Archive for category Books
A bit more on REAMDE
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Pictures, Reviews on 2011/10/25
The last four hours were spent head-down in REAMDE. My rating? 4 out of 5 stars. It’s no “Cryptonomicon”, but it’s also not “The Baroque Cycle”. With all due respect to Stephenson, in this book he got some things right, but quite a number of things wrong.
I saw some semi-clear plot holes, something that I couldn’t even begin to utter about “Cryptonomicon”. The end of the book stretched out forever. Or maybe it was just my desire to be done with it. The characters weren’t as good as his previous work and there was too much storyline that was covered, only to be forgotten and never returned to. (Contrary to the tangents in “Cryptonomicon” or “Diamond Age”, which had an actual purpose.) The MMORPG parts were good, but the interface that was described was not realistic and we didn’t spend enough time in that world. A virtual war of factions was mentioned, and apparently helped some real characters, but Stephenson didn’t delve into it too deeply. The writing was good, but not exemplary: whereas his other books were littered with insightful, quotable and hilarious passages (I literally crack open “Cryptonomicon” in random spots and enjoy the material), REAMDE was lackluster. I had trouble finding a handful of clever quotes, or concepts that made me stop and reconsider some taken-for-granted part of reality.
With REAMDE, Stephenson does something strange: he writes an actual ending. If you’ve read anything else by him, you know that a Stephenson ending is something akin to a wall, sneaking up on a nice, speeding Porsche right in the middle of the road. Something like a Roadrunner cartoon and about as welcome as a tsunami. REAMDE, however, has an actual end, something that attempts to wrap up all of those disjointed story-lines with a satisfying, Hollywood-esque finale. And I said attempts. Because, in my opinion, the story isn’t really wrapped up. Just… finalized. Not as suddenly as “Snow Crash”, for instance… for who could forget a pop-up ad?… but rushed nonetheless.
I keep coming back to this, but it’s true: REAMDE just isn’t as good as Stephenson’s earlier work. Does this mean that the master has lost his touch? I certainly hope not. Maybe it was just the side-effect of working in the action-thriller genre. Who knows.
The book does have the feeling of being a great source for a TV miniseries. Action-filled and usually not dull, I can easily see the plot being something similar to “24″. And at least partially in the same format: about 200 pages (of 920 total) are devoted to a single, hair-raising day. A great chapter. Though, sadly, it is followed up by 50-100 pages of boredom.
I could go on for a bit more, but it’s getting late. Read the book. It’s more “mainstream” than his other works, so maybe that’ll appeal to some. For me, I wish Stephenson would get back to the sci-fi, tech-novels that I fell in love with.
“REAMDE” and the Kindle Touch
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Pictures, Random Thoughts, Rant, Reviews, Terrorism on 2011/10/22
I’ve been ensconced in Neal Stephenson’s “REAMDE” for a bit over a week now. It’s a contemporary techno-thriller that deals with MMORPGs, viruses, international terrorism, espionage and Canada. Of course, as a Stephenson novel, it strays far from its main plot and hits on a hundred different fascinating tangents.
That being said, this book is an exercise in pushing the limits of my emotional response to its two extremes: indescribable joy/amazement/thrill, and almost mind-numbing boredom. Of Stephenson novels I’ve read, this is only the second time I’ve experienced this. “The Baroque Cycle” also had periods of boredom, most likely brought on by discussions of 17th century economics, politics or theology. REAMDE does sometime fall into a gratefully-short sprint of semi-boring happenings. But this is punctuated by amazingly awesome, action-filled sections that propel the story at supersonic speeds.
As is common with Stephenson novels, it’s hard to describe the novel in a sentence or two. At least, without spoiling the entire story. So I won’t try to. I will mention that there are quite a few overt references to Stephenson’s earlier work, like “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon”. I giggle every time I notice one of these little gems.
The only other thing I’ll say is that if you’ve any interest in computer gaming (MMORPG experience is helpful, but not a requirement: I have never played WoW or anything of the sort), action thrillers, espionage, info-dumps or just good writing, REAMDE is more than capable of holding your interest.
A few curious excerpts (with spoilers removed minimized but still present) from the novel. These are only from the last two hundred pages or so, or since the last time my book crashed. A bit more on that later.
