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newer entries...
04-28-00 we're all out of midnight oil
04-21-00 the future is always happening
04-19-00 in search of answers
04-16-00 hailing frequencies open
04-12-00 under construction
04-07-00 cheap lessons
04-03-00 the day the music was butchered
older entries...
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we're all out of midnight oil |
| 04-28-00 |
You know, I think The Cricket Who Sang has finally gone to wherever bad invertebrates go when they die. The apartment has been blissfully silent in the past few days.
So has the office (except for occasional screams of anguish and the soothing white noise of the laser printer and photocopier). Partially because Steph is on vacation, and partially because of the project that had some of us putting in 40 hours in the past 3 days... and liking it.
Of course I can't say what the project is. I can say that it's not Hero's Journey, but that it stands a good chance of being really cool. I can also say it's... hmmm, maybe I can't say that.
So, uh, read any good books lately? Neil Gaiman's "Stardust" was lots of fun. A mythical fairytale sort of thing, but every once in a while there's a dollop of British humor. In fact a couple of times, the turns of phrase and ironic coincidences had me feeling like I was reading the Hitchhiker's Guide.
I like Tanith Lee, but her books are wonky. "Biting the Sun" walks on (and crashes itself into, and drowns itself in) strange territory. A supposed Utopia where everyone's happiness is not only guaranteed, it's mandatory, whether one likes it or not. A world where death simply means the opportunity to design yourself a new body of either gender.
The interesting thing is they still take murder very seriously, even though it has no obvious lasting consequences. It's a bit like PVP in a roleplaying game, isn't it? Even if death has very little meaning, the act of violence against another person is still, under most circumstances, fundamentally wrong.
Hmmm.
Rather than climbing up the screen walls of his cage, Poco has taken to sleeping behind his basking rock. He's much cuter that way than when he's just hanging from the side. Any opening or closing of the top zipper and the Cricket Interceptor goes on "scramble" -- but once he realizes I'm not going to feed him, he settles down and actually lets me pet him without freaking out. However, picking him up either requires a special technique I have not mastered, or he's just not ready for that yet.
He's got some new orange patches here and there on his head. I can't remember his genetics offhand but I think he's a red/gold X normal, which means the only thing that can be predicted about his appearance as an adult is he'll be bigger than he is now and still vaguely lizard-shaped.
He made another nasty mess in his food dish -- just normal dragon doo this time, but normal dragon doo is still not something you want to clean off of a plate. I bought him a different dish, one that's much lighter colored and has steep, high sides rather than one he can comfortably sit in. Hopefully he'll get the clue.
I had a couple of other possible titles for this entry. For a brief moment I entertained the notion of writing an entry completely in titles. Then I considered doing an entry consisting solely of bullet points and flowcharts. Then I got a grip and wrote this.
But I was thinking of "behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts" (from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun) or "tactics level clear, continuing to strategic level" (from a Toonami interstitial video collage). These two phrases were running through my head, as was some particularly dramatic music. If I explained why, I'd have to sic the geckos on you.
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the future is always happening |
| 04-21-00 |
Sinus trouble combined with weird weather has done it to me once again... never sneeze when you have a nosebleed.
 I'd heard that the Ghost In The Shell manga is much better than the movie. I rented the tape a couple years ago and was left a little cold, but as a cyberpunk fan and a guy with a healthy appreciation of gun-toting robot babes, I decided I wanted a second opinion, namely, mine.
The manga (English version of course) makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than the movie did. Even so, there's a point where the dialogue gets positively weird, and the Author's Notes in the back of the book often seem to have little to do with the action on the page they refer to (but many of them are interesting and thought-provoking). The movie was downright ponderous as I remember it, but the manga ranges in mood from dead serious to completely wacky, with synchronized shifts in artistic and literary styles.
I want to trade in SqueakyCar for a Fuchikoma. The artificially intelligent spider robots somehow manage to look both cute and dangerous at the same time, like a good sportscar does. There wouldn't be any problem with traffic jams like there was on my lunch break this afternoon, they'd just scramble over stopped cars (careful with those convertibles!) and leap over busy intersections. No need to worry about parking, vandalism or theft -- tell it to park on a rooftop and go invisible. And my lousy sense of direction wouldn't matter, I'd have the AI do the navigation. For that matter I could send it out to get drive-thru food and deliver it to my door... yeah, this has possibilities. Mitsubishi, are you listening?
