Chronicles of a Hereditary Geek

Deadlines

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:36:23 GMT

I've drawn a line in the sand.

Pyrlogos will launch June 21, 2008.

What the launch looks like, and how often pages come out after that, depends on what I manage to get done between now and then. But I've been working without a constraining deadline for long enough - I don't think it works. There's too much room for me to procrastinate. I need a date that I can panic about and react to.

So I've got May to try to build the buffer up while Sora pokes at the CSS of the site (currently running the ComicPress theme for WordPress) and three weeks in June to iron out the kinks, put together some ad images and other promotional type stuff, and hopefully continue making comics. My production rate in May will determine the schedule I start with, and that plus the total number of comics I have ready as of the 21st will help determine what I launch with and how. (Options include something like the six-pages-at-once launch partiallyclips did for Erfworld, and a quieter launch of one page at a time where I wait to start promoting it until I've got a bit of the story up. We'll see what I can do.)

Auditioning

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:00:24 GMT

Sunday afternoon, Sora and I drove down to Portland to spend the night at our friends' apartment. The social visit was nice, but that wasn't the primary reason we drove down.

Monday morning, I auditioned for Jeopardy for the second time.

The process was a bit different than last time. Last time I auditioned, in November 2005, I had submitted my name directly into their random selection process, and was very lucky to be picked as one of about 150 people to audition, from everyone who had applied to audition in Seattle. As a result, the 50-question test I took then was an elimination process - of the roughly 50 of us in the room when I was there, I was one of 10 to pass the test and do the mock game during the second part.

This time, the first part of the process was the online test. So at the actual audition, there were only 19 of us - all of whom had already passed the test. I was worried about having to pass another test to move on, but we were assured early on that we would all be getting put into the contestant files.

After some introductions by the audition staff, we watched a brief video featuring Alex and the "Clue Crew", discussing the basics of the audition process and exhorting us to have fun a number of times. In fact, we were asked afterwards: how many times did they tell us to have fun? After a couple of wrong answers, my answer of "Four" was accepted, and I won a copy of the Jeopardy DVD home game. (It looks like it should be useful in practicing...)

Next, we did a few questions as a group - clues would be read and we'd raise our hands to answer. It was mainly to get us comfortable with the format, I think.

After that, we took the test. 50 questions, just like the last test I took. Looked like it was photocopied off of the same answer sheet I used last time, too. There were several questions I wasn't quite sure about, but overall I think I did pretty well on the test. My impression is that it's just another data point for contestant selection.

After that came the mock game. Three of us at a time would go up and play a few questions with actual buzzers and such. I ended up being one of the last people to go up, but in the meanwhile I was "buzzing in" with the clicky-pens they gave us. (They actually had to tell us to stop clicking at one point. I don't think I was the only one.) But when I finally got up for the mock game, I think this is where I shone - when it was finally my turn to go up, I answered questions clearly and confidently (and loudly!) and had a lot of energy in general.

That was it for the audition, but I feel pretty confident. The other change since last time I auditioned was the eligibility period - I'm in their files for 18 months, now, instead of just a year.

The next step? Hopefully, I'll get called sometime before Oct 1, 2009. Until then, I wait.

Icons meme

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:35:36 GMT

From my beloved nightsinger. Comment and I'll give you four of your userpics to explain to me and the world. In your own journal, if you want to spread the meme - if you don't, you can just post responses here.

Genericon, 2002. I dressed as the guy whose spoon is too big, from the animated short Rejected. (See post icon for reference.) The top hat was - and is - my usual con attire, but also in this case a call-out to the Silly Hats Only segment of the same film. The spoon was seven feet tall and made of aluminum sheet metal (with a 1x2 plank inside the handle). I'd have thought getting it across the Canadian border (twice in each direction, going between Ann Arbor and upstate NY) would have been difficult, but the border guards apparently refused to acknowledge its very existence.

Cropped from a poster for Lost in Translation, with the movie's tagline added in. Vaguely philsophical-sounding, and Scarlett Johansson is pretty.

The grandfather from the webcomic Sheldon, swearing in creative ways after being put on hold by the cable company for 45 minutes. Even the duck is shocked.