Except for the part about [SPOILER], this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one’s normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one’s mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true – the way small children experienced things – precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life.
Which Richard was totally incapable of, normally. Looking back, he could see that the majority of his breakups with [women] had occurred in conjunction with attempts to go on vacation. He had never gone on vacation in any place that did not have high-speed Internet. Even the private jet in which he flew to those vacation sites had its own always-on Net connection. This probably qualified him as a serious head case, but he liked nothing more than to sit on a beach underneath a palm frond cabana in Bali, stripped to the waist, sipping an exotic drink from a coconut shell, watching waves roll in from a blue ocean, while wondering around [his company's MMORPG] via the computer on his lap, firing off memos and bug reports to his technical staff. He could think of nothing more relaxing.
Except for what he was doing now. If only the bad parts of it could be done away with. He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.
I’d love to add some more, but… ready for another rant on e-books?
My Sony Reader – PRS-500, to be exact, the first of the line and one of the earliest “true” e-ink consumer ebook readers – has an annoying tendency to crash every so often, and to take the history of the past few weeks with it. Like the history of the books I’ve read and the bookmarks I’ve placed. In the case of Stephenson work, that’s about a bookmark every few pages.
Last time the Reader crashed, I was apparently on page 520, out of 920. So that means that all those little segments that I wanted to mark as interesting in the first 520 pages of the book… all those pointers to all those interesting tidbits are now lost to oblivion. How wonderful.
I’m pre-ordering the Kindle Touch right now. Fuck this shit, I’m tired of my Reader not holding much of a charge and deleting information that I consider important. It’s time for an upgrade, anyway.
I would have loved to add some more quotes to this post, if not for the fact that (a) my bookmarks have been erased and (b) I got a headache typing in the above quote.
So, the mini-rant on e-books: copy-pasting. You can’t do it! (At least with the Sony Reader.) The text is there, I can see it, I can read it, I can transcribe it, I can even highlight and add notes to it. But I can’t. Fucking. Copy it.
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Sony and the publishers were having a laugh, that they were making an ironic reference to the Wooden Table “meme”: to get the digital text that already exists on my computer, I have to read it and type it up in notepad, or take a screenshot and run OCR on it. It’s a joke, right? I mean, do the publishers want me to crack the DRM on the book as soon as I download it? Because copy-pasting already digital text seems like an idea that anyone would want to take advantage of. Like, students, for instance. Or people that want to quote a book in their blog. Or people who want to copy-paste the entire book into a Word document, print it out, and share the entire book with their neighbor. Ummm, I mean… who the fuck would be doing that? Is that really a concern?
Apparently the publishers aren’t getting it through their heads, so I’ll type it out in bold: the people who want to steal a book, WILL. It takes 5 minutes to rip the DRM, and that includes the time to Google for that information and for a non-technical person to use it. The only thing your draconian measures are doing is pissing off the legitimate users.
Shit, because I got pissed off enough at this concept, I paused before writing the last paragraph, and it did take me 5 minutes to crack REAMDE. (As mentioned above, that’s how long it took me to find the tools online, download and use them.) It wasn’t a hassle at all. Ripping the DRM off a book is a two-step process. And it takes the same 2 steps to batch-convert a thousand books.
Fuck you, publishers. Just… fuck you.
E-book publishing, etc.
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Music, Rant, YouTube on 2011/10/17
This post has been a long time coming. If you know me, you’ve probably already heard a number of the points I’m going to make. It’s because ebooks are important to me, publishers piss me off and ebook piracy is a load of horse-shit.
So… read on, after the jump.
“Startide Rising”
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews on 2011/10/13
Wasn’t it Johnny Depp who – in a movie role – said that the most important part of a story is the ending? You can fuck up literally (hehe) everywhere else, but if you got the ending right… well, the audience wouldn’t complain. You’d have a success on your hands.
That is the only explanation I have for David Brin’s “Startide Rising” winning both the Hugo and the Nebula, the great duo of sci-fi. There haven’t been many novels (21, so far, actually) that hold the honor of winning those two awards. I’ve read some of the other books. A few, like “Ringworld”, “Rendezvous with Rama” and “Neuromancer”, were great and I can honestly see how they succeeded. Others… not so sure.
