"It was a dark and stormy night."

I just picked up Altered Carbon tonight and when I got home I cracked it open to see how it started. I was very amused to find out that it basically starts with the classic line, "It was a dark and stormy night," rewritten to:

"Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah's cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting."

I keep hearing from many, many people that's it's excellent, so I figured I'd pick it up when I happened to see it tonight. Actually I picked up a ton of books as gifts, a number of which are for tomorrow night's gift exchange with some friends, but I also found a perfect gift for Jason that I had to pick up once I saw it.

I also saw an autobiography tonight that I'm interested in, but now I've completely spaced on the subjects name. His name starts with a "b", I think, he's very somber, has been an author, had his own television program in the past, was an editor of some political magazine for a long time. Very accomplished. But I've completely forgotten. I'm going to have to walk over and look at the book to remember who it is.

I've been having some really good talks with Jen. She's doing very well in L.A. and we seem to have reconnected in the past few weeks. Actually, it's really nice. I don't know what's up with it, but so far it's good. I just wish she weren't eleven-hundred miles away.

I "finished" the work that kept me there so late the last couple of nights (1:30 Thursday night as well as 2:30 the night before). I put it in quotes because that's just this round of work. It had to go to the testers, so I kinda had to be done. Luckily I managed to get a lot of writing done today, so I'm happy about that.

I played in another fun session of Savage Worlds Thursday evening. This is the game set as the War of the Worlds-style martians attack and the players' characters along with a number of other people spontaneously exhibit superpowers and begin fighting the aliens. So far it's been very combat intensive, but I'm hoping for a chance to actually do some roleplaying/interacting with other people in the setting. Really, no complaints, it's been good.

Speaking of gaming, I have to remind Jason to update the Worlds Largest Dungeon blog. We've had quite a few games since his last post and it would be nice to catch up to Glenn's prolific output over at Spike's Journal.