Joker, from the anime Read or Die, which remains one of my favorites. It's a series about occasionally-superpowered secret agents from the black ops branch of the British Library - what's not to love?

WOOOOOOOO

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:09:41 GMT

I just got the email: I've been called back for another Jeopardy audition!

This is a little different than last time. Last time I got an audition, I got my name picked out of a hat without any prior work, went to the audition, took the 50-question test, passed it there, and then auditioned with a mock game.

This time, I took the online test on January 31st, and so this audition will be made up of people that have already passed that test (and gotten their name picked out of the hat, too - but a much smaller hat). I don't yet know what the audition will entail - whether I'll have to take another test to make it to the mock game portion of the auditions, or whether I'm done with the testing portion. I hope it's the latter, though I'm reasonably confident about my testing chances given that I've gotten called back in two out of the three Jeopardy tests I've ever taken.

Anyway. The audition is at 11:30 on Monday, March 31st in Portland - I'll probably drive down on the evening of the 30th and stay with friends that night. I'll have more details soon.

In the meanwhile, Sora bought me a trivia book last time I passed an audition, and I never got a chance to look at it. I'm going to try to go through all one thousand questions over the next month, and we'll see how I do. I'll be keeping score for each of the book's section, to determine what areas I have to study more. I'll also be reviving my previous plan to read Wikipedia's featured article every day... and like last time, I will avoid listening to Weird Al's "I Lost On Jeopardy" for the next year, for superstitious reasons.

This should be interesting.

Caucuses

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:26:25 GMT

The presidential nomination process comes to Washington state this month, and it's confusing.

There will be caucuses held on Saturday, February 9th, at 1 PM, at various precinct locations depending on party. There will also be a primary election on Tuesday, February 19th, all day long, at the usual polling places.

Here's the trick: For the Republicans, the primary and caucus each count roughly one-half for allocating the delegation from Washington state. For Democrats, though, the state-mandated primary is held but its results are ignored: all delegates are allocated via the caucus. The Democratic presidential primary is just a straw poll in Washington state.

To participate in the caucus on Saturday, you must show up to your precinct's caucus location at 1 PM. Caucus locations are set by the legislative district party organizations - their websites should have details. Important: your caucus location may not be your normal polling place! In fact, it likely isn't.

The caucus is essentially a meeting of party members, though depending on party rules you may or may not need to be registered as a member of the party to participate. The Democratic requirement is just that you consider yourself to be a Democrat and that you swear not to participate in another party's nomination process - no registration is required.

At the caucus, you'll sign up or group together according to the candidate you wish to support. A count is done, and then those groups without enough voters to earn a precinct delegate will be given an opportunity to join other viable groups. After this final count, each candidate group has earned a certain number of precinct delegates, who will go on to participate in a similar process at the legislative district and state levels. The delegates to represent the precinct are then chosen from each group according to the numbers permitted.

Of course, this all means that we'll only have an estimate of delegates won by each candidate when the caucuses are over - the actual numbers won't be strictly decided until the state convention, which I think is in April.

If anyone's curious about my own preferences, I'll be happy to elaborate. I'm also happy to help people find their caucus locations. (They're determined by precinct, which is the 4-digit number following your legislative district on your voter registration card.)

Also, Facebook.

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:29:44 GMT

It was aki pointing out Scrabulous (Facebook's Scrabble app) that pushed me over. I'm not really intending to do the whole social-networking thing, but if you're up for a game come find me.

2008: Books Read

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:33 GMT

Let's see if I can keep this list up this year. This post will serve as the master list, and I'll update when I add to it, I suppose. If anyone's interested.

During the holidays last year, I finished Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent, and started and finished Maus, Steven Brust's 500 Years After, and Connie Willis' To Say Nothing Of The Dog. I would recommend the latter in particular, being one of the best time-travel stories I've ever read, and a hilarious depiction of Victorian society besides. And I found the ending particularly pleasing for reasons I refuse to elaborate on, but that you'll understand if you read the book...

So, books I've finished this year:

1) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (finished 1/16)

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. The combination of a 19th-century upper-class drama with traditional English magic and mythology makes for a fascinating book. One of the things I really liked about it was the understatement of the actual magic being performed. There are very few cases when the magicians are doing huge, flashy spells with lights and sounds and smoke and such. But as the book progresses, the world becomes more unpredictable and strange on its own...

2) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (finished 1/31?)

WWII-era nurse has an accident with a circle of standing stones and gets transported back in time to 1743 in Scotland. There she gets rescued by a Scottish outlaw, and it's romance and swashbuckling (with a side of Jacobite politics) from there on out. I enjoyed it reasonably, but I'm not rushing to pick up the next one or anything...

In the meanwhile, I've started reading Simon Singh's The Big Bang and I'm about halfway through Brust's The Paths of the Dead. I'll be picking up Prisoner of Trebekistan soon, too - I read the (very short) first chapter last night.

Fanart Project: 17 - Brown

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:34:49 GMT

I told you I'd go back to being slow. It's been over a year since my last project post.

Fiona is one of the main characters from a myth by Eric Burns, explaining why the drip coffee at Starbucks tastes like crotch. She's standing in front of the original Starbucks in Pike Place Market; the image on her shirt is the original mermaid logo.

The full chart and list of fanarts can be found here, and my fanart project gallery is here.

For those of you job-hunting:

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:12:56 GMT

nightsinger's company is hiring!

Lots of IT/customer service positions open. Not just call-center work. Take a look if you're interested!

ETA: Completely unrelated, but I didn't feel like a new entry.

Bacon Salt. "Because everything should taste like bacon." It's apparently vegetarian and certified kosher.

Bits and pieces and odds and ends

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 05:28:54 GMT

IKEA sells packs of 11-watt compact fluorescent lightbulbs for $5. I was under the impression they were expensive, but when we found those last week we did a quick mental count of the lights in our house and bought enough to replace most of the incandescent bulbs in the house. (At least those for which it was possible; you're not supposed to use fluorescent bulbs with dimmer switches, and the bulbs in the bathroom are of a different type.) So several of our lights' energy usage has been reduced by over 80% with no large difference in light quality - an 11-watt fluorescent bulb puts out roughly the same amount of light as a 60-watt incandescent - and we're feeling green at the moment. :D

After a hiatus of a few weeks I'm playing Guitar Hero 2 again, working on five-starring the Medium songs. I'm nearly done; a lot of these songs seem easier than the last time I played through them, but that's to be expected. I just upped my rating on "The Trooper" from 3 to 5 stars, and that's the hardest song I've 5-starred so far, though Psychobilly Freakout is looming large in the near future. (ETA: Just tried it. Got it up from 3 to 4 stars on my second try, but the toggling-notes sections are kicking my ass hard.)

In other 360 news, I've gotten very frustrated with Gears of War. I'm fighting RAAM at the moment, and I can't finish him off because my goddamned AI teammate keeps running off and getting himself killed. I'd be fine if he'd just hunker down somewhere and hide, but no, he'll die off in a corner, and I'll have to run and revive him, and then I'll die because I left my own cover. To say nothing of the cases when the Kryll come in and dismember one of us; that's an instant game-over because we're unrevivable. It feels like I'm unable to progress from here as a result, and I'm frustrated: the single-player campaign should not require the use of a second player just to override the crappy AI.

Also, Beautiful Katamari is awesome. I rolled up the black hole!

We seem to have chosen venues for the wedding. We haven't nailed anything down yet, but we've got a pretty decent idea... We should be announcing a date soon.

I'm officially writing Pyrlogos now. I'm have the major story arc scripted out for each character for whom it is important, and I plan to start writing actual scenes either tonight or tomorrow. (For those of you who saw the earlier attempt, the input from that editing session has proven useful; I'm reevaluating both my ideas about story structure and my art style.)

After a recommendation from seorin and iris_of_ether, we picked up a bottle of peach lambic at the local specialty beer and wine store. We also got some raspberry lambic, which we just tried and don't like as much (it's a bit more beery than the peach), and a bottle of Moscato d'Asti, a white dessert wine that I've been looking for forever. More on that one later; the first time I had it, it tasted like candy, and I'm looking forward to trying it again.

Puzzles for Sora

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:07:33 GMT

So, Sora broke the news last night...

Short version: Sora and I are engaged! I proposed last night when we were out to dinner to celebrate our second anniversary. And thank you to all of you who offered congratulations over on her LJ...