With “Startide”, I think it may have been the ending. It was good. Just, not enough to raise up the rest of the book from mediocrity.
More ranting after the jump.
On David Brin and “A Fire Upon the Deep”
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2011/10/08
A brief overview of “A Fire Upon the Deep” and two of David Brin’s novels in the “Uplifter” universe.
More about the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
Mini-review: “Spin”, “Axis” and Robert Charles Wilson
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2011/09/26
A fairly-simple “review” of the first two books in the “Spin” series, “Spin” and “Axis”, by Robert Charles Wilson.
Here be spoilers.
Book review: “Look to Windward”
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2011/09/23
“Look to Windward” (LW for short), is the sixth Culture novel from author Iain M. Banks. It was published in 2000.
The following review will contain some spoilers.
A measure of work
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Random Thoughts, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2010/09/22
A good way to measure how much work I’ve done today, and therefore if I should feel guilty about sneaking off to the gym a bit earlier than usual, is to note when I read my daily comics.
I’ve got a group of bookmarks for my morning comics that I usually peruse when I’ve got some spare time. Normally, that happens in the mornings. Sometimes, I don’t get to them until lunch-time. Today, I only read them at 3:30pm.
So, yeah, busy morning (continuation of having stayed at work until midnight last night). Figured I deserve some me-time, which obviously includes a blog post.
Now, a post about being busy is quite boring in its own right, so I’ll say a few words about the sci-fi I’m currently reading.
The rest of the post is after the jump.
Very good Labor Day weekend
[Need to get this down before I forget it all, so excuse me if it's in a bit of a shambles.]
Saturday
- Got excellent dim-sum with Steve and Jerry
- Equally-excellent coffee-shopping down in Fremont
- Started outlining a sci-fi short-story concept
- Discussed said short-story with Steve and Catherine, got stellar input
- Shooting the shit (literally) down at Wade’s: got to try out 45 and 357 Magnum, a hell of a lot of fun, even if my arm did hurt afterward
- TapHouse!! Always a good decision, esp. considering that I ended up with leftovers and three more beers added to my list
- “Mad Max” at Jerry’s: as was pointed out by a number of people, the film hasn’t aged well. I’m not a fan, but it was still fun to watch
Sunday
- Big Four Ice Caves!
- The hike was short but fun, the ice caves were awesome, the drive was scenic and entertaining
- Took some pictures that show potential, should have those developed soon-ish, will see how they turn out
- Had a wonderful evening at home, depleted my beer supply (I am seriously out of beer!), re-watched “Up in the Air” and remembered why I like that movie
Monday
- Played Red Dead Redemption for a number of hours, got a number of achievements, had a hell of a lot of fun killing a shit-ton of people in order to get the OJ Simpson achievement
- Played some more while enjoying the Taphouse leftovers for lunch
- Finished up a short-story outline at a coffee shop
- Started the short-story at said coffee shop
- Went to Taphouse for dinner, had four beers, found the card that I lost there exactly 1 week ago, delighted to see that I still have the 75$ balance and somehow managed to pick up 2 extra beers on my tab
- Up to 94 beers so far! Hello liver disease!
- Got home and decided to blog it all. And remembered it all! That’s the damn achievement!
Here’s a picture to (kinda) illustrate how I feel right now.
From ‘Eifelheim’ to ‘Consider Phlebas’
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2010/08/18
Having polished off ‘Eifelheim’ just as I was finishing up the biking for today, I quickly transitioned (over beer at the Tap House) to Ian M Banks’ ‘Consider Phlebas’. I can’t begin to describe the transition. Whereas ‘Eifelheim’ said nothing while talking a great deal, ‘Phlebas’ moves with all the speed of your average sci-fi novel: screw characterization, to hell with motives, who needs scene descriptions anyhow, let’s get to the fucking action!
‘Eifelheim’ has its merits, of course. Rapid progression of the plotline is not one of those. Hell, there isn’t much of a plotline. Most of the story is spent discussing the Christian holidays and rites and exactly how different those are from the post-Einsteinian aliens. There are, as mentioned earlier, snippets from the present time, but these are nothing more than interjections and, sometimes, spoilers. Nothing of interest actually happens for most of the book. And I was kinda OK with that. Hell, I was expecting just that after having read Flynn’s “The Wreck of the River of Stars”. Come to think of it, this book also progresses from death of characters to death of more characters to death of most characters. Quite original.