Speaking of lunch break. Since there's an online class tonight I don't want to miss and my cricket reserves are low, I hit PetSmart on the way home for lunch. Good thing I did, because Poco was sick, right in the middle of his food dish. I don't know which end of the lizard the green squishy stinky goo came out of, but I doubt it was any more pleasant for Poco than it was for me. I cleaned it up, fretting about whether he was seriously ill and needed to be taken to the vet. If he does it again soon I'll take him in for a checkup. I think I know what the cause was though, and it likely had more to do with Poco's lack of sanitary habits combined with ravenous hunger and lack of discrimination... I'll just leave it at that.
Back to the future. Ghost In The Shell and fansites relating to it have got me thinking about various futurist movements and philsophies, or should I say, memes. I have a better handle on the cyberpunk genre and some of the other things I've read, particularly Transmetropolitan and Linda Nagata's stuff.
In particular, there's transhumanism -- essentially, the idea that through technological and cultural advance, we may enhance ourselves physically and mentally to the point where we are no longer bound by the limitations of humanity.
There are many vectors of development that could trigger such an upheaval, so this isn't just a sci-fi dream. We've successfully cloned large and complex animals already for instance. Nobody can predict with certainty that we will never develop real sentient AI that's smarter than the human mind, or nanotechnology that can halt and reverse aging and disease, or even such wildness as transferring the self outside the brain and into the net. I wouldn't bet money on these things, but it's silly to declare them impossible at this point.
The main concern isn't technical though, it's the socioeconmic and philosophical implications. Even putting aside the potential abuses of any technology, this stuff is going to change some pretty basic assumptions we've held for thousands of years. Things are going to get really weird.
For example, look at any sort of duplication of the self in which all the memories of the original are present in the copy. (Cloning probably doesn't work like that, but "mind uploading" would.) Dave is now Dave1 and Dave2. What is the relationship between these newly made "twins?" Does Dave1 "own" Dave2 in some strange way? Does it mean Dave's parents now have two sons or is Dave2 the child of Dave1? Which one of them legally owns SqueakyCar and is responsible for the payments? Does Dave2 inherit Dave1's credit history, criminal record (thankfully there is none), academic record, etc. or get a clean slate?
Then there's manipulation from the outside, in which truly sinister things are possible. One well-trained soldier cloned into an expendable army. Black market copies of people. Mind hacking of various kinds -- to make a witness forget what they've seen, to make people buy Brand X instead of Brand Y or vote for Politician X instead of Politician Y, mind reading, extremely subtle psychological torture.
I'm optimistic enough to think that there'll be solutions for these things, but even if that solution is a total ban on that sort of technology, just the mere possibility that the process can be done requires some new thinking. For those of us that believe in the soul, in something that is essentially the "self" that lives on beyond the death of the body, where does one stand? Can the soul be contained in a machine, copied by a computer program, distributed across the internet, stored in an inert form? Can multiple copies of a soul be "running" simultaneously, and will they diverge and become separate entities? What happens to the soul when its program stops running temporarily but is resumed later?
We may find out, or we might not.
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in search of answers |
| 04-19-00 |
I've got the Diablo II jones bad. Blizzard released the creepy intro movie on their site and I've been looking at beta screenshots. It looks incredible.
 So I've been playing Diablo (1) again. I took a Rogue down to the caves, got thoroughly stomped, restarted at level 1, worked my way back down to the caves, got stomped again, restarted as a Sorceror. Sorcs have it rough at the beginning, but I've gotten Mr. Ominous as far as the entrance to the catacombs so far. By the time he gets to the caves, he's going to be a lot deadlier than the Rogue was. Apparently the steep curve at the beginning is flattened out a little in II by the fact that mana regens naturally over time, so you don't have to keep buying potions when you can barely afford them. Hmm.
My dreams the past couple of nights have been... well, the best word is fractured. Like my mind is looking through compound eyes or something. These haven't even followed along a sequence of events. I'm not sure how to describe them, or if it's possible to describe them from within the context of normal consciousness. Weird.
The Librarian of Congress, Zhar the Mad, has decided that the LOC will not digitize books. Not because of the cost, bandwidth or storage issues, but because he doesn't like the internet. I'm not sure what to think. It looks on the surface like he's simply being a Luddite. A book in a building in Washington DC is not going to educate somebody in San Diego or London or Johannesburg. There is no card catalog, table of contents or index that works as well as a search engine or a brute-force grep. There is no bibliography or footnote that couldn't be improved by linking directly to the cited material.
