Titan

[prog]

I used my magic monkay powers to remember that my backpack contains my Apple work order receipt in lieu of my iBook. Typing in the dispatch ID it supplies tells me that My Precious arrived at the mothership scant hours ago. Strange that asking to see a view of all pending repairs in my name still brings up a blank, but no matter; I'm a little less antsy now.

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Stupid thing that happened inside my head: I am reading The Game-Players of Titan, a murder mystery by Philip D. Dick. It is more or less exactly what you'd expect this to be. While immersed in it, the thought occurred to me: Huh, this is like a murder mystery were it written by Philip K. Dick. Um, yeah.

The reason this thought occurred to me is that I believe that I've seen PKD's name invoked a lot in my past few months' worth of media consumption; the film Donnie Darko (which I didn't like much) and the novel Acts of the Apostles (which I kinda liked) both had attached blurbs that compared them to Dick's work, and Waking Life (which I liked a lot) contained a conversation about PKD's Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said. (Which I have read only a little of before misplacing my copy. Fooey.) Add this to the fact that early 2001 saw me devouring novels by Tim Powers, one of Dick's proteges.

Serendipity, since I myself discoered PKD only a three years or so ago, and so probably wouldn't pay attention to references to him before now; or observation of a whole generation of authors and filmmakers coming into maturity after having steeped in his work? Innnteresting.

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I have noted before my failure to list any family in my P&X acknowledgements section, but today I realized I didn't list Andy, my friend who introduced me to Perl and got me my first programming job! I'd rather have his name there than Larry Wall's. I feel kind of bad about this. Sigh. Well, I have another ack section only a few months away, don't I.