‘Phlebas’ is completely different, and for that I am thankful. The story – so far – actually has action, space-ships, hyperspace, a galactic war, shape-shifters, aliens… And that’s just the first three (short) chapters. I must say, it’s quite a shift. Like going from Corona to Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA: you can tell the difference!!
Will comment on the book some more, once I finish it off. Shouldn’t be more than a week, seen how it’s a fairly quick read.
“Eifelheim”, by Michael Flynn
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2010/08/10
Maybe it has something to do with me being in a Tron-mood and seeing the name Flynn on-screen, or that the book’s name triggered some subconscious memory I didn’t know I still had, but a few days back I started reading Michael Flynn’s “Eifelheim”. As mentioned before, Flynn uses 5-dollar words wrapped up in a pound of carbon pulp to make his point. And in that respect, “Eifelheim” is no different from “The Wreck of the River of Stars”: a long-ass book, plentifully seasoned with character descriptions, grad-level vocabulary and an incomprehensible number of segues. But it’s still one hell of a ride!
I’m only half-way into this tome and… well, it’s still trying to grab my attention. With every electronic page turn I feel that all-too-familiar sensation of “next chapter, shit gets real”. And it never comes. And I still continue, still I push through the verbiage and find myself more and more mystified.
The plot? Oh, there is one, but it’s difficult to explain when nothing much really happens. I’ll try: it’s Germany, The Black Forest in 1348, and aliens crash-landed by a small town called Eifelheim. Interleaved with this curious premise is the present-day snippets (I can’t really call these weak collections of words anything as expansive as “chapters”, so snippets it is) concerning two scientists: Tom is a cliologist (“cliology” is the mathematical study of history, something that I am currently inclined to call pseudo-science) and Sharon, a physicist. Tom is investigating the disappearance of Eifelheim (at some point, after 1348, it was deserted and never resettled, something that he is not expecting), while Sharon seems to be on track to… shit, I have no idea. Snippets Isaid and snippets I meant.
And that’s where I find myself, trying to grasp the main character’s religious ramblings (he’s a pastor of Eifelheim), attempting to care about a story that moves with all the speed of a sloth or an anime plot, while at the same time working on getting my heart-rate up while cycling for an hour at the gym. Two awesome challenges, I must say.
And that’s another thing (pardon the OT, but this is, after all, my blog, so I’ll blog as I wish): I’ve gotten back into that wonderful swing of things where I disappear from the office for a few hours every afternoon, to come back nicely refreshed and tired from biking some 30 km. It was swimming before that, but then, like the idiot that I am, I realized that there are birds to be killed: if I’m going to spend an hour exercising, might as well combine it with an hour of reading! And here is were I find myself. It’s a great thing really: leave work for a while, get some exercise and do a hell of a lot of reading.
That’s all for now. May post a mini-review of the book once I’m done with it. Or may just go on another multi-month blogging hiatus. Whatever.
Pancakes and Heinlein
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Random Thoughts, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2010/04/11
One shouldn’t be upset while consuming pancakes. Pancakes are a Happy Food™. And yet, here [half an hour ago, when I didn't have blogging ability] I find myself, eating those heavenly manhole-covers and fuming. The problem? Heinlein. More specifically, the issue is one of Heinlein attempting to describe a computer, how one works, what it is capable of and how it is used. Complete and utter poppycock! Admittedly, I should not be getting angry at this, since I’ve long ago encountered and ignored RAH’s technical in-expertise, but… Last time I met such horrid mis-representation of computers was in Heinlein’s “Number of the Beast”. Both the computer and the inaccuracies were very minor points in a grander story. Today, as I read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, the computer and the mistakes The Master makes are central to the plot, and thus matter (at least to me) so much more. It’s disturbing, for instance, to see a single computer in charge of the Moon’s complete infrastructure and not so much as a programmer in sight. Or to have the computer know user passwords to secure data. Or… well, there’s just too much stuff I can rant about on this particular topic, but I’d rather be doing something else.