I don't believe that "dead tree format" books are in danger of being replaced by electronic versions within our lifetimes -- at least not fiction. It's quite possible with reference books. It's already been happening for some time with documentation for OSes and programming languages.
At this time, any research that starts and stops with the Web is half-assed at best. Even assuming you filter out irrelevant links, a good portion of the information you find online about something is going to be outdated, wrong, or purely a matter of opinion. The barriers to publication keep the quality of information in real books a bit higher (though it doesn't guarantee the accuracy or value of the information). Right now, this is the only "danger" I see in online research. But wouldn't you think making the LOC available and searchable online would be a step in the right direction?
By no means should brick-and-mortar libraries be bulldozed and their contents put to the torch. But the point of a library is to store information and make it available to people; putting copies online as well makes it that much more available and that much more safe from disasters, accidents and the ravages of time.
 I've been working on further enhancements to Splunge. What I want to do is a big, powerful Gundam W beam cannon / Yamato wave motion gun type of thing. The visual effects actually seem to be the easy part at this point, the challenge it's testing for collisions with something that's not a normal sprite without mucking up the the main code and making it incompatible with what we've been doing in class.
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hailing frequencies open |
| 04-16-00 |
My guts were rebelling about something for a while yesterday morning. I skipped the second airsoft game in two weeks, though this time I was really looking forward to playing. Took it easy all day, went in to the office to play games for a bit in the afternoon, and went along with Steph and Jeff to Wild Oats, aka the Hippie Grocery Store.
It's kind of a neat place, a supermarket of health food and a little exotic stuff. It's a good place to find chai mix, Sapporo Black (would you believe the Japanese do dark heavy bread-like beer better than the Irish?), and stuff like that. Whee.
I bought oranges too. Unfortunately not nice sweet Florida oranges, but the tangy ones from California (which is all they had). They're not the delight that I was expecting, but they're not half bad either. I hope my family will forgive me.
Oranges are by no means a neat, clean food. You can't easily eat them while updating your web page. "Mom" wouldn't like them; she seems to appreciate food that comes in small discrete snacking units that aren't sticky, don't melt, and don't leave crumbs, and coincidentally can be idly sorted and counted. M&Ms and raisins are good scribe food. Juicy squishy oranges are not.
And yes, when I tear open a bag of M&Ms I usually sort them by color, eat the ones with the highest population by color until there are an equal number of each, then divide them up into equal groups of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-brown. Before they replaced the tan ones with blue, tan and brown always had the highest population because those colors represented chocolate itself. Now the distribution is a little more even.
Why are you staring at me like that?
The tornado siren went off in several very long sustained wails. I wonder, had I grown up and gone to school in Mizzu would I have been taught Sirenese? The sky through my window was only a little overcast so I figured they were just testing the thing (they've been known to go off on perfect cloudless days), but then thunder rolled across the plains and rain followed shortly thereafter. Now it's hailing, and the ground is rapidly being covered in crushed ice, accumulating faster than snow does. This is freaking me out. Wish my digital camera was here instead of over at the office. Glad I'm not out there trying to take a walk like I'd been thinking about doing.
Ten minutes later, it's stopped hailing, stopped raining, it's a beautiful day and the sun is shining and reflecting off the little piles of ice.
So to follow up the mind-bending reading of a few days ago, I went all out and reread Hornung's Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. It's a translation of the historical-philosophical-logical investigation of a highly trained German mind, so you know it's got to be heavy stuff. On the bright side, it's a good translation, I already know the conclusion, and I've read it before.
I won't summarize the book, if you're interested then go get a copy of it from Powell's or Amazon. Any attempt to just shortcut to the conclusion is probably doomed, since it requires a completely different mode of thought than the everyday.
But it did hit me that the "paradox" of light in quantum physics would be perfectly natural to the ancient Egyptians. Light behaves as photon particles or as energy waves depending on how the experiment is set up. Does it make more sense to say that our expectations actually change the basic nature of how light works, or does the "paradox" simply point out the limits in the way we think?
In all this reading I've been looking for something, and I haven't found it yet, and I don't know what I'm looking for. I feel like I've been given a big clue and I'm on the verge of a new stage of something, but what that is I haven't the foggiest. The one thing I'm sure of is I want to play a new game. :) C'mon Diablo II, the world is waiting...