Over in that thread we've also had requests for "the whole story". So here it is.

Sunday, November 4th was the second anniversary of the day we met. I sent her a love note over email... a rather oddly-worded one. After reading the email and realizing something was strange about it, she faintly recognized some of the phrases I'd used.

It wasn't long before she discovered that the main body of the note was composed entirely of phrases from Jonathan Coulton songs, and specifically from Thing-A-Week songs. An hour or so of googling and searching later, she'd figured out which song each line came from.

It just so happens that Thing-A-Week was composed of 52 songs (numbered as such on his website). 52 being twice 26, it wasn't difficult to translate the song numbers into letters, and she revealed the phrase "INSIDE ALBUM WITH OUR SONG". We've long recognized that JoCo's "Skullcrusher Mountain" was the closest thing to an "our song" that we had, and so she found the CD with that song on it, and inside the case was another puzzle.

This second puzzle at first appeared to be just a few paragraphs of narrative. It described a pilgrim's journey to the new cathedral at the city of Carcassone, detailing some things he saw along the way and some particular places where he took special note of them. (The narrative was also full of typos - every time there should have been an "st", the "t" was missing.)

So she got out the Carcassone game, and noticed a rubber duck looking at a set of tiles, with a label indicating that up was north. (The duck is not only a NaNo reference, but a reference to the infamous "Duck Conundrum" puzzles from the MIT Mystery Hunt.) So she started laying out the tiles, following the pilgrim's path. Generally he would take note of the shapes of roads he'd traveled, and when at last the pilgrim reached the cathedral she'd collected the letters "SARDUS". But, like the narrative, the answer had typos - the actual answer was "STARDUST", which led her to the copy of the book sitting on the desk upstairs. Inside the book was an envelope, containing some art I'd had commissioned for her, and a URL.

The URL led here - the third puzzle. It's a lot more straightforward than the other two - and easier to reproduce - so you can try it if you want; the answer is here¹. Apologies to those of you with small monitors; I had a reasonable expectation that she'd be working on this one from the widescreen we have. :D

Unfortunately for Sora, the instruction from the third puzzle's answer could not be followed for another five days - she finished all three of these puzzles on Sunday evening, but she had to wait until the following Friday.

Friday, November 9th was the NaNoWriMo write-in. One of our friends (the organizer) traditionally has a treasure chest full of random little prizes for people who finish a thousand words at the write-in. I arranged with her to sneak the next puzzle into the chest; when she finished up her thousand words she opened up the chest and found an envelope labeled "For Sora".

Inside the envelope was the next puzzle - a 30x30 nonogram (a.k.a "paint-by-numbers"). She'd never done one this size before, nor one on paper, so she felt a bit daunted originally, but it was actually a reasonably easy puzzle in the end. (Rows/columns with only one number in them are easy... rows/columns with zero numbers are even easier.) When the nonogram was complete, it had a message: "DANIEL'S NOV. 12 @ 7:30". This was of course the place and time for our anniversary dinner.

Sora figured that was the end of it. She'd discovered where and when dinner was, and after work yesterday I picked her up from her office and we went home to change into nice clothes, and then off to Daniel's. We had some very nice steak (mmm, steak), and Sora made sure to save room for dessert... which was a good thing, because when we asked for the dessert menu, there was a rather suspicious-looking item on it, labeled "puzzle chocolate cake". After a bit of deliberation, she decided to order it, and soon there was delivered to the table a molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream (which was very good) and a small Japanese puzzle box. After expressing frustration with the choice to be made, she decided to eat the dessert first - after all, the delicate heat balance of the ice cream with the molten chocolate cake wouldn't last long.

Soon sated, she turned her attentions to the puzzle box. Owing to a technical problem with the puzzle box I'd ordered, I'd actually used a small puzzle box she gave me for Valentine's Day way back in early 2006. Thankfully, as I'd hoped, she'd forgotten the details of how to solve it in the meanwhile, so it took her a few minutes to open up... and inside she found this. (More pictures.)

By the time she recognized the ring for what it was, I was on my knee, and I asked her to marry me. She said yes, and I put the ring onto her finger... and she's been squeeing and giggling ever since.

