Recommended Links

I spent the past few weeks making myself redundant. Now I can enjoy two weeks of time off before my position on the training hierarchy becomes polarised.

One of the first things I did with my free time was read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. It covered several things that I am currently interested in when reading fiction: social commentary, fourth wall breaking and main characters who slowly go insane. I enjoyed it. And because I had no work to get back to after I finished reading it I decided to indulge in some tracing to work out why I actually read it.

Vonnegut has been recommended for decades. It was only recently I decided to find one of his books, after hearing him referenced on a track by Baltimore rapper E-Dubble. I first discovered E-Dubble's talents after he posted a freestyle over a remixed version of the Parks and Recreation soundtrack, which I only watched after it was posted in a thread about Parks and Recreation on the Something Awful forums. I was reading that thread because I'd just watched two straight seasons of Parks and Recreations in about three weeks. I started watching Parks and Recreations because it appeared on a few people's "TV Shows" list on Facebook, and they also had The Office and Arrested Development alongside it. Arrested Development is close to my favourite TV show. I discovered it when another thread on the Something Awful forums advertised that it was good the day it started on Australian TV in 2004. I originally signed up for the Something Awful forums for the files, not for TV Show recommendations, but that has been a welcome bonus. I found out about Something Awful's files from a member of another forum which was mainly about the computer game Age of Empires II: Age of Kings. This is going back a while now, but I think I first started reading that forum to try and find strategies to help me beat Ballard at Age of Kings when we played against each other back in high school. I first became an Age of Empires player when Josh's family bought a new computer somewhere around 1997 and it came packaged with it. I became friends with Josh after my parents and his parents started spending a lot of time together after we were born.

That was fun. I think the internet is really working hard on the way it's able to recommend and suggest new forms of entertainment or new directions for life. However, I think once you dig deep enough everything in my life can be traced back to either Josh or high school.