A while back I commented on the annoying habit of some authors – for instance, Niven – to write action scenes in a minimalist way, where they skip the actual descriptions of what’s being done and instead only focus on the effects. I usually don’t keep track of spots where/when this happens in books (“Neuromancer” had a few of them, but alas, can’t find them now). Here’s sample from “The Jennifer Morgue”, another a great book by Stross (the asterisks act as quotation marks, simply specify that the character are communicating through telepathy):
*Bear with me for one last test?*
*What?* She half stands as I get off the bed, but the constraining field prohibits her from reaching me: *Hey! Ow! You bastard!*
It brings tears to my eyes. I clutch my right foot and wait for the pain to subside from where I kicked the bed-base. Ramona is bent over, hugging her foot as well.
See that? The author had action happen while the characters were talking that was not explained until after it happened. Niven and Heinlein do this all the time, except sometimes they even skip out on the post-explanation. As one coworker explained Heinlein, “you never know who’s naked in a scene until after they make a suggestive remark.”
“The Atrocity Archives”
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Pictures, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2010/03/15
Currently on my reading list – and thus on my Reader – is Charles Stross’ “The Atrocity Archives”. It’s a quaint little book of the occult, mathematics, Nazi’s and Stross’ humor. The last part of which reminds me so much of Stephenson that it’s freaky. In a very good way, mind you. Stross somehow manages to write a terrifying occult story (some of the things in the book leave me shaking) while dripping a healthy portion of Office-esque bureaucracy all over the place. Below are some of the great quotables from the book that I’ve encountered so far:
Nameless dread is all very well when you’re slumped in front of the TV watching a slasher movie, but it plays havoc with your stomach when you drop half a pint of incredibly strong black coffee on it in the space of fifteen minutes.
The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms – translation: all your bank account are belong to us – and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.
In the case of the great circuit of Al-Hazred, the terminator was originally a black goat, sacrificed at midnight with a silver knife touched only by virgins, but these days we just use a fifty micro-farad capacitor.
I boggle as discreetly as I can manage. “I’m not sure you should be on this course. The material gets technical quickly and it can be dangerous if you’re not familiar with the appropriate laboratory safety precautions. Are you sure you want to stay here?”
“Sure? I’m sure! ’Course I’m sure. But I ain’t too happy with the content For one thing, where’s all the stuff about license terms and support? That comes first. I mean, pacts with the devil is all very well, but I need to know who to phone for real technical support. And have CESG certified all this stuff for use on government networks?”
“That woman’s a psychopath.”
“So I keep telling myself. But after the tearful reconciliation, hot passionate bunny fucks on the bedroom floor, screaming pentacle-throwing tantrum, and final walkout number four, at least she’ll give me something concrete and personal to feel really depressed about, instead of this gotta-save-’em-all shit I’m kicking my own arse over.”
“Just keep her out of the cellar this time.” He stands up unsteadily. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some omelettes to nuke…”
“Fred was a waste of airspace and one of the most powerful bogon emitters in the Laundry.” [Protagonist's employer.]
“Bogons?”
“Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again. Hacker folklore-”
Well, that’s enough for now, don’t want to copy-paste the whole damn book here. If you’ve got the stomach for Nazi occult literature and multiverse discussions, give this one a read. I’m 2/3 of the way through and so far this one looks like a B+/A- effort. I’m even attempting to overlook the all-too-persistent consciousness-causes-waveform-collapse bullshit. See, I place that idea in the same basket with creationist nonsense, young earth crap and similar mysticism. But, seeing as how I’m reading a book about the occult, I’m willing to let the author have this one. It’s on the house.
“Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days”
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2010/01/23
After having finished re-reading “Cryptonomicon” (started reading it on the plane into Chicago, finished reading it on the plane back to Seattle), I started on a short book titled “Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days”. It’s actually not a single novel but rather two stories. The first one, “Diamond Dogs”, deals with a mysterious structure on a desolate world. The second story, “Turquoise Days”, deals with the planet Turquoise and the ocean-spanning entities on it dubbed the Pattern Jugglers. Below follows my review of the two stories, as well as some commentary about the author, one Alastair Reynolds.
