As predicted, Mushroom Jazz 6 is growing on me. My current thought is that the first 2/3 to 3/4 is bumpin’ but the tail end still doesn’t grab me. It’ll probably take a few more weeks of listening to converge though.
However the three track run of:
is definitely sicktastic!
Film at 11. Image cribbed from the in depth analysis from Wired Epicenter by Elliot Van Buskirk. And just when I was about to seriously start considering Amazon’s MP3 Downloads.
Looks like there might be some blog mileage in digging into each service’s dj mix catalog and seeing what I find.
For whatever reason, I don’t see much link love for Discogs.com in the circles I travel. It’s a great open source effort to capture artist discographies and album listings in obsessive, gory detail.
Discogs.com actually solved a decade old mystery for me. Living in the SF Bay Area in ‘94, and partaking heavily of the underground house music scene, I moved into the modern era and started buying dj mix cds. One of the earliest, maybe even the first, was Little Louie Vega’s United DJs of America, V2: New York City. I wore that thing out and still enjoy listening to it 14 years after its release. The build and release at the end is to die for.
However, Track 16, listed as In The Dark We Live by Aphrohead, always puzzled me. I was familiar with all of the vinyl releases of that cut and knew that on Vega’s mix there was something else blended in that carried really distinctive vocals. “I dance … and I sweat … and I let myself… Go!” I searched high and low. I even got someone on Usenet to promise to unearth the secret. They never came through, go figure. I gave up the chase until I found Discogs.com
Digging around under Vega’s discography I checked the DMC UK version of United DJs V2. Sure enough, “Notes: Sleeve mistakenly shows track 16 as Aphrohead - In The Dark We Live.” Instead it was Head Rush’s Underground and apparently the only track they ever released. Talk about obscure!
Technically the track listing is correct, but it would have also been fair to credit Head Rush in the liner notes as well. In a similar fashion, Vega cribs from himself and The Bomb (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind) makes an uncredited appearance early in the mix. Maybe it had something to do with licensing.
The Web provides.
Scott Rosenberg beat me to it but I meant to point to an interesting New Yorker article drawing parallels between The Village Voice and The Blogosphere. I’m in agreement with Rosenberg that the spirit of the early Voice was akin to blogging’s ethos, but that The Voice was nowhere near what the blogosphere is now. As a fan of early hip-hop, I hear echoes of the whole “Lou Reed rapped, so he was the father of hip-hop” line of argument. Yeah, right.
The correct phrasing is that The Village Voice presaged the blogosphere.
I used to have a somewhat curmudgeonly view of gift cards. A gift card was saying, “I don’t care enough to bother shopping for you, but care just enough to tell you where to spend my money!” I took a slightly less dim view of cash. At least you can spend that anywhere on anything or even stash it and earn compound interest. My overarching principle though is that if you really want to give a gift, put in the freaking time to consider and select one.
Of course my mother-in-law had to go and wreck that philosophy.
Now I should mention that the fact that these cards were quite generous was a factor. My mother-in-law was definitely not into the $10 Starbucks drive-by. I’ll just say that while you couldn’t get a laptop or netbook, much of the iPod line was in range. Still, if one was truly being a humbug, the above sentiment would apply no matter the denomination.
But the key was that the past few gift cards (8 or so between Christmas and birthdays) were from Borders. Big deal you say? Well up until this year, Borders.com was essentially a private label Amazon.com for books and music. Win!! At least until Borders decided to strike out on their own. One highly inconvenient Borders shopping trip with a gift card later (Whaddya mean my Amazon Prime doesn’t apply? How the hell do you find the House music in this mess?) and I’m dropping hints with my wife that it would be great if she could find a way for her Internet challenged mom to generate Amazon gift cards.
This Christmas we made a step forward to the BestBuy gift card, as generous as ever. Granted it’s not as convenient as Amazon or price competitive as NewEgg, but I look at it this way. A decent sized gift card is a pretty good head start on a significant electronic purchase. That’s how the MacBook purchase came about. I had a store credit and didn’t really know what to do with it. That plus saving some pennies over time got me a new laptop. Same concept will apply with my mother-in-law’s present. I’m thinking of targeting a digital SLR camera.
My mother-in-law will never shop for the geek stuff I like. But she never wants to be told what to get for a gift. A stance I agree with. Gift demands are for children. Judiciously chosen gift cards allow us to meet halfway.
Subsequently, I’ve revised my thinking about gift cards. Obviously, I’m going to graciously receive them. But now I’ll consider giving them, although I try to team them up with something inexpensive that I’ve picked out, just to show I’ve put in the effort.
Furious downloading shall commence as soon as this is posted.
