In ECMAScript 6 there is a Map class that looks and feels like a .NET Dictionary. As an extension of JavaScript, TypeScript code like this is totally valid:

let map:Map<number,string> = new Map<number,string>();
map[1]="Category One";
let name:string = map[1]; //name is now "Category One"

However, the code above is wrong. What this does is create a string property named "1" on the map object with a value "Category One". Its "size" is 0. The correct code would be like this:

let map:Map<number,string> = new Map<number,string>();
map.set(1,"Category One");
let name:string = map.get(1); //name is now "Category One", map.size is 1

Similar code for ECMAScript 6, you can just declare the map as let map = new Map();

Just in case you wonder why utilize this hard to use type instead of a normal object, it's a user choice. Most of the pros involve the type of the key (object keys can only be strings or symbols) and ease of counting and iterating, but these issues can be solved trivially in code, if ever needed.

Proxima is the first book in the Proxima duology, by Stephen Baxter. And it is barely about Proxima! The book starts with multiple viewpoints over several arcs, is split into tiny chapters and volumes, attempts to become something epic and eventually fizzles. It's not that it's a bad book, it's simply not very good.

You have alien technology found on Mars, two different expeditions to Proxima C - if you don't count the first misguided one, a habitable planet in the Proxima Centauri system, several people and their families over a span of several decades, Artificial Intelligences, a nebulous period in the history of mankind called "The Heroic Generation" which seems to have left people in fear of innovation and discovery, alien lifeforms, artificial lifeforms, parallel timelines, etc. And it's all mixed in. It feels like it should be more, like it was meant to be more, but it just comes out as jumbled and directionless. I think what bothered me most is that characters barely have time to change. In order to explain what happens with a zillion people Earth, Mars, Mercury and an alien planet in a single book, their personal development is sacrificed.

But overall the book was interesting. It covered some bits of Earth future history that most sci-fi works quickly get past. The downside is that it went over them really fast, too :) The actual exploration and life on Proxima was on fast forward, too, with a really hard to believe ecosystem for its simplicity. Oh, and that ending was horrid! I will not read any of the works in the series. I feel that Baxter is overambitious, but also very courageous. I usually have a lot of problems with his works, but still read some of them.

What do you do if you want to make an anime that would be successful not only in Japan, but everywhere Netflix is watched? You take a bit of every successful anime and mix it all together. This is how you get the kingdom of Cremona, set somewhere in a nondescript time that has 1960's cars and cellphones and a nondescript place that looks like Europe, where experiments with the bones of god like creatures leads to superpowerful beings that are super crazy fast and shout Nipponisms with every opportunity: win and lose (in life, but seen as a game), protecting (someone, something, anything) just so your life makes some sense, "I will kill you with my own hands" and so on and so on, but also super smart detectives that figure things out, all for the sake of energetic, smart, cute and ultimately pointless much younger girls. But wait, there is more: there are crazy psychopaths that kill people and are super smart. There are arrogant evil people that have a lot of power, but are ultimately crazy, and which act as if everything and everybody is beneath them. And of course, all the fighting is done with magical swords and henchmen die quicker and with less talk than bosses, who are not particularly strong, but they just yap and yap and yap.

The anger that you see expressed in my review is related not so much to the mediocrity of the anime, but to the potential that it had. The animation is well done, the sets are good, the story is... ahem... workable. And yet they press every button that was ever pressed and add absolutely nothing new. B: The Beginning even has the gall to believe it will spawn sequels, so whatever else they had in mind they left it for later. I would say that's typical DragonBall Z, but that should apply to Saiyans not anime shows! You don't leave the good part for the end of the battle! You don't level up your writing only when you see that everybody is bored already.

Bottom line: the writing was the biggest flaw of this series: unimaginative and inconsistent, with tiresome dialogues and brutal switches of emotional context that made even the most motivated viewer break stride. The rest was always just good enough, with no evidence of any effort for reaching greatness. As mediocre as it can possibly be.

