If you're reading this, it means I haven't been by my blog for a full year. I find it extremely unlikely that I'd do such a thing, unless I was doing it on purpose, in which case I imagine I would have disabled this thing.
Given that's the case, I'd like you to assume that I haven't been able to do something about it. In fact, go ahead and assume I'm dead.
Unless the post right before this is about me going away for a while. Then you should yell at me for being such an idiot.
I'd play Monopoly with the addition of an "earthquake damage table". (See playing to lose, roundabout here-ish.)
Neil Gamian's Fortunately, the Milk is a wonderfully preposterous bit of exquisite nonsense. Well. I say nonsense. Once you accept the time-traveling stegosaurus, and the goopy green space aliens, everything else makes perfect sense. (Well, except the piranhas.)
The father, the main character of the story, gets interrupted on the way back home with some milk—all-important for breakfast cereal and tea, you see—and in the course of his adventures ends up saving the world almost, but not quite, entirely by accident. Along the way he meets pirates, dinosaurs, aliens, space police, wumpires, and one Angry Volcano God. (But no piranhas.) He meets them all out of order, of course, and timey shenanigans are used multiple times to save the day. Twice, at the very least. (Hey, that's high for (what's nominally) a children's book.)
The book is illustrated in a Seuss-like manner. Well—. The illustrations don't look at all like Seuss's work, but otherwise they've got the same kind of absurdity look to them. Unfortunately, as I'm writing this review from memory, I don't have the name of the illustrator at hand.
Final Verdict: 8/10. Well worth reading, but may not be worth buying if you don't have kids who'd enjoy it. I liked it, but I don't expect I'll be buying a copy. I've been very spoiled by fanfic. (Mind you, I probably 'should' buy a copy, to support the existence of such books. But....)
I was thinkin' about science fiction and technological explosions. A scifi writer and utopian once said something about how "machines will eventually take over so much of what we currently do with manual labor, humanity will be in a state of enforced leisure. What an envied thing it will be to work!" (That's not even close to an exact quote.)
Humans are, of course, really inefficient at a lot of things.
How does one measure efficiency of creativity?
I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.
Moore's Law states, in paraphrase, that processing power as a whole doubles every eighteen months. Sometimes it's been clock speed, sometimes it's been number of transistors, but this seems to have generally held true.
The obvious corollary is that newer processors --computers in general-- are more powerful than older ones. This has consistently been born out, with extreme cases being the emulation of entire old systems on newer ones, even many at once, even without being emulated on the newest systems. (See: Linux to Game Developers: No More Excuses)
Based on this, I've thought up a potentially interesting, but probably wrong, corollary: Every eighteen months, it becomes possible to add another layer of emulation, without effectively slowing down the deepest layer. This means that, for example, I can have my MacBook Air emulating a Mac from a year and a half ago, emulating a three-year-old Mac, emulating a Mac eighteen months older than that, all the way down to the original Macintosh -- with the deepest Mac having an effectively indistinguishable user-experience (for better or worse).
Practically speaking, assuming an arbitrary six-month delay before full emulation of a system, this means that twenty-four months after a system comes out, it's possible to emulate it indistinguishably.
Of course, this is all armchair garbage. I have no numbers of any sort to back it up. I have no intention of going looking for them, although you're welcome to throw any you find/have at me if you want :)
In a total cop-out, my 'blog post' for today is drawer full of pennies.
...Well, and this note informing you of this fact.
...And the tips/howto/note-to-self about how to create a direct link to a facebook post that I'll be putting up shortly.
...
...Never mind, then.
I've actually rather enjoyed my post-every-day practice, and the tendency to use this blog for a dumping ground. I don't think I can keep up a post a day, but posting every even-numbered day would probably work.
If I were a writer, I would write about Celestia in order to ask my questions about God. Since I'm not doing that, I conclude that I'm not that much of a writer.
Which I suppose is a pity, since I love books and all, but what are you going to do, y'know?
Day three. Or maybe Day 4. I really can't tell. I haven't been keeping track. It's too late now.
The space warping is starting to leak out. I'd swear I turned both alarms off last night. But instead the cd played straight through once and stopped. I figure this had to be a warp, because the alarm that stayed on is between the off one and the cd control.
Then again, maybe I'm just fatigued.