Also: A nice overview of the Picasa Mac Beta from Michael Calore at Wired’s Epicenter blog.
Wish me luck. I’m going to try and upgrade to Movable Type 4.23 in-place. Breakage may ensue.
Update: Looks like we have success.
One of the side benefits of the book reading effort of 2008 was the discovery of the Arlington County Public Library, which is a few blocks away from where I work. Besides a nice collection of books they have reliable, no registration, WI-FI, and plenty of computer friendly tables. They’ll even send you e-mail notices about upcoming due dates. I’ve taken to dropping in over lunch or when there’s some slack time between knocking off work and catching my bus home.
Browsing the graphic novel section, I came across the collected versions of Frank Miller’s Sin City comics. Although I didn’t think the movie was great (the intense ultraviolence can be offputting) I thought The Hard Goodbye was excellent and in hindsight portends Mickey Rourke’s star turn in The Wrestler. The voiceovers in The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard were overly intrusive. However, the movie worked for me visually as an audacious attempt to bring a comic book to life on the big screen.
I didn’t realize the extent the movie was an almost literal interpretation of the comics. I had repeatedly watched Sin City on cable in 2007 long before I got my hands the graphic novels. I would say 90 percent of the plot survived directly from the books. Probably 75 to 80 percent of the dialog was retained, which I find pretty remarkable. Having gone back to the original source material, I have to commend Robert Rodriguez et. al. for creating a pretty compelling experience that’s true to the original vision and style. Obviously having Frank Miller on the team helped, but it’s still a pretty far leap from the comic form to cinema. That’s why they’re different media.
While Old Man’s War was a revelation, The Ghost Brigades is a worthy successor. Originally I thought The Ghost Brigades fell a little short of Old Man’s War, but upon some reflection I think it might be just as good if not better.
The Ghost Brigades continues in John Scalzi’s world of the Colonial Defense Forces protecting spacefaring colonists from an exceedingly hostile galaxy. The sequel moves into a deeper exploration of the CDF’s Special Forces, a.ka. The Ghost Brigades, radically augmented humans bred from the womb to take on the really dirty tasks of space warfare. Members of the Ghost Brigades are synthesized from gene lines harvested from CDF volunteers who die before getting their new bodies. They’re old, it happens. Because of this, and the augmented capabilities they receive, Special Forces are considered to be a bit freakish.
The protagonist, Jared Dirac, is an odd case even amongst this band of post-humans. Through a confluence of highly damaging treason against the Colonial Union and “consciousness transfer” technology, Jared is technically a clone of a high profile traitor, Charles Boutin. However, failing to initially reveal any knowledge that could lead to the capture Boutin, Jared is simply entered into the Special Forces. This gives Scalzi, in homage to Heinlein, room to explore how troops train, adapt to their technology, and ultimately bond. Eventually Jared enters into his tour of duty, sees a couple of harrowing missions and ultimately becomes key in a high risk plot to eliminate Boutin.
Where The Ghost Brigades diverges somewhat from Old Man’s War is a clearer emphasis on some of the ethical, political, and philosophical conundrums hinted at in Old Man’s War. For example, the odd status of the Special Forces as post-humans definitely comes to the fore. While Old Man’s War was a good end-to-end tale, the originality of its fundamental premise, the wisdom of old age fused into engineered warfaring youth, is the critical hook. That trick can’t be relied on in The Ghost Brigades, but the reward is deeper exploration of what it says about humanity to take old people and recycle them into soldiers, to create post-human super soldiers who haven’t experienced adolescence before seeing battle, and to willy-nilly record and transfer consciousness between physical bodies. Not to mention various devious tactics employed by a number of the main characters.
So while I’m sure there are plenty of folks who think The Ghost Brigades, by virtue of being a sequel, can’t stand up to Old Man’s War, I actually think it does quite well.
Memo to self: posting once a day through January will get you back in the habit.
Memo to self: While the break with the past life should be clean, it shouldn’t be totally erased. Figure out a way to give it a proper resting place.
Memo to self: spend some time learning about Clojure, a Lisp dialect focused on functional programming and concurrency. Bill Clementson makes a pretty compelling case for Clojure.
I’m in the tank for Mark Farina. I bought in at Seasons One and have been hooked ever since. Farina has been a consistent mix-cd generator over the past decade, and has two broad styles: groovy San Francisco style house, and downtempo blends of hip hop and jazzy beats.
I’m typically on top of new Farina releases like a hawk, but Mushroom Jazz 6 snuck in during the middle of the 2008 US Presidential campaign. Suffice to say I was somewhat distracted.
