First, the funniest geek joke ever: Internet nerds and/or 8-bit Nintendo fans will surely find it hilarious that the title of my brother's wedding web site is "Hank and Katherine: All Our Base Are Belong to Each Other." (Which, for non-Internet nerds, references this.)

Second, to celebrate my birthday yesterday, I loaded up on painkillers and went for a ride on a Segway. Outrageously fun.

Third, I just received the first audiobook of An Abundance of Katherines. You can listen to a sample of the Katherines audiobook here, and a sample from the forthcoming Looking for Alaska audio here. What do you think of them?

Fourth, we need to talk more about lonelygirl15 and danielbeast, the best thing ever to happen to youtube, particularly now that my brilliant editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, has been converted to lonely girl/danielbeast fandom.

As you'll no doubt recall, we learned in a recent video that Bree, aka lonelygirl, seems to have a religious devotion to the occultist cocaine addict Alesiter Crowley. Well, now Daniel is going to visit Bree's summer camp to see her in a play. The summer camp is 'religious,' and since Bree's religion appears to be Thelema (although some at this New York Times blog argue she's a Scientologist, which is certainly funnier), this promises to be one hell of a good play. Virgins will be sacrificed, pentagrams will be drawn, magick will be spelled with a k, etc.

Julie believes that the series may culminate in a video of the play, and that the people behind 'Bree' and 'Daniel' accidentally tipped their hats with the Crowley bit. I tend to agree. (It could even be the Blair Witch Project people, up to their old quasi-occultist tricks.)

At this point, very few people believe that Bree is actually an occultist with excessively strict parents. But the slight chance that it might really be real has thousands of people utterly transfixed, which I think is the larger point. By maybe being really real, we pay closer attention to Bree and Daniel's story than we would to a similar known-to-be-false story. And I still think that hypertextual narratives like this might be more and more prevalent in the future.

Now, Sara Zarr, who is a lovely person and an excellent writer but apparently inadequately fond of my theory, asked some good questions in comments, which I'd like to briefly respond to:

Q. First of all: How much vicodin did you take last night?
A. The Vicodin ship has sailed, dude. I'm on much stronger stuff these days. But plenty, trust me!

Q. Are you pro or con realishness?
A. I'm neither. I'm only saying that these days people seem to have an easier time devoting themselves fanboy-style to realish narratives than to non-realish narratives (although I have to say that I am blessed to have a big audience that re- and re- and re-reads Looking for Alaska, which does rather poke a hole in my argument.)

Q. I think this kind of realism/ishness is still in plenty abundant supply in novels, and in a superior way because the terms are clear from the beginning.
A. But my argument is that because the terms are clear from the beginning, the audience will note devote itself to as close of a reading. There are thousands of people trying to figure out the meaning of lonelygirl and danielbeast. Are they a parable? Do they stand for Christianity or against it? Is this mere marketing and if so for what? I agree that a lot of readers will still devote time to asking the same questions about a novel, but I don't know if that will continue to be the case, or if the easy intoxication of the realish hypertext will eventually seem more compelling to almost everyone.

But regardless, I agree with Robin Wasserman that books will survive. They always survive. But you can survive without thriving. See also: Opera, ballet, and heavyweight boxing.