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under construction |
| 04-12-00 |
This has been parked near the office for a few weeks now and I chortle everytime I see it. ;)
Speaking of construction... don't go check out sodaplay.com. You'll be there for hours, playing with springs and masses. I know a web-based physics toy may not sound that exciting, but it's like a design-a-Slinky on steroids. I don't want to think about how much time I've already spent trying to make things that bounce, roll, walk, or wave in an artificial breeze. In fact I didn't want to put this link here because it'd be too much of a temptation to actually check it...
I spent the weekend vegging out mostly, though I did get a little cleaning done around the apartment and made some music. I still have to go through all the tag renewal rigamarole that Missouri requires: inspection, personal property tax, and then the actual renewal itself. Are other states like this too? Florida was nice and simple, they mailed you an envelope and you mailed them a check and it was over. I hate bureaucratic nonsense.
Once more out of reading material, I've been rereading. First Heinlein's Starship Troopers, then Morgan Llywelyn's Druids. It's a bit brain-twisting when you read these books one after the other while comparing their morals and beliefs to each other, to Kemetic Orthodoxy, and to modern mainstream American society. I did this a couple years ago as well. This time, I had hopes that it'd trigger some new inspiration, maybe some ideas for HJ even, but it hasn't really.
But I do have some observations. Celtic culture is fixated on the individual. At first, that doesn't seem like such a bad thing, but it's what kept them divided, unable to effectively unite against a snert like Caesar. In fact, supposedly the whole reason they didn't write things down was that written words can be altered, while what's in your head is permanent. Uh. First off, that only works if you can actually remember stuff... maybe a druid with 20 years of training in memorizing epic poetry has no problem with that, but I can't remember my grocery list without writing it down. Secondly, it shows no regard for anyone else. The whole point of writing things down (says the Seshat child) is that other people -- even those far away or thousands of years into the future -- will read it. It's a kind of sharing. It's why we have the Web.
There was some other point I was going to make, but I forgot it 'cause I didn't write it down in time.
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cheap lessons |
| 04-07-00 |
The setting: Mooville Apartments*, 1 AM Thursday evening. Our Hero is just returning from an interlude of mind-bending anime intrigue with his friends. The parking at Mooville Apartments is SNAFU, with at least a quarter mile from Our Hero's front door to the nearest available parking space. Ordinarily this wouldn't even be cause for comment, but the weather outside is frightful. Enough lightning that the sky is bright more often than dark, increasingly heavy rain, and hail on the way.
Previous experience at Mooville Apartments has taught me that, while (illegally) parking next to the pointless yellow-curbed island thingies that occasionally interrupt the parking lot is frowned upon, there really hasn't been much of an effort to discourage it. Even so, I haven't done so for more than 10 minutes at a time in the past two years. Until last night.
Naturally, they chose Friday morning to crack down on the practice. Having planned a trip to go hunt down Urban Operations (the world's first PC game with the initials U.O.**), I got up at the crack of 12:30PM and went outside. There was a big honking sticker, bright orange, slapped on the driver's door window of SqueakyCar, notifying me that it would be towed away 30 minutes ago if I didn't get its squeaky red ass out of there.
Not fair, I railed at the universe. Those other people park like this all the time and nothing ever happens. I do it once and I'm nailed. Just like elementary school! I swear other kids could catapult an entire farmer's market across the cafeteria and not get away with it, but I kick one apple and I'm doomed to miss recess.
I've seen those stickers before, but not on my beloved beliked SqueakyCar. You've probably seen them too, on vehicles abandoned by the side of the road or the like. Let me tell you, those stickers are designed to leave a lasting impression, if white gunky sticky stuff is an impression. They've got that kind of nasty ultra-perma-mega-glue that was the mother of the invention of the razor blade. I, having neither razor blades, pressure washer, nor high-output laser, had to use a sponge, a gallon of water and a quart of elbow grease to get the danged thing off of there, and then threw away the sponge.
Was it worth saving myself from a little more rain? Doubtful. And it definitely wouldn't have been worth it had I needed to bail SqueakyCar out of lockup. Could be worse, and I'm grateful it wasn't.
In all this unpleasantness there are lessons: Stick to your principles. If they're not worth a little extra discomfort, they're not worth anything.