In any event, I downloaded the new CD off of iTunes (sans DRM) and have listened twice. Number Six is definitely trying to be much more jazzy than the previous five Mushroom Jazzes. I’m not sure it quite works, but then again each of the previous editions has taken a few repeat listens to grow on me in their unique ways. I’ll wait a little bit to pass final judgement. Somewhat disturbing though is that Mushroom Jazz Six has some subtle djing/blending errors to my bedroom dj level ears. Anything else Farina has done was flawless in this regard.
However, this prompts me to latch on to an opportunity for 2009, review all of the Mushroom Jazz series in depth, and write a wrapup overview. There seem to be a decent amount of web feedback on the newer CDs, but not much on earlier ones. I’ve seen a number of short highly positive sentiments, but it will be fun to do some research and put together an overarching view of this unique ouevre.
Yeah, I know. Nobody cares about my fantasy football team!! But with the end of the NFL regular season, I need to vent just for closure.
Sad to say but Green Lantern Corps finished out of the playoffs. Still I enjoyed the experience overall (my second season), and it definitely made me much more knowledgeable about the league.
For any fantasy geeks who stumble upon this, here are some pertinent details. 16 team league (yikes!!) with a standard roster + flex. Touchdowns and yardage + points-per-reception (PPR) scoring. Top six made the playoffs, with ties broken by season total points. I got the 12th pick in the draft, so you know the deck was stacked against me.
Positives. Foresight to draft Kurt Warner as a backup to Tony Romo. Picking up Houston’s Steve Slaton and New Orleans Lance Moore off the waiver wires. Squeezing points out of Oakland’s Justin Fargas, along with Denver’s Ryan Torain and Peyton Hillis. Tying, based on record, with four other teams for that last playoff spot.
Negatives. Missing that last playoff spot by about 30 fantasy points. The league was so big that the waiver wire was pretty close to empty all season. A six team playoff, meaning two teams get byes, is sort of stupid. I had a crappy set of running backs all season, including Fred Taylor, who managed a negative game. Giving up on Steve Slaton way too early in week three. Tony Romo getting hurt right before Kurt Warner’s bye week. Romo not getting back on the field until after our trade deadline.
The GM of Green Lantern Corps (me!) blew two games with bad roster decisions driven by matchups. Fred Taylor bit me in the ass posting 0.5 points against Denver’s run defense. Alternatively, I could have played Earnest Graham against Carolina for 12 fantasy points and the win. Also, I sat Lance Moore against the Green Bay secondary (I thought Al Harris and Charles Woodson were shutdown corners) and Lance went for a couple of long touchdowns. Meanwhile, for some godforsaken reason, I thought St. Louis’ Antonio Pittman, as a starter, would actually put up some fantasy points against the Bears. There’s your season right there.
Despite all the negatives it was still pretty rewarding being a challenger with such a crappy draft position. Bottom line is that I’m a pretty decent talent evaluator, but overthought the matchup angle a bit. Next year I’ll have the confidence to put my best lineup out there and run with them.
Wow! I knew Watchmen was great, but I had forgotten how great. The upcoming movie has a heck of a high standard against which it will be measured. I almost didn’t include it in my books completed list since Watchmen is technically a “graphic novel”, but after re-reading it I realized that it is so richly complex, the term novel is definitely applicable.
The surface story is the murder mystery of The Comedian, a costumed crusader. Layers are added by putting masked heroes into a realistic context, complete with clear literary statements on political and cultural themes. These aren’t superheroes but mere humans with all their strengths and frailties, modulo Dr. Manhattan who injects an element of the metaphysical. A classic mid-50’s style horror comic is deftly woven throughout the book. Each chapter concludes with a more text driven segment, that provides a lot of backstory. The mystery folds in multiple tragic twists and eventually turns into a deeper and more horrific conspiracy, with a disturbing ending. Amazingly efficient, every last word, last frame, and every last image of Watchmen contributes to the power of the story. As in every great work, Watchmen rewards repeated close reading. Hit the Wikipedia article for Watchmen to get a sense of how closely the novel can be read. Beware spoilers!!
But Watchmen’s unique strength is in the depth of of its character development. Obviously the time and attention given to the major characters, The Comedian, Rorschach, NiteOwl (elder and junior), Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Ozymandias, etc. pays off. But Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons make even minor characters have a big impact. The whole thread built around Marooned, a Tale of the Black Freighter is truly brilliant and many an author can learn something about how to put a minor arc to great use. Marooned stands on its own as a story, gives weight to a number of minor characters, foreshadows the larger drama, and questions the final resolution.
