Please Ignore This Message

I find a good portion of human conversation to be unnecessary. A lot of the communication we choose to have with each other—or rather, at each other—serves no purpose beside being said for its own sake.

Why does it seem like some people never stop and think about what the contents of their words mean to the recipient? In some cases, I suspect because the answer would be 'nothing' close to 100% of the time. For instance, in what way does something like "If I'd a known you didn't have one a these, I'd a brought one" give the recipient anything of value? How does the information he could have almost had something improve his current situation? I guess at best the sentence conveys a vague feeling the speaker woulda helped you out if only he'da known, but as warm fuzzy feelings go, that one is kinda tepid and threadbare.

In fact, that whole "if only" can of worms is a rant of its own, an activity that some people seem to love to wallow in. And if the image in your head when you read "wallow" is of a pig in his sty, all I can say is that it matches the one in mine. Image. Head. (To quickly fix the references, because I do not have a lot of time. I have to be going soon.)

Some of you may have guessed: I'm going to see my parents-in-law. Please don't misconstrue the previous paragraphs; I really like them. They're genuinely nice and lovable folks, and I often enjoy spending an afternoon with them. If only there wasn't such bland and shallow conversation. Or if there simply wasn't such a lot of it.

Crooked Little Vein

I am a Warren Ellis fan.

I love Transmetropolitan, Desolation Jones, and especially Fell. I love Ellis' style of setting his story in front of the weirdest backdrops and make it all work. Despite the weirdest scenario, he still manages to make the story interesting and give it depth.

That said, Crooked Little Vein is a little shallower than I had hoped.

Before I start, it is a rather short book. Don't let the package fool you, it looks like a normal book, but it has a large typeface and wide margins.

Starting to read Crooked Little Vein, I got the impression Ellis wrote it with the explicit intent to put something gross on every page. The beginning of the book failed to draw me in by cracking too many jokes, too many one-liners, and generally going overboard too much. In that respect, to me it was a lot like the first half of Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller—too smart for it own good. I did enjoy the grossness, and I genuinely cringed a couple of times at his descriptions of (or his hinting at) the outrageous acts of perversion that form the backdrop to his book. But it is this crass backdrop which is, in my view, the book's weakness.

Warren Ellis tries to do something extraordinary by using the most vile, disgusting, and often silly occurrences as the setting of his book, in a way a dystopian view of America, where perversion is pervasive. Instead of employing it for shock value (e.g. make a baddie truly hateable by giving him some weird repugnant fetish), he transforms it into something ordinary, which the characters in the book accept as everyday occurrences.

The one occasion where the plot itself sharply rises above the background noise level is late in the book, at a turning point for the main character. Up until then, Warren Ellis has been the weird uncle you only meet once every year on that family occasion, whom you try to get drunk because he will tell you the most outrageous stories. But the harmless uncle suddenly gets up and punches you in the stomach so hard all the air goes out of your lungs. Like Cory Doctorow, Ellis masterfully tortures his readers and induces that gut-wrenching feeling of loss you feel in sympathy with his characters.

The ending is short and sweet, although it could have been a little sweeter in my opinion. The reconciliation between the two main characters, an ideal counterpoint to the mean shock before, would have been nicer had it been described in more detail. It still would not have been too long. After all, the point of hurting you main character is to set up the happy ending, right?

All in all, I think Crooked Little Vein is best not considered as a full-length novel, but as something more experimental, like Warren Ellis' three-issue miniseries City of Silence. I do not mean to belittle the book in any way by saying this, by the way. I did enjoy it hugely, and I think it's wonderful that not all books are the same.

Ellis Fans: Buy it if you don't have it already, which you almost certainly do anyway.
Others: You might as well go ahead and buy it, if you fulfill the prerequisites: being a little jaded to the perversions of modern times, and the ability to accept a story on its own grounds.

By the Way, Congratulations

via Pundit Kitchen

Untitled

"You're out of here on the count of three, or I shoot the three of you. One."

What's he waiting for? He can't think I'm not going to shoot. I apply more pressure. Make it clear I'm not messing around.

"I'm going shoot your daughter first."

I take aim on the center of the five year old's forehead. His new wife's face drains of all color and she looks ready to faint.

"Two."

Why the hell is he smiling?

"Three."

I brace myself. I hate it when this happens. You bring yourself in a situation where you lose control, and you have to do things you don't want to.

The hammer clicks home on the empty chamber.

"Don't get yourself into a situation where you have to do things you don't want to," he says.

The quote is so familiar, from years ago, it almost brings a smile to my lips. Brief memories of shared in-jokes and friendly discussions take me back to a less complicated, happier time. All the fight goes out of me.

