How Tim Ferriss Made Me Quit

Oh my gawd. I did it.

I just quit this damn molecular biology course.

And that’s all because of Tim Ferriss and his book, the audio version of which I have been listening to obsessively over the last week.

I still can’t believe I really finally did it. I have been fantasizing about making this call literally for months. I was so very close to doing it about a hundred times - basically every day while I was sitting in class and dying a little inside I made my mind up to call as soon as I got back to the flat. But for one reason or another, I always found excuses not to.

Until today.

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Ok, so I’ve seen it now. And I was decidedly underwhelmed.

It’s not like I went to the cinema with great expectations or anything. I mean, it was written by George Lucas - yes, I know, so were all the others before, but after the Star Wars prequel disasters I don’t trust this guy with anything anymore (not that I ever was a big Star Wars or Lucas Fan).

And after reading the not-so-very-favorable review on Pajiba all I asked was to have some mindless fun. But the film didn’t even deliver on that score.

It’s not that it is a very bad film. It’s just that it isn’t particularly good, either. It’s just meh. Boring. Not funny. Well, no, on second thought: that is bad. An Indiana Jones movie shouldn’t be boring. I think I actually fell asleep a few times for a couple of minutes.

The main reason for this was that the story didn’t seem to have much of a point. So Indy is running away (not very successfully) from the Russians now instead of the Nazis, puzzling about the relevance of an oh-so-mysterious crystal skull. Uhm, and I should care about this why exactly?

And he reunites with his former lover (who got on my nerves already the last time around) and finds out he has a son. Again, snorefest. I just don’t give a rat’s ass about his family connections. I want a storyline. I want some jokes that are actually funny. I want characters that are not comicbook cardboard cutouts. (God, what an awful waste of Cate Blanchett’s sublime acting abilities this mess was!)

And a sidekick with at least remnants of a personality would have been a nice addition, too. Not that I want to say anything against Shia LaBeouf - the kid is kinda cute, and I’m sure he’s gonna be an alright actor one day. At the moment however, he is just a bland pretty face of no interest whatsoever. (Then again, I’m probably too old already to see his appeal.)

Harrison Ford did his job, as usual. He was never the most elegant of actors, but he gets the job done. And at some points he even managed to make it sparkle for a second or two. The more depressing it was when everything slid back into the muddy soup this whole mess was in the end.

One thing I do most emphatically NOT want from an Indiana Jones movie are telepathic aliens made of jellie-like movable pseudo-crystal. What the fuck was that all about?

Oh yeah, and the fact that Indy was on Ground Zero of an atomic explosion and survived virtually unscathed just by climbing into a refridgerator, which coincidentally was the only thing not totally obliterated by the blast, but conveniently hurled out of the blast zone into the surrounding desert? CRAP! CRAP! CRAP!

And what’s with the fucking gophers? WTF?!?!?!?

There are so many things so fundamentally wrong with this movie that I for one am 100% sure I will never watch it again. Ever. Even on tv I will switch the channel when it comes on. It’s such a complete waste of time. For me the Indiana Jones franchise ends with The Last Crusade and this big, steaming pile of whatever just doesn’t officially exist. Damn you, Lucas. I want my money back.

Ok, so this title is an inside joke. You probably don’t get it if you are not a fan of Battlestar Galactica - in which case I can only feel sorry for you, oh and I also can help you. I just found this hilarious 8-minute-recap of the first 3 seasons on YouTube.

Even if you’re not a sci/fi fan and if you have no intention of ever watching the show, even if you don’t know what the frak I’m talking about: do yourself a favour and watch it. It’s seriously funny.

Oh yeah, and then I also found the exact same thing for the first 3 seasons of LOST.

I had given up on this show last season, but watching this has made me reconsider. I might actually watch the current season after all.

This is clearly one of the stupider dogs I have seen in a long while…

But just in case you cat-lovers are thinking about making fun of our poor, addle-brained canine companions now: Cats don’t seem to be any smarter.

Don’t mean to sound smug here, but my dog would never be that stupid. Unfortunately I can’t prove that, because we don’t have any screendoors in our house.

“A masterpiece” — Stephen King

I don’t know how it is with you, but I am often peeved by overly enthusiastic reviewers’ praises for a book printed on the cover (or even on the first couple of pages inside). Mostly, the books with the most over-hyped praises turn out to be the dullest tomes imaginable. So, normally, I tend to ignore this.

If, on the other hand, somebody like Stephen King endorses a novel, I do pay attention. Not only because I like his own books, but because I have come to trust his opinion on such matters. I have yet to be disappointed in any of the books that I have come across that had an endorsement by Stephen on the cover. So, if he calls this one ‘brilliantly written and scary as hell’ how can I not pick it up? (And just to spare you the suspense: I think he was damn right with this description.)

