Ye Olde Staging Point

Yes, faithful blog-readers, I have returned. I have emerged from torpor, shaken off the slumber of long-forgotten aeons, and am once again posting. The last week has seen some truly great blog posts by my fellow bloggers, most especially Alan and pcg. Great stuff, guys. However, if you are somehow expecting that I've spent the last week of blogging inactivity brainstorming up incredibly brilliant topics to post, you are in for a disappointment. That's right--until I re-acquaint myself with this whole blogging thing, you will have to suffer through yet another "here's what I did this weekend" type post. Without further ado, then, here is what I did this weekend:

• spent the Best. Valentine's Day. Evar. with the amazing Michele. Have I mentioned lately that Michele is amazing? We celebrated Valentine's Day on Saturday, a day later than everyone else--we went out to an Italian restaurant in Muskegon and chatted about everything from the impact of World War 2 on Sartre's philosophy, to the horrific-ness of that old sitcom Married with Children, to the subtleties of the ancient Egyptian distinction between cosmic order and chaos. Have I mentioned that Michele is amazing? She's amazing. We're getting married, you know.
• I watched Memento (thanks to Mark for recommending it). An excellent film, and it's put me in the mood to watch The Usual Suspects again. I was halfway expecting the main character from Memento to reveal at the end of the film that he was, in fact, Kaiser Soze. Anyway, most of you have probably seen Memento already, but if you haven't, you should immediately bump it to the top of your rental list.
• I read up on Vernor Vinge's theory that by the year 2035, computers will have acquired godlike sentience and will have achieved dominance over humanity, ushering in a new glorious age of machines. If you haven't read anything by Vinge, you owe it to yourself to check him out--he's an absolutely brilliant sci-fi writer. He is quite serious about his machines-will-take-over theory and in fact focuses heavily on that theme in his novels. I very highly recommend A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, two of the best sci-fi novels I've read since Frank Herbert's work. Fire is a look at a far-future universe in which computers have evolved into godlike entities, far beyond the pale of human understanding; Deepness is a novel set in a universe in which machines cannot achieve sentience, and so humanity is supported by hopelessly complex, nearly incomprehensible levels of automation. As for the whole machines-taking-over thing, I'll confess I'm kind of looking forward to it. Perhaps I'll delve into that in a later post, or perhaps I'll save it for my therapist. (Thanks once again to Mark for sending the Vinge link.)

So yes, that was my weekend. I hope you all had wonderfully romantic Valentine's Days. Or if you didn't, I hope you spent it doing something fun like playing computer games all weekend. Or perhaps some combination of both. Have a great Monday!