Beautiful day outside – 60 degrees already and supposed to top out at 70. While I wouldn’t diagnose myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder, I can’t deny that later sunsets and warmer temperatures help my mood a lot. With all the writing I’ve been doing lately about asteroid miners, I have to wonder what they’d do to deal with the problem of spending weeks, months, and years in an environment where it never ‘got light out’.<\/p>\n
Finished re-reading Neuromancer<\/i> and reading Soul Music<\/i> this weekend. Soul Music<\/i> was almost too light-hearted for a book dealing with the weariness of being Death, and the way that musicianship can change people. Also, if I understood the ending (and I don’t know that I did), there was a lot of ‘reset button’ hand-waving happening to avoid untidy loose ends. I suppose, on the Discworld, that’s not unreasonable.<\/p>\n
One thing that’s never made completely clear in Neuromancer<\/i> (partially because William Gibson didn’t actually know that much about computers (or so I’ve read)) is whether Case, the expert computer cracker at the center of the novel, is in fact a computer expert in any way. On re-readings of the book, he seems more like an experienced top-level “script kiddie” or video gamer than someone who can actually read or write any kind of code. Wintermute calls him “barely print-literate”.<\/p>\n
Fun link today:<\/p>\n