Now that class has started and I have no free time, I have gone back to reading books and listening to music. I briefly moved away from reading purely for pleasure and picked up Flash Hacks, a book which contains 100 “tips and tricks” for the serious Flash hacker. The day after that, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling appeared in my Amazon.com gold box, which I took as a sign that I was ABSOLUTELY required to purchase it. I am glad I did, because it is a fantastically interesting and enjoyable book.

In the last couple of weeks I have picked up a couple of novels; the first being Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb, which is every bit as good as her previous books in the Live Ship Traders, Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies. And just today I began reading Forty Signs of Rain, an eco-thriller by Kim Stanley Robinson.

But life is not all about reading: In the past few weeks I have picked up three CDs which I have been listening to nonstop: Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years, a best-of collection of the songs of Richard Thompson; Bacchanal/1969, a double-album set of the songs of Gabor Szabo; and Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, a collection of songs performed by Otha Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum band.

This last CD in particular is amazing. Listen to the samples on the amazon.com page. If you hear something and say Where have I heard that before, it is probably “Shimmy She Wobble”, which was played in Gangs of New York, in the opening scene of the movie, just before the big Five Points fight.

Aaannddd last but not least, I spent $12.00 on the “Best of the Web” issue of Step Inside Design magazine, because it highlights a couple of projects I worked on while at BBK Studio: Discovering Design and Pique.