I can't say it's not fair. I can't blame Mooville Apartments for something that is my responsibility. It's true the situation wouldn't have come up if there was adeuqate parking for each building -- and if there was any reasonable solution to that problem I'd be all over them to fix it -- but it was me that parked where I did. It's true that I got nailed on something they rarely bother to enforce, but that doesn't mean it's "unfair" that they chose that moment to do so.
Anyway.
After visiting 3 different stores I found Urban Operations. The new weapons aren't anything to write home about, but it has fairly nice mod support and some interesting maps. The new Defense single-player missions are very, very rough, at least with auto-aim off (the only way to play IMHO). The ability to put from 1 to 50 terrorists on the map for a hunt is cool (50 slows things down pretty badly on the Celeron 400 I'm on though). Teammate AI is still abysmal, but you can give them orders during a misison (cover, defend, etc.) and thus have a better chance of keeping them alive. If you liked Rogue Spear, either single or multiplayer, then this expansion is definitely worth the $20.
* (not actually called Mooville Apartments)
** (not really the first)
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the day the music was butchered |
| 04-03-00 |
Maybe the apocalypse has come after all... Madonna has remade "American Pie."
That's right.
The Material Girl drove her Chevy to the levee.
Argh.
Now, I really don't consider myself a big fan of the original song. But it and a few other classics have a certain something that cannot be improved upon. Anyone who tries to remake them sounds like they're just going through the motions.
I liked Madonna's hey-I-have-a-daughter-to-think-about-and-I'm-changing-my-ways album, Ray Of Light. Some of it was still a little too poppish (poplike? poppy? poppiferous?) for my tastes, but most of it was pretty darned good. And then this bit of soulless, mindless, spineless, caffeine-free drivel comes along and I have to go back to thinking of Madonna as part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Phooey.
I've felt the desire for a new game for several days now. But Saturday afternoon I hit the store and came up empty. Messiah, Soldier of Fortune, Septerra Core and some others are on the shelves, but I found I didn't really want to put down the cash for 'em until I've seen someone else playing them or at least read some really good reviews. Diablo II and Urban Operations are all that's on my must-buy list now.
On the other hand, I did go for music.
- On Pamie's recommendation, Kittie.
- On sis's recommentation, the Run Lola Run soundtrack.
- On random accidental discovery, Music for Cats, a cEvin Key project I was previously unaware of.
  Key has been busy: he was a "key" part of Skinny Puppy, Doubting Thomas, Cyberaktif, Tear Garden, Download, and Plateau as well as releasing at least this one solo album (in which he actually collaborated with many of his regular musical partners). This album is mostly reminiscent of Download -- there are no melodies, but thoughtfully arranged samples and loops and noises with the occasional recited bit of weirdness from Genesis p.Orridge. It strikes me as slightly more accessible than Download tends to be though, and I can't put my finger on the reason why.
The Sardine told me Run Lola Run had a great soundtrack, and I read the same elsewhere. I picked it up, thinking if I didn't like it I could always point a blaming finger at my sis and demand that she buy it off me. ;) First impression was that it was pretty slick but too repetitive. Two of the songs follow the same formula in their lyrics:
- I wish I was a (two syllables)
da dum da dum da dum
I wish I was a (two syllables)
dada dum da dum da dum
- I don't believe in (two syllables)
da dum da dum da dum
I don't believe in (two syllables)
dada dum da dum da dum
Now take those two tracks and do multiple remixes of them and before you know it, you have 16 tracks that should, by all reason and logic, sound the same. But the amazing thing is that despite the repetition, the album becomes more and more enjoyable the more you listen to it. It's got sort of a hypnotic effect. I never thought I would say this, but there's one really cool variation that features German rap.
As for Kittie... there's a stupid multimedia thing on the CD that takes over your computer and installs some crap without bothering to ask first, which lets you look at photos of the decidedly non-photogenic band, or play a video. Of course it screws up Winamp. The music itself seems to fall into distinct levels of coolness; at times they're just screaming aggro Korn-like stuff which isn't bad but isn't anything new and exciting, but when they get more creative they go up by quantum leaps and bounds. In general though, I will probably have to be in just the right mood to get the most out of Kittie.
You may have noticed the search thingy on the left. New feature. I actually had some use for it in the past where I knew I linked to some site when I was talking about something or other and had to go through all my archives to find it. The neat thing is it searches the message board too, so if you ever need to find those comments about Swedish nasal passage cleaning systems, they'll be right at your fingertips. Whee!
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