I’ve fallen off the wagon and ordered the last four volumes of Death Note.
As for Y: The Last Man, I’m waiting for the series to play out before continuing to get the books. They read too quickly, and I keep having the distinct feeling that Vaughan is pretty much guessing as he goes. I’ll wait until it has run its course to avoid getting attached to another initially-promising-but-later-meandering Powers.
Ricardo Books, music and film
Michael Abrash once pointed out that the really brilliant science fiction authors don’t just imagine the gadget – they foresee how the gadget will change society. I’ve found this ability to envision society-sweeping changes appears in visionary writers even when they might get the exact technology wrong.
For example on The Accomplice, one of Vernor Vinge’s short stories written in 1967 which I’ll spoil on this paragraph, a company owner is outraged to find that one of this trusted men has been stealing valuable processing cycles from their mainframe – a seriously outdated concern nowadays. Two particular details mark that story as the work of a technology seer. First, the reason this employee is stealing processing cycles is in order to make a computer-generated movie. Seventeen years before The Last Starfighter, Vinge had already seen that some special effects were just too expensive to make anywhere else; when whole worlds need to be generated, nothing else will suffice. Second, the movie they’re generating is an adaptation of a certain J.R.R. Tolkien book.
Even aware of the man’s genius, Vinge still manages to catch me unprepared. I’d never read True Names, but I knew it was written years before Neuromancer and was effectively the source of the cyberpunk genre, so when I recently got the book I didn’t expect any surprises to be lurking within. And it turns out, what hit me like a sledgehammer was not on the novella itself but a bit that Vinge wrote near the end of his introduction, when speaking about wether computer networks will hinder or help human freedom.
On the other hand, there are the “Four Horsemen” that Tim, Alan and Lenny remark upon. All four horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the “Terrorist Horseman” is the one that could shift our whole society towards strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It’s not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century.
He wrote that in August 1999.
Ricardo Books, music and film
A bloody sequel to the excellent Danny Boyle film, this time with too many helicopters and explosions, and apparently focusing more on shoot-the-crazies than character drama. Why the hell can’t they leave well enough alone?
Ricardo Books, music and film
Politics.
That’s the only possible reason why Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s careful examination of where current politics are leading us, is being passed on for any relevant Academy awards while Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s tepid brew of facile conflicts and contrived connections is receiving nominations left and right.
Its characters’ problems do not stem from the distance created by language barriers, like the movie propaganda wants to present it. It’s not some sort of vocabulary gap keeping people apart, harming their prospects and screwing with their lives. The real problem is that all of them insist on acting like either masochistic sub-morons or outright dicks. And while I’m sure that the immigration problem is close to González’ heart, the way to make the point is not to attempt to make us feel sorry about somebody who consistently makes idiotic decisions. It very hard to related to relate when their bone-headed choices finally catch up with them.
Any other points the movie may have attempted to make are similarly frittered away, along with the great performers in them. Brad Pitt – wasted. Cate Blanchett – squandered in the worst manner I’ve ever seen. Gael GarcÃa Bernal, Clifton Collins Jr., even Rinko Kikuchi whom I’d never seen before but who I’m looking to watch again. All are dragged down by González’ insistence on shoving the story’s square peg down his usual fragmented narrative style’s round hole, a style which was fresh back in Amores Perros but has now become a dead giveaway that we’re in the presence of a one-trick pony.
González seems to have only one movie in him, and I’m officially tired of watching it.
Ricardo Books, music and film
Vero and I recently finished the latest chapter in the comic series Y: The Last Man – Kimono Dragons. I’d spoken of the series before, and kindly referred to it as literary crack. This latest episode doesn’t change that perspective.
I’m now convinced that Vaughan is going nowhere fast, or at least has no bloody clue where the story will take him. He has his formula down pat, and follows it with surgical precision to weave one page turner of a series, but much like the series 24 it’s basically a long string of cliffhangers and surprises, with little else going for it.