I found Being a Dog a bit misleading, as it is not so much about dogs as it is about smell in general. However, as a book about smell it's a concise and very interesting book. Alexandra Horowitz has a steady professional writing style and the information in the book is being related as anecdotes from her very thorough research.

From the very start the book acknowledges that dogs are not visual and auditory like humans are; instead their main sensory organ is their nose. As the author explores the world of smells, we understand more about us, dogs and how we sense the world in general. I liked many sections of Being a Dog, but I found the first part as most interesting. Mainly because it is about dogs :) There we find that the structure of the nose of dogs is as much responsible for their great sense of smell as is the immense number of sensory cells and dedicated brain neurons. Horowitz explains that dogs do not pass the so called "mirror test", but that is because they are not visual. If the experiment is constructed so that the mirror is olfactory, then they easily pass the test. It also tells us where the smelly glands on the dog are, including its paws. And indeed, I smelled my dog's paw and it was concentrated and nice. If you have a dog, smell their paws now!

That doesn't mean that the part about human smell was not captivating. I found myself smell things on the subway - that is a good thing - just because I felt inspired by what the author described. In conclusion, I recommend the book. It's a light read and it is the kind of work that makes us aware of a part of the world that is both near and ignored.

Well, if Java can do it, so can I! Why not make my own C# string class that can do whatever I want it to do? Requirements? Here they are:

• I want it to work just like regular strings
• I want to know if the string is empty just by using it as an if clause, just like Javascript: if (text) doSomething(text);
• I want to see if it's a number just by adding a plus sign in front of it: var number = +text;
• I want to easily know if the string is null or whitespace!

OK, so first I want to get all the functionality of a normal string. So I will just inherit from it! Only I can't. String is a sealed class in .Net.
Yet there is an abstract class that seems destined to be used by this: ValueType! It's only implemented by all value types (more or less) except String, but I will be the next guy to use it! Only I can't. If I try, I get the occult message: "Error CS0644 'EString' cannot derive from special class 'ValueType'". But it does help with something, if I try to inherit from it, it tells me what methods to implement: Equals, GetHashCode and ToString.
OK, then, I will just do everything from scratch!

Start with a struct (no need for a class) that wraps a string _value field, then overwrite the equality methods:

public struct EString
{
    private string _value;
 
    public override bool Equals(object obj)
    {
        return String.Equals(obj, _value);
    }
 
    public override int GetHashCode()
    {
        return _value == null ? 0 : _value.GetHashCode();
    }
 
    public override string ToString()
    {
        return _value;
    }
}

I used 0 for the hash code when the value is null because that's what the .Net object GetHashCode() does. Now, in order for this to work as a string, I need some implicit conversion from string to my EString class. So add these two beauties:

public string Value { get => _value; }
 
private EString(string value) { _value = value; }
 
public static implicit operator string(EString estring)
{
    return estring.Value;
}
 
public static implicit operator EString(string value)
{
    return new EString(value);
}

EString now supports stuff like EString text="Something";, but I want more! Let's overload some operators. I want to be able to see if a string is null or empty just like in Javascript:

public static bool operator !(EString estring)
{
    return String.IsNullOrEmpty(estring);
}
 
public static bool operator true(EString estring)
{
    return !!estring;
}
 
public static bool operator false(EString estring)
{
    return !estring;
}

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, true and false are not only boolean constants, but also operators. That doesn't mean something like this is legal: if (text==true) ..., but you can use stuff like if (text) ... or text ? "something" : "empty". Overloading the ! operator allows also something more useful like if (!text) [this shit is empty].

