Happy Holidays! I hope everyone had time to reflect on friends, family, and the meaning of Christmas. And now that we're done with that, on to the loot!
My parents kindly sent me a cash gift that I could use to obtain a new tablet, since
mine died a few months back. I did a brief poll of some friends and decided on an
ASUS ZenPad 10. It's not the most powerful or feature-rich tablet, but all I really want is a good-sized quality display suitable for reading comics and playing simple mobile games (i.e.
Star Realms). This tablet fills that need admirably, at a reasonable price.
From my brother, a fine paper book! Literally and in terms of subject matter. Most of what I've been reading recently has been in eBook format, so this will be a nice change of pace back to basics. And it goes nicely with
The History of Writing series from
Extra History, which I just finished watching the other day.
I also participated in a Secret Santa gift exchange this year with some folks from the
QT3 forums. For my part, I shipped gifts all the way to Norway. The distance meant it was a good idea to keep it small, so the only physical item was a small model Viper ship from Battlestar Galactica - my giftee is a fan of the forum game based on that show. I also added some Kindle books (no shipping costs there): a cookbook full of video-game-related recipes and a couple of sci-fi novels.
From my secret santa came some reading and listening material, along with notes mentioning that some of the posts on this very blog helped with ideas.
Star Trek - Ships of the Line is a 350-page book of artwork featuring all sorts of ships from the Star Trek universe (gift idea inspired by
this post).
The Amory Wars is an epic sci-fi comic collection, which I'd never heard of but looks very interesting. Even better, it comes with an accompanying metal album of songs related to the story!
Coheed and Cambria frontman Claudio Sanchez is also the writer of the comics. Looking forward to checking out the set. (
Update: There was also Randall Monroe's
Thing Explainer book! It came a couple of days later in a separate box.)
Hope everyone out there had a Christmas as enjoyable as mine - happy holidays!