Finally, the ultimate evidence of the power of the characters is the emotions that Rorschach, arguably the protagonist of the story, engenders. He’s a reactionary nutball, certifiably psychotic, and almost completely unsympathetic. Somehow, in revealing his backstory Watchmen makes him more vile, more pathetic, and more human. To the very end, he bitterly holds to his ideals, which in American culture is always enobling. Yet given the final outcome, and Rorschach’s eventual end, can he be viewed as anything but a fool despite possibly having the last laugh?
Anyone who thinks of comics as only about “underwear perverts” will have their world shattered by Watchmen.
Encouraged by the gifts I got from MacHeist, I decided to ante up for some MacOS application licenses I’ve had my eye on for a while: MarsEdit 2 and Witch.
I’ve been a MarsEdit license holder since it first launched. I’m planning to blog more regularly in 2009 so the upgrade fee of $9.95 is money well spent on a nice desktop blog post editor.
Witch is a window switcher, as opposed to most of the application switchers available for the Mac. I like to have lots of applications open and typically multiple windows in each application. But I also like to minimize some windows, which apparently is not idiomatic on MacOS. The key distinction to me is that it’s somewhat difficult to switch to minimized (not hidden) windows from the keyboard. Worse, I’m working on a 13.3” MacBook, so there isn’t a lot of screen real estate. Witch is a nice compromise.
Next up, I’ll be looking to upgrade my dusty old OmniGraffle 3 to version 5, get an image processing application (not Photoshop, overkill for my needs), and determine if I really need a virtualization solution. A photo managing tool is on the horizon but not pressing. Obviously I’ve got iPhoto, but I’ve found it really irritating in the past. And I’m hoping Google finally delivers Picasa for the Macintosh.
One neat thing about being on the Macintosh was the MacHeist Giving Tree. MacHeist is an annual promotion that bundles up a bunch of good Mac apps into one low price. There’s some controversy as to whether or not the bundle is a good thing or a bad thing for app vendors, but it’s definitely a win for consumers, modulo the potential for driving independent Mac developers out of business. The Giving Tree was an inducement for new registrations with the promise of free applications, some to be made available on Christmas.
I’m a little wary of promotions like this. Usually there’s too much chaff relative to the wheat. Not so in this case. I automatically received Synergy and Enigmo. Synergy is a lightweight, but really professional, iTunes controller. I found Synergy immediately useful. Enigmo is a 3D puzzle game. Not my style so I probably won’t play it much though.
On Christmas, MacHeist revealed it’s other gift applications, Headline, iConquer, SantaSnaps, and 1Password. I’ve been using a promotional version of 1Password and was planning on purchasing a license, so the gift license was a big win. I will definitely purchase an upgrade when the next version comes out. Consider that a successful customer acquisition. On first blush, iConquer is essentially the old board game Risk. Not real compelling from where I sit. SantaSnaps dresses up photos with festive decorations but won’t be useful until next year. Headline is a compact RSS reader. I’m a NetNewsWire and Google Reader junkie, so I doubt I’ll find it handy.
Two out of six clear hits, two middling games, and two clear apps destined for the attic. Don’t know how they evaluate these things, but I’d call it a win. Plus, they can promote the heck out of MacHeist to me and I will seriously consider a purchase.
Not to mention they gave away some iPhone apps, but I don’t have an iPhone.
FeedBurner was a small company that provided proxying and analytics for webfeeds. They became pretty popular. Then they got bought by Google. Nothing changed … for a while.
Now I’m seeing crappy image based ads in my aggregators. Yuck! Text based ads have been around for a while, but they were pretty unobtrusive. Worst of all is that the image ads are usually insanely ugly and frequently mistargeted.
This sucks!!
That is all.
(Actually I’m making these assertions without doing proper legwork. If it’s not FeedBurner’s fault, my apologies. Often wrong, never in doubt.)
I’m an inveterate William Gibson fan. Neuromancer is one of my favorite books of all time and Burning Chrome is an incredible short story. Yeah there were a couple of slipups (I’m looking at you Difference Engine), but the body of work as a whole resonates with me.
What grabs me the most is the “techno-cultural ether” he manages to generate. A Gibson book never stops to explain a technology. The characters all treat the fancy stuff as if it was air, the way we do laptops, and cell phones, and WI-FI, and X-Boxes, etc., etc. The focus on the cultural milieu, as opposed to hard science, often makes Gibson’s works seem light and airy to some folks. That in my book is just the residue of elegance.
I’ve heard, the “Virtual Light” series receive this criticism, but upon rereading the books, some distance gives the trilogy some more heft.