Will I keep reading it? I’m not sure, but I might. The series comes out ahead of most movies in book cost vs. hourly recreation value, plus the series is entertaining enough that it keeps me hooked, no matter how empty I may consider it. I can always act as a palate cleanser between the Vernor Vinges and Alan Moores. There are worst things that could be said about a one’s efforts, I suppose.
Ricardo Books, music and film
Livingston: What advice would you give to a programmer who’s thinking about starting a company?
Spolsky: I’ve got a lot: [laughs] Don’t do it. It’s going to suck. You’re going to hate it.
Can I steal one from Paul? Don’t start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you. If you don’t have two people (or I would even say three) that you’ve convinced to devote their lives to doing this, it’s just going to be a different thing. There are a lot of programmers that are very tentative about starting their own companies. There are a lot of working programmers doing something they hate, with some company that they hate, but they need money to pay the mortgage. So they figure, “I’ll develop something in my spare time. I’ll put in 1 hour every night and 2 hours on the weekends and I’ll start selling it by downloads.” And you say to them, “Who’s your cofounder?” And they say, “My significant other—husband or wife. My cat.”
But because they never really take the leap and quit their job, they can give up their dream at any time. And 99.9 percent of them will actually give up their dream. If they take the leap, quit their job, go do it full-time—no matter how much it sucks—and convince one other person to do the same thing with them, they’re going to have a much, much higher chance of actually getting somewhere. Because they either have to succeed or get a job. Sometimes “succeed” seems like the easier path than actually getting a job, which is depressing.
So quit your day job. Have one other founder, at least. I’d say that’s the minimum bar to getting anywhere.
From the Joel Spolsky interview from Founders at Work.
Ricardo Books, music and film, Programming
Joel Spolsky has written a review of Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, a book about the development of a personal information manager called Chandler. Started by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Corporation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the people behind Go Corporation (a company whose life and death is chronicled in Startup), Chandler was supposed to be a revolutionary personal information manager that would absolutely change how you handled your information.
Spolsky goes into great detail not only about the book but development processes in general, using Chandler as an example of how not to do things.
Say, for example, that your vision is to rebuild an old DOS personal information manager, which was really really great but totally unappreciated. It seems easy. Everything about how the whole thing works seems so obvious, you don’t even try to design the thing… you just hire a bunch of programmers and start banging out code.
Now you’ve made two mistakes.
Number one, you fell for that old overconfidence trick of your mind. “Oh, yeah, we totally know how to do this! It’s all totally clear to us. No need to spec it out. Just write the code.�
Number two, you hired programmers before you designed the thing. Because the only thing harder than trying to design software is trying to design software as a team.
[...]
Still, it’s a great look at one particular type of software project: the kind that ends up spinning and spinning its wheels without really going anywhere because the vision was too grand and the details were a little short. Near as I can tell, Chandler’s original vision was pretty much just to be “revolutionary.� Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t code “revolutionary.� I need more details to write code. Whenever the spec describes the product in terms of adjectives (“it will be extremely cool�) rather than specifics (“it will have brushed-aluminum title bars and all the icons will be reflected a little bit, as if placed on a grand piano�) you know you’re in trouble.
You can find the rest of this very enjoyable review here.
Ricardo Books, music and film, Programming
You don’t need me to tell you anything. Actually, you probably shouldn’t even read anything more about the movie. You should just go watch Children of Men.
Ricardo Books, music and film
It’s always funny to read books on current events a few years after they were published and try to find those cases where they were flat out wrong, or even encounter some very funny coincidences. In this book the first moment came when Friedman is arguing against Samuel P. Huntington’s assertion on The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, where Huntington mentioned that the next great war would be a war of civilizations. Friedman even mocks it as
we won’t have the Soviets to kick around anymore, so we will naturally go back to kicking the Hindus and Muslims around and them kicking us
I guess Huntington got the last laugh there.
Ricardo Books, music and film