Moar! How about a simple way to know if the string is null or empty or whitespace? Let's overload the ~ operator. How about getting the number encoded into the text? Let's overload the + operator. Here is the final result:

public struct EString
{
    private string _value;
 
    public string Value { get => _value; }
 
    private EString(string value) { _value = value; }
 
    public override bool Equals(object obj)
    {
        return String.Equals(obj, _value);
    }
 
    public override int GetHashCode()
    {
        return _value == null ? 0 : _value.GetHashCode();
    }
 
    public override string ToString()
    {
        return _value;
    }
 
    public static bool operator !(EString estring)
    {
        return String.IsNullOrEmpty(estring);
    }
 
    public static bool operator true(EString estring)
    {
        return !!estring;
    }
 
    public static bool operator false(EString estring)
    {
        return !estring;
    }
 
    public static bool operator ~(EString estring)
    {
        return String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(estring);
    }
 
    public static decimal operator +(EString estring)
    {
        return decimal.TryParse(estring.Value, out decimal d) ? d : decimal.Zero;
    }
 
    public static implicit operator string(EString estring)
    {
        return estring.Value;
    }
 
    public static implicit operator EString(string value)
    {
        return new EString(value);
    }
}

Disclamer: I did this mostly for fun. I can't condone replacing your strings with my class, but look at these examples for usage:

EString s=inputText;
if (!~s) {
  var d = Math.Round(+s,2);
  if (d != 0) {
    Console.WriteLine("Number was introduced: "+d);
  }
}

Unfortunately, being typical is not a good thing. All characters in A.I.C.O. Incarnation are manga clichés and the few interesting sci-fi ideas are obliterated by the lack of courage in showing body horror and the obvious gaps in logic. The most promising, yet underdelivered concept is that of consciousness and identity. What would happen if brains and bodies were swapped, changed, mingled, etc. This could have been great if each episode explored some way the "malignant matter" affected biology and consciousness, but in truth, less than half of an episode really approaches the idea.

In short, the story follows a group of "Divers" who go into a biological infested area in order to stop said infestation and save people. They have to battle amorphous blob like monsters and government officials and mad scientists to get to their goal. Obviously they are all young and rash and falling in love and trying to protect people and making honor bound promises and so on. It was so by the book that it became nauseating. I think a heavily cut video edit of the first and last two episodes would more than cover the entire series.

It is good that Netflix is paying for more anime adaptations, but this one is not that worthwhile. Still 29 to go, though :) Here is a trailer, if you are still interested:

[youtube:CCfYQnOLHV0]

Literally translating to "The town where only I am missing", Boku dake ga Inai Machi presents (what else?) a manga artist with no life or future who finds out he can transfer his consciousness in the past, fixing things that went wrong. Of course, the worse thing that ever happened to him was living through a killer's series of murders of some of his school classmates. Another traumatic experience makes him, now 29 years old, transfer his consciousness in the past, during his childhood years, and determined to find and stop the killer.

Now, this might not seem particularly captivating, only the solution for saving the children is not to investigate clues or stake out locations or alert adults, but using the tools a mere child has: making friends, being around the lonely people the killer seems to target. This has an impact on the man's life, but also on that of the people around. In the end, it's a call to end self alienation by connecting and doing good things to people close to you. The title is a metaphor to the impact a person has on their environment. What if you never were? Would things change? The English title - Erased - is the one licensed for the US market and has little to do with the plot.

The anime is nicely drawn, if not spectacular, the Japanisms are pretty common, the story is sort of predictable, so the only true positive thing about the show is the mood and moral. I can't recommend it to everybody, but I personally enjoyed it. It has just 12 episodes and so it's like 4 hours in total. Here is a trailer:

[youtube:75MF3Sap1J0]

Update: the initial article was plaing wrong :) I fixed it now. The important change is that you need to npm link the dist folder, not the root folder of the plugin project.

So, the question arises when you want to change a module that is used (and tested) in another module. Let's say your normal flow is to change the version of the child package, then npm run packagr, then npm publish it, then npm install childModule@latest in the parent app. This quickly gets tiresome and leads to unrealistic version numbers.

A better solution is to use npm link. First, you go to your plugin/child module and you run npm run packagr. When it's done, go to the dist folder and run npm link. This will create a symlink in the global node_modules folder for your project's distribution package. Then, move to the parent module and run npm link <name-of-child>. The name of the child is the same as the name of the application. This creates a symlink in the parent module's node_modules to the global symlink created earlier.