All Tomorrow’s Parties, the culmination of the trilogy, was definitely better than I remembered. In typical Gibson fashion, a number of parallel threads interweave and interlock their way to a dramatic conclusion. Bobby Rydell, ace rent-a-cop from Virtual Light, reenters the scene as well as Chevette, his bicycling love interest. The echoes of Idoru ripple around the Pacific Rim, through to cyberspace and back.
Parties works best as an ode to the organic life of unplanned urban environments. One of the major dramatic tensions is the survival of the autonomous community that has enveloped the remnants of the Bay Bridge. More than once this odd confluence of people, cultures, and scraps of technology conspire to save Rydell and Chevette.
The book is not without its flaws though. A few too many new characters are added to the mix, some with stage time disproportionate to their dramatic impact. The infosphere conflict between Colin Laney and Harwood is muddled and confusing. Parsing through Laney’s past and his final battle left me cold.
But as I said I have a soft spot for Gibson so I can’t really discourage anyone from reading All Tomorrow’s Parties.
Asimov’s Foundation and Empire continues the underlying theme this year of meat and potatoes science fiction. The tale, or tales, still hold up surprisingly well. The first major one, detailing The Foundation’s encounter with an upwardly mobile general of the Empire, now reads like a short story developed after Asimov had an introduction to game theory. The Hand of Seldon reaches out and saves The Foundation, completely independent of the actions of the main players.
The heart of the book though, is the extensive tale of The Mule’s potential to absolutely disrupt Seldon’s plans for The Foundation. The Mule is a completely random wildcard. An unknown mutant of unknown powers who is rapidly conquering large portions of the galaxy’s fringe. His emergence coincides with a slow stagnation and corruption of The Foundation and the development of an opposing underground resistance.
Even knowing the rough eventual outcome of the story (I’ve read Foundation and Empire before, over a decade ago) the battle to defeat The Mule was deeply engrossing. Surprisingly so since the book crescendoes in a classic surprise ending built on a “hide in plain sight” gambit. This is an example of good storytelling being compelling even if you know the ending.
In retrospect, the two stories of Foundation and Empire are nice counterweights. The first story buttresses the concept of Seldon’s macro scale psychohistory being some sort of sufficiently advanced technology unto itself that it can transcend mere mortals. The Mule, and his eventual nemesis, points out that random events on the micro scale can have huge impacts, and that the irrationalities of humans (emotion, loyalty, intuition) still have something to say about our future.
As miserable as American Gods was, Anansi Boys is completely delightful. Easily the best Neil Gaiman book I’ve read so far.
Somewhat of a sequel to American Gods, Anansi Boys features Mr. Nancy, essentially Anansi The Spider of African myth, and his estranged son Fat Charlie Nancy. Anansi is one of the classic trickster gods, continuously spinning wondrous tales, and conniving the other primal gods of the African plains. Mr. Nancy is always the life of the party. Fat Charlie is the antithesis of his father, being a bit of an English schlub, destined for a henpecked marriage courtesy of an overbearing mother-in-law. In fact Fat Charlie hates Mr. Nancy for the myriad ways his father found to embarrass him over the years.
Mr. Nancy nominally dies, Charlie attends the funeral, and with a bit of folk wisdom from Mr. Nancy’s old-time neighbors, accidentally conjures up his long lost brother, Spider. Spider got the entertaining side of his father’s personality, not to mention the magical abilities of the gods. A night of drunken revelry with Spider ensues, and then an entertaining caper breaks out. Caught up in an embezzlement scheme that devolves into a comedy of errors, Charlie eventually comes to terms with his father’s world and finds his true mate.
Sighs!
Actually it’s not as treacly as I’ve written and the key for me was the light humorous touch Gaiman brought, befitting a trickster god’s tale. Anansi Boys is really funny in spots and never overbearingly dark, despite quite a bit of evildoing and violence.
One other thing that struck me was that some of the characters were, get this, black and this was just matter of fact. Racial differences weren’t leveraged as a literary device, or used as a crutch for urban “street cred” as in many science fiction books. Or I was just too dense to notice. In any event, I found it refreshing.
So much for that Rendezvous with Rama film. Looks like the production is not going forward.
Sorry Camino, it just didn’t work out. When I moved into the new digs, our fling was pretty hot. As time went on, memories of the old Foxy mama kept creeping back in.
She always was colorful, memorable, and really, really flexible. While we were taking time off, she got faster, and more user friendly, not to mention better at safe surfing. She moved back in today.
Sorry it didn’t work Camino, but hey, every guy likes a freak in the bedroom.
“He’s still alive. They hit him with five shots and he’s still alive!”
—Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo
The White Sox managed to avoid elimination by beating the Rays, 5-3, last night. The Sox outlasted The Lovable Losers from the Northside of town at least. If we can get it back to Tampa, the heat’ll be on the newbies.
