We had five consecutive holidays at the office. Monday was a working day, but someone sent a mail asking all of us team leads to petition for a holiday on that day, and we did so, earning countless blessings in return.

What did I do these five days? Nothing. Unless you count the fact that on Wednesday night, I finished the fifteenth level of the Punisher game after an undocumented number of being killed and respawned and killed again, and am now onto the last level, called “Ryker’s Island”. In other news, inspite of a 256 MB graphics card, Half-Life 2 refuses to run on my machine. Does it require more than 1024*768 resolution to run by default? My monitor ( which happens to be moccacino‘s monitor), was bought just before the last tyrannosaurus rex on earth forgot to breathe and brought about premature extinction on himself, ergo, low-res. GTA San Andreas does run, though, but I don’t want to play it before I complete 100% of Vice City. What? I didn’t tell you? Of course I haven’t completed Vice City! I am a busy man. (Oh wait, that kind of negates the first two lines of this paragraph.)

The kind potnuru agreed to bring along two items from my amazon wishlist on his recent trip to India, and he also agreed to bring them along from Hyderabad to Bangalore. The items in question happen to be the humongous graphic novels Locas by Jaime Hernandez and Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories by Gilbert ‘Beto’ Hernandez. Two brothers, both amazing storytellers, two hardcover publications collecting ten years of stories published in the indie comic called Love and Rockets. I had one of Gilbert’s short fiction collection called Fear of Comics from an eBay sale ( autographed, too, hyuk) and one of Jaime’s, called Death of Speedy – needless to say, I did cartwheels when I heard of both these books coming out sometime in 2004, completist bastard that I am. It’s impossible to get complete runs of the L&R comics, as far as I know, and the early issues go for about 50-60$ each. Have begun reading Palomar, which is the story of a village, and hence has innumerable characters to keep track of. The cool thing is that Beto includes proper pronounciation guides for all the characters as footnotes – I didn’t know a Latin American character named Jesus would be pronounced “Hey-sooz”, for instance.

Note the difference in the drawing styles of the two brothers. Jaime’s (on the left) is more detailed, and it’s also more super-heroey. Gilbert’s is sparse, but I like sparse. Of course, if you would ask me to choose between the two, I would have to think really, really hard. Both the brothers draw FANTASTIC women, and more important, they create believable characters out of the women they draw.

A one-stop link for all things Hernandez Brothers-related.

There’s a neat interview with Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke over at Salon.com. You will need to click on a free day-pass ad-thingie to read the complete thing, but it’s worth it, seriously.

In other news, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes has come out, and both Bookworm and Blossom have it on sale at 20% discounts. I have a feeling I might end up buying this next month.

Of late, I have also been suffering from frightening lapses in memory. A casual conversation about horror writers led me to mention Shirley Jackson and HP Lovecraft, and then I wanted to talk about this author of I am Legend, a book that has been out of print for quite sometime, and has been plugged by Stephen King in his Danse Macabre and On Writing. Damn. I couldn’t remember his name! I remembered ( quite correctly too) that he had also written The Incredible Shrinking Man and A Stir of Echoes and What Dreams May Come, and that Charlton Heston acted in The Omega Man which was adapted from I Am Legend and I also bought one of his lesser known books called Hunted Beyond Reason, buit I COULD NOT REMEMBER HIS NAME! It was scary, let me tell you. Steadfastly avoided googling for it, even stopped thinking about it consciously – no use at all. It took me about a week to remember that the guy’s name was Richard Matheson. Scary. More so, because I’ve been looking for his other books for quite sometime.