Wait! A few gotchas, first:

• careful with the operations that might change the content of the folder linked in node_modules, as they will change the actual source code of the plugin
• after you finish with the work on the plugin, then delete the symlink, publish the child and reinstall @latest at the parent
• make sure that the version of the plugin package in the parent is permissive (something like >=initialVersion), otherwise you might have problems with the version number you set in the plugin package.json file

Hope this helps.

NPM is a popular package manager (think NuGet for JavaScript) and the information of the packages that it needs to install is stored in a file called package.json. You run npm install, packages are getting downloaded in a folder called node_modules and a package-lock.json file is generated. Since you can always delete node_modules and package-lock.json and rerun the package install, a common assumption is that they are redundant and they shouldn't be stored in source control. That is wrong in most cases.

The lock file not only stores the progress of the npm installation, but also the actual versions of the packages that it installs (for the entire dependency tree). As opposed to this, package.json contains only the packages directly needed by the project and the acceptable ranges of the versions. One can allow for any version of a package to be used, or maybe anything above a version, or an interval or something that is "the best version" around a specific version. Deleting the package-lock.json file effectively tells NPM that you trust package.json and the developers of each package for the versions of the dependencies loaded.

Here is a common scenario: you create a new application, you need some NPM packages so you npm install thePackage. This gets the latest version of thePackage and installs it, then marks the exact version into package-lock.json as well as the versions of the packages thePackage uses and what they use and so on. Finally, you commit the project, including package-lock.json. Three months later, a new developer comes and gets the project from source control. They use npm install and see that everything works perfectly, because the packages restored are the exact same versions as the ones restored for the original developer. But now they think "who committed package-lock.json? Don't they know it's redundant?" so they remove it from source control. Three months later another developer comes and runs npm install on the source from the code repository, only nothing works anymore. The versions that were downloaded are, depending on what is specified in package.json, the latest version of the dependency or maybe a version similar, but with a different minor version, and with the dependencies that the developers thought best for that particular version.

There is a situation when package-lock.json is entirely redundant and that is when package.json only specifies exact versions. NPM works so that you cannot replace the same version of a software in their repository, so the devs will never be able to change the package versions they used for a specific version. That is why it is safe to assume that the same version of a package will use the same package dependency tree (unless some of the packages are removed, but that's another question entirely).

Summary: If you have any version of a dependency in package.json specified as anything else than a specific version (no tilde, no caret, no asterisks, no intervals), then you also need to store package-lock.json in your source control.

If you ever used The Pirate Bay, you know that a lot of the content there is porn. Even the most popular distribution users share movies or series among tons of porn links. In order to solve this problem, TPBClean.info appeared, as a simple pirate bay proxy that eliminated the porn links. Now that site is dead. I can't say that I am overly sad about it, since it worked very badly anyway. Yet, now, if you want to find movies shared by the likes of xxxlavalxxx or juggs99 (which probably started out as porn distributors anyway, with those nicks), you can't even see where they are in all that sea of xxx.

Well, there is a very simple solution, works in your browser, and all you need to do is install an extension that you probably ought to have had anyway. Now, this article assumes you use Chrome, but it probably works the same with Firefox. For Internet Explorer and Edge I have no idea and I also don't have the time to do the research, so if you feel inclined to help others and you know how to do it, please leave a comment and I will update the post.

This is the solution: install the CJS extension, which is a simple enough tool that allows you to run a script of your own design on any page. After you have installed it, browse to The Pirate Bay, click the extension button and add this script:

document.querySelectorAll('a[href="/browse/500"]')
.forEach(node=>{ 
    while(node && node.nodeName.toLowerCase()!='tr') { node=node.parentNode};
    if (node) node.style.display='none';
});

You might be tempted to try to load jQuery and rewrite the script, for better readability, but take into account that most ad blockers (which you probably use, if you use torrent sites) block jQuery on pirate bay domains.