I have to beat them to death with the butt of my empty gun now. It will mean life imprisonment for me, at the least, if I don't. I've seen it done, but I can't bring myself to do it.

"Damn it, dad." I say, dropping my gun onto the thick carpet.

Yahoo wants to copy my data to its servers in... Limbo?

So they want to copy my data to their servers in . I've neven been to , but I hear it's nice and warm there.

My Kitchen. Let Me Show You It.

Sorry for the confusion, I had a YouTube link here at first, but YouTube mangled my video, getting get the audio out of sync.

Please download it until I find a better solution.

Charles Stross: Glasshouse

I recently finished Glasshouse by Charles Stross, and I have to say, my high expectations have been more than fullfilled.

The first book I read by Charles Stross was Accelerando, which is a wild ride into the future of mankind, and so-called "posthuman", or "post-singularity" humanity. Accelerando is available as a free download under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. Go read it. It's great.

What I loved about Accelerando was that it was so weird. Every few chapters, the timeline jumps ahead a few years, a couple of decades, or even a century or two, and the setting and characters you'd just barely got used to in the preceding pages change so radically it throws you off like you're being flung out of a rollercoaster. You have to work to reconnect to the story.

Which is not to say, it's hard to read. I hate books that are hard to read. This book isn't exactly what I'd call hard, but it does take some effort to read. However, I really enjoyed putting in that effort. I even enjoyed the recurring sense of disorientation —it was intentional, after all—and the ever-increasing weirdness of human life, or what in the later stages of the book is referred to as 'humanity', more or less, I suspect, for lack of a better term.

Glasshouse is much more accessible than Accelerando, because the setting does not change half as quickly. But the lack of rollercoaster-style disortientation is compensated for by a lot more punch. After reading about the first third (the novel is about 400 pages long), it seriously became impossible for me to put the book down. I finally succumbed to fatigue and fell asleep at 2am (on a work day no less).

Glasshouse is set in the far future. Thanks to 'assembler' technology (replicators to you Treckies), combined with mind/consciousness/memory transfer, humans are essentially immortal. Everyone has a backup to revert to in case of fatal accidents, making death a mere inconvenience. However, as you live for a truly long stretch of time, you are bound to accumulate unpleasant memories, up to a point where they become too much to bear. When that happens, people use the assemblers to have their memories partially or fully erased, and start a new life.

Stross addresses the age-old Sci-Fi question of "what is life?", or "what is human?", but not in the way Asimov and others did. Where Asimov speculated whether man-made automata could aquire sentience, Stross takes the concept of sentient artificial life as granted, and focuses on a different aspect of what makes us human, or rather what makes us us. If our thoughts and memories are what makes each of us unique, what if these memories could be manipulated arbitrarily?

Another question arising in that context is whether someone is responsible for actions he committed, before his memory of these actions was erased. And what would be the point of punishing somebody for something he cannot remember doing?

Throughout the novel, which is written in first-person perspective, Stross manages to convincingly tell the tale from the point of view of somebody who has his memory erased, is killed and restored from backup, brainwashed, and has other ugly things happen to his memory. No mean feat, considering what the stream of consciousness of someone like that must be like, but he pulls it off brilliantly.

By setting the bulk of his novel in a wildlife-preserve-like social experiment, intended to recreate the "dark ages"—that is, the late 20th and early 21st century—he manages to bring another message across. By describing our present day from the viewpoint of an 'enlightened' future human, he holds up a mirror to our society.

Rereading that last sentence, it reads just like the usual generic blather you'd read on any book cover. But this book has honestly been different, at least for me. This was the first time I actually went 'Holy shit, we really do live in a damn restrictive society'.

There is one more point I found remarkable, but I don't want to spoil too much. Suffice it to say that this book has opened my eyes to some issues of gender roles, i.e. women staying at home, men going out to work and the associated problems, better than any other author I've read before.

Lastly, while Glasshouse is not what I'd call a 'hard SF' novel (if you want that, try Eric Nylund's 'Signal to Noise'), there's still a lot of technology in there, especially relating to the 'assemblers'. As much as there is, it's all very well thought through, with all implications of the technology considered. The world the novel is set in really gives the impression of being well-rounded, and is very believable.


All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable book, which I can only recommend, very much, to anybody.


Disclaimer: This post had been lying in my drafts folder for almost a year, so the part where I claim I 'recently' finished the novel only applies for very large values of 'recently'.

Sofa King Disappointed

And now, for your viewing pleasure, an intriguing piece of commissioned art.

The Sofa King abides.

Does not work as advertised

This app will not run on my Powerbook, even though Mac OSX 10.5.5 clearly fulfills the compatibility criteria.