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Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

Related Post Roulette

39 Responses

  1. Michael Cain says:

    I stumbled across a PDF of Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp. I had forgotten all about Mr. Earbrass, the well-known novelist.Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    “Let’s Be Cops” is not a movie I would ever see but I think the articles suggesting that this might not be the best week to release it are kind of trying to hard. The release date was probably decided weeks if not months ago and so where the arrangements with theatres. The current events of this week are well beyond the control of anyone involved.

    My Murakami book should arrive on Tuesday. Yesterday I picked up “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan from the Library”Report

  3. Mike Dwyer says:

    I’ve been reading a book on the history of the North American fur trade for weeks now. Slow and tedious but kind of fascinating. I desperately need a few novels to grind through but have nothing in the hopper. All of the spy/thriller series that I read are between releases. Help!Report

    • Robert Greer in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

      I’m reading something similar: a history of the salt trade and its politics over the millennia. I guess animal pelts were often shipped on the same transports as salt, because salt was needed for preserving the skins properly.

      Does your book talk at all about how the fur trade changed the ecology and even the topography of the American Southwest? I’ve heard that when beavers were absurdly plentiful before the fur trade started in earnest, their dams helped to regulate the flow of water in otherwise-dry regions, thereby enabling a much more abundant array of plant and animal life than exists today.Report

    • Kim in reply to Mike Dwyer says:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Nature_(novel)
      It’s supposed to be fantastic. And spy/thrilerish is what the Doctor does.Report

  4. Robert Greer says:

    I’m making my way through “Stuffed and Starved” by Raj Patel, which has blurbs on the back from Naomi Klein and Michael Pollan, and is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from that description. Lots of good detail on the history of different food regimes and regulations and interesting stuff about the enduring influence of colonialism on the world food system, but with weird Marxish prescriptions sprinkled throughout.

    I’m also reading “De Los Altos”, a Spanish-language novel set during the War of the Cristeros in Mexico in the 1920s. But my Spanish isn’t very good, so it’s taking a while for me to get past the beginning where people are just wandering around the desert fighting and hunting deer.

    I’m also thumbing through “Salt: A World History” by Mark Kurlansky, whose “Nonviolence” was wonderful in every respect. “Salt” is a little drier (hey, it’s a desiccant!), but I’m definitely learning a lot from it that I wouldn’t have thought to investigate otherwise, which is one of my favorite qualities in a book.Report

  5. Will Truman says:

    Out of nowhere, I decided to watch an episode of Better Off Ted, which had me watching the last half of the first season and the whole of the second. Man, I love that show.

    I finished 24, will now move on to the latest season of White Collar.

    Knee deep in Turtledove’s Southern Victory series (second book, first one covering WWI). I like it okay, but it’s really had to follow in audiobook form. So… many… characters.Report

  6. James K says:

    I’ve started reading Robin Hobb – just finished The Assassin’s Apprentice.Report

    • Mike Schilling in reply to James K says:

      I’ve read some of the stuff she’s written as Megan Lindholm, but didn’t particularly care for any of it No idea how different her voice is between the two names.Report

      • Kim in reply to Mike Schilling says:

        The Gypsy was a surprisingly fun romp. I highly recommend it.
        I don’t particularly care for her Assassins books.

        Some people are surprisingly good at looking like multiple different people as they write. It’s hard to change your fist (some manage this feat — look at Anonymous), but you’d be surprised at how manifoldly different you can be while still being the same human.Report

  7. Mike Schilling says:

    I just signed up for HBO Go, which is an embarrassment of riches. My son and I are watching The Wire (first time for him), while I’m watching Silicon Valley. Silly and nothing like my experience of the real place, but funny enough. I also watched the first episode of Entourage, but am not motivated to see any more of it.

    On the big screen, I took my daughter to Guardians of the Galaxy. It was somewhere between a meh and a meh-minus. If they’d kept the 70s pop up through the whole thing instead of falling back on faux John Williams during the (I guess you’d call it a) climax, it might have earned a meh-plus.Report

  8. dhex says:

    a friend of mine turned me onto rick & morty, which i wholeheartedly recommend.Report

    • Glyph in reply to dhex says:

      I watched a couple but got sidetracked by Review, which is kinda genius. I’ll get back to Rick and Morty soon.Report

    • Glyph in reply to dhex says:

      Holy cow, I finished Review last night and it is AMAZING. The first couple are funny, but by the third or so, when they start making it clear there are through-lines to the madness (it’s not just a series of sketches), it gets great. If you have Amazon Prime you can stream it free.