So that's basically the story of the puzzle-hunt proposal. We don't have a date set yet; we don't see any particular need to rush into planning a wedding, particularly when we're blatantly busy as it is.

¹The answer to the rebus is "WRITE ONE THOUSAND WORDS AT TERRABITE". The last word may be confusing to some of you; Terrabite is where the Friday evening write-ins are this year - the same write-in (though at a different place) at which Sora and I met, lo these ~~many~~ two years ago.

NaNoWriMo

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 07:43:29 GMT

I haven't posted much about it, so far, but after three days I have slightly over 5000 words of background material for Pyrlogos. So I'm on pace so far. And I'm even (kind of) sticking to the novel format! It's just... a novel that's so far composed of 5000 words of exposition.

Neil Gaiman on story ideas

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 05:48:32 GMT

http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/essays/essaysbyneil/ideasessay/

As we head into November, many of us NaNoWriMo writers are trying to come up with some sort of plot, or even just the tiniest little seed of an idea which we can water carefully, nurture and feed as it grows into a blossom, and then try to wring fifty thousand words out of it as if it were a recalcitrant sponge.

Gaiman's essay isn't so much on the creative process itself as what he and other people think about it, but it's an interesting read, and does contain a few starting points if you need them.

So, I've heard from some of you, but... what's your plot/idea this year? My goal is to get the first story arc of Pyrlogos completely plotted and scripted, and have outlines of varying detail for the next two or three arcs.

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 05:20:53 GMT

Fine, I'll take the fricking career meme. For instructions, consult the journal of nearly anybody.

1. Computer Engineer (I thought they'd confused this with Software Engineer, but no...)
2. Mining Engineer (My great grandfather did this.)
3. Electrical Engineer
4. Electronics Engineering Tech
5. Electrical Engineering Tech
6. Industrial Engineer
7. Multimedia Developer
8. Mechanical Engineer
9. Aerospace Engineer
10. Industrial Designer
11. Mathematician (I would have double-majored had the relevant college's requirements not sucked.)
12. Actuary
13. Electrician
14. Fashion Designer (BAHAHAHAHAHA)
15. Interior Designer (see 14)
16. Computer Programmer (This far down? Huh.)
17. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator (Well, yes.)
18. Electronics Assembler
19. Desktop Publisher
20. Project Manager

In lieu of remembrances or political discussion...

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:37:13 GMT

My friend 5tephe has been trying to spread this idea around:

Today, do something to make the world better, no matter how small it is.

That's all. His hope is that, a thousand years from now, people will simply remember this day as a day to make the world a better place.

Even if you just take five minutes out of your day to help someone out, or clean up a public place, or donate a little bit of money to a worthy cause... do something to improve the world.

A short movie review.

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:25:00 GMT

Stardust is quite possibly the best movie I've ever seen, and definitely in the top five or so. As a fairy tale, it's pretty much perfect. It's tense and exciting and wondrous and left Sora and I with the feeling we'd witnessed something absolutely extraordinary.

I've never seen anything like it, and I recommend it to anyone with even the slightest interest in fantasy, fairy tales, or even just straight-up love stories.

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 06:41:26 GMT

Now that I've got all my music copied over to iTunes on the new Macintosh, I have verified something I have been hoping was true ever since I thought of it a month or two ago (but haven't bothered to check until now).

Namely, that "Comment contains [keyword]" is among the ways you can specify a Smart Playlist.

Why is this important? It means I can basically use the Comment field as a list of tags, and generate playlists based on those tags. This is far, far better than the way I was previously generating playlists, i.e. going through my library and just copying everything I wanted over to the playlist, and therefore needing to remember which songs I've sorted through and which I haven't, etc... now I can just store the tags and have an easy way of keeping that sort of state.

OMG KITTIES

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 03:38:26 GMT

I present to you Morpheus and Thanatos:

Morpheus is the grey one, and Thanatos is the black one.

They're brothers, born on Friday, April 13th, 2007. Yes, we actually own a black cat born on Friday the 13th, and we basically named him "Death". Good thing we're not superstitious, huh?

Morpheus, stalking a speck of something on the carpet. Or exploring his new home.

