Borgus Reviews of Literature
Finally caught up on my reading this weeked… finished re-reading “The Barsoom Project”, read “Idoru” and “Snow Crash”, and checked out some half-remembered passages in “1984”.
“Barsoom Project” is one of my favorite books – it’s set at a Disneyish corporation that runs incredibly realistic Live-Action Role Playing games in a pair of titanic Star Trek-style holodecks. (Paid for by the movie they’ll edit out of the footage, the home game cassettes, and the novels and tie-ins.) It’s three stories at once – you want to find out how the LARP will work out, who commited the act of industrial espionage that drove one of the last group of players insane, and what the game controllers will do when that player inexplicably pops up again in this run-through of the LARP.
“Idoru” is the sixth William Gibson book I’ve read, and the third in a row that I just didn’t like. In “Difference Engine”, “Virtual Light”, and “Idoru”, he writes of helpless characters who mostly stand around open-mouthed as the book happens around them. It’s kind of dull, and uninteresting… you finish the book thinking, “what was that about, and why would I care?” It’s a darn shame, ’cause “Neuromancer” was so good.
“Snow Crash”, on the other hand, more than made up for that. Excellent humor, interesting characters who matter greatly to the plot, intelligent writing, and intriguing speculation about the fragmentation of human language. I just told a friend that the story “begins with a guy who delivers pizza for the Mafia, and ends with a futuristic Ted Turner’s attempts to enslave the population of the world”. If this is the quality of the author’s work, then I am absolutely picking up “Cryptonomicon” as my friends have been advising me.
Finally, after looking at the portions of “1984” where George Orwell (as Emmanuel Goldstein) describes the method by which the Party came to power and maintains it, I have arrived at the uneasy conclusion that the world is still traveling smoothly in that direction, just a lot of years behind schedule. However, I can’t think of a dang thing I can do about it, so I’m not going to stay up nights worrying about it.
Oh yeah, and I finally beat a sub-boss in the fifth act of Diablo 2 that has been giving me serious trouble on “Nightmare” difficulty. So that’s good.
The latest bill that Hollywood is pushing through Congress would, if they suspect you of piracy, allow them to hack your system, disable your file sharing, and delete things they don’t like.
Oh, and if they delete the wrong stuff or break something else on your machine, you probably can’t sue.
So, I’m thinking that next time Hollywood lobbyists do something I don’t like, I should have the right to break into their house and smash stuff up for a while. Seems only fair.
“Yum”, the iMac girl
Relating to my post about Macs and B&D, here’s the “dojinshi”-ish graphic that some were asking about:
You can find a nice desktop / wallpaper sized image here, as well as Yum in the fruit flavors.
http://www.polycount.com has a model of her that can be used in Quake 3 and Voyager: Elite Force.
An expensive morning
Mister Jobs just announced at Macworld NY that Mac OS X 10.2 – “Jaguar” is official, and will be released to the public August 24.
My problem: It will cost $129.
New GeForce or Radeon video card to take advantage of Jaguar’s high-speed graphics rendering will cost $130 – $150… less if I let the eBay mistress raininva find me a good deal.
I’m not even going to talk about the cost of the announced 1 GHz processor upgrade which would more than double the speed of my current machine.
Understand, I’m not whining – these are all “wish list” items, and I’ll manage fine with what I have until I can get them. But I do sometimes wish I indulged in a less expensive hobby. Assuming there are any.
Addendum (12:25pm) Looks like current 10.1.5 users might be able to upgrade to Jaguar for about $19.95. That improves my mood some. 🙂
One more thing to clutter my friends page
For those users out there who don’t read the LJ news; now, if you are a paid user, you can add slashdot, the geek news site, as an LJ friend. Basically means you get the headline and links to each article.
I’m gonna try it for a while, but Iffen I don’t like it, gone it will be.
So, like, I had a long post almost ready yesterday… but I had to slot a Zip disk to check a reference. I should know better. The Zip driver for OS X crashes the desktop every time (no big deal, the process restarts automatically)… but this time it locked up the whole machine, I had to do a hardware restart. Lost my post, and just wasn’t up to re-typing it.