Now that I’m solidly back into blogging, I have to give a shout-out to my core writing tool: MarsEdit. I’m only using the 1.2 version (licensed), but with every post I’m more and more inclined to fork over the $9.95 for an upgrade.
Now if I can only automate the process of generating an Amazon link from a book title, I’ll be in good shape.
Speaking of “meat and potatoes” science fiction, you can’t get much more stock science fiction than Isaac Asimov. And other than maybe the Robot series, nothing is more emblematic of Asimov than Foundation.
Foundation is really a sequence of short stories. The first establishes the core thread of the series. The massive Galactic Empire is slowly decaying and will eventually fall. Yet The Empire is so gigantic only one scientist, Hari Seldon, can actually foresee the oncoming catastrophe. Seldon is a devotee of “psychohistory”, which in today’s parlance would probably be a combination of statistics, sociology, and economics. He uses psychohistory to chart the future of humanity, and has devised a plan to radically shorten, though not eliminate, the oncoming dark ages. The plan involves the establishment of the Foundation at the outer edges of the galaxy, hidden from the Empire’s gaze, but destined to save humanity. The remainder of the stories chronicle the growth of the Foundation and a sequence of challenges it faces from its primitive neighbors out in the hinterlands.
First published in 1951, Foundation is obviously from a quite different era. Akin to my feelings about Rendezvous With Rama, I’m struck by how science and reason are held with such high regard in Foundation. Also the tech is quite muted, although distinctive to that era, atomic power is the trope behind the magic. The real strength of the book is its faith in reason and the interplay between those who rely on it and those how don’t.
Despite the years, Foundation still reads like a classic and is well worth anyone’s time.
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The science fiction blog io9 has a nice ode to Dan Simmons, author of the Hyperion Cantos which includes the well-received The Rise of Endymion, micro-reviewed here earlier.
Alex Carnavale’s survey of Simmons’ work gives high marks to such works as Song of Kali and Prayers to Broken Stones. Carnavale usefully highlights Simmons’ novellas and short stories, which I didn’t know about. More grist for the reading mill.
Despite following Steven Johnson’s blog for a while, I’d only read one of his books, Emergence, many years ago. I bin Johnson in that category of technology pop writers such as Rheingold, Kelly, and Levy that make the stuff I deal with on a daily basis accessible to the wider population. For me though, reading their work is perilous since I often feel I know more than the author does. That does not apply here and Everything Bad is an enjoyable if not particularly deep read.
Everything Bad takes the contrarian view that various elements of our media culture (TV, video games) are making us smarter rather than dumber as numerous pundits claim. Johnson’s argument rests on two pillars: 1) modern media challenges us in new and different ways and 2) the complexity of modern media is increasing at an unprecedented rate. An admittedly limited discussion of various supporting demographic trends, and brief media analyses are used to bolster his side of the debate. His main point though is that we need to stop being dogmatic about how modern media affects us, especially our youth, and examine the impacts with a more nuanced eye.
I swallowed Everything Bad pretty much whole, but can’t say I was fully satisfied. As even Johnson might admit, the book is barely the start of a debate, not the definitive end of one. It’s a book worth reading, especially if you’re wondering what all the fuss was within the blogerati, but I wouldn’t rush out to make it happen.
I know John Rooney’s moved on to the Cardinals, but his signature closing is most appropriate tonight as the White Sox manage to beat the Twins and win the 2008 Central Division Title, 1-0. Amazingly the Sox did it with pitching and defense, not their hallmarks this season.
I was living in Chicago in 2003 and 2005. It’s a great city in general, but a real blast when there are baseball playoffs in town. Every corner bar, and there are still quite a few, is a great place to catch a game. I can’t imagine what the place will be like if both teams go deep in the playoffs.
Dreams of an eLevated series with the Cubs are still alive.
I like to use Mac native applications on the new MacBook. Camino tries to be a much more native than Firefox, so I’ve been using it, with small doses of Safari.
A lot of people complain about the lack of extensions, which is no big deal to me, but the tab navigation control is just not up to snuff. I’m so used to right clicking on a window and being able to resurrect a closed tab, it’s muscle memory. Memory that Camino consistently denies.
I may have to switch to Firefox.
John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is straight ahead meat and potatoes science fiction. Starships, aliens and interplanetary warfare. Perfectly executed. Quite satisfying.
Old Man’s War is built around a premise of US citizens actually enlisting in the Colonial Defense Forces when they turn 75. Our protagonist, John Perry, honors his dead wife and then takes this route into the stars. He exhibits particularly fine mettle in making the transition to a soldier’s superhuman body, creative destruction of aliens, and survival in a hostile universe.