      FIVE STARSReport

      • zic in reply to Glyph says:

        Thank you @glyph been needing something new to watch.Report

      • Glyph in reply to Glyph says:

        This isn’t a spoiler, since they never address it in the show, but Andy Daly (who plays Forrest MacNeil) says that his character’s backstory is that he was a film reviewer who started falling asleep 30 minutes into each film, and so started plagiarizing other reviewers and got caught/fired.

        This is what fuels his compulsion now, to see each of these life experiences that he is reviewing all the way through, to the bitter end.

        A commenter on AVClub said it’s like the trials of Abraham, except with Twitter instead of Yahweh.Report

  9. Maribou says:

    I’ve gotten deeply hooked on Continuum so that has been what I’m watching this week. Not even reading a whole lot though for me that means no more than 10 books a week :D. I’m in the middle of the deeply odd historical-kinda YA novel Kingdom of Little Wounds at the moment…. it’s exceptionally well written and I’m pretty sure I love it but it’s also kind of hard to read. Lots of bodily functions, many of them not functioning very well. Very literary in style. Appealing characters.Report

  10. Hoosegow Flask says:

    Burn Notice. It started with reruns coming on while the TV was basically background noise. Then I started watching on Netflix and am thoroughly enjoying it. It’s a nice mix between a problem of the week that gets resolved neatly by the end, and overarching plot line that gets advanced every episode (at least so far).Report

    • Mike Schilling in reply to Hoosegow Flask says:

      When you’re a blogger, you constantly have to find new subjects to write about. News, politics, music, even TV shows. Keep at it long enough, and the pickings can get pretty thin. But that’s what you signed up for when you first said “I want to blog.”Report

    • Chris is a huge fan. I enjoy it as well, though it did wear on after a while. And I never did like Jeffrey Donovan (Michael). The supporting cast really carries that show.

      (I’m afraid I don’t quite know what @mike-schilling is getting at.)Report

    • Chris in reply to Hoosegow Flask says:

      Greatest scene in television history:

      Report

    • Chris in reply to Hoosegow Flask says:

      I got my brother to watch it, and he watched the first few episodes and said, “You love this show?!” Then a couple weeks later he had watched the entire series. It is cheesy as hell, but about as fun as television can be.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Chris says:

        I just watched one, in fact. Fi is trying to help a woman whose son has been kidnapped:

        Fiona: Patricia, I want you to try something. It’s a relaxation exercise I do in situations like this. I want you to close your eyes and breathe deep. Picture a peaceful mountain stream, can you do that? Now picture yourself drowning the kidnapper in the stream. You’re taking a rock from the stream and raising it above your head, and with tremendous force you’re bringing …

        Michael: Fi! Report

      • Chris in reply to Chris says:

        Marry me, Fiona.Report

      • James Hanley in reply to Chris says:

        Cheesy as hell but fun, yes. It’s my guilty pleasure.

        Michael Weston has to be the least low key spy in the history of the business. I always suspected they burned him because he was a nightmare in real field work.Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Chris says:

        @james-hanley

        That, or he was very good, but he’s been burned & he’s all out of sh*ts to give in that regard.Report

      • morat20 in reply to Chris says:

        A friend of mine runs a regular D20 modern campaign. He says the show has provided both campaign material and character ideas. Several players have watched the show, and it…shows.

        Lord knows Mike Westin and Sam Ax infected my character concept, but he was already an unrepentant pyromaniac with a love of specialty ammunition. I added quite a bit of Knowledge(Demolitions) to my character based on the show. And got to use them. 🙂Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Chris says:

        “When you’re a lawful chaotic mage …”Report

  11. El Muneco says:

    I’m looking at getting into blogging, mostly from the World of Warcraft side, but Mike’s advice above definitely isn’t lost on me…

    That said, does anything else in the pop-culture world matter right now? We’re in the calm-just-before-the-earthquake phase, a moment that stretches to be endless before the cascade.

    Five days. Peter Capaldi.Report