its hysteria, are told in an interview format, with narrator speaking with various individuals of all sorts who influenced and were influenced by The Zombie War.

Despite the premise, the book is very not-hokey, and there are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at the current U.S. administration and American culture scattered between the assorted interviews. I've been pleasantly surprised by the book.

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So there you have it. The image links directly to Amazon, and if you do buy the book directly from clicking the link, I get some really small cut of the sale. But really, I'll be pleased with just a couple bucks here and there. I'm not even looking to offset hosting costs. You are of course under no obligation (implied or otherwise) to click the links or buy anything.

That's all for today, tootles.