Work sucks. All the four day weekends are gone. We got rid of our satellite tv receiver last weekend so I'm almost at a loss for things to do after work. I'll probably get a lot more gaming done, until the cables I ordered to hook a laptop up to the TV come in, then I suppose I'll be crashed on the couch watching Hulu all night.

I recently read Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War". It's basically a literary response to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" based on Haldeman's experiences in the Vietnam war. It's an amazing book. Coming home from two year long deployments was always something of a shock. So many things had changed that it's like I was put in a box for a year and brought out into this bizarre new world and Haldeman illustrates that kind of culture shock when the main character returns to Earth decades after he left, though time dilation causes him only to age a year or two. Everything he remembered from before he left seemed to have gotten bleaker, less enjoyable, the same way coming back from Iraq to a Bush-ravaged economy was to me. It's like in the span of a year, the whole world had hit a downward slope at a faster pace than I could've imagined.

It really made me want to read John Steakley's "Armor" again so that's what I'm doing now. Another amazing book.