But, you see, the thing is, even though I usually rarely tend to read thrillers I wouldn’t even have needed Steve’s encouragement in this case, because the author is none other than Michael Marshall Smith. Ever since finding him through Bookcrossing I have been a fan of his dark and twisted imagination. The books he writes under the name of Michael Marshall are less science fiction and more the thriller kind, but if this one is anything to go by, they are just as fantastic.

The story starts with two guys gunning down 68 people in a fast-food restaurant in Pennsylvania. We have a teenage girl that gets abducted from a busy street in the middle of L.A. And then there is Ward Hopkins, who tries to make sense of the accident that apparently killed his parents in Montana - then finds a note in his father’s favorite chair, reading: “We’re not dead.”

At first, it is a bit puzzling to figure out what all these events are supposed to have in common, but as the story unfolds it becomes ever clearer. Behind everything there are The Straw Men. Nobody knows who they are, and why they kill. But Ward, with the help of some friends, is doing his best to find out.

That probably doesn’t sound all that scary or captivating on first glance, but I can assure you that impression is deceiving. As I said, as a rule I am not much of a fan of thrillers, so I don’t have all that much experience with the genre, but as far as gripping stories go this one is definitely among the best I have read lately (and I don’t just say that because I have already loved the author before!).

You know, there is another pet peeve of mine concerning book reviews. It is the overuse of certain words that get bandied around just because the reviewers are too lazy to think of an original description. One of these words is “unputdownable” - actually, I’m not even sure if that is a proper english word, but nevertheless you find it in every second book review. As somebody who reads a lot of books I have come across many stories that I love and that I can’t wait to finish eventually, but a really unputdownable book in the literal sense of the word is a very rare thing for me.

This novel, though, does qualifiy for that description in my opinion. I literally was glued to my armchair and refused to even acknowledge anybody talking to me until I had finished it.

Incidentally, Marshall wrote a sequel, named “The Upright Man”, a title that makes sense if you read the first one. At my next shopping spreee on Amazon, this one will be on the top of the list of books to get.

I’m on a bit of a reading binge of books about writing lately. This one is just a slim volume of about 130 pages, so I didn’t expect any deep insights from it.

Turns out, I got pleasantly surprised. Not only does Mr. Card have a very engaging style of writing, he also clearly knows what he’s talking about (he is a very successful author himself, after all) and he’s got the knack of getting his points across in a concise and understandable manner. What more can one expect?

I very much enjoyed this book and was only sad that it was over so quickly. The best thing about it was definitely the fact that Card writes from his own experience with what works and what doesn’t. If an author, who has written dozens of books and sold millions of copies, tells me how to approach writing, I am much more inclined to actually listen than when I hear the same stuff from somebody who never actually published a book in his/her whole life. After all, how can you try to teach something you’re not able to do well yourself?

The book is divided into 5 sections:

1. The Infinite Boundary (defining what is, and isn’t, science fiction and fantasy)
2. World Creation
3. Story Construction
4. Writing Well
5. The Life and Business of Writing

I found all of them immensely interesting and learned a few things that were new to me, even though I have read dozens of writing books before. Funnily, this book not only made me want to check out Card’s own novels (of which I know only “Ender’s Game” so far) and his other book about writing, “Characters and Viewpoint”, but it also caused a few new additions to my wishlist by mentioning some books by other authors he recommends.

This book left me decidedly underwhelmed. In fact, so much so that I didn’t even bother to finish it. It is not really a novel as such, but consists of several separate stories (my guess would be 11, but I didn’t really check) that are only very tenuously connected by the mention of woodworm and/or Noah’s Ark - don’t ask me why, I didn’t get it either.

The first story, which tells about what went “really” on on board Noah’s Ark, told from the standpoint of one little passenger, was quite funny. If you’re an atheist that is. It doesn’t leave a good hair on any aspect of the nonsensical story as told by the Bible, and as such I obviously enjoyed it a lot.

I really wanted to like the book based on that first story, but sadly it all went downhill from there. The following chapters ranged from the downright silly (as in “stupid” and not funny at all) to the plain boring. I couldn’t muster any interest in any of them, except maybe “The Survivor”, but even that one got too confusing and pointless in the end.

In fact, most of the stories seemed kind of pointless to me. Probably I just didn’t get the point, but they all left me wondering why the hell I should be interested in those people. Very, very dissatisfying.

The most puzzling aspect of the whole book, though, was the to my eyes absolutely exaggerated praise for it on the back cover. All those reviewers praising it as a masterpiece, as funny and moving and whatnot - they all must have read a totally different book and I want to know which one.