Seriously, I was excited when I saw a new album was coming out. I will have to give it a couple more listen throughs, but my first take is it is so over produced and over tuned.

I feel old. Every once and a while some pop culture thing pops up that reminds me of when this song came out. I'm not an older then this song, but the nexus that existed when this song was released always reminds me of a particular time in my life.

30 years ago this movie was released. It's corny at times and not very accurate, but it's pretty nostalgic for me. I saw it when it the day it was released in 95.

I decided to fire up the ole blue ray player and rewatch it tonight. I realized I had missed something when I first saw it: in one of the opening scenes, Dade, our antihero star, is "taking over a TV station" so he can watch the outer limits. Currently being broadcast is a very racist TV show about how white people are superior are better then black people and other minorities. The tape is ejected and we see the name of the videos "America first".

It made me laugh out loud how 30 years later we are still experiencing the same rhetoric, and the same racism, using the same titles.

What I am listening to seems to ebb and flow with the time of year. Early September seems to be violent Femmes for whatever reason.

About 15 years ago I read though everything Neal Stephenson had written. It started with snow crash, then the cryptonomicon, then less popular works like zodiac and the diamond age. In general I loved them all. I stopped reading his books right before anathem came out...

But on a vacation last year I picked up a copy on my e-reader and started it. I enjoyed the concept, I loved the mat-as-philosophy, despite the difficulty getting into it. Anyway, vacation came to an end, I was about 40% through it, and I just stopped, picked up a couple other books, and moved on. No real reason, but a combination of how slow it moved, the extraneous details that seem like they could have been left out, etc.

Well, vacation this year hit so I picked it back up. After about the 50 percent point the book totally changed, as if I was reading an entirely different story. I'm trying to leave out spoilers, but now I am about 80% through and I'm having trouble with what the characters are doing in the book based on the history provided in the beginning.

Don't get me wrong... I follow the story and the plot tracks well, but there was so much character development in the beginning and suddenly what they are doing doesn't track with any of that development.

The best summery I read by someone on reddit said "what do you think about Anathem? I think it is about 200 pages too long". I'm going to push through and finish it. My e-reader says I have about 7 hours to go and I think I am enjoying it. I just was wondering how others feel about it.