Thanatos inspecting the bathroom. He's still treading carefully since it's his first few hours home.

Thanatos and Morpheus, playing a game of tag around the trashcan in the bathroom.

After some errands (picking up needed kitty supplies, etc), we arrived at the MEOW adoption center in Kirkland and submitted our adoption application (which included previous cat-ownership history and a personality test to best match us to cats). We then looked around for a while, and discussed our plans with one of the workers. We decided to aim for a pair of kittens that could keep each other entertained, and chose a couple kittens to bring into the meeting room (separate rooms where you can hold the cats and make sure they don't escape) first. We absolutely adored the first pair of kittens we met. The next two pairs didn't seem terribly interested in us, and the last pair was incredibly playful... so we had a hard choice. But when we brought the first pair of kittens out again, they just curled up on our laps and purred up a storm, and we just fell in love.

The adoption center didn't see any problem with us as cat owners, as expected. We had to sign an adoption contract saying that we'd take care of the cats for life, would keep them indoors, and would never declaw them - I was pleased and a bit surprised at the restrictions they had. I rather like that shelter.

So. We have kitties now! We took a nap after we got everything set up (well, Sora did; I read a book) and Morpheus just curled up with us and slept. I think they like their new home, and we're glad we finally have kitties - we've been anticipating them for over a year now.

A poem.

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:31:28 GMT

Major bugs have little bugs, which, being fixed, can cause'em.
And little bugs from tiny bugs, and on it goes ad nauseam.
The bigger bugs themselves can be pernicious, tangled creatures;
So suck it up and ship the code and we'll just call them "features".

So I needed a bit of a trim.

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 06:17:00 GMT

These two pictures are from Sora's birthday weekend.

And now...

These two pictures are from sometime after Memorial Day.

Expect an update to my user icons at some point.

And from the same weekend as the first two pictures, here's Sora with her main birthday present from me.

The idea popped into my head earlier today...

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 07:28:07 GMT

...and I'll admit I'm unlikely to be the first person to think of it, but I had to get it out of my head, and I decided it would be pretty good Photoshop practice anyway. In fact, what follows is the first stuff I've ever done in this program.

So without further ado:

(edit: moved the larger-than-I-expected picture to behind the cut)

Scratch disk - advice needed

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:05:21 GMT

We're installing Photoshop and Illustrator on our Mac Pro soon (thanks, Pam!), and I've come to realize that I probably want a scratch disk.

The only disk drives Apple will sell us are 250GB and 500GB, which seems a little excessive for a scratch disk. Apparently Seagate has a 750 GB drive, but that's moving in the wrong direction.

I'm looking for a drive in the 40-100 GB range - preferably something cheap. Is any old desktop disk drive compatible with the Mac Pro? The small amount of information I've found so far implies that a Mac Pro can use any SATA drive you give it...

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Thu, 17 May 2007 19:33:00 GMT

Those of you who don't consider children to be sacred will probably be amused by this.

I'll concede that I feel sorry for the kid, and think the dad's an utter asshole, but the first thought that came to mind was "I guess they took Ian's advice."

Book #6

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:30:49 GMT

A while ago, I found my copy of Phoenix Guards, and having completed this following book, I've picked it up again. (The complete list, updated.)

This is only the sixth book I've started this year, for a variety of reasons. (Seventh if you count a book I read at work. I should write about that one sometime. Maybe I will.)

6) The Confusion - Neal Stephenson (Feb 21 - May 7)

The Confusion is the second massive tome in the Baroque Cycle, an epic of quasi-historical fiction set between about 1660 and the early 1700s. It's actually made up of two books, which follow intertwining plotlines, and chapters from the two books were therefore interspersed in the single volume I had.

One book, The Juncto, is largely a work of political intrigue, espionage, and financial adventures. The finance is particularly important; Britain, France, Spain, and the Dutch are all in various stages of war throughout the book, and the manipulation and disruption of entire national economies is in play as the main characters are nobles working at high levels in their respective societies. But Juncto also contains a fair bit of Natural Philosophy (i.e. those studies, and those students, which would come to know as "science" and "scientists"), as well as certain amounts of Alchemy. This area of the story tends to center on Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and naturally the world of Natural Philosophy is nearly as rife with political squabbling as the world of war and finance.

