After burning out at my old job, I’ve recently stepped into a new one that will hopefully allow me to prioritize the things I care about most in life – God, loved ones, and catching up on fun tv. Part of creating Halbs 3.0 has involved reconnecting to things I used to love doing, especially physical exercise and spiritual practices focused on being still and silent. Into the Silent Land was recommended to me by a colleague, and after reading it I could see why. While […]
Delicious morsels of trivia, with hints of cheekiness.
Bill Bryson is a delightfully dorky guy full of interesting and trivial facts. In this book, he utilizes his own English country home as a launching pad to discussing, room by room, the history of the modern home. The concept works well to take us everywhere, from the kitchen (that’s why it’s called “room and board”) to the bathroom (weirdly enough, was once considered something for poor people) to the bedroom (people love sex). I never knew I would care so much about the history […]
An incomplete yet intriguing start to a series
Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi stories, and so I snagged another one of his books as I was browsing through the library. The Other End of Time is the first book of the Eschaton trilogy, and I have to say that while the series may be good (haven’t read it, yet), the first book felt incomplete and disappointing. A pet peeve I have in comics and in modern books is that stories are incomplete. I sort of enjoy recurring characters, although I prefer to […]
Charming!
Some quick facts that you need to know about me: I turn 35 this year, I loved The Princess Bride as a kid because he looked like Zorro and as a Hispanic kid I loved Zorro, I love pro-wrestling, and I didn’t like The Princess Bride as an adult. If you’ve ever driven from Austin to Dallas, you know it’s hell. First, because you’re sitting in traffic on I-35, and second, because you’re leaving Austin for Dallas. (Just kidding. Dallas has a cool skyline!) I […]
If aliens landed, we’d still be idiots.
Reading ideas come from all sorts of places. While I’m a big sci-fi fan, I’d admittedly never heard of the Strugatsky brothers until I read an article about European dystopian games in a recent edition of Game Informer magazine. (For you cool people who don’t know about Game Informer, it’s the magazine you get an automatic subscription to when you sign up for a rewards card at GameStop stores. It’s pretty good!) I found out that the influential S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game was based on a […]
“In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.”
Since it’s my Year of Murakami, I’m reading both the man’s fiction and his non-fiction. A decade or so ago, Murakami wrote a book about running. Unbeknownst to me, when not listening to jazz records or drinking whisky or thinking about women just out of reach, the author runs marathons. In fact, he runs one a year or so, and also likes triathlons. This book isn’t really a how-to or a straight memoir so much as a man recording his wandering thoughts. For a fan […]
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