However, the story really thrives on a number of personal relationships developed by Perry. When you’ve already lived a life that you can’t return to, how you interact with others in the same boat makes for an interesting tale, not to mention fighting some nasty aliens. The contrast between the philosophies of the wise old soul and the soldier ethic is quite bracing, providing a juicy intersection to build upon.
Compared to Stross and Stephenson, Scalzi’s first novel is a walk in the park. There are no in depth excursions into how particularly technologies work, no involved historical digressions, and minimal fanboy jargon. Comes in at a reasonable page count too.
Old Man’s War retains a couple of interesting unresolved mysteries. First, apparently US citizens aren’t allowed to be colonists, only soldiers. Humans from more populous regions, e.g. India, seem slated to expand humanity’s hold on foreign planets. Second, Scalzi has little, if any, physical description of the characters. The reader is left to fill in the blanks. I just found this to be an odd little twist.
Saying Old Man’s War is meat and potatoes science fiction is not meant to demean the book. It actually ranks high on this year’s reading list and is strongly recommended. I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.
Well the Sox woke up to get a must win on Sunday and avoid elimination again today. The Twinkies visit US Cellular Field in a one game showdown. I can’t say as I’m too optimistic. Minnesota just seems like Kryptonite to the Sox.
Still while there’s breath, there’s life. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.
So much for my plea. Javier Vasquez has his usual singularly explosively bad inning, a 6 run fifth, the Sox get way behind, and they can’t recover.
Hawk Harrelson said it best, “What we simply have here is two teams with tight butts.”
Pretty straightforward for the Sox. The playoffs are here now. Granted, they’re technically not facing elimination games, but they really need to start playing like these games are.
It’s stunning how quickly the Sox’s pitching, starting and middle relief, have gone south. Mark Buehrle’s on the mound and today’s one of those games where you think this is why he got that big contract extension. We need a Johan Santana like result with Buehrle style. 8 innings, 90 pitches, scattering 5 hits and allowing 1 run for the victory. All in 2 hours.
7:30 PM EDT and the Minnesota Twins have just lost to the Kansas City Royals, 4-2. At home. Again.
Having lost their last 4 games, my Chicago White Sox are 1/2 game behind the Twins for the AL Central title. The Sox are playing right now against the Tribe.
C’mon South Siders. Win tonight and put all the heat on the Twinkies. Nows the time!!
Charlie Stross’ Halting State is a little more tame than Stross’ typical conceptually overpopulated prose. But not by much. It wasn’t quite as affecting as The Atrocity Archives, but a ripping yarn nonetheless.
The kernel of the story is built around a multi-million dollar heist within a virtual world. Set in near future Edinburgh, the heist reverberates throughout multiple spheres in the “real” world. One of the strengths of Halting State is the realistic construction of a world in which virtual reality and augmented reality have intertwined with daily life. The seeds of this transformation are already here today and Stross convincingly projects them forward to some reasonable conclusions.
As a combination of a police procedural and techno thriller, there are plenty of surprises along the way, although I found the resolution and denouement to be a bit unsatisfying. Also, the appearance of the Men-in-Black in the middle of the story seemed a bit over the top and bolted on.
There’s a sweet, for a nerd techno thriller, little love story threaded through Halting State. I didn’t quite bond with the characters enough to get much out of it though. There wasn’t enough backstory on Elaine to fully flesh her out. Then again, you don’t really pick up a Stross book for the romance.
Still, of the authors I’ve read this year, Stross has been the most consistently entertaining and challenging. Halting State is another worthy contribution.
I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a book as miserable as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Not the writing which was excellent. Miserable in the sense of truly unpleasant, disquieting, and disturbing.
Anyhew, American Gods starts with our protagonist, Shadow, in jail counting the small number of days until he’s paroled and can join his wife. He gets out early only because she dies in a car accident. Things only go sideways from there.
American Gods’ main thesis, that America is not a good place for gods, but there’s plenty of them stuck here and doing quite badly as their worship fades, is captivating. These older, down on their luck gods are balanced with a set of newfangled deities of the sort you’d expect from our techno-driven, consumerist culture: Technology, Media, The Markets, etc. An odyssey for Shadow ensues, introducing us to various of these magical entities, major and minor. Drama is generated from an oncoming storm of war between the old and new gods. As is normal for this style of tale, not everything is as it appears.
The plot is complex, occasionally confused with dreamlike episodes that are a little hard to parse and put in context. But it moves well and leads to a satisfying, if somewhat anti-climatic resolution. All of the major characters are flawed, but fleshed out to a satisfying level. Thinking back, fresh from finishing, the tone is amazingly consistently, melancholy, low key, droll, even quite morbid and grisly at times. There’s bits of humor, but only of the gallows variety. Which is most appropriate. I found myself snorting occasionally, but never laughing out loud.