The other book, Bonanza, is a fantastical, swashbuckling, world-spanning adventure, as the fortunes of one Jack Shaftoe and his comrades are brought high, and low, and high again. It seems the farthest thing possible from high-nobility story of Juncto, and yet the two meet and intersect time and again, dancing about each other like two snakes coiled about the staff of Hermes. Each book's developments has very real implications on the other, and so despite being technically split into two books, there is ultimately a single narrative.

The writing style is glorious. It feels at once like a pastiche on the style and vocabulary of the Baroque era, like an actual instance of said style (with minor translations to ensure the understanding of a modern audience), and like a thoroughly modern story. The dialogue and descriptions are littered with modern references, as in this quote:

Enoch stood on the upperdeck, waiting for his chests and bags to be lowered into the longboat. As he often did in idle moments, he reached into the pocket of his traveling-cloak and took out a contraption that looked a bit like a spool. But a poorly made one, for the ends of the spool were bulky, and the slot in between them, where the cord was wound, was narrow. He unwound a couple of inches of cord and slipped his finger through a loop that had been tied in its end. Then he allowed the spool to fall from his hand. It dropped slowly at first, as the spool's inertia resisted its tendency to unwind, but then it picked up speed and plunged smoothly toward the deck. Just shy of hitting the planks it stopped abruptly, having unwound its meager supply of cord. At the same moment Enoch gave a little twitch of the hand, and the spool reversed its direction and began to climb up the string.

Jack glanced across several fathoms of open water toward the Dutch ship. A dozen or so sailors were watching this miracle with their mouths open.

"They cannot see the string at this distance," Jack commented, "and suppose you are doing some sort of magick."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo," Enoch said.

Without understanding the reference, the passage is at the least amusing; Enoch merely appears to be snarking a bit about the sailors' understanding in the last paragraph. The reference is not necessary to the understanding of the narrative, and one could conceive of him making that statement coincidentally, nearly three centuries before another author popularized a very similar sentiment. But from our modern point of view - or at least in my opinion - the reference adds another layer of humor over the top, with a sort of dialogical irony in that the audience can perceive a meaning to Enoch's statement that he could not himself have meant.

Anyway. That's the kind of stuff that makes me love this book, and that has me eagerly awaiting the arrival of the third volume, which I'll probably jump to the head of my reading queue (or at the very least, right after Heinlein's Number of the Beast, which will follow the completion of Phoenix Guards). And I would heartily recommend this series, at least to anyone who's interested in a book that requires a fair bit of attention to fully absorb and comprehend. It is not by any means light reading, but if you're willing to put the time into it, it is ultimately an incredibly rewarding story.

New computer!

darthparadox@yahoo.com — Sat, 05 May 2007 08:15:00 GMT

The last piece of the new computer setup - the monitor - finally arrived. (More on the utterly asstacular service from the third-party company later - I'm still undecided as to whether dealing with them was worth the $300 we saved.)

So: I am typing this on a Mac Pro (two dual-core 2.66 Ghz Intel procs, 3 GB RAM) with a 30-inch Dell flatpanel LCD monitor. This is by far the best computer I've ever owned, and the monitor just makes it all the sweeter. I'm going to be able to do some serious graphics work on this thing, which was most of the point - I can finally start graphical work on the comic I've been planning, and about which I've given most you precious little information. More soon, I promise.

But for now, I'm just reveling in the awesome new computer. Sora and I went through the APOD archives back to the beginning of the year and saved our favorite high-res space pictures into a folder for screen-saver purposes - basically expanding upon the "Cosmos" screen saver included in OSX. (We'll be working through the APOD archives year-by-year - it does go back to 1995, after all, but I didn't really feel like going through ~4000 pictures all at once, and in the early days they didn't do the high-res pictures so much. How fast was your connection back then?)

Shiiiiiiny.

(Some of you will also note that this is the first Apple computer I've ever owned. The decision was a combination of wanting to try something new, wanting a computer that excels at multimedia work, not wanting to have to bother with Vista anymore (and honestly, just being sick of Windows in general), OSX's Unix support, and Sora's past history with Macs - they're the computers she's most comfortable with.)