Reviews after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
The opposite of a “To Be Continued…” moment
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Sci-Fi on 2010/01/09
You know that moment, when you’re watching a show or a movie, and the hero is still royally fucked, and the bad guy is just starting to put The Big Bad Plan into motion, or Dr Foreman is slowly dying of the disease and it’s five minutes before the hour and you know House isn’t pulling a solution out of his ass, or Frodo is leaving the company of the bad-ass experienced travelers to face-off against The Big Asshole and I’m wondering how long will this movie… Umm, I think I got carried away a bit.
Anyway, you know what I mean.
Well, just now I had a reverse of that. My e-book is showing that I’m on page 3141 of 3660 pages (re-reading “Cryptonomicon”). But then I realize that the story is almost over. What the hell? We finally met Outdoorsy Lawyer, and I know that the ending is just a stone’s throw away. Looking at the TOC, it’s true enough, I’ve only got 60 pages of story. Which means that there are 460 pages of stuff. An eighth of the book is fluff that I’m honestly not going to read. Hell, the Pontifex/Solitaire algorithm is there in all its glory, complete with instructions, operational notes, etc. And then there’s the Quicksilver excerpt… Anyway, almost done with the book, time to start something else.
Sunday morning blogging
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Art, Books, Comics, Food, Music, Pictures, Random Thoughts, Sci-Fi on 2009/09/13
Flickr
Found this amazing Flickr user, Deborah Chen, through a random search: was looking for “bionic bunny”, stumbled on some of her photos. Great photos, excellent composition, interesting colors, beautiful models (photographer herself included, of course). Just about the only gripe I have with her work (aside from wishing I could do something similar) is that sometimes the 1970′s-coloring is overdone. Here’s an example of where I think it’s appropriate, Argonaut, and here’s one where I think the photo was fine without the effect, Castro.
PostSecret for 9/13/2009
I wish I was there for my cat.
Alright! Good for you!
Get Fuzzy
The brilliance that is Get Fuzzy is sometimes hard to describe to the non-believers. Below is a comic that shouldn’t need much explanation. Sunday edition comics are large, so click for the full image.
Random thought
There is no such thing as “life”. If we’re looking for anything in this universe, it should be beauty. Possibly more on this topic later.
Fin
Well, anyway, enough internet for this morning, laundry’s done, I can finally go get some dim sum and read.
—
Currently listening to: Gomez, “Bring It On: 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition”.
Currently reading: “The Dreaming Void”, by Peter F. Hamilton
Batman, Mass Effect, ray tracing and writing
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Food, Games, Gaming, Movies, Pictures, Programming, Work, Writing on 2009/08/26
This week at work is a bit hectic: all of my bugs have to be fixed by Friday/Monday. (It’s technically supposed to be Friday, but if I get them in my Monday then all’s good.) So that brings us to a bit of a dilemma. For the past half a year or so I haven’t been working on weekends. At all. Yeah, a huge achievement, considering that before that, for the past two years, I’ve been at work every single weekend.
So, here’s the dilemma: this weekend I’ve got scheduled a writing session, a fair amount of Lego Batman, the new Mass Effect expansion pack, the new Batman game, programming my ray tracer (of course). A packed weekend to be sure. But then, if I don’t get my bugs finished off by Friday, that means that all the plans go right out the window. Sigh.
More on the individual things I’ve got planned for the weekend:
- An ex-coworker is organizing a writing session. For some of us it’s about planning for the next NaNoWriMo, for me it’s about just practicing writing short stories.
- I’ve been playing Lego Batman for the past two weeks and it’s really a lot of fun, even for a silly kid’s game. And for a silly kid’s game, there are some interesting puzzles in the game. It’s taking a while to get everything there.
- A new expansion has been released for Mass Effect. It’s only 5$, so I don’t expect to spend a lot of time on it, but it’ll still be something new to experience. Can’t wait!
- The new Batman game, Arkham Asylum, is really quite amazing. I tried out the demo just an hour ago and I’m very impressed. From the looks of it, there’s a large amount of stealth – sneaking up on unsuspecting enemies and ambushing them while hanging upside down – as well as pure kick-ass fighting.