Gaiman is an interesting author relative to my tastes. It took me three tries to start and finish Neverwhere, but I really appreciated it after the effort. I’ll talk more about Anansi Boys in a later post, but that gets high marks too. I think of the three, I liked American Gods the least, it really is discomforting in a number of places, but I can still recommend it to others. Definitely worth the time.
My initial training in Computer Science used the Scheme programming language. I also did some undergrad research using Common Lisp on the Texas Instruments Lisp Machines. I’m not a whiny, bitter Lisp weenie, but I’m definitely sympathetic with the cause. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much of a chance to really use Lisp at all in recent years.
Just for grins on the new laptop I decided to kick the tires on a wide variety of Lisp implementations: CLISP, SBCL, Clozure CL, PLT Scheme, and scsh. While I haven’t pushed any of them too hard, I have to say I’m extremely impressed in how fast these guys run.
Lisp implementations out of the box performed pretty decently on mid-90’s stock hardware. Moore’s law dragged the Intel platform past the special purpose Lisp Machine architectures. Meanwhile, Common Lisp and Scheme have been pretty stable since then and despite their kitchen sink nature, regarding the former, and hyper advanced features, corresponding to the latter, technology’s march has blown past them. What used to be a large Lisp memory image is peanuts these days.
Next up, digging into how well these various Lisps interface to modern graphic toolkits and what kind of graphics performance do you actually get.
In my past life, I was interested in conducting research on RSS Aggregators, so I’m a bit of an afficianado. On the new Macbook, I use NetNewsWire, but I’m a really big fan of Google Reader.
I use Google Reader a lot, even to the point of hacking around with the unofficial API. I’m always thinking of ways to turn the application into a high powered information trapping tool.
Both GReader and GMail have the ability to star information. GMail one ups Reader though with the experimental Superstars feature. Superstars is basically a hyperfast way to tag items. Adding this to Reader, and then being able to see the results through the API, would be a great addition.
It’s amazing how efficient the classics can be.
Over 35 years old, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama checks in at a slim 240 pages. The technology, both human and alien, is nothing to blow you away. No singularity, cyberspace, virtual reality, or quantum computing to be found here. I’m guessing that even by the standards of the mid-70’s, the sci-fi aspect of Rama was pretty tame.
At it’s heart, Rendezvous with Rama is a mystery novel. Where did this massive alien cylinder come from? Why is it in our solar system? What is it for and how does it work? Where is it going and what is it going to do? Through a series of increasingly tense challenges, Clark weaves a totally engrossing tale that reveals a lot about human nature, without really revealing anything about the intruding alien craft.
A distinctive feature of the book, relatively to the more “modern” stuff I’ve been reading, is it’s faith in good old science. Clark acknowledges the petty wars within and between disciplines, but the astronauts that explore Rama are fundamentally scientists, and engineers, carefully investigating a new occurrence in the world. And he manages to make them quite heroic. Some are even steadfastly religious, yet still maintain scientific discipline. Would that this attribute was more common in these anti-intellectual times.
Apparently there’s a movie adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama in development. Obviously Hollywood can screw up anything (Bonfire of the Vanities anyone?), but it looks like there’s a solid foundation with Morgan Freeman starring and David Fincher directing.
Speaking of Freeman, did you know he was a regular on The Electric Company? I only know this because one of my best buddies from college TF clued me in. Coincidentally I vividly remember TF reading Rendezvous with Rama our freshman year.
One of the unfortunate things about moving to a MacBook for personal computing is the iTunes hegemony. I mainly listen to DJ mix CDs which makes me a very playlist oriented type of guy. iTunes is radically track oriented and over time I’ve found a number of “playlist hostile” warts. For example, I’ve never figured out a way to select multiple playlists and move them to my iPod.
But my biggest gripe is that iTunes doesn’t support streaming of music in Ogg Vorbis format. This is obviously a complete geek Rube Goldberg setup, but I have an icecast server setup on a UNIX machine, which I can drive from any remote shell with a combination of mpd and ncmpc. What can I say it works for me, and anywhere I can ssh from I can get to my music. Not to mention I can geek out and write scripts to control my jukebox.
Just for grins, I decided to download Songbird and give it a go. Dang if it didn’t do the right thing straight off of the disk image! It’s glitchy in a few places, for example there’s a noticeable lag when navigating playlists, and sometimes the streams skip. But Songbird’s got the right price and it fills an unfortunate hole in iTunes.
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