What the script does is hide all the rows that have the Porn (id 500) category. If the site ever changes its ids, you might want to update the script, although that scenario is pretty unlikely.

Update: TPB Clean seems to be back online, but the article still applies.

We are changing the furniture and repainting the walls in the apartment, so naturally, the first order of business is to dig into closets, drawers, bags, boxes and various regions under existing furniture and throw away as much as possible. It is a strange feeling, one that makes me remember a past and dead self, one that was hopeful, smart, crazy, in love, using technology and doing stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend nowadays.

I dug into old CD albums, remembering with much nostalgia the movies that I was watching and intending to keep forever. The movies are still around, CD players are almost gone. I had to use my wife's laptop to read the CDs, as mine would only accept a few of them. Well, that's because it's broken, but still. Among the CDs I found old source code and material that I had gathered from friends, jobs, the Internet, hacking. I felt like an archaeologist digging through the remains of old civilizations, ones we hold dear and towards which we feel a strong sense of ownership, but with which we have nothing in common.

Here it is: the Palm VX PDA that was built in 1998 and still works now, with the same battery, if you can just find a way to connect it to a computer so you can upload new stuff to it. Here it is: the Nokia E60 phone that worked flawlessly for more than ten years. I bought a smartphone to replace both of them just five years ago. But also, here it is: an external modem I had forgotten I had; I still wonder where I used it, if ever, and how I got hold of it. Same for the audio/video/infrared wireless transmitters and receivers that allowed me to watch movies from the computer to the TV in the other room. Tens of meters of Ethernet and all kinds of connective cables, forgotten in an age of ubiquitous digital wireless connection just forgotten in the odd corners of the house. Remains of two desktop computers (that I could still make work if I had the inclination) linger like the fossilized bones of extinct creatures.

I feel a mix of gratefulness, nostalgia, loss and that I am fucking old, all at the same time. I wonder where I could find people that still value these things that I dug out from my past and that otherwise will soon become anonymous and amorphous junk. Geez, look at the 6 CDs of utility software, stuff I still remember fondly and stuff I have never used: antivirus, archiving, communication, VoIP, OCR, document processing, all software that is in heavy use today but you would be hard pressed to find people still recognizing these particular incarnations. Music that I still have in my playlist on CDs almost twenty years old. Games that I had worked on that I have forgotten ever doing. Random writing from when I was so young I feel embarrassed just to remember.

And this is just from a 50 square meter apartment that we moved into just ten years ago. I can't even imagine how people do this when they move out from their childhood home, where they and their kids have lived for generations. What do they find? Do they even recognize it? What happened to all the people that I once was?

Just a short info about HttpInterceptor, which is the Angular system of intercepting http requests, so you can do useful stuff like logging, error handling, authentication, etc. There are two npm packets for http, the old one is @angular/http and the new one is in @angular/common. While their interfaces are similar, HttpInterceptor only works for @angular/common/http.

Bonus thing: in the interceptor you are building, when you get the Observable<HttpEvent<any>> from next.handle, do not .subscribe to it, lest you will double all http requests (including adding items).

Occasionally I ask myself if I really am an "ist". You know: misogynist, racist, classist, sexist, bigot, and so on. Or maybe I am "one of the good guys", a progressive feminist antiracist. And the answer is yes. I am both.

I've just read a really long feminist article that - besides naming white bigoted men "the enemy" and showing them the smallest bit of empathy just because "if you mess with them, they mess with us women when they get home" - had the author wonder how come so many of the people who got outed by the latest wave of misconduct allegations were people who declared themselves progressive and even wrote or shared content towards that. And the answer is really simple and really uncomfortable for all purists out there: we are all a bit bigoted. More than that, sometimes were are really leaning towards a side and then we change back, like reeds in the wind. I think that's OK. That's how people are and have been since forever. The answer is not to pretend we are different, but to accept we have that side and to listen to it and converse with it in order to reach some sort of consensus.