- I’ve been doing quite a bit of coding on my ray tracer application, and this weekend should be no different: I’m trying to optimize the application so it’s viable to add interesting effects and construct complex scenes. ATM, it takes anywhere between 4 and 35 minutes to render a single pig (3D pig-shaped object consisting of 7,000 polygons). That’s way too damn slow, even considering that the rendering is occurring on a dinky old laptop and in managed code. So I’m implementing some accelerators, like k-d trees, lazy initialization and caching some frequently-accessed data.
If only I could squeeze in a few other things, like dim sum, reading (haven’t been reading for a while now), getting mildly drunk, watching a movie, watching a movie while getting mildly drunk, etc. Ah, wishful thinking. Ooh, maybe Labor Day weekend. 
Year’s Best SF9
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews, Sci-Fi on 2009/08/02
Just finished “Year’s Best SF9″, an anthology of sci-fi short stories. I think this is my second non-Niven short story collection, and I’ve gotta say: “meh”. Some of the stories there are really outstanding, while others… Not to sound too full of myself, but I think I could write better. (And I’m trying, too.)
The best story of the bunch was Rick Moody’s “The Albertine Notes”. It is a wonderful mind-fuck, not unlike some of Philip K. Dick’s work. I kept expecting the story to end at a dozen different points, all with that classic “well, that’s all, the world is still fucked, and now the hero is screwed as well, ain’t life grand?” conclusion, but the ending just kept moving further away. Give it a go, though be prepared to not understand some of the story. That’s the point, really.
Here’s a quick listing of the stories and my impressions, along with a simple school-style rating:
- Amnesty – Didn’t like it, the whole story happened during a job interview. C.
- Birth Days – Not bad. The delivery was OK, most of the “plot” was non-essential and the final conclusion didn’t seem to be really based on science. B+.
- The Waters of Meribah – Eh. “Science” (according to tree-hugging hippies) taken to an extreme, combined with a strange property of the universe (something like that mystic quantum BS) that results in a monster. C+.
- Ej-Es – Much non-sense and an attempt at tugging on some emotional strings. Not a bad delivery, but not much else to say about it. B-.
- Four Short Novels – Good stuff, even if the final moral of the story is sappy. A-.
- Rogue Farm – Interesting story, though a bit more more exposition would have helped. Which is of course true of most of Stross’ work, so this is nothin unexpected. A-.
- The Violet’s Embryo’s – The story, like a typical mind-fuck, starts off incomprehensibly and goes from there. It’s actually quite good, but the beginning just bugged the hell out of me. All these strange names and concepts being introduced in every sentence, and none of them explained. Argh. A-.
- Coyote at the End of History – A classical Native American story mixed with sci-fi. I’m not such a great fan of mythology, and Native American mythology is no exception, so this story didn’t do much for me. B.
- In Fading Suns and Dying Moons – Cute story and an ironic ending, so classic sci-fi short story. A.
- Castaway – Strange and unmemorable. B-.
- The Hydrogen Wall – Great concept, not bad execution. The only beef I have with the story is that two plot points are so damn similar to a short story I wrote a few weeks ago. It’s a strange coincidence that’s in no way related to the actual story, but still weird. A-.
- The Day We Went Through the Transition – An imaginative take on the concept of Time Cops. One of the better stories of the set. A.
- Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers – Too short, but really enchanting. A.
- Night of Time – Spends a lot of time on the inconsequential while merely skimming over the main point, that of an ancient intelligence. Still, a wonderful gem. A-.
- A Night on the Barbary Coast – Immense potential, great setting, curious characters, horrible resolution. B+.
- Annuity Clinic – Quite an emotional story, though lacking in pretty much all other aspects. B.
- The Madwoman of Shuttlefield – Leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Has no real point or conclusion. B-.
- Bread and Bombs – Might have had a curious point, if the story wasn’t told through the eyes of a kid. B.
- The Great Game – Eww. Utter crap. An anti-war story that idolizes war. All the characters are (or become) pro-war. C-.
- The Albertine Notes – Like I said before, a great mind-fuck. A+.
There. No one failed. Good times.
"The Selfish Gene", a mini review
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Reviews on 2009/05/17
It’s been a week since I’ve posted. In that week I finished reading “The Selfish Gene” and managed to get pissed off at a tree-hugging hippy. Those two are connected, and they are probably what caused me to stop blogging for a bit. I didn’t want to revisit the points of that argument, so I stayed off the internet for the last few days. Mostly that time has been spent reading “The Ring” by Stephen Baxter, playing games, coding and of course working.
