Watching: Just finished the second episode of Babylon 5 Season 2.  After a full season of Commander Sinclair, it's always a bit jarring when we get to Captain Sheridan; mostly it's the voice, I think, probably an octave higher and rough instead of smooth.  But Sheridan's already got more depth to his character, and the writing seems much better; the plot has hit the ground running.

My wife and I also watched the first episode of "Outlander"; she's a big fan of the Diana Gabaldon books they're based on, and I have read and enjoyed them as well.  It seemed okay to start with, not as off-putting as I found "Bitten" or "True Blood", so I'm sure we'll keep on.

Reading: Slogging through The Talisman by Stephen King & Peter Straub.  Never read any Straub, but I've read a fair chunk of King by this point, and I frankly can't point to anything that doesn't read like him.  But I'm not enjoying it that much; our main character is a little too hapless, and just when he seems to be ramping up his confidence slightly he gets saddled with a hapless companion.  Part of this book almost seem like a dry run for the Dark Tower.  Not sure if I'll keep it when I finish, or if I'll want to try to the sequel I seem to recall they came out with a few years ago.  Also inching through What If The Earth Had Two Moons?, which is fitfully interesting, but today I've been trying to catch up on Cracked.com columns, which I seem to have become a dedicated reader of.

Listening: Mostly Rush's "Vapour Trails" recently.  I skipped over this one when it came out, mostly because on first listen it seemed horrifically noisy, something I'd been afraid of since "Stick It Out".  It became available on eMusic, though, so I thought I'd give it a try.  A fellow Rush fan that I met at my wife's family reunion said they had come out with a less noisy version, so maybe I managed to get that one by chance.  (I did like "Snakes & Arrows", which gave me the impetus to try again, and one of these days I should try "Clockwork Angels", too.)  I also have Sloan's "Between The Bridges" coming up soon; Sloan's a band I find hit-and-miss, but I read a gushy chapter on them in a book on Canadian alternative music a few months back, and since they're on eMusic too, I thought I'd give them another try.

Playing: For several months now my brain has been mostly dominated by Paradox Games's offerings, specifically Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV.  I could write a big long blog post about my games, but let's just say that at the moment I am experimenting with EU4 games created from my CK2 save files, and having a lot of fun with it.

I've also been spending an embarrassing amount of time playing with Akinator, a guessing game with a genie, bad English, and a bit more than twenty questions.  It only guesses characters--both real and fictional--but I've become caught up in the question of which characters it knows about, and then which ones are most popular (because it tells you how many times it's been guessed before...).  I now have several pages of numbers, character from different sources and their respective popularities.  Akinator the genie itself is at the top, followed by Hitler and Jesus, unless there's other obvious ones I haven't tried yet.  I'm sure it'll pall eventually, but at least it keeps from playing more Candy Crush Saga on my iPod.