The animal brain has one job and one alone. It has to heavily filter all the inputs from the real world and then create a manageable model of it in order to predict what's going to happen next. Shortcuts and pure yes and no answers are heaven to it. If you can look at one person and immediately infer things that will help you predict their behavior from simple things like sex or color of skin or the way they dress, the brain is ecstatic. Try telling it that no, that's not good, and instead of the limited statistical experience model that it uses it should instead rely on the morally curated amalgamation of acceptable experience of other people frustrates it. It's not a human thing, it's not a mammal thing; if you could express this idea to an ant, it would get angry with you. The brain wants - if not even needs - to be racist, sexist and other isms like that. What it wants is to take everything and put as much of it in small boxes so that it can use the limited capacity it has to navigate the things that are not labeled in one way or another.

So yes, physiologically we are too stupid to not be bigots. All bigots are stupid. We are all bigots. In order to not be, or at least not behave like one, you have to be motivated. Messing one's entire life in a matter of days with an onslaught of sympathetic and coordinated allegations would do that quite well. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, any more than it would be to "kill off" people who disagree with you. Therefore in matters such as these I cannot help feeling sympathetic towards people who are quite literally dicks. It doesn't mean I agree with what they did, it means I don't agree with what anybody did. And in such moments of sympathy I hear the parts of me that current society wants erased shouting for attention: "See, we were right! We are dicks, but these moralists are überdicks!" I listen to bits of me that want everything wrong with the world to be the fault of poor people, women, people from other nationalities, races or religions, certain jobs or certain types, having certain cars or behaving or dressing in a certain way. It would be so easy to navigate a world like that: just kill off the Jews and black people, put women in their place, write code only in C#, rename the island of Java to DotNet, be happy!

Yet it is obvious it doesn't work that way. Not even white males wouldn't want this to happen, most of them. How do I make the voices shut up? Clearly witch hunting offenders until their lives are more upended than if they stole or ran someone over with their car does not work. And the answer, from my own limited experience, seems to be contact. Whenever I am inclined to say all Chinese or Indians are stupid (which is numerically much worse than being antisemitic and so many people from my background are guilty of it) and I meet a brilliant Asian programmer or entrepreneur or simply an articulated and intelligent human being I am forced to revisit my assertion. Whenever I think women can't code and I meet young girls smarter and more energetic than I am I have to drop that, too. Whenever I want to believe black people smell or are violent or are genetically faulty and I see some Nubian Adonis talking high philosophy way over my head, I just have to stop. If these people would all go hypersensitive, get offended by everything I say or do and gang up on me for being limited in my view, I clearly won't be motivated or even have the opportunity to grow out of it. Of course gay people and Jews are responsible for all evils on Earth if they are the ones making my life hell. And it is also easy to remain bigoted if I surround myself with people just like me. I've read somewhere a statistic that showed racists usually live in areas where they lack contact with people of color.

Basically, what I want to say is that I see no reason why someone would want to be paranoid. Either there is something wrong with them or people are really out to get them. And it is so easy to label someone "the enemy" and just pound on them, so easy to blame anyone else for your troubles, so easy to enter the flight or fight mode that is encoded in our very beings. I see this with my dog: he avoids big dogs since a big dog attacked him. If he continues this trend, he will certainly avoid getting attacked again by a big dog, while trying to get acquainted with them might result in injury or even death. It's so easy to decide to avoid them, however nice they smell and how nice they play. For him it is a very limiting, but rational choice.

Hide your inner bigot, cage him in the darkest depths of your soul, and it will grow stronger, malignant, uncontrolled. This is what civilization, especially the forced kind, does to people. It makes them think they are something else, while inside they are cancerous and vile, just waiting to explode in the worst way. Instead, I propose something else: take your bigot for a walk, talk to it, introduce it to people. Maybe people will start avoiding you like the plague, but that's their own bigotry at work. And soon, you will probably be the progressive one. It's hard to be a racist if you have a black friend and difficult to be a misogynist when you meet wonderful humans that happen to be female. You will make the bad joke, you will expose your limits and the world around you will challenge you on them. But in the end, your limits will expand, people who matter will understand and appreciate your growth, and frigid feminazi Jew lesbos can go to hell.