What got me pissed off? The argument didn’t happen on this blog, so I won’t be continuing it here.
And that’s a problem. I can’t seem to move on to other and better things, like actually reviewing the book, until I can counter those arguments. Well, let’s try and see where we get. If you see this post and it’s not a violent rant against a certain hippy, then I’ve been able to push emotion aside (at least for an hour) to write a – hopefully – objective review.
“The Selfish Gene” is a mind-altering work, turning on the side my notion of life, evolution and the birds and bees. That last point is, incidentally, not a euphemism. I really did learn quite a lot about both birds and bees, as these were often-used examples.
The book is largely scientific and confines itself to presenting and supporting a theory. The book doesn’t attempt to advocate a specific morality based on this theory, and neither does it attempt to push specific applications of the theory. (Except once, at the very start, where Dawkins jokingly suggests that by pushing the age of reproduction it is theoretically possible to breed immortality into humanity.)
The idea that Dawkins presents is that of evolution from a gene’s (selfish) viewpoint. Nothing more than that. Of course, once this idea is presented, that life is not about survival of the organism but the survival of a gene, ten chapters are spent on providing supporting evidence and explaining how, for instance, altruistic behaviors can still be explained by the theory.
Concepts are presented from the viewpoint of the gene and in probabilities of the gene’s own survival. Gone is the idea that actions benefitting a single organism are the most beneficial and thus ones that are “picked” by evolution. We must now concentrate on how the actions of an organism benefit other organisms that carry the same genes. This viewpoint, for instance, succeeds in explaining the seemingly altruistic behavior of bees, when they sacrifice their own lives for the good of the hive. “Classic” theory of evolution may have had a hard time with this, but we now know that when a bee sacrifices itself, it is for the good of its sisters, who are genetically-identical to the “suicidal” bee. In this sense, the behavior of the social insects like bees and ants seems quite straight-forward.
The the book I read was the 30th anniversary edition, so it included an extra chapter that serves as a tantilizing preview of Dawkins other work, “The Extended Phenotype”. I wish I got my dad this version of the book instead of the first edition hard-cover. But I digress. The concept of the last chapter and of the latter book is that a gene’s influence, its phenotype (according to Wikipedia, an organism’s “observable characteristic or trait”), extends beyond the physical body that the gene happens to be inhabiting at the moment. This can be seen in the instances of parasites that affect the host’s behavior to their own purposes. One of the more striking conclusion this leads to is that the parasite and the host can evolve to work together so well that at some point they may end up being a single organism, without any signs of the old parasitic relationship. Of course, it is not argued that this will happen during the course of a (combined) lifetime, but rather over successive generations of parasites and hosts.
Overall, this book was an eye-opener, both to a “new” (originally published in 1976) approach to evolution, as well as the sad reality that not nearly enough people have read the book yet. Anyway, that’s my own take on it.
An instant classic, “The Selfish Gene” earns high praise from me (which is, of course, not saying much).
The Selfish Gene on large families
Posted by FuzzyGamer in Books, Quotes on 2009/04/26
Individuals who have too many children are penalized, not because the whole population goes extinct, but simply because fewer of their children survive. Genes for having too many children are just not passed on to the next generation in large numbers, because few of the children bearing these genes reach adulthood. What has happened in modern civilized man is that family sizes are no longer limited by the finite resources that the individual parents can provide. If a husband and wife have more children than they can feed, the state, which means the rest of the population, simply steps in and keeps the surplus children alive and healthy. There is, in fact, nothing to stop a couple with no material resources at all having and rearing precisely as many children as the woman can physically bear. But the welfare state is a very unnatural thing. In nature, parents who have more children than they can support do not have many grandchildren, and their genes are not passed on to future generations. There is no need for altruistic restraint in the birth-rate, because there is no welfare state in nature. Any gene for overindulgence is promptly punished: the children containing that gene starve. Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused.
Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth-control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature. The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known. But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.
The Selfish Gene, Chapter 7, Family Planning, pages 1117-118