On Reading

I enjoy reading, and always have.

Starting with my older brother's comic books, then moving on to proper books: super-heroes, fantasy, science fiction, science fantasy, westerns, history, and other nonfiction.

These days, though, most of my reading is blogs and forums.  I almost said FB groups (I am a member of several D&D-related groups there), but I am both trying to wean myself of FB and don't know that FB meets my definition of reading, despite how long some posts are.

Anyhow, I read blogs and forums.  Not every day, or even every other day, but there are times I sit down and binge-read (which is cheaper and healthier than binge-drinking), following links and reading article series and entire forum threads.

Sometimes I participate with comments, but that is a rarity.  Which is different from FB, where I often comment, and occasionally get responded to (on rare occasion, my comments get responses from surviving creators of the earlier editions of D&D or published authors, which I find super exciting).  Usually I read and absorb, maybe save a document to the computer (a second step, as my online reading is mostly done on iPad), and then let the ideas percolate in my head, mixing with other thoughts.

Which is related to one of my favorite quotes: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - Friedrich Neitzsche

It is related because that bit about the abyss drives what I do and do not read (or watch) - I firmly believe that nothing we come in contact with ever goes away.  We may consciously forget about it, but it lingers forever, affecting us in strange and subtle ways. 

But I'm not writing about philosophy (because then I'd be all over the Stoics, because it lines up neatly with my personal beliefs and Catholicism in general), I'm writing about reading.

The blogs and forums linked to the side are my most common haunts, although I drift to others as the links take me.  On occasion, those links take me to Amazon for a proper book, and then I come full circle.

So when it comes to gaming (or the fiction that I write that stays safely unpublished), you now know the source of the ideas.