You know that joke, about the guy who wants to become progressive, so he is searching for a gay friend? Why not try it the other way around? Find a bigot near you and make friends.

In both these positions, White to move and mate in two moves. Can you spot them?

[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "2B5/K7/6p1/3QpNbb/4Pkp1/3P4/3PqP2/5RN1 w - - 0 1"]
1. Nd4 Qxf2 (1. .. Qf3 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qe1 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qe3 2. dxe3#)
(1. .. Bh6 2. Ne6#) (1. .. Qxe4 2. Qxe4#) (1. .. g3 2. Nh3#) 2. Ne2# *

[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "7b/3PKn2/1R2N1P1/1pr1k3/1N3p1Q/1pP1r2n/4pR2/BB6 w - - 0 1"]
1. Nd4 Nxf2 (1. .. Rcxc3 2. Ndc6#) (1. .. Rc8 2. Re6#) (1. .. f3 2. Re6#)
(1. .. Bf6+ 2. Qxf6#) (1. .. Nd8 2. Qxh8#) (1. .. Nfg5 2. Qxh8#) (1. ..
e1=Q 2. Re6#) (1. .. Rc6 2. Ndxc6#) 2. Re6# *


Here it is in video format:

[youtube:ueht7DBP5dc]

Until recently, all I knew of Jack London is that he wrote White Fang, which I read when I was a child and to my shame sometimes mix up with Romain Gary's White Dog, and To Build a Fire, which is a short story I really liked, but which I mostly use as an example of how cold some places on Earth are. At a friend's recommendation I started reading Martin Eden and I really loved it.

Slowly building the characters and with careful attention to details of action and thought and feeling, London is both heavily autobiographical and feverishly critical of society as a whole. An extreme version of his own history, Martin Eden's character is a street ruffian who had to fend for himself since he was eleven years old. A chance meeting with a beautiful young girl from high society makes him want to be more so he dedicates his life to reading, learning and becoming more like the ideal he believes people in high society embody. Handsome, strong, very smart and blessed with good health and powerful will, he does just that, in short time managing to cross the cultural gap and then continuing to grow and learn until he even becomes a critic of the people he saw as gods just a few years ago.

There is so much more to the book, though. The transformation carries the reader through every strata of society, dissecting behavior, culture and belief, making bold philosophical claims while making one feel and understand from the point of view of this amazing character and others. At the time of the writing, the book was not well received, mostly because of the ending, which I won't spoil here, but how premonitory it was to describe similar events to the actual fate of the book itself! Now it is considered one of the best Jack London books and the one he is more known for.

I've read the Andrew Sinclair introduction after I've finished the book, which is what I really recommend to everyone, since it spoils the entire story. From the intro we learn that the book is heavily based on the author's own life and also of the differences between Eden and London's stories. Sinclair also criticizes some parts of the book, where the writing was not as good or was discordant with the rest of the work, but I personally liked every bit of it. Used to a classical story structure, I always expected some things to happen which did not or happened differently, an early sign that so much of this is based on real life. But also, I feel that having Martin Eden be endowed with so many positive attributes made the book a bit less accessible that it should have been, for the character is a beast of will and life force, of health and capacity of work. London was not as fortunate himself and many a reader will probably feel as I did, that the book hints that only an extraordinary person can break away from their position in life and maybe it isn't worth it anyway. Intended as a critique of individualism and personal ambition, it falls a little flat when we encounter the person London probably dreamed to be.

Bottom line: a powerful book on the nature of life values, as they are taught, believed, chosen and created, about how illusion can spur one to magnificent deeds and hard achievement sour the taste of life itself. It talks of the inner and outer drives of people, making them both majestic and ridiculous. It felt realistic and somehow uplifting and terribly depressing at the same time. I highly recommend it.