I'd made a deal with myself, of sorts. That's not a book you read at night. So of course, recently I've been up past one-thirty, two-thirty AM reading bits and pieces of it. The footnotes are sometimes the worst parts. It had never occurred to me that you could refer to a footnote that was on a previous page, or hadn't happened yet. And that's just the numbers.
I can do a reasonable job of faking being well-adjusted in the evenings if I've been away from the book all day. Then I go back and pick it up and it all falls apart.
It's funny, but this book is something of a microcosm of my life the past year. descending, deteriorating, obsessed. ending up strange places there can be no return from because they were never there. I think I need to get out.
I've been reading bits of the book out of order, but I discovered that Navidson has a book titled House of Leaves with him. I wonder at that. What manner of recursion is this? but because I read out of order I know almost nothing else about it. Only the page count, which differs from the page numbers in my version. I feel compelled to tally up all the pages in mine and compare.
The last thing to disturb me this much was Everything is Fine, where Fluttershy 'is' Johnny and the Minotaur.
It's amazing what you can do simply by striping context. For example:
I am moved.
-- Abraham Lincoln
I'm fairly certain he said that exact combination of words at some point in his life. What context he may have used them in, I can't imagine. The context where I picked them up is that he is literally moving into a new room.
It's the commentaries on House that matter. Kind of like shakespeare, if you read the quotes.
"Saying House of Leaves is different for everyone who reads it is like saying a used car is different for everyone who drives it. And like that used car, that's a big part of the experience.
"i will not Deface a library book. But i will not remove my Postit annotations, either."
Inside front cover, behind the flap (but showing just past it).
"Knowing some of what this means gives me pause for thought.
"Yet what does it truely mean?"
Page xix, next to the Jan. 1997 note from Zampano.
"Are these colored scrawls part of the original book, or somebody's addition?"
Page xx. Picture attempts to show both scrawls.
"The most frightening thing in the world is man himself"
Page xxiii.
I feel, rather strangely, like I'm writing House of Leaves/Just Another Fool crossover fanfiction. Wonder where that came from?
My (library) copy of House of Leaves came in today. I already know that mainly I don't know what to think of it. I bet it could make for a great (La)Tex leaning tool, trying to re-create it. Whoever double-spaces their sentences, though; I like that[1].
Apparently there is also braille which my edition does not have. Has anyone got notations or pictures or somesuch of those?
[1]Their monospaced sentences, at least. I can't tell about the other ones (I haven't gotten to them yet, but I doubt I'll be able to tell even once I do get there).
Choosing an operating system is kinda like buying a car.
When you get a Mac, you walk into Toyota dealership and say "Ooo, that one looks nice." And they say "good choice. Do you want it with 4, 6, or 8 cylinders? Stick-shift or auto?" You say which, pay your money, and leave. You're pretty happy with it until a new one comes out in six months, but in the meantime you're confused by the steering 'wheels' on other cars.
With Windows, you spend a lot of time fiddling and debating and comparing Ford to GM, and the various options, and eventually you decide on one with 75% of the options, an entertainment system you can only use half of, 18 cupholders and two seats.
Using Ubuntu is like deciding "Hey, I need a car," so you go on craigslist and spot a car that looks good and it's in your price range. You end up getting it, and it does 93% of what you want it to do, but sometimes you have to turn left three times before you can change the channel on the radio and it has to be in reverse to open the trunk.
Using arch Linux is like saying "Well, I should get a car," so the first thing you weld together a frame and then you go down to NAPA for a couple of pistons...
My brain goes to some truly weird places. For example: Why do toilet seat exist as a separate thing, rather than being molded in? What possible benefit is there? Yes, yes, I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason. I just can't imagine what it is.
I give up on twitter. Twitter's not long enough to contain my nonsanity. I'm just going to dump here, instead.
There's some new words making their way into my vocabulary. I figured it'd make sense to write down what they are, both to help puzzle out what I mean by them and so the rest of you can know have any idea what I mean by them.
There are good books, and there are bad books. And then there are books that make you want to throw them across the room. This... is one of the later kind.
Plot-wise, Rise of the Elgen is ... okay, I guess. It's the second book in the Michael Vey series, and I've read the first one. I'm basing mostly on that, because I didn't finish this one.
Why? Because I've seen trollfics that were better-proofread.
It's easy to 'put on' someone else.
It's hard to become someone else.
Now if only I could think of the full-length blog post that wants to end on that note...