Anyway.
Figured out the last problem I was having with the special effect for my friend’s wedding video. Rain wants me to change the timing slightly, but that will just be an evening’s work. I’m learning a lot – maybe I can be meiran and raininva‘s special-effects tech when they are famous moviemakers.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein is very hard in single-player. Hey, game designers – some of us don’t play Quake 3 Arena 40 hours a week. The easy setting is supposed to be… easy.
Yes, I enjoyed MiB 2… no, it was as good as the first one.
Got the final “Robotech: Macross” boxed set this weekend, thanks to Rain. It even has the “Robotech: Sentinels” pilot as an extra – a film that made Macross purists howl. Only four more boxed sets to go before I have the whole Robotech series… then I can get the UFO set… then Monty Python’s FC… then Thunderbirds… what do you mean they’re already released ST:TNG third season?
MPEG-2 is going to be very expensive to me, I can see that.
Ooops… my boss’ laptop is throwing a kernel panic… won’t boot off the hard drive or the CD. This oughta be fun…
On a Yahoo! mailing list I belong to, a couple people are being horrid and insulting to a woman because she won’t post topless or nude pictures of herself. Then another member leaps to her “defense”, telling her to ignore them ’cause they are obviously gay and that gay people just like to sit around harassing upstanding straight folk.
*sigh* Times like this, I just need to leve the computer and go watch something involving puppies, or kitties, or Hayao Miyazaki and childhood.
At work, they call me “The Oracle”
Hmmm… seconds ago I refreshed my friends page, and kittykatya had an entry up about her Sailor Senshi colors. Had to close the window before I could really read the entry… and now it’s gone.
Did the Matrix just glitch on me and I saw part of the simulation that won’t be up for a little while? Or am I just hallucinating again?
Dang, I dropped the Library of Congress again
Researchers at IBM have developed technology which uses dents in thin plastic film to store information. It’s a bit like the punch cards of computing history, except the dents are 10 nanometers in width. (A nanometer is one-millionth of the width of a piece of paper-clip wire.)
The researchers estimate that with this technology in practical use, a common multifunction digital wristwatch could contain 15 gigabytes of data… that’s about 23 CDs, or 2 or 3 DVD movie discs.
“I’ve backed up the ship’s computer core in this small MDM memory chip!” Brion Fields, Space Rogues
The more things change…
This train of thought began as I watched Adobe Photoshop go through a complicated scripting sequence without any assistance from me… I began thinking of Rick Deckard’s wonderful photo-processing “Esper” machine. (Yes, I want one.)
So, I’m thinking about Blade Runner and the fact that, in an unscientific poll of science-fiction fans, I’m one of the few viewers who prefer the theatrical release to the director’s cut. (Voiceover, less uncertain ending, and all).
I’m not going to debate the merits of the two versions here, though it has occurred to me that it is the theatrical release that made Blade Runner one of the classics of SF film (and made it possible to produce a director’s cut release, before DVDs made such releases common).
However, the discussion of the versions made me think about how we revise things in our heads. I watched hours of the old Robotech series last weekend, but used the remote to skip over the dull, boring, or actually painful parts. (Yes, I’m referring to Minmei.) The Internet produced the “Phantom Edit” version of Star Wars Episode I – in many opinions, a superior film. Douglas Adams himself wrote multiple variants of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – all official, and all contradictory.
Then, while looking up information on Apple’s “Final Cut Pro”, I found this web page that compares such revisions to the Bible itself, where the Gospels contradict each other and concentrate on the parts that the individual writers found interesting. And I realized that people have been arguing about this for nearly two thousand years.
So, the next time I go to a con and find an earnest discussion of how Enterprise has re-written the established history of the Star Trek universe, I’ll be less likely to jump in with both feet. If we’ve been revising our most sacred texts to personal taste for this long, Kirk and Picard